newrepublic--2020-12-03--Why We Love the Monolith

Why We Love the Monolith

On Monday , airborne sheep surveyors in San Juan County , Utah , observed a three-sided , 11-foot-tall reflective metal object nestled in the orange rock .
After the Bureau of Land Management issued an official press release on the pillar , complete with alien jokes , the objet became affectionately known on social media as “ the monolith.
” This is a misnomer , since the -lith part of monolith means stone—this thing is metal .
It may in actuality be three sheets of aluminum riveted together to resemble a massive unsegmented Toblerone .
Whatever you want to call @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prism ’ s purpose , along with the atmospheric images posted to social media by the Utah Department of Public Safety , have captured imaginations the world over .
Please be aliens , you can almost hear the planet pleading .
Please be aliens come to take us away , and not a viral marketing campaign .
Interest ratcheted up after the prism disappeared , then seemed to reappear in Romania , in California , and in Paris .
In the dying moments of a brutal year , a shape has become a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the simplicity of its form , its sci-fi symbolism , and the way it has sparked people ’ s wonder against all odds , the Utah monolith is perhaps the breakout artwork of this horrible , unending year .
Marketing might be the most likely explanation for our shiny friend ’ s existence , with banal happenstance coming a close second , but if we keep logic out of the equation , we have a little time left before the dream is ruined .
The “ monolith ” moniker comes from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Stanley Kubrick ’ s 1968 classic , 2001 : A Space Odyssey .
Adapted from Arthur C. Clarke ’ s story “ The Sentinel , ” that film features monoliths that manifest on earth , the moon , and in orbit without announcing their purpose .
Blank , black , and impenetrable , the monoliths are dense symbols that resist interpretation in a way that terrifies and inspires with equal force .
Over time , they turn out to be something like supercomplex computers capable of spurring on a species ’ evolution—hence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s famous opening scene , where a hominid learns how to smash bones with bones .

On Monday, airborne sheep surveyors in San Juan County, Utah, observed a three-sided, 11-foot-tall reflective metal object nestled in the orange rock. After the Bureau of Land Management issued an official press release on the pillar, complete with alien jokes, the objet became affectionately known on social media as “the monolith.” This is a misnomer, since the -lith part of monolith means stone—this thing is metal. It may in actuality be three sheets of aluminum riveted together to resemble a massive unsegmented Toblerone. Whatever you want to call it, the sheer enigma of this prism’s purpose, along with the atmospheric images posted to social media by the Utah Department of Public Safety, have captured imaginations the world over.
Please be aliens, you can almost hear the planet pleading. Please be aliens come to take us away, and not a viral marketing campaign. Interest ratcheted up after the prism disappeared, then seemed to reappear in Romania, in California, and in Paris. In the dying moments of a brutal year, a shape has become a celebrity. More than that: Because of the simplicity of its form, its sci-fi symbolism, and the way it has sparked people’s wonder against all odds, the Utah monolith is perhaps the breakout artwork of this horrible, unending year. Marketing might be the most likely explanation for our shiny friend’s existence, with banal happenstance coming a close second, but if we keep logic out of the equation, we have a little time left before the dream is ruined.


newrepublic--2020-12-04--An Epidemic of Arrogance on the Supreme Court

The conservatives ’ critique of Jacobson is relatively straightforward .
It reflects a simmering disdain on the right for the sweeping measures taken by state and local officials to reduce the coronavirus ’ s spread .
Few of the lawsuits challenging those measures have succeeded , often because courts cite Jacobson to turn away complaints .
In the public-health context , American courts have long recognized that government officials have the power and responsibility to take actions that might not otherwise be tolerated in other contexts .
A pandemic is , quite literally , a matter of life and death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Society last month , Justice Samuel Alito suggested that this deference had gone too far .
“ All sorts of things can be called an emergency or disaster of major proportions , ” he told the audience .
“ Simply slapping on that label can not provide the ground for abrogating our most fundamental rights .
And whenever fundamental rights are restricted , the Supreme Court and other courts can not close their eyes.
” His colleagues on the right expressed similar views in dissenting opinions earlier this year .
The math behind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death in September and Justice Amy Coney Barrett ’ s confirmation in October .
Smith is slightly more complicated .
The case centered on two men in Oregon who were denied unemployment claims by the state because they had lost their jobs for drug use—namely , for the ceremonial use of peyote as part of services in the Native American Church .
In a 6-3 decision , the Supreme Court rejected their claim that Oregon had violated the Free Exercise Clause .
Antonin Scalia , writing for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not intervene on their behalf .
“ Generally applicable and neutral laws that incidentally burden the exercise of an individual ’ s religion do not offend the First Amendment , ” he wrote .
In response , Congress and many of the states passed laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that allow people with religious beliefs to challenge government laws and actions that violate their beliefs in certain circumstances .
That suited Scalia just fine .
He took a pragmatic approach to how courts would have to wrestle with the Free Exercise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to invoke it to carve out religious exemptions from general , non-discriminatory laws would force judges to perform the unsavory task of evaluating the legitimacy and value of religious beliefs themselves .
Giving this duty to legislatures was not ideal , he admitted , because it could disfavor minority religious groups .
“ But that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs @ @ @ @ @

Smith is slightly more complicated. The case centered on two men in Oregon who were denied unemployment claims by the state because they had lost their jobs for drug use—namely, for the ceremonial use of peyote as part of services in the Native American Church. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court rejected their claim that Oregon had violated the Free Exercise Clause. Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, concluded that the courts could not intervene on their behalf. “Generally applicable and neutral laws that incidentally burden the exercise of an individual’s religion do not offend the First Amendment,” he wrote. In response, Congress and many of the states passed laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allow people with religious beliefs to challenge government laws and actions that violate their beliefs in certain circumstances.
That suited Scalia just fine. He took a pragmatic approach to how courts would have to wrestle with the Free Exercise Clause in these circumstances. Allowing believers to invoke it to carve out religious exemptions from general, nondiscriminatory laws would force judges to perform the unsavory task of evaluating the legitimacy and value of religious beliefs themselves. Giving this duty to legislatures was not ideal, he admitted, because it could disfavor minority religious groups. “But that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs,” he wrote.
Smith is a frequent target of criticism from the conservative legal movement and from the court’s conservative bloc, despite their admiration of Scalia himself. Indeed, the landmark ruling may also not be long for this earth. Earlier this term, the court heard arguments in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, where it considered directly whether Smith should be overturned. The case involved a local Catholic adoption organization that refuses to work with same-sex couples, citing the church’s teachings on homosexuality. After Philadelphia stopped making referrals to the organization on anti-discrimination grounds, the group sued the city for violating the Free Exercise Clause and discriminating against it on the basis of religious belief, setting up a direct challenge to Smith.


newrepublic--2020-12-04--The Tangled Legacy of James Beard

The Tangled Legacy of James Beard

Twenty further books followed , and though he went on to augment his success in other venues , such as the James Beard Cooking School , it was above all as a cookbook author that Beard cemented his reputation as the garrulous doyen of American cooking .
It ’ s difficult to imagine a writer today being allowed the time to develop as Beard did : His “ platform ” as a virgin author was relatively slim , sales weren ’ t much better , and it wasn ’ t until The James Beard Cookbook came out in 1959 that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ critical hit .
The relative leniency of the postwar publishing environment gave him the space to perfect an identifiable philosophy of food , and New York granted him access to a network of patrons willing to fund the frequent European tours he took to nourish his culinary imagination .
The tenets of that philosophy have become , in subsequent decades , relatively commonplace : freshness , seasonality , an emphasis on the use of local ingredients , and a preference wherever possible for drawing on the goods of the green market , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the small-batch producer .
But in the decades immediately following World War II , when Beard was at his most productive , advice such as this was genuinely radical .
America after the war , writes Birdsall , was “ a nation more interested in the future than the past ” —a bland and triumphal capitalist wasteland of fish sticks , frozen vegetables , bagels in a can , and TV dinners , in which homes sprouted with magical new cooking gadgets like the Cal Dek , the Smokadero stove , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Beard ’ s struggle was to convince Americans that there was another way , one that resurrected old cooking practices , paid homage to the bounty of each region ’ s produce , and did not recoil from the sight of whole animals or fresh vegetables , reveling instead in the possibilities of their unprocessed textures , flavors , and scents .
At a time when the country was swooning over Adolph ’ s Meat Tenderizer and the Birds Eye frozen asparagus spear , Beard encouraged Americans to find glory in simplicity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he wrote in the introduction to the 1954 volume How to Eat Better for Less Money .
“ A boiled potato—a potato cooked to the point at which it bursts its tight skin and shows its snowy interior—can be gourmet food.
” To make his case , Beard adapted France ’ s cuisine bourgeoise for the American market , Anglicizing the names of certain dishes , turning down the volume on others considered too complicated or adventurous , and grafting American ingredients onto the rootstock of French recipes .
Beard recast the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” with American smoky bacon subbing for the traditional salted pork belly , while daube emerged as “ Braised Beef , Peasant Style , ” a new type of American pot roast given a dash of flair via the addition of red wine , cognac , and thyme .
In this way , Beard ’ s invention , “ American food , ” emerged as a concern cultishly devoted to the authenticity of taste even as it mined foreign culinary tradition .
We were still , at this point , some way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ salad , Gramercy Tavern ’ s coronation of the burger with a bonnet of Cabot clothbound cheddar , or squash blossoms at Spago .
But the train was in motion .
The voice of Beard ’ s early cookbooks was chatty , unfiltered , and unapologetically camp .
His recipes were larded with terms like “ chichi ” and “ doodadery ” ; at one point , he floated the suggestion that a new book about grill and rotisserie cooking be given the endearingly arch title doing it outdoors ( “ in small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
cummings ” ) .
As Beard ’ s stature grew and he began to attract the interest of more prestigious publishing houses , that voice was gradually silenced ; by the time The James Beard Cookbook appeared in 1959 , it was gone almost completely—the gossipy asides and waspish digressions of his earlier work excised in favor of a narrative style that presented Beard as a practical man of action .
“ James Beard , Dean of American Cookery , ” was the creation of editors and publishing executives who worked hard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all traces of gayness from Beard ’ s voice and public personality .
Beard was deflavorized even as he emerged as America ’ s apostle of taste ; many of his books credit him not as James but as a manly Jim .
This was , of course , the simple and heartless reality for all non-heterosexuals of Beard ’ s generation : “ The central rule of being queer in the brutal era after the war , ” writes Birdsall , was that “ you never , ever publicly acknowledged being queer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ”

Thanks to one of those serendipitous and vaguely literary society encounters that seemed to proliferate without effort in the years between the two world wars, Beard landed a deal to produce his first cookbook. When Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés, With a Key to the Cocktail Party came out, Beard’s mastery of his new métier was on full display: not only in the cool confidence of the recipes, but also in Beard’s embroidery of his own expertise as a caterer and the casual, callous failure to give any kind of credit to Rhode or Rhode’s sister, whose creations appeared without attribution as Beard’s own. Beard presented Brioche en Surprise, a parsley-edged brioche sandwich filled with mayonnaise and onion that was the closest thing Hors d’Oeuvre Inc. had to a signature dish, as the specialty of an imaginary French salon, while a pineapple dessert was inspired by “a famous English hostess who entertained a great deal in the summer at her large country place.” The food was real, and the fiction was total.
Twenty further books followed, and though he went on to augment his success in other venues, such as the James Beard Cooking School, it was above all as a cookbook author that Beard cemented his reputation as the garrulous doyen of American cooking. It’s difficult to imagine a writer today being allowed the time to develop as Beard did: His “platform” as a virgin author was relatively slim, sales weren’t much better, and it wasn’t until The James Beard Cookbook came out in 1959 that Beard enjoyed his first genuine commercial and critical hit. The relative leniency of the postwar publishing environment gave him the space to perfect an identifiable philosophy of food, and New York granted him access to a network of patrons willing to fund the frequent European tours he took to nourish his culinary imagination. The tenets of that philosophy have become, in subsequent decades, relatively commonplace: freshness, seasonality, an emphasis on the use of local ingredients, and a preference wherever possible for drawing on the goods of the green market, the neighborhood providore, the artisan farmer, and the small-batch producer. But in the decades immediately following World War II, when Beard was at his most productive, advice such as this was genuinely radical.
America after the war, writes Birdsall, was “a nation more interested in the future than the past”—a bland and triumphal capitalist wasteland of fish sticks, frozen vegetables, bagels in a can, and TV dinners, in which homes sprouted with magical new cooking gadgets like the Cal Dek, the Smokadero stove, the Big Boy barbecue, and the Broil-Quik. Beard’s struggle was to convince Americans that there was another way, one that resurrected old cooking practices, paid homage to the bounty of each region’s produce, and did not recoil from the sight of whole animals or fresh vegetables, reveling instead in the possibilities of their unprocessed textures, flavors, and scents. At a time when the country was swooning over Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer and the Birds Eye frozen asparagus spear, Beard encouraged Americans to find glory in simplicity. “A much misunderstood word—gourmet,” he wrote in the introduction to the 1954 volume How to Eat Better for Less Money. “A boiled potato—a potato cooked to the point at which it bursts its tight skin and shows its snowy interior—can be gourmet food.”


newrepublic--2020-12-04--We Need More Than Antitrust Law to Tackle Big Tech

The frightening power of Big Tech is one of the few issues Democrats and Republicans still agree on , even if they don ’ t agree on the specifics .
Conservatives often claim to be victims of a type of social media censorship that doesn ’ t exist , while Democrats tend to focus on corporate power and monopoly .
But amid the faintest outlines of bipartisan consensus , it seems possible that our political leaders may soon take a more aggressive posture toward these companies .
Even President-elect Joe Biden , following the drift of public opinion , has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to break up industry giants like Facebook .
In early October , after months of hearings and research , the House Judiciary Committee took a step toward this by releasing a 450-page report , titled “ Competition in Digital Markets , ” which critically examined the roles played by Amazon , Facebook , Google , and Apple in the U.S. economy .
Based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents , the report was supposed to be a broadside against a tech industry that has grown so large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , its monopolist practices threaten the economy itself .
“ By controlling access to markets , these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy , ” the report read .
“ They not only wield tremendous power , but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees , imposing oppressive contract terms , and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely on them.
” But while the report was a diligent piece of investigatory scholarship , and perhaps helped catalyze the Justice Department ’ s antitrust lawsuit against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ document , recycling familiar bromides about monopoly power and lack of competition .
It didn ’ t question the industry ’ s first principles : Who should own our digital infrastructure ?
Who should it serve ?
When does a monopolistic service like Google Search in fact become a public utility deserving public ownership and regulation ?
And how should one approach an industry whose fundamental business model depends upon asymmetrical information between company and customer , and which collects the customer ’ s personal data ?

The Common Wealth paper, by contrast, recognizes that consolidation isn’t just anti-competitive: “This consolidation of power is in turn creating increasingly harmful economic and social effects, from surging inequality and the growth of precarious forms of digitally-organised work, to ubiquitous surveillance and the rise of biased algorithmic management. Moreover, these baleful trends have been accelerated by the effects of Covid-19, leaving us more unequal and more insecure.”
To get a better sense of not just what’s wrong with our digital economy but also what we can do about it, I hopped on Zoom with Mathew Lawrence, one of the three co-authors of the Common Wealth report. He had a lot to say—about what makes a monopoly; about the amazingly fast, publicly funded broadband in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a model for municipal internet access nationwide; about the Department of Defense–funded origins of Big Tech, and how we can publicly fund new innovations without depending on the military-industrial complex; and about the digital “enclosures” of Google-type platform monopolies versus the possibility of “data commons,” where data is shared without the relentless monetization pressures imposed by surveillance capitalism.
A data commons, in Lawrence’s telling, is “a stewarded resource, with democratic governance.” Think of it like a public park—shared, protected, with few of the impositions of capitalism. In one example of a data commons, a city might require all transportation services, public and private, to share certain anonymized data with the municipal government, allowing the city to learn about anything from traffic patterns to pollution to where more bus lines might be needed. Other data commons could be centered around industries, communities, or areas of interest. Major cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam are exploring them. While there are rules around access and privacy, data commons are designed to create a more accessible, and less market-based, system of data usage and to challenge the privately held data monopolies of Google, Facebook, et al. “Data commons are a way to address the power inequalities that emerge from that dynamic of enclosure that’s at the heart of the platform economy,” said Lawrence.


Down With Slack

It crushes individual initiative .
The typical boss has a weakness for believing that everything would be fine if my office workers could only be made to do exactly what I want , every second of every hour of every day .
Slack puts that proposition to the test by maximizing the reach of that wrongheaded ideal .
The inconvenient truth is that , unless you ’ ve hired a pack of imbeciles , the success of your company depends on workers showing initiative—which in turn depends on their getting away from the boss long enough to develop relationships with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ) , gathering a bit of information , and thinking matters through .
Slack discourages such behavior by immersing hapless workers in conditions of managerial surveillance around the clock .
It encourages snap judgments and bullying .
I ’ m no great fan of meetings , but gathering a group of people face to face to exchange ideas usually forces them hear one another out in courteous fashion .
Slack is like a meeting that never ends , but because it ’ s done facelessly there ’ s much less pressure to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social lubrication that comes from looking at another person ’ s face and hearing that person ’ s voice—even on Zoom—matters quite a lot , and it ’ s absent on Slack .
Moreover , in pandemic times we don ’ t have to worry about bumping into whoever we just gave the back of the hand to at the water cooler .
In this way , Slack makes office communication dumber and nastier .
Much has been written about the role that Slack recently played in workers getting managers fired for offenses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some cases , nonexistent , through collective action that intimidated the big boss into cutting the offender loose .
I don ’ t want to re-litigate these controversies , but at least some of them might have gone better if they ’ d played out in person .
Like Twitter , Slack encourages a certain detached contempt for the person being criticized .
Don ’ t kid yourself that this contempt travels only in one direction , up the chain of command .
It ’ s far likelier , especially during economically difficult @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have witnessed , and on one occasion experienced personally , managers expressing a level of nastiness on Slack that I don ’ t think they would have thought advisable in a face-to-face encounter .
Because of its misleadingly impersonal interface , Slack is too conducive to cutting off discussion and barking orders like some Parris Island drill sergeant .

Fat chance. If you widen a road to reduce traffic congestion, what generally happens instead is that you get the same level of congestion, only with more vehicles. Similarly, if an office opts for Slack because everybody’s email inbox is overflowing with crap, it’s magical thinking to believe that their Slack channels won’t soon be overflowing with crap, too. Note the plural. Slack channels multiply like rabbits in heat. A 2019 Recode piece reported that employees at large companies sent more than 200 Slack messages per week. Some of these companies had more Slack channels than they had employees.
It crushes individual initiative. The typical boss has a weakness for believing that everything would be fine if my office workers could only be made to do exactly what I want, every second of every hour of every day. Slack puts that proposition to the test by maximizing the reach of that wrongheaded ideal. The inconvenient truth is that, unless you’ve hired a pack of imbeciles, the success of your company depends on workers showing initiative—which in turn depends on their getting away from the boss long enough to develop relationships with outsiders (sometimes known as “customers”), gathering a bit of information, and thinking matters through. Slack discourages such behavior by immersing hapless workers in conditions of managerial surveillance around the clock.
It encourages snap judgments and bullying. I’m no great fan of meetings, but gathering a group of people face to face to exchange ideas usually forces them to hear one another out in courteous fashion. Slack is like a meeting that never ends, but because it’s done facelessly, there’s much less pressure to be properly attentive and courteous. The social lubrication that comes from looking at another person’s face and hearing that person’s voice—even on Zoom—matters quite a lot, and it’s absent on Slack. Moreover, in pandemic times, we don’t have to worry about bumping into whomever we just gave the back of the hand to at the water cooler. In this way, Slack makes office communication dumber and nastier.


newrepublic--2020-12-04--So You Won’t Get an Early Covid-19 Vaccine. That’s OK.

Those doses need to be manufactured , then stored , shipped , and administered—a mammoth undertaking all on its own .
“ We ’ re going to have limited supply in the beginning , ” Kates said .
“ We have to ration out what we have , to have the biggest effect .
If we just throw it out there , it wouldn ’ t have the same effect.
” That ’ s why health care workers are first in line , Kates said .
“ We need them as a workforce , because our lives are depending on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ put at risk.
” As soon as health workers and those at high risk are protected , she said , pressure on the health care system will be greatly reduced .
“ We need to keep them functional , in order to care for everyone else , ” Schaffner said .
People in public health departments are working day and night to organize the “ gigantic enterprise ” of rolling out the vaccine , he added .
“ They are stretched extremely thin .
They are stretched as thin in public health as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” And they ’ re undertaking this effort despite massive shortages in funding .
Only $ 200 million of an estimated $ 6 to $ 8 billion needed for vaccine preparedness have been distributed so far .
Equity must be central to this unprecedented vaccination campaign , experts said .
Many people of color have been disproportionately affected because of decades of discrimination and neglect , including in the medical system and in the workplace .
Because of the U.S. government ’ s history of medical experimentation upon communities of color , many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the front of the vaccination line .
“ This is a really difficult thing that we are going to try to do .
And we ’ ll need as much help with the leadership in the Black and the Latinx community and other minority communities in our country to help us out , ” Schaffner said .
However , experts said , the benefits of successful immunizations will start to be felt immediately .
Schaffner particularly wants to prioritize anyone who works in childcare or schools .
Not just teachers , but administrators @ @ @ @ @ @ @ workers—everyone who plays a role in childcare and education .
“ If they could be vaccinated , first of all , you could hear the sigh of relief across the country among parents , ” he said .
( This parent , for one , sighed audibly as he spoke . )
“ That would make schools so much safer to open , that the parents could once again earn livings .
And that would stimulate the economy and put everything back in a repairing mode .
So things would slowly but surely @ @ @ @ @ @

The other thing worth remembering as you compare your spot in line to someone else’s is that it takes more than a good vaccine to stop a pandemic. It’s not as if once someone is vaccinated they can return immediately to normal life. “Even if it were a perfect imaginary vaccine that induces 100 percent sterilizing immunity and everybody gets it and it’s perfectly safe for everybody to take—even then, we wouldn’t be able to say the pandemic is over the day that we start vaccinating people,” Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and affiliate of the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, told me. “It is not a small task to roll out hundreds of millions of doses, especially a vaccine that requires a two-dose regimen.”
Those doses need to be manufactured, then stored, shipped, and administered—a mammoth undertaking all on its own. “We’re going to have limited supply in the beginning,” Kates said. “We have to ration out what we have, to have the biggest effect. If we just throw it out there, it wouldn’t have the same effect.” That’s why health care workers are first in line, Kates said. “We need them as a workforce, because our lives are depending on them, and they’re being put at risk.” As soon as health workers and those at high risk are protected, she said, pressure on the health care system will be greatly reduced. “We need to keep them functional, in order to care for everyone else,” Schaffner said.
People in public health departments are working day and night to organize the “gigantic enterprise” of rolling out the vaccine, he added. “They are stretched extremely thin. They are stretched as thin in public health as the hospitals are stretched in clinical care.” And they’re undertaking this effort despite massive shortages in funding. Only $200 million of an estimated $6 to $8 billion needed for vaccine preparedness have been distributed so far.


newrepublic--2020-12-07--The Georgia Runoff Elections Are a Referendum on Political Corruption

Perdue and Loeffler have noted in their own defense that the Senate Ethics Committee investigated their actions and cleared them of any wrongdoing .
In most cases , they have said , their stocks were bought and sold by investment firms on their behalf , not directly by them .
But this defense is less persuasive than it sounds .
“ In the first place , candidates not taking direct control of their stock trades does not actually remove the conflict of interest , ” The Week ’ s Ryan Cooper recently noted .
“ If you are a senator @ @ @ @ @ @ @ asset managers to look after your investments without any kind of blind trust , you still know what those investments are .
You can make decisions knowing that your Goldman Sachs lackeys will make the profit-maximizing move in response—which is the best-case scenario of what happened here.
” Some other senators who sold stock when the pandemic first struck the United States have faced consequences for their actions .
North Carolina Senator Richard Burr , who was already planning to retire in 2022 , was forced to give up his chairmanship of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this spring .
But other lawmakers , including Loeffler and Purdue , emerged relatively unscathed .
They faced neither sanctions nor criticism from their party for their misjudgments .
Since they faced election and re-election in November , that silence may have been more strategic than anything .
Ethical lapses take a backseat to raw political utility .
Some of the problem can be traced back to President Donald Trump , who has done more than any other president in history to normalize corruption in Washington .
He refused to fully divest himself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its properties as extensions of the federal government and a source of income from people trying to curry favor with his administration .
He defied federal ethics rules large and small by hosting partisan events on the White House lawn and wielding government power for political gain .
So inescapable are his unethical behaviors that he ’ s now reportedly contemplating pre-emptive pardons for himself and his adult children to shield them from legal consequences after he leaves office in January .
Along the way , he ’ s inculcated a fervent belief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s done is normal and legitimate , and that his critics are the real crooks .

Perdue and Loeffler have noted in their own defense that the Senate Ethics Committee investigated their actions and cleared them of any wrongdoing. In most cases, they have said, their stocks were bought and sold by investment firms on their behalf, not directly by them. But this defense is less persuasive than it sounds. “In the first place, candidates not taking direct control of their stock trades does not actually remove the conflict of interest,” The Week’s Ryan Cooper recently noted. “If you are a senator, and you hire a bunch of asset managers to look after your investments without any kind of blind trust, you still know what those investments are. You can make decisions knowing that your Goldman Sachs lackeys will make the profit-maximizing move in response—which is the best-case scenario of what happened here.”
Some other senators who sold stock when the pandemic first struck the United States have faced consequences for their actions. North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, who was already planning to retire in 2022, was forced to give up his chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the scandal broke this spring. But other lawmakers, including Loeffler and Perdue, emerged relatively unscathed. They faced neither sanctions nor criticism from their party for their misjudgments. Since they faced election and reelection in November, that silence may have been more strategic than anything. Ethical lapses take a back seat to raw political utility.
Some of the problem can be traced back to President Donald Trump, who has done more than any other president in history to normalize corruption in Washington. He refused to fully divest himself from the Trump Organization, then used its properties as extensions of the federal government and a source of income from people trying to curry favor with his administration. He defied federal ethics rules large and small by hosting partisan events on the White House lawn and wielding government power for political gain. So inescapable are his unethical behaviors that he’s now reportedly contemplating preemptive pardons for himself and his adult children to shield them from legal consequences after he leaves office in January. Along the way, he’s inculcated a fervent belief among Republican voters that what he’s done is normal and legitimate, and that his critics are the real crooks.


newrepublic--2020-12-07--Selling the American Space Dream

Selling the American Space Dream

Mark Armstrong , the son of the first man to step onto the moon , once told me “ Star Trek drove my father crazy .
The Starship Enterprise would whoosh by , and my father would shake his head .
He ’ d say , ‘ You wouldn ’ t get that noise in space .
Sound is caused by molecules moving , and molecules in space are too few and far apart to generate sound.
’ ” Yet the American space-industrial complex is sustained by Hollywood hokum .
All those many years after the brief three-year run of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me she liked to drop into Houston ’ s Mission Control and chat on the radio with the shuttle astronauts as they orbited Earth .
NASA , she said , always made her feel very welcome .
“ Nearly everyone I meet there—whether it ’ s a physicist , an engineer , an astronaut or the guy who zips up the space suits—they all say watching Lost in Space made them know what they wanted to do when they grew up.
” When Ronald Reagan proposed an automated space “ shield ” that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impotent by shooting them down , a movie title became its shorthand name : Star Wars .
The blockbuster film franchise Star Wars has gone on to employ thousands and enrich many corporations .
And for a time , until it was proved too daunting a feat of software coding , Star Wars the military extravaganza enriched many more corporations while funding a vast network of researchers and engineers .
Out of Star Wars the movie has grown a fervent fandom roiled by debates over how much racial , gender , and sexual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our dreamscapes .
Out of Star Wars the weapons program grew the internet and critical advances in artificial intelligence .
A famous genesis story for Elon Musk is that his ambitions sprang from comic books—and that a comic-book movie hero sprang , in turn , from his ambitions .
The bullied , miserable boy with the father he later called “ a terrible human being ” would read one comic after another at the local shop in Pretoria until , he says , he ’ d read them all .
In those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and again of a world coming undone because of villainous evil or human frailty .
Then to the rescue , from unsuspected origins , arrives a superhero .
As a 14-year-old , Musk also was particularly inspired by Douglas Adams ’ s droll novel The Hitchhiker ’ s Guide to the Galaxy , in which the hero learns his planet is about to be destroyed , so he skips out on the next spaceship , only to be dumped loose in outer space .
And in a fitting art-imitating-life-imitating-art twist , the wisecracking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be is said to have supplied the template for the wisecracking brainiac techno-titan Robert Downey Jr. plays in the Iron Man movies .
Musk famously made millions co-founding PayPal , and plowed those earnings into the Tesla electric car company and SpaceX .
He utilizes popular culture as instinctively as did von Braun—though today ’ s popcult landscape is markedly different .
Musk , who fathered a child named X Æ A-12 with his pop star girlfriend , Grimes , in 2018 sported an OCCUPY MARS T-shirt as a guest on Joe Rogan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smoked a joint , warned artificial intelligence will advance “ outside of human control , ” and said that if we were “ forever confined to Earth , this would not be a good future.
” Musk joked as well about fun he ’ s had selling 20,000 flamethrowers for $ 500 each through his Boring Company .
“ I said , ‘ Don ’ t buy this flamethrower .
Don ’ t buy it .
Don ’ t buy it , ’ ” he told Rogan with a bad-boy glint in his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad idea.
” At one point , Rogan wondered aloud : “ How does this motherfucker have all this time and all this energy and all these ideas and then people just let him do these things ?
” Rogan found solace in this notion of human salvation .
“ If there was , like , maybe an intelligent being that we created , you know like some A.I .
creature that ’ s … superior to people and [ could ] maybe just hang around with us for a while like you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a bunch of shit—maybe that ’ s the way , ” he said , eyeing Musk for affirmation .
“ I might have some mutation or something like that ... probably , ” said Musk , still grinning the half-grin of the anointed one .
More than 37 million people have watched the two-and-a-half-hour interview , confirming Musk ’ s appeal as the perfect space visionary for the moment .
Musk is so disruptively different from von Braun and all else before him—this rich geek defeating the government space monolith at its own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shit .
We seem to have come light-years .
And yet , in most respects , we are pretty much right where we started .
Musk ’ s SpaceX workforce remains overwhelmingly male and white and , according to reports , decidedly unwoke .
The main business of its reusable rocket design is not crossing the 38 million miles to Mars but putting satellites in low-Earth orbit 350 miles above the ground—about the distance from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley .
Their purpose is to facilitate a cheaper broadband internet service .
Musk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and seems to be angling to get the government to pay for the whole thing .
Wernher von Braun , who once admitted , “ I have to be a two-headed monster—scientist and public-relations man , ” would appreciate the hustle .
While Musk points us to a distant star , his other hand splays like a puppeteer ’ s , strings descending to connect everybody and everything in our present , single world .
Surveillance by governments inevitably will be further empowered .
Von Braun sensed the demand seven decades earlier , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will go unobserved.
” Musk aims to send aloft more than 40,000 satellites to join the 5,000 already up there ( many of them dead , and joined by some 34,000 other good-size chunks of “ space junk ” ) .
Experts warn he will blot out astronomers ’ views and create a space junk nightmare , but space lord Elon proceeds to build an ugly development on the edge of the sky , raising billions in equity for his Starlink “ constellation , ” and making noises about an initial public offering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that SpaceX could become worth $ 120 billion .
But while the equity market studies SpaceX ’ s telecom play , what creates popular buzz is the comic-book story of apocalypse and redemption .
We are all sitting around von Braun ’ s campfire in rapt attention .
Never mind that Musk ’ s Mars Starship prototypes keep exploding .
The bizarre belief persists that even as the digital capitalism hollows out the middle class , destabilizes our politics , and delivers stratospheric wealth to just a few , it will be those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unraveling fate .
In their hungers for the role , today ’ s sellers of the space dream are alike .
Musk , Amazon founder Jeff Bezos , Virgin founder Richard Branson , and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen all as boys “ mostly read the same science fiction , ” a New Yorker review of Christian Davenport ’ s book The Space Barons notes .
“ The space barons were all outsiders as young men ; they ’ re all obsessed with rockets ; they all want , more than anything , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ driven by a common goal of elevating or saving humankind , but they don ’ t always treat others humanely.
” If anything , this armchair diagnosis goes too easy on the space barons : They are wounded and megalomaniacal , and it is difficult to know which of them is more cautionary .
Maybe Bezos ; if it ’ s all about whose is biggest , then Bezos wins by predicting a trillion humans will someday populate the universe .
Musk merely vows to put a million people on Mars by sending @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of jobs ” there .
Given that Bezos himself admits that “ space is really easy to overhype , ” it ’ s probably worth asking how many regular people really buy it .
A Gallup Poll last year found that , for the first time since the question was asked in 1969 , a majority of Americans would favor “ the United States setting aside money ” for a mission to Mars .
But any conclusions about our actual , executable preferences would need to factor in salience—the weighing of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of conviction .
If I ask how you feel about me putting aside some of our money for more comic books , you are likely to say sure .
If I ask whether you ’ d prefer I spend that money on comic books or , say , pandemic prevention measures and a vaccine , your answer is likely to be different .
In fact , fewer that one in five Americans want a Mars mission to be NASA ’ s top priority , according to a Pew Research survey .
They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ projects solving problems here on Earth .
That is likely why Musk , who in the past acknowledged taxpayers ’ funding was crucial to his rocket business , nowadays makes it sound like a private airline , suggesting tickets to Mars can go for the low , low price of $ 100,000 .
And if passengers don ’ t like it there , he ’ ll ship them back for free .
In any case , one can imagine that our understanding of what is salient and what is deluded noise has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reminded of the role of policy in the immediate public interest , of interdependent governance , of scientific research and engineering applied to saving lives now and in the near future .
We understand our fragility as a species more than ever , but we also see that the real forces that can stave off catastrophe have more to do with mundane social cooperation than with emblazoning any one man ’ s visions across the heavens : washing our hands , social distancing , donning masks and gloves , and supporting embattled frontline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After so much social isolation , absence has made the heart grow fonder for the only planet we know .
From this vantage , we should be able to see that the mind of Elon Musk is powerful but untrustworthy , as if missing a key line of code .
Some glitch in the systems engineer would not accept the knowledge of epidemiologists who ’ d seen tens of thousands already die in other countries .
Instead , he deemed construction of a Mars colony to be an essential service .
We might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Earth less infected by the American space fever , and consider the perspective of Mark McCaughrean , who is a senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency .
“ It ’ s a wild-eyed investment pitch , pumped up by the enthusiasm of credulous fanboys brought up on comic book sci-fi , wrapped in evangelism of saving humanity from itself & the problems we ’ ve wrought on this planet , a kind of modern day manifest destiny , ” he tweeted in response to a 2017 paper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ getting to Mars .
McCaughrean wasn ’ t done , so he sent another lamentation to the skies , which bounced off one satellite or another and back to reality .
“ I ’ m less concerned about making humans a multi-planetary species , ” he tweeted , “ than I am about making the Earth a sustainable multi-species planet , before we go gadding off colonising the solar system.
” Ellen Stofan , a former NASA chief scientist , dared to speak similar heresy with cooler , stoic precision .
“ Job @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she said .
“ There isn ’ t a planet B .
”

As a 14-year-old, Musk also was particularly inspired by Douglas Adams’s droll novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the hero learns his planet is about to be destroyed, so he skips out on the next spaceship, only to be dumped loose in outer space. And in a fitting art-imitating-life-imitating-art twist, the wisecracking brainiac techno-titan that Musk grew up to be is said to have supplied the template for the wisecracking brainiac techno-titan Robert Downey Jr. plays in the Iron Man movies.
Musk famously made millions co-founding PayPal, and plowed those earnings into the Tesla electric car company and SpaceX. He utilizes popular culture as instinctively as did von Braun—though today’s popcult landscape is markedly different. Musk, who fathered a child named X Æ A-12 with his pop star girlfriend, Grimes, in 2018 sported an OCCUPY MARS T-shirt as a guest on Joe Rogan’s videocast, on which he smoked a joint, warned artificial intelligence will advance “outside of human control,” and said that if we were “forever confined to Earth, this would not be a good future.”
Musk joked as well about fun he’s had selling 20,000 flamethrowers for $500 each through his Boring Company. “I said, ‘Don’t buy this flamethrower. Don’t buy it. Don’t buy it,’” he told Rogan with a bad-boy glint in his eye. “It’s a bad idea.”
At one point, Rogan wondered aloud: “How does this motherfucker have all this time and all this energy and all these ideas and then people just let him do these things?”
“Because I’m an alien,” Musk answered with a half-grin.
Rogan found solace in this notion of human salvation. “If there was, like, maybe an intelligent being that we created, you know like some A.I. creature that’s … superior to people and [could] maybe just hang around with us for a while like you’ve been doing and then fix a bunch of shit—maybe that’s the way,” he said, eyeing Musk for affirmation.
“I might have some mutation or something like that ... probably,” said Musk, still grinning the half-grin of the anointed one.
More than 37 million people have watched the two-and-a-half-hour interview, confirming Musk’s appeal as the perfect space visionary for the moment. Musk is so disruptively different from von Braun and all else before him—this rich geek defeating the government space monolith at its own game while fixing up a bunch of shit. We seem to have come light-years. And yet, in most respects, we are pretty much right where we started.
Musk’s SpaceX workforce remains overwhelmingly male and white and, according to reports, decidedly unwoke. The main business of its reusable rocket design is not crossing the 38 million miles to Mars but putting satellites in low-Earth orbit 350 miles above the ground—about the distance from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley.
Their purpose is to facilitate a cheaper broadband internet service. Musk has landed the Army as a customer and seems to be angling to get the government to pay for the whole thing. Wernher von Braun, who once admitted, “I have to be a two-headed monster—scientist and public-relations man,” would appreciate the hustle.
While Musk points us to a distant star, his other hand splays like a puppeteer’s, strings descending to connect everybody and everything in our present, single world. Surveillance by governments inevitably will be further empowered. Von Braun sensed the demand seven decades earlier, rhapsodizing that from low orbit “nothing will go unobserved.”
Musk aims to send aloft more than 40,000 satellites to join the 5,000 already up there (many of them dead, and joined by some 34,000 other good-size chunks of “space junk”). Experts warn he will blot out astronomers’ views and create a space junk nightmare, but space lord Elon proceeds to build an ugly development on the edge of the sky, raising billions in equity for his Starlink “constellation,” and making noises about an initial public offering. The Starlink project has analysts predicting that SpaceX could become worth $120 billion.
But while the equity market studies SpaceX’s telecom play, what creates popular buzz is the comic-book story of apocalypse and redemption. We are all sitting around von Braun’s campfire in rapt attention. Never mind that Musk’s Mars Starship prototypes keep exploding.
The bizarre belief persists that even as the digital capitalism hollows out the middle class, destabilizes our politics, and delivers stratospheric wealth to just a few, it will be those same mega-billionaires who deliver us from our unraveling fate.
In their hungers for the role, today’s sellers of the space dream are alike. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin founder Richard Branson, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen all as boys “mostly read the same science fiction,” a New Yorker review of Christian Davenport’s book The Space Barons notes. “The space barons were all outsiders as young men; they’re all obsessed with rockets; they all want, more than anything, to win. Their space ventures are supposedly driven by a common goal of elevating or saving humankind, but they don’t always treat others humanely.”
If anything, this armchair diagnosis goes too easy on the space barons: They are wounded and megalomaniacal, and it is difficult to know which of them is more cautionary. Maybe Bezos; if it’s all about whose is biggest, then Bezos wins by predicting a trillion humans will someday populate the universe. Musk merely vows to put a million people on Mars by sending three rockets a day to fill “a lot of jobs” there.
Given that Bezos himself admits that “space is really easy to overhype,” it’s probably worth asking how many regular people really buy it. A Gallup Poll last year found that, for the first time since the question was asked in 1969, a majority of Americans would favor “the United States setting aside money” for a mission to Mars.
But any conclusions about our actual, executable preferences would need to factor in salience—the weighing of one desirable against another to gauge strength of conviction. If I ask how you feel about me putting aside some of our money for more comic books, you are likely to say sure. If I ask whether you’d prefer I spend that money on comic books or, say, pandemic prevention measures and a vaccine, your answer is likely to be different. In fact, fewer that one in five Americans want a Mars mission to be NASA’s top priority, according to a Pew Research survey. They’d prefer the focus be on space projects solving problems here on Earth.
That is likely why Musk, who in the past acknowledged taxpayers’ funding was crucial to his rocket business, nowadays makes it sound like a private airline, suggesting tickets to Mars can go for the low, low price of $100,000. And if passengers don’t like it there, he’ll ship them back for free.
In any case, one can imagine that our understanding of what is salient and what is deluded noise has been recalibrated by Covid-19. We have been reminded of the role of policy in the immediate public interest, of interdependent governance, of scientific research and engineering applied to saving lives now and in the near future. We understand our fragility as a species more than ever, but we also see that the real forces that can stave off catastrophe have more to do with mundane social cooperation than with emblazoning any one man’s visions across the heavens: washing our hands, social distancing, donning masks and gloves, and supporting embattled frontline health care workers and grocery clerks. After so much social isolation, absence has made the heart grow fonder for the only planet we know.
From this vantage, we should be able to see that the mind of Elon Musk is powerful but untrustworthy, as if missing a key line of code. Some glitch in the systems engineer would not accept the knowledge of epidemiologists who’d seen tens of thousands already die in other countries. Instead, he deemed construction of a Mars colony to be an essential service.
We should be able to see that the mind of Elon Musk is powerful but untrustworthy, as if missing a key line of code.
We might ponder all this from a different point on Earth less infected by the American space fever, and consider the perspective of Mark McCaughrean, who is a senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency.
“It’s a wild-eyed investment pitch, pumped up by the enthusiasm of credulous fanboys brought up on comic book sci-fi, wrapped in evangelism of saving humanity from itself & the problems we’ve wrought on this planet, a kind of modern day manifest destiny,” he tweeted in response to a 2017 paper by Musk laying out his plan for getting to Mars.
McCaughrean wasn’t done, so he sent another lamentation to the skies, which bounced off one satellite or another and back to reality. “I’m less concerned about making humans a multi-planetary species,” he tweeted, “than I am about making the Earth a sustainable multi-species planet, before we go gadding off colonising the solar system.”
Ellen Stofan, a former NASA chief scientist, dared to speak similar heresy with cooler, stoic precision. “Job one is to keep this planet habitable,” she said. “There isn’t a planet B.”


newrepublic--2020-12-07--Trump Will Finally Get What He Wanted All Along

But the mere act of running for president has long been a way for a few political luminaries to open revenue streams .
For Trump , the mere act of campaigning opened the possibility of rekindling the lucrative branding deals he ’ d previously wrought the corrupt nations that had sustained him during fallow periods before Mark Burnett dusted him off and got him to play-act as the tycoon he wasn ’ t .
He could use his status as an icon to tens of millions of nativist true-believers to sustain his flagging empire and pay down the hundreds of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actual outcome of the election didn ’ t matter to Trump in the week before he made the terrible mistake of winning it : “ I don ’ t think about losing because it isn ’ t losing , ” Trump reportedly told Roger Ailes .
“ We ’ ve totally won.
” In this version of events , Trump could lose in 2016 , retreat to Mar-a-Lago , and possibly establish a sort of cable news-based Avignon presidency that would have permitted him to constantly harangue Washington losers from both parties , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
From there , he could transform himself into a modern-day version of a 19th-century pop culture figure , a political P.T .
Barnum barnstorming the country , selling snake oil and geek-show thrills , raking in wheelbarrows full of boodle from paid speeches .
His business , however , fraudulent , would still more or less be intact .
He would have it both ways : He could dress up as both the mogul and the political leader , without ever having to be either one .
When he leaves office , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ version of the life he was dreaming for himself when he confidently cooed about his future to the now-deceased head of Fox News .
The hoped-for “ Trump TV “ network might no longer be in the cards : such a proposition is quite an expensive endeavor and the field has become too crowded , ironically by new organizations who ’ ve muscled their way onto the scene thanks to their slavish devotion to Trump .
It ’ s unlikely that a week will ever go by without Trump giving his time to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One America News Network , or even Fox News ’ s late night programming .
( His rift with Fox ’ s news division may never heal , but Trump will quickly learn that he needs Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson almost as much as they need him . )

In this way, the campaign that Trump began in the summer of 2015 never really ended, it just got badly sidetracked when he tragically won the election. Trump will undoubtedly continue to do rallies, like the one he held in Georgia on Saturday, until he is physically or mentally unable to carry on with them. It should not be surprising to see him launch a 2024 presidential campaign before Joe Biden places his hand on a Bible to take the oath of office next month. Trump’s life from 2015 to 2024 should be best understood as one long political campaign. Given that there was so little governing involved—and that Trump only really cared for the pomp and circumstance of turkey pardons and medal ceremonies—that near-decade will quickly blur into a succession of rallies.
But ex-President Trump will be entering a much different world than he would be if he’d been smart enough to fail the first time. He is currently being investigated by the attorney generals of a number of states; the financial shenanigans undertaken to sustain the illusion of enormous wealth, herculean even by American standards, are being put under a microscope. Even if Joe Biden opts to let bygones be bygones and decline to sanction investigations into the president’s conduct, Trump will be facing a number of serious and costly legal probes. (He is reportedly considering wide-ranging pardons for his adult children, who are also being investigated.) These probes, combined with his fragile ego, essentially demand that he continues acting as the leader of the Republican Party.
One wonders if Trump still thinks about what might have been if everything had gone right the first time he ran for president. Running in 2016 was a lark; the expectation was that he could always go back to his old life, whenever he wanted. He had nothing to lose, and Mar-a-Lago was waiting. He’d fashioned for himself a lucrative carnival act that played sold-out crowds and got him home to sleep in his own bed after every performance, with all his old revenue streams open to him. The only thing he needed to do was lose an election. Trump, of course, did get his wish, although in a monkey’s paw sort of twist, the electoral loss he needed came four years too late. He’ll soon be sent packing, back to the old life for which he longed. But there’s no getting the hell out of his presidency now.


newrepublic--2020-12-07--The Elusive Promise of the Underground Railroad

Whereas Wells focuses mostly on what the historian Richard Bell has dubbed the Reverse Underground Railroad , John Harris ’ s The Last Slave Ships zeroes in on Manhattan ’ s role in the illegal transatlantic slave trade .
Though the U.S. and Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 , U.S. enforcement was so lax that , between 1850 and 1867 , around 200,000 enslaved Africans were smuggled into Cuba and Brazil—where slavery remained legal until the 1880s—on slave ships operated by Manhattan-based traffickers .
Like the kidnapping of Black New Yorkers , this story is not unknown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ study of its size and extent , and of the specific political dynamics that turned New York into “ one of the trade ’ s last Atlantic hubs.
” It is a remarkable piece of scholarship , sophisticated yet crisply written , and deserves the widest possible audience .
Manhattan emerged as a central port for this illegal slave trade in part for the reason Wells identifies : New York ’ s business and shipping communities did lucrative trade with slaveholding Brazilian coffee and Cuban sugar producers .
But there were factors beyond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transatlantic slave trade in 1836 , but it did not aggressively enforce the ban until 1852 , after a series of slave revolts and aggressive pressure from the British .
In the wake of Brazil ’ s crackdown , prominent Brazilian slave traders , like Manoel Cunha Reis , moved to New York City , where they had long-standing relationships with Manhattan shipbuilders , suppliers , and merchants .
Reis and his accomplices , known as the Portuguese Company ( also featured in Wells ’ s book ) , were also confident that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overwhelmingly proslavery Democrats , would enforce the U.S. ban .
Though the city ’ s proslavery newspapers expressed outrage at the occasional discovery of illegal slave ships in Manhattan ’ s harbors , Harris argues they only did this because it allowed Democrats to make a case for seizing Cuba for the U.S. , a key objective of expansionist Southern slaveholders in the 1850s .
By blaming Cuba for not enforcing its own slave trade ban , slavery ’ s defenders had their justification for war .
Another reason New York emerged as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , keen on asserting national independence , refused to allow British naval ships to stop and search American vessels .
Brazilian and Cuban traffickers purchased the U.S. flag for their ships using New York accomplices as “ straw buyers ” ; Harris finds that 75 percent of the 474 illegal slaving ships between 1853 and 1866 flew an American flag .
In what is perhaps his best chapter , he painstakingly analyzes how conditions on board slave ships changed as the trade became illegal .
Slave ships became more tightly packed , routinely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost double the average for the trade during its entire life span.
” By the 1850s , males made up 80 percent of captives , compared to two-thirds over the course of the Atlantic slave trade ’ s 350-year history .
After 1850 , children comprised half of all captives , nearly twice the overall average .
As the amount of food and space shrank for each captive , the death rate spiked , increasing by five percentage points at midcentury to 17 percent .
If there was any relief , Harris notes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reality ” of more deaths , the dead bodies tossed overboard providing more room for the living .
Instead of focusing on the street-level activism of men like Ruggles , Harris trains his eye on federal policy .
In 1861 , shortly after the South seceded , Lincoln created a new federal unit , called the Suppression of the African Slave Trade , to aggressively prosecute American slave traders .
New York officials took the hint , immediately cracking down on local traffickers .
Famously , when in 1862 one such trafficker—Nathaniel Gordon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involvement in the trade punishable by death , Lincoln refused to commute his sentence .
The execution of Gordon was a national sensation , cheered in Harper ’ s and The New York Times and denounced by their proslavery counterparts .

Given the precarity of freedom in the antebellum North, enslaved Black Americans often sought freedom in Mexico instead. Scholars of the Underground Railroad have long known that a small stream of runaways escaped to Mexico, but Alice Baumgartner’s South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War offers its first full accounting. Having immersed herself in Mexican archives, Baumgartner cautiously suggests that 3,000 to 5,000 slaves fled to Mexico before the Civil War. This might seem slight in comparison to the 30,000 to 100,000 slaves who escaped to the North or Canada, but the difference can largely be explained by geography and timing. Mexico did not gain independence until 1821, and its national emancipation law went into effect 16 years later. Even more important, only slaves that lived near free states, whether Northern ones or Mexico, were likely to abscond. Not surprisingly, the majority of slaves to escape to free Northern states, like Pennsylvania or Ohio, lived in slave states that bordered them; similarly, the vast majority of fugitives to Mexico lived in Texas, which did not join the Union until 1845.
Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republican Party, and the abolitionist war it ultimately fought, was partly an outgrowth of Mexican emancipation policies enacted decades earlier.
South to Freedom does far more than establish numbers. It is primarily concerned with understanding why the U.S. failed to stop slavery’s expansion, why Mexico did, and using that knowledge to cast the coming of the Civil War in a new light. Baumgartner argues that Mexico’s anti-slavery policies led the South to try to conquer the nation, partly achieving that goal through the U.S.-Mexican War, which lasted from 1846 to 1848. But the South miscalculated. It hoped to reestablish slavery in the territory it acquired from Mexico after the war (what became California, Utah, and the Southwest) but instead fueled an anti-slavery backlash. The Republican Party, established in 1854, refused to allow slavery to expand into Western territories, especially where it had already been abolished—including those seized from Mexico. In this way, Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republican Party, and the abolitionist war it ultimately fought, was partly an outgrowth of Mexican emancipation policies enacted decades earlier.
Baumgartner has achieved a rare thing: She has made an important academic contribution, while also writing in beautiful, accessible prose. South to Freedom shows that U.S. officials proved far less willing to overcome slaveholder pressure than Mexican authorities were. From the 1803 Louisiana Purchase until Lincoln’s election, U.S. politicians repeatedly backed down to planters who insisted that slavery be allowed to expand into federal territories, fearing that if they challenged slaveholders, they might cause the Union to disintegrate. By contrast, Mexican officials feared that if they did not restrict slavery, more slaveholders would enter, destroying their fragile republic. This nearly happened when Stephen A. Austin, a Louisiana slaveholder, moved to the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas in 1821. Prioritizing the need for settlers over the potential for instability, Mexican officials allowed Austin to enter with his slaves. But to Austin’s chagrin, his state legislature enacted a gradual emancipation law in 1827, joining eight other Mexican states. That Austin led a rebellion eight years later, establishing the Republic of Texas, was a surprise to no one.


newrepublic--2020-12-07--Why Biden Should Declare a Climate Emergency

Last week , New Zealand became the latest country to declare climate change an emergency .
Across the planet , local , regional , and national emergency declarations including those in New Zealand , Japan , and the United Kingdom now represent some 820 million citizens .
The United States following suit could tip the scales—and broadcast to the rest of the world , at a crucial moment , that the country is discarding President Donald Trump ’ s legacy and reclaiming its role as a global citizen .
It could also usefully signal to Americans , stunned from four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that the climate crisis is upon us now , not in the distant future .
Scientists say we need to slash greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent in the next 10 years to have any hope of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius ( 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) by 2050 .
Right now , warming is accelerating faster than predicted .
Planetary temperatures may even exceed the 1.5 degree mark within five years .
First-day-in-office promises have a patchy , clichéd history .
Barack Obama promised to close the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first day—leading instead to an order on his second to close it within a year .
That never happened .
But beyond its symbolic importance , the immediate declaration of climate as a national emergency will unlock specific executive powers , outlined in more than 130 statutes , to speed our transition off fossil fuels even without permission from Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans .

There are many concrete steps Biden could take. In 2015, for example, Congress lifted the 40-year-old export ban on crude oil. Crude-oil exports skyrocketed to three million barrels per day—a quarter of daily U.S. production. If, and only if, he makes a declaration of national emergency, Biden could immediately end these climate-killing exports and reinstate an export ban. (About five years ago, the group I work for, along with 350 others, submitted a petition to President Obama requesting he do exactly that.)
President Biden could direct the Department of Defense to construct clean energy systems through the emergency redirection of a portion of military funds. The rest of the federal government could follow suit, deploying rooftop solar systems and other clean energy technologies on government buildings and properties. If each of the 30,000 U.S. post offices had at least five free electric vehicle charging stations, that alone would vastly increase access to charging in rural areas that badly need the capacity.
Along with his emergency declaration, Biden should invoke the Defense Production Act. Through the act’s allocation, finance, and industry-coordination powers, he could mobilize domestic production of solar panels, smart-grid infrastructure, and ultra-energy-efficient appliances and technologies. In doing so, he would both defend against climate change—which even the military sees as a major national security threat—and generate millions of high-quality jobs for American families. To spur the demand for green energy, he could require government agencies to use their federal procurement powers to buy those American-made, labor-protective goods as part of fulfilling their greater mandate to be powered by 100 percent clean energy—and to adopt energy conservation measures.


newrepublic--2020-12-08--Beyond the Great Awokening

Beyond the Great Awokening

This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication of Black Metropolis , St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton ’ s landmark study of Chicago .
Black Metropolis appeared as World War II neared its end , with U.S. political leaders fiercely debating the best ways to bring about civilian reconversion and reconstruction .
Drake and Cayton recognized that the outcomes of those debates would be critical for their fellow black Americans in the postwar decades .
A pair of other influential studies published around the same time , An American Dilemma : The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Negro Wants , an anthology edited by Rayford W. Logan , likewise affirmed the central challenges of racial equality in the postwar world , stressing continued expansion of New Deal social-wage policy and the steady growth of industrial unionism as keys to black advancement .
Against this backdrop of social-democratic policy debate , Drake and Cayton laid out a rich account of changes in Chicago ’ s black population between the 1840s and the early 1940s .
They focused especially on the evolving patterns of employment and housing , and the overlapping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and structured opportunity—what they describe as the Job Ceiling—in the 1930s and 1940s .
Their description of the city ’ s racial hierarchy was grounded in their account of material social relations—showing that , for example , competition for employment underwrote racial discrimination in labor markets , and that housing market dynamics established white exclusivity as a basis of real estate value .
They assumed , that is , “ racism ” and even “ prejudice ” did not constitute in themselves adequate explanations for patterned racial inequalities : “ The intimate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and social status is so intricate that it is difficult to unravel the threads.
” And , they insisted , “ Race conflict in northern urban areas arises when competition is particularly keen—for jobs , houses , political power , or prestige—and when Negroes are regarded ( with or without foundation ) as a threat to those who already have those things or who are competing for them.
” Drake and Cayton did not assume that racism is an unchanging , monolithic force eternally suppressing black people , because they knew better @ @ @ @ @ @ @ account of how black Americans ’ circumstances as individuals and as a group had altered over the previous half-century , pointing out the large and small improvements and victories that black advocates won for equality in employment opportunities , civil rights , and material security .
They also stressed how blacks had made the most of the greater freedom and economic and political opportunity afforded them in Chicago and other Northern cities , in contrast to the Jim Crow regime of the South .

However, the fervor of the Great Awokening has since transformed this fundamentally rhetorical device into an assertion of fact. That is one of the most intellectually disturbing features of the irrationalist race reductionism of our own historical moment. It sacrifices or openly rejects not only nuance in historical interpretation but also the idea of historicity itself—the understanding that the relation between past and present generates meanings and nuances beyond the bounds of outworn dogmas in either era. Inflexible race reductionism also rules out, on principle, the notion that we should strive to understand ideas and actions in the past synchronically, as enmeshed in their own complex contexts of meaning, as well as in relation to ours. Race reductionist politics depends on denying historical specificity, typically through a sleight-of-hand maneuver that depicts black Americans’ challenges and struggles as set in motion by a singular, transhistorical, and idealized abstraction called “racism,” “white supremacy,” or “anti-blackness.” What’s omitted from this Borg-like model of an undeviating, and seemingly all-conquering, white supremacist opposition are the actual policies and programs that actual black people, often along with others, fought for and against. Black Metropolis shines a spotlight on that difference.
Drake and Cayton also provide a suggestive (if inadvertent) explanation of a core paradox of the Awokening age: that, as actual class inequality intensifies among black Americans, the fervor of anti-racist politics escalates to ever more irrational lengths to deny this state of affairs, or to subordinate it to a race-reductionist set of priorities. The authors observed, “The Negro middle class views the white middle class as its competitor, and the Negro lower class sees it as an exploiter.” Of course, it would not have occurred to them to ask in 1945 how the black working class would view the black middle class if the latter were to replace its white counterparts; that possibility was then beyond the scope of pragmatic political imagination. Ventriloquizing the interests of a fictive, undifferentiated racial population has become an important source of political capital for advancing identitarian agendas skewed to benefit the upper strata and aspirants—a key development that in turn suggests the Great Awokening represents a form of cognitive dissonance within that class. That is to say, the more obviously the premises of race-reductionist politics are at odds with the daily realities of black Americans’ lives and expressed concerns, the more insistently the Woke must double down on the fantasy of monolithic, unchanged race-driven oppression. In this way, the vital contrasts of unequal life outcomes arbitrated by class, or other forces beyond the scope of race reduction, are simply factored out of the equation. This, indeed, may mark the point where wishful thinking approaches pathology. Or it may just show the deep wisdom of Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”


newrepublic--2020-12-08--North Carolina’s Labor Commissioner Abandons Workers One Last Time on Her Way Out the Door

As an anti-regulation Republican , Berry has rarely been an ally to North Carolina workers in her two decades in the role .
The pandemic hasn ’ t softened her position .
For her part , Berry has largely shied away from enforcing any of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper ’ s related executive orders , which have included mask mandates for both business owners and individuals .
Cooper also promised farmworker advocacy groups that he would issue an executive order to increase testing access and hygiene requirements , only to be told by Berry that if he issued it , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care not to publicly overstate the role of the NCDOL regarding enforcement.
” Facing similar messages from the Agriculture and Health and Human Services department heads , Cooper quietly walked back plans for such an order .
As the News & Observer reported , North Carolina has been home to 280 reported clusters at workplaces , which has resulted in over 6,000 cases and 30 deaths , yet the only citations Berry ’ s department have handed out in the pandemic have been non-Covid related .
With the agriculture industry still deeply rooted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , meat-packing plants like those of Tyson and Smithfield dot farm counties throughout North Carolina .
And as with other states , the cases have followed—over two-thirds of North Carolina ’ s workplace-related cases have been traced back to such plants .
In Berry ’ s letter , she wrote in support of not enforcing regulations that “ most of these deaths are people over the age of 65 ; generally this group is no longer active in the workforce.
” Meanwhile , in the first week of December , two elderly workers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recently contracted the virus and both died within a day of one another .
In the Tar Heel State , the Commissioner of Labor is an elected position , unlike the federal agency ’ s appointed status , which makes Berry ’ s prolonged tenure a curious facet of North Carolina politics .
She actually holds a bit of a mythic status in the state—Lord knows it ’ s not for anything she ’ s done to help workers , but for the grand idea a communications staffer had to plaster her face @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increased visibility ( Berry waited until she was reelected to her second term to move forward with the change . )
She even snagged the Twitter handle “ @ ElevatorQueen ” to double down on the branding exercise .
The widespread name recognition has helped the conservative regulator win five consecutive terms .

As an anti-regulation Republican, Berry has rarely been an ally to North Carolina workers in her two decades in the role. The pandemic hasn’t softened her position. For her part, Berry has largely shied away from enforcing any of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s related executive orders, which have included mask mandates for both business owners and individuals. Cooper also promised farmworker advocacy groups that he would issue an executive order to increase testing access and hygiene requirements, only to be told by Berry that if he issued it, “I respectfully ask that you take care not to publicly overstate the role of the NCDOL regarding enforcement.” Facing similar messages from the Agriculture and Health and Human Services department heads, Cooper quietly walked back plans for such an order.
As the News & Observer reported, North Carolina has been home to 280 reported clusters at workplaces, which has resulted in over 6,000 cases and 30 deaths, yet the only citations Berry’s department has handed out in the pandemic have been unrelated to Covid-19. With the agriculture industry still deeply rooted in the state’s rural economies, meatpacking plants like those of Tyson and Smithfield dot farm counties throughout North Carolina. And as with other states, the cases have followed—over two-thirds of North Carolina’s workplace-related cases have been traced back to such plants. In Berry’s letter, she wrote, in support of not enforcing regulations, that “most of these deaths are people over the age of 65; generally this group is no longer active in the workforce.” Meanwhile, in the first week of December, two elderly workers employed at a nursing home in Hickory contracted the virus and died within a day of one another.
In the Tar Heel State, the Commissioner of Labor is an elected position, unlike the federal agency’s appointed status, which makes Berry’s prolonged tenure a curious facet of North Carolina politics. She actually holds a bit of a mythic status in the state—Lord knows it’s not for anything she’s done to help workers but for the grand idea a communications staffer had to plaster her face in every elevator in the state for increased visibility (Berry waited until she was reelected to her second term to move forward with the change). She even snagged the Twitter handle “@ElevatorQueen” to double down on the branding exercise. The widespread name recognition has helped the conservative regulator win five consecutive terms.


newrepublic--2020-12-08--Neal Katyal and the Depravity of Big Law

Even the lawyers who founded this country would ’ ve taken issue with the idea that Katyal can be meaningfully independent of his client ’ s interests .
In a 1995 history of legal specialization , Michael S. Ariens described what he considered “ a transformation in lawyers ’ understanding of the reasons justifying their position in society.
’ ” In the nineteenth century , lawyers justified their stature by distinguishing the profession of law from a mere trade .
One pillar of professionalism was treating the practice of law as a science and not a mere skill .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Ariens wrote , “ was tied to the notion of the lawyer as ‘ officer of the court.
’ As an officer of the court , a lawyer was under a duty to serve the interests of justice , not just the interests of the client .
Even though the client paid for the lawyer ’ s service , the lawyer was a professional , whose main purpose was ‘ [ p ] ursuit of the learned art in the spirit of a public service.
’ Because the making of money @ @ @ @ @ @ @ legal profession , the lawyer ’ s duty to the cause of justice should not and could not be purchased by the client.
” That said : “ Once elite legal practice shifted from advocacy to office practice , however , the concept of the lawyer as an ‘ officer of the court ’ was stripped of its original meaning.
” That shift led almost immediately to the kinds of justifications of corporate work we still hear from lawyers today .
John W. Davis—a Wilsonian Democrat and fantastically successful corporate attorney , whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wardwell—ran for president in 1920 and 1924 .
Even then , his large corporate clients were considered a political liability .
And he wrote a defense of his practice that was published , among other places , in the Virginia Law Register .
For such an early document , it ’ s a masterclass in the art of blurring the distinction between court advocacy and simply working on behalf of corporate interests .
Since the law , however , is a profession and not a trade , I conceive it to be the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it is the duty of the priest or the surgeon , to serve those who call upon him unless , indeed , there is some insuperable obstacle in the way .
No one in all this list of clients has ever controlled , or fancied that he could control , my personal or my political conscience .
I am vain enough to imagine that no one ever will .
The only limitation upon a right-thinking lawyer ’ s independence is in the duty which he owes to his clients , once selected , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the effect such a service may have upon his own personal popularity or political fortunes .
Any lawyer who surrenders this independence or shades this duty by trimming his professional course to fit the gusts of popular opinion , in my judgment , not only dishonors himself but disparages and degrades the great profession to which he should be proud to belong .
Davis argues that he doesn ’ t let political considerations dissuade him from performing his work disinterestedly—just as a surgeon or a priest would say that politics never gets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or who they choose to help .
What Davis conveniently elides is that he was himself expressing his political opinions through his legal practice .
Davis would become an ardent anti-New Dealer , and he used his firm , over the course of his long and distinguished career , to fight government regulation on behalf of his corporate clients .
( He ’ d end his career defending school segregation before the Supreme Court . )
His legal practice reflected his politics ; it was never independent of them .

Corporate lawyers frequently dissemble on this point, so I will be clear: Nothing in our “legal system” or Constitution says Nestle and Cargill deserve “the best advocacy” when it comes to civil claims. But the question of whether they “deserve” it in some ethical sense is completely moot: They will always receive it, because they can afford it. Once you establish that simple fact, it’s clear that the attorneys representing these corporations are not acting out of some high-minded commitment to a central constitutional principle; they are simply representing Nestle for a lot of money. They have chosen to go into corporate law and, as Katyal consistently has throughout his career, make arguments that favor large corporations at the expense of everyone else.
The point is not that Katyal should be disbarred or something for representing a client. The point is that the cases Katyal chooses to take, the arguments he chooses to make, even the firm he chooses to work for, all speak to his values. He cannot separate his politics, whatever he thinks they are, and whatever he wants everyone else to think they are, from his decision to defend Nestle against the threat of potential lawsuits from enslaved children. That is a statement about how one believes the world should be organized and on whose behalf the legal system should operate.
To defend an accused murderer or rapist in a criminal trial is a straightforward endorsement of the idea of the presumption of innocence, not an endorsement of murder or rape. That’s the act enshrined in our Bill of Rights. To make a career out of defending and expanding corporate power at the expense of employee and consumer power, on the other hand, is simply to endorse those things.


newrepublic--2020-12-08--Why “Harriet the Spy” Had to Lie

Why “Harriet the Spy” Had to Lie

Young Louise rebelled against the materialism and stuffiness of her father ’ s life by traveling , with the help of her allowance , to Paris and Greenwich Village , where she fell in with leftist artists and intellectuals .
For a time , she lived in Bologna , Italy , ostensibly to study painting but also , Brody writes , because “ she believed it to be a communist city , one of the few outside Eastern Europe or China , and she was curious to learn what life there might be like.
” In New York City , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lesbian party scene , mixing with the likes of Djuna Barnes and the Marxist playwright Lorraine Hansberry , with whom she exchanged letters about politics and art .
At the time , Louise was working as a portrait artist and illustrator .
She did the drawings for a children ’ s book called Suzuki Beane ( 1961 ) , written by her friend Sandra Scoppettone , about a beatnik girl who lives on Bleecker Street .
The book was a hit .
One review said of Suzuki Beane that it did “ for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s On the Road did for their ( slightly ) elders.
” Buoyed by this triumph , Louise decided to try her hand at writing a children ’ s book on her own this time .
In a letter to a friend , she said she was working on something new : “ It is called Harriet the Spy and is about a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.
” When Harriet the Spy came out in the mid-1960s , spies were everywhere—from John le Carré ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cold ( 1963 ) and Ian Fleming ’ s James Bond books to the “ Spy vs. Spy ” comic strip in Mad Magazine—and the world had learned that the scary prospect of nuclear winter was also the stuff of bestsellers .
It was no surprise then that writers of children ’ s literature would want to get in on the fun of double agents , bad disguises , and elaborate gadgets ( though Harriet ’ s magnifying glass is not exactly the tear-gas cartridge disguised as a tin of talcum powder from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much of the book , Harriet ’ s version of spycraft is decidedly playful ; when she does not want to go to dancing school because it ’ s “ not something spies do , ” her nanny , Ole Golly , tells her about Mata Hari and how she used her wiles as a dancer to collect intelligence .
“ Now how are you going to be a spy if you don ’ t know how to dance ?
” Ole Golly asks her .
As Brody notes , Harriet the Spy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and occasional breaking and entering ” as actually quite innocent activities .
Harriet , Brody emphasizes , “ doesn ’ t spy or extort to blackmail or abuse the secrets she collects.
” Harriet ’ s people-watching games are ultimately about her ambitions as a writer and wanting to hone her skills of observation and description for artistic , rather than nuclear , purposes .
( It is , after all , her friend Janie , the scientist , who wants to “ blow up the world .
” )

When Fitzhugh tried to follow up Harriet the Spy with a novel that centered on a lesbian relationship, her agent was “quite terrified.”
Young Louise rebelled against the materialism and stuffiness of her father’s life by traveling, with the help of her allowance, to Paris and Greenwich Village, where she fell in with leftist artists and intellectuals. For a time, she lived in Bologna, Italy, ostensibly to study painting but also, Brody writes, because “she believed it to be a communist city, one of the few outside Eastern Europe or China, and she was curious to learn what life there might be like.” In New York City, she was a fixture in the downtown lesbian party scene, mixing with the likes of Djuna Barnes and the Marxist playwright Lorraine Hansberry, with whom she exchanged letters about politics and art.
At the time, Louise was working as a portrait artist and illustrator. She did the drawings for a children’s book called Suzuki Beane (1961), written by her friend Sandra Scoppettone, about a beatnik girl who lives on Bleecker Street. The book was a hit. One review said of Suzuki Beane that it did “for the kindergarten set what Jack Kerouac’s On the Road did for their (slightly) elders.” Buoyed by this triumph, Louise decided to try her hand at writing a children’s book on her own this time. In a letter to a friend, she said she was working on something new: “It is called Harriet the Spy and is about a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.”
When Harriet the Spy came out in the mid-1960s, spies were everywhere—from John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books to the “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip in Mad Magazine—and the world had learned that the scary prospect of nuclear winter was also the stuff of bestsellers. It was no surprise then that writers of children’s literature would want to get in on the fun of double agents, bad disguises, and elaborate gadgets (though Harriet’s magnifying glass is not exactly the tear-gas cartridge disguised as a tin of talcum powder from To Russia With Love). For much of the book, Harriet’s version of spycraft is decidedly playful; when she does not want to go to dancing school because it’s “not something spies do,” her nanny, Ole Golly, tells her about Mata Hari and how she used her wiles as a dancer to collect intelligence. “Now how are you going to be a spy if you don’t know how to dance?” Ole Golly asks her. As Brody notes, Harriet the Spy treats “stalking, peeping, eavesdropping, and occasional breaking and entering” as actually quite innocent activities. Harriet, Brody emphasizes, “doesn’t spy or extort to blackmail or abuse the secrets she collects.” Harriet’s people-watching games are ultimately about her ambitions as a writer and wanting to hone her skills of observation and description for artistic, rather than nuclear, purposes. (It is, after all, her friend Janie, the scientist, who wants to “blow up the world.”)


newrepublic--2020-12-09--Will Democrats Get Suckered Into Mitch McConnell’s Corporate Indemnity Scheme?

Will Senate Republicans ever stop trying to indemnify employers against Covid-19 lawsuits as the price for a Covid stimulus deal @ @ @ @ @ that they might , but on inspection that turned out to be a feint .
@ @ @ @ @ that Democrats were starting to go wobbly .
The battle over employer liability began in @ @ @ @ @ Leader Mitch McConnell said there would be no more pandemic stimulus unless state governments and @ @ @ @ @ Administration were barred in virtually all cases from penalizing employers for maintaining workplaces that didn @ @ @ @ @ to stop the spread of Covid .
It would be hard to overstate how terrible @ @ @ @ @ .
In effect , it would require the incoming Biden administration to continue the Trump @ @ @ @ @ all Covid-related workplace safety violations .

According to a publicly released “framework,” the Manchin-Collins proposal would “provide short term Federal protection from Coronavirus related lawsuits.” Democrats scatter like autumn leaves when you ask them what exactly this means. It appears to be a retroactive shield of six months’ duration that does not extend to OSHA or state enforcement actions, but rather covers only lawsuits brought by individuals.
Assuming that’s the case, the Manchin-Collins language isn’t going to block very many lawsuits. Individuals already are mostly barred from suing their employers over workplace safety under state workers’ compensation laws. (By one reckoning, only 116 of the 1,032 labor and employment-related Covid claims filed since March concerned workplace safety.)* The comparative scarcity of Covid-19 litigation brought by individuals furnishes the rationale for defending the Manchin-Collins liability language: The indemnification is largely superfluous.
The logic against the Manchin-Collins liability language, though, is pretty compelling. In those rare cases in which individuals are permitted under state workers’ compensation laws to sue their employers, the offenses have to be highly egregious. So the Manchin-Collins provision would protect employers whose behavior by definition is pretty goddamned awful.