"Trump vies for Bush’s Crown for Worst Foreign Policy Decision in US History" | The Guardian

David Smith, The Guardian's Washington DC bureau chief writes on the US president upending half a century of foreign policy with another attempt at Middle Eastern regime change, "Trump vies for Bush’s Crown for Worst Foreign Policy Decision in US History". He writes, "George Bush Jr. dragged the US into a tragic war in Iraq in 2003 that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and was recently crowned by Council on Foreign Relations thinktank as the worst foreign policy decision in US history. The avaricious Trump seems determined to seize that title for himself with another act of Middle Eastern regime change. At least Bush tried to make a case to justify his invasion - mendacious as it was - see NPR's "Orchestrated Deception by Bush on Iraq" for reference - and tried to convince the UN of its merits. Donald J. Trump did not even bother. He amassed a huge “armada” in the Middle East with little explanation to Congress or the public. In "Trump’s Ever-Changing Rationale for War on Iran", he did not mention Iran until more than an hour into last month’s State of the Union address. Finally, when the bombs were already falling, he tried to offer a rationale in his social media video. The Iranian regime, he said, are “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people” whose menacing activities “directly endanger” the US and its allies. Trump ran through the history of the Iran hostage crisis, the Marine barracks bombing, the attack on the USS Cole and Iran’s hand in killing and maiming US troops in Iraq. “It’s been mass terror, and we’re not going to put up with it any longer,” he said."

Both the New York Times and NPR chronicle the unsupported and exaggerated claims in the president's speech announcing the attack on Iran, "Fact-Checking Trump’s Justifications for Attacking Iran". But none of that answers a simple question: why now? David Smith continues, "Trump went on to reference Iranian proxy groups “that have soaked the earth with blood and guts” and cite Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, saying: “Iran is the world’s No 1 state sponsor of terror and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. Trump underlined the US policy that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and glided past his own past claim that last June’s attack had “obliterated” its program, contending that the US wanted to make a deal but Tehran refused. “They rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore,” he said. The president said the US had undertaken “a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests” - an ominous sign that Washington could be in for the long haul. The chair-for-life of the new Board of Peace promised to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy”. Then came an unexpected admission: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.” Here was Trump, the reality TV president, understanding how desperate the optics will look if American service members return home in body bags, their lives sacrificed for a cause that the public little understands and still less believes in." Making for only the most recent, and possibly most ill-conceived chapter in, "From Bush Sr to Trump: The Risks, Lessons and Legacy of US Interference in the Middle East".

"How NPR Lost America's Trust: Inside the Crisis at NPR" | The New York Times

A yearslong push to diversify NPR’s staff, in part to lure listeners beyond its aging and predominantly white audience, hasn’t generated the listenership boost some executives had hoped for. But the effort, which NPR’s former chief executive called its “North Star,” had been a point of contention within the organization, as detailed by The New York Times in their, "Inside the Crisis at NPR". Upon departing the organization, longtime editor Uri Berliner, said NPR’s leaders had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace” - at the expense of diverse political viewpoints, and at the risk of losing its audience. These accusations by Berliner were leveled in an essay published in The Free Press, "I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.". Still, some critics of NPR believe NPR’s “North Star” strategy has failed for a completely different reason: It has not taken ideological diversity into account. Tim Eby, who was the general manager of St. Louis Public Radio until 2020, said in an interview that while it made sense for NPR to seek an audience that looked more like the country, he wasn’t sure its approach was the right one. And its story selection has on occasion left it open to criticism that its focus on race and identity has affected its news judgment. There have been stories, for instance, on how to "decolonize your bookshelf” and “thin privilege."

"Making matters more complicated: NPR’s unusual leadership structure. NPR’s reach is the result of its hundreds of member stations around the country, many of which both pay NPR for its shows and produce their own. But the leaders of those member stations - who control NPR’s board - often have conflicting priorities and compete with the network for donors, making changes more difficult. Together, the challenges raise questions about the long-term vitality of NPR, one of the country’s most storied and far-reaching media organizations. The demographics of the country being what they are, it goes without saying that if you want to have a sustainable business going forward, you have to reach new audiences,” he said. “I think the question is how you’re doing that. I think they’ve overcompensated on attempts to reach audiences that are not going to listen," he added." But NPR’s troubles extend far beyond concerns about its journalism. Internal documents reviewed by The Times and interviews with more than two dozen current and former public radio executives show how profoundly the nonprofit is struggling to succeed in the fast-changing media industry. It is grappling with a declining audience and falling revenue - and internal conflict about how to fix it."

A counterpoint, made by ex-editorial assistant Alicia Montgomery suggests that there's a different lesson to be considered here. In "The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems" in the pages of Slate, Montgomery states; "I leaned on the positive, and the belief that NPR was great and could be better. So I was a part of a lot of the “Let’s make this diversity thing work” efforts that rankled Uri. I remember leading one session he attended, when he spoke out to insist that NPR’s diversity problem had a lot to do with issues beyond race, like class, region, education, and political perspective. He was right, and I told him so. But maybe the stove-piping meant that Uri didn’t see the pattern in those efforts that started wearing my spirit down. Some big news in the world or an internal failure would spark a wave of carefully stage-managed soul-searching from leadership, and ad hoc committees of well-intentioned volunteers would be assembled to write lists of recommendations. Then those recommendations would be politely received, filed away, and forgotten. And two or three years later, some new crisis would start the cycle all over again. In my experience, those multihyphenated identity groups or task forces were disproportionately full of junior staffers. Because many veterans - except for true-believing tryhards like me - understood that they were a waste of time." Photo credit: Erin Schaff

"Elon Musk's Shadow Rule: How the U.S. Came to Rely on the Tech Billionaire" | The New Yorker

For The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow author of "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence" writes on one of numerous examples presented within his wider research and journalism on "The Rule of Elon Musk". In this case, "Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule" is manifest in the Ukrainian war with the invading forces of Russia, the Pentagon's role as mediator, and the dangers of a wider world coming to rely on Musk's technological resources as a metaphor for his wider political and financial influence. "Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control."

“It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like f*cking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access. The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

“My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official." Illustration credit: Ariel Davis

My Bloody Valentine reissue "Loveless", "Isn't Anything" & "MBV" on Domino Records UK: May 21 | "Kevin Shields on My Bloody Valentine's Return: Time Is ‘More Precious’" | The New York Times

The consensus is that shoegaze and the concurrent sounds of dreampop were born of two bands. These are considered to be Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser's Cocteau Twins in the early 1980s, and A.R. Kane, the British duo whom The Guardian credits as having "Invented Shoegaze without Really Trying". Representative of their influence, decades later both can be seen ranking highly on Pitchfork's "The 30 Best Dreampop Albums of All Time". Not limited to the post-punk and indie rock era of it's genesis, both shoegaze, and it's dreampop offshoot, are going through a renaissance this decade with new bands stepping into the forum. The telltale distortion-soaked melodies, and submerged vocals can be heard in the music of 21st century bands originating from destinations as far flung as Russia and New Zealand. On the other side of the globe from the sound's UK origins, a new generation of shoegaze is currently exploding across the south pacific, detailed in The Guardian's "'A Language We Use to Say Sentimental Things': How Shoegaze Took Over Asia". At the head of this renaissance, many of the genre's most influential and formative acts have returned from extended hiatus, not only touring, but with new and relevant material. To begin with, it was improbable that Slowdive would not only reform to tour, but produced one of the greatest albums of their career. Other unlikely returns have been seen in Robert Hampson touring with LOOP, the one-time-only North American visit from Lush's brand of 4AD dreampop, and live shows and some of the first new material heard in decades from The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Ride. The Guardian's "Shoegaze: The Genre that Could Not be Killed", and New York Times' "Shoegaze, the Sound of Protest Shrouded in Guitar Fuzz, Returns", best encapsulating this contemporary resurgence. Second only to the decade of the genre's origin, it's a great time for listeners avid for more of shoegaze melancholic melodicism and blissed-out fuzz. For those just now entering the neon torrent for the first time, you'd not go far wrong beginning with The Guardian's "Shoegaze: A Beginner's Guide", and the near-comprehensive book and compilation the Cherry Red label have assembled, "Still in a Dream: The Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995".

The most unprecedented of these returns was seen in the four US domestic tours since the 2007 reformation of the definitive shoegaze band, My Bloody Valentine. The band's guitarist and composer Kevin Shields has since promised forthcoming material, following on the heels of their first new album in 22 years in 2013. All of this was initiated with a series of interviews beginning with Shields' admission to The Quietus that, "Not Doing Things Is Soul Destroying", in which he shares the details of the protracted process and decades of delays involved in My Bloody Valentine's recent remasters. Speaking further with The Guardian on how the period after the 1991 album was a series of derailing setbacks involving, among other things according to Shields, the dangers of chinchilla ownership. And yet, those trials and tribulations only hint at the complexity behind the development of 2013's "m b v" album. Its creation through a relocation, rebuilding the studio, and a meticulously obsessive, perfectionist work ethic as detailed in Mike McGonigal's 33 1/3 book on "Loveless". A new chapter in this near-epic of persistence and refinement began this week with the independent label Domino securing the rights to reissue their back catalog in the United Kingdom. These will be in newly remastered editions, with the details as supplied by Domino; “Isn’t Anything" and "Loveless" have been mastered fully from analog for the deluxe LP editions, and also mastered from new high definition uncompressed digital sources for standard LPs, with each being made available widely for the first time ever. Fully analog cuts of "m b v" will also be available on deluxe and standard LPs globally for the first time. As well as a deluxe CD edition of the  "EPs and Rare Tracks 1988-1991", anthology." Shields himself offering details to the New York Times on the long and circuitous road taken to this destination, creative work throughout the pandemic, and the promise of new recordings on the horizon, "Kevin Shields on My Bloody Valentine’s Return: Time Is ‘More Precious’".

“Donald J. Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This”: A Nation Unprepared for the Present Public-Health Calamity | The Atlantic

It's enough to consider the federal mishandling of the pandemic, such as detailed in The Washington Post's "The Inside Story of How Trump's Denial, Mismanagement, and Magical Thinking Led to the Pandemic's Dark Winter", and the lack of demand for accountability on the part of no small subset of the American public. Correspondingly, this week offers an excellent opportunity to examine the premise of the political Cult of Personality and its effects and consequences even in a relatively liberal democratic society such as our own. Let's begin with the general definitions of the term and its application throughout modern history, beginning with The New Yoker's “The Field Guide to Tyranny”. Then moving on to a more contemporary correlative with their, “The Strongman Problem, from Modi to Trump”, in which Steve Coll draws the parallels; "In the cases of Modi and Trump, two recently empowered strongmen presiding over relatively robust democratic systems, the question is whether their populism and authoritarian instincts will allow them to alter the laws of democratic accountability. Trump is already altering certain norms - about the access of the press, conflicts of interest, and nepotism - with the acquiescence of the Republican Party. After his Inauguration, on Friday, he will preside over the largest economy and the most powerful military in the world. It is tempting to assume that accountability will eventually take hold, as in the past, whether through prosecutors and courts, if the President or his aides act illegally, or at the next election, if they govern poorly or betray the hopes of their voters. Yet the history and machinery of populist rule worldwide offers no easy comfort. Sometimes strongmen break the constitutions they inherit, or bend the functioning of those charters until they become, gradually, unrecognizable." With more troubling correspondence in cycles of performance and audience reception and to be found in between the 45th president of the United States and Benito Mussolini, as mapped by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian history at New York University's, “A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That’s Familiar with Trump”. As a cursory assessment, she writes; “There’s this whole political theatre that they stage,” Ben-Ghiat said of both leaders. She called up a photo from a folder of images on her laptop, material from a PowerPoint she delivered at a recent seminar on the election. In the picture, Trump is walking through a rolling mist, from darkness to light, to accept the nomination at the Republican National Convention. “They have this hunger for approval. But their personas are created by the symbiosis with the crowd. They need the crowd to consolidate their personalities.”

Both figures clearly establishing an adversarial relationship with any demographic or sphere of thought opposing, or even deviating from the given narrative, the demarcation of a clear line can be seen in The New Yorker's “Trump and the Enemies of the People”. From which its author David Remnick is quoted; "It should serve as a warning to Americans in the era of Donald Trump about the fragility of principles and institutions, particularly when those principles and institutions are under attack by a leader who was ostensibly elected to protect them. This week, dozens of American publications are publishing editorials in ardent opposition to President Trump’s assault on the press and his use of that poisonous phrase “enemies of the people.” The refusal to bend to that assault, and the protection of practices and institutions that are more fragile than we usually care to acknowledge, is essential to the future of American democracy. Because Trump knows little about policy or history, it is tempting to imagine that he knows nothing at all. This is a mistake. He knows well that the American press is hardly popular and, in many ways, is on the defensive. He knows that the ecosystem of information and its distribution has changed radically, and he has figured out how to exploit that change. He has seized on the capacities of right-wing radio, cable television, and social media to form an alternative, fact-free, Trumpian universe. For decades, Trump took little interest in matters of state, but he has studied the media for years. Even as a real estate mogul, he was not a master builder; he was a master manipulator. He spent decades honing his self-aggrandizement in the pages of the New York tabloids and on local television. He came to believe that he could fool enough of the people enough of the time to suit his purposes. He learned how to render himself as a distinctive and “colorful” character. He sensed the weaknesses in lesser reporters: their laziness; their willingness to cut a deal or make a trade; their desire to please an editor with cheap sensation, a “story.” He even made “catch and kill” deals with tabloids such as the National Enquirer, which protected him from carnal and financial scandal."

Yet the New Republic speculates what it will take for these supporters and willing members of this political worldview, or "Trumpian universe" if you will, to reconsider the quantifiable evidence before them. To what extent must their own well-being and the given "American way of life" for which they purport to be defending be compromised and endangered for individuals to be self-motivated to, “Escape from the Trump Cult”? As Alexander Hurst paints it, there may be no returning from such an impasse; "Trump sold his believers an engrossing tale of “American carnage” that he alone could fix, then isolated them in a media universe where reality exists only through Trump-tinted glasses, attacking all other sources of information as “fake news.” In the most polarized media landscape in the wealthy world, Republicans place their trust almost solely in Fox News, seeing nearly all other outlets as biased. In that context, the effect of a president who lies an average of ten times a day is the total blurring of fact and fiction, reality and myth, trust and cynicism. It is a world where, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, truth is no longer truth. “Who could really know?” Trump said of claims that Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “It is what it is.” Amidst the frenetic pace of disgrace and outrage, Trump’s support remains stable among too large a chunk of the American public to just ignore. Trump, who insisted on the presence of voter fraud by the millions in an election he ultimately won, and a coterie of prominent Republicans spent the week after the 2018 midterms delegitimizing the very notion of counting all the votes in key races in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still retain the loyalty of his followers is jokingly referred to as the truest thing he’s ever said, but it’s less funny that 52 percent of them would hypothetically support postponing the 2020 election if he proposed it. What happens when a man who has already promoted political violence, and whose most hardcore supporters have shown their willingness for such violence, finds on election night two years from now that he has just narrowly lost? Do any of us truly believe that Donald J. Trump and his followers will simply slink away quietly into the night?"

With foresight, Hurst continues; "The debate over how to deal with Trump’s anti-democratic following has largely avoided the question of engaging it directly. These days there is no shortage of articles and books dealing with radical-right populism, despots, democratic backsliding, and the tactics that authoritarian leaders deploy. Dozens of experts have pointed out that liberal democratic institutions need constant attention and reinforcement in order to be effective bulwarks. But most of the solutions on offer are institutional in nature: maintaining the independence of the judiciary, thwarting a would-be autocrat’s attempts to grab hold of the levers of justice, maintaining a legislative check on executive authority, enshrining political norms more clearly into constitutions. Democracy, especially liberal democracy, has always been dependent on the trust and belief of the self-governed. It is one thing to implement tangible measures to prevent the decay of bedrock institutions, and when it comes to voting rights, elections, the courts, and restraints on executive power, we know what these measures should look like. It’s another, far tougher thing to figure out how to maintain the legitimacy of these same institutions - and how to restore it once lost." With that question, we now find ourselves in this political moment, faced with the mis-management of America's share of the global health crisis. The Wall Street Journal's view on the lack of federal initiative is on the conservative side of the assessment. All the while, bipartisan statements of solidarity like The New York Times appeal to the wider public in April, “Don’t Let Trump’s Cult of Personality Make Covid-19 Worse” have been met with not only silence, but outright resistance from almost half of the electorate. While reductive, it is not inaccurate to say that, “Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This” as we enter into a third wave of the pandemic, with little or no guidance, resource management, and messaging from those who were elected to safeguard the country and the well-being of its populace. We have seen a man, his administration, and 'audience' unequal to the task of this historic moment, and the scientific community has responded decisively with their political endorsement of the opposing candidate. Whether we voted red, blue, or third party this past week, we will all be bearing the consequence of this cult of personality and the support it has found both within the electorate, as well as government officials and institutions. All the while we move toward a deeply consequential future just around the next bend, in which “The Surging Coronavirus Finds a Federal Leadership Vacuum". For an amassed body of evidence, timelines, and facts supporting the above claims, further reading can be had in Michael Lewis' "The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy", and "The Premonition: A Pandemic Stroy". Map graphic courtesy of: The New York Times Covid in the US: Latest Case Count

 

The Draw of the Gothic & "No Rest for the Eerie: A Paean to the Haunted House" | The New York Times

The month of October has arrived and with it All Hallows' Eve nods to the Olde World traditions of seasonal harvest rights and festivities, like the Gaelic Samhain and Celtic Hop-tu-Naa, which themselves bear some relationship to the Ancient Greek festival of Thesmophoria. Part and parcel with the changes of Autumn, come abundant celebrations of the gloomily crepuscular and gloaming eerie in literature, film, and popular culture. In recognition of this season of ominous portent, The New York Times annually whip up sinister concoctions like "A House of Horror Films" their interactive history, trivia, and guessing game on Haunted Houses by Tommi Musturi. Rather than the difficulty of hunting down regional options due to the global pandemic, Halloween this year has become more a question of whether any of its traditions can be observed at all. Erik Vance wonders if there will be opportunities even while observing pandemic social protocol, "Please Let Me Terrify Some Kids on Halloween", all the while the New York Times offering yard decorating tips, while musing on, "Will the Coronovirus Cancel Halloween?". Turning back the clock, last year's features for the season included a set of writers, directors and various artistic creators detailing their own personal recipes for making the night a memorable one in, "Hoping for a Spooky Halloween? We Have Some Suggestions". Which is followed up by a horror litmus test of sorts in which self proclaimed horror aficionado Fahima Haque takes a sampling of three very different Manhattan and Brooklyn haunted house offerings, and comes away with some insight inter her own threshold for the fearsome season, "‘Not Much Scares Me.’ Then She Entered the Haunted House.". Other annual highlights have included Steven Kurutz' gorgeous little, "No Rest for the Eerie: A Paean to the Haunted House". In which he did more than an admirable job, going as far as to cite John Tibbetts' anthology of essays and interviews “The Gothic Imagination”, which is essential reading for anyone who wants to plumb the depths of "uncertainty, anxiety, and fear" that is the art of the Gothic literary tradition.

The undeniable, and very real, fears surrounding the choices that were left to us in 2016's election cycle and its fallout have been fertile ground for Halloween, "Spooked by Real Life? Bring On the Halloween Frights". No one has quite exploited those fears to the extent of Pedro Reyes' "Doomocracy" wherein, "Brooklyn Put the Politics of Fear on Display". Steven Kurutz has also delivered a brilliant Home & Garden feature, "House Haunters" on seasonal real-world Haunted Houses like Kopelman's 30-year running institution near Phoenix which also acts as ground zero to America's Best Haunts. A directory that includes Ben Armstrong's Netherworld, Kohout's long-running Hauntworld house near St. Louis, Phil Anselmo's New Orleans House of Shock, Los Angeles and New York's Blackout, and the immense, preposterous undertaking that is Rob Zombie's Great American Nightmare. Sadly none of our local Northwest haunts make that list, but there's a good number of them to be found throughout the state. The Haunted House and it's offspring have long been a staple of western literature and folklore, movies and pulp storytelling. Their origins in the 18th Century speak to an era equally fascinated by science as the supernatural, with mesmerism and the phantasmagoric in vogue, it's little wonder, "Ghost Stories: Why the Victorians were so Spookily Good at Them". Some memorable manifestations of the Gothic tradition in cinema come to mind, from Ti West's contemporary "House of the Devil", to the campier mid-century side seen in William Castle's B-movie “House on Haunted Hill”, to the the solidly constructed 1970s entry, "The Legend of Hell House". There remain a set of classics in the genre, few of which can rival the adaptation of Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House", that is Robert Wise' masterfully psychological, "The Haunting".

A select number of silent era representations also stand out like Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel's 1928 surreal, claustrophobic adaptation of the Poe classic, "The Fall of the House of Usher", and the early 1930's horror-comedy talkie of James Whale's "Old Dark House". Later decades produced Roger Corman's B-movie Vincent Price vehicles like "The Haunted Palace", and 1970s Italian Giallo works in the genre represented by Lucio Fulci's H.P. Lovecraft-inspired "The House by the Cemetery". The 1980s saw the Pacific Northwest set "The Changeling" by Peter Medak, and by the 1990s, examples like the unhinged "Sweet Home" by a young Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The late 1970's and early 80s hit their stride with the Japanese insanity of "Hausu" co-conceived by Nobuhiko Obayashi and his 11 year old daughter, Stuart Rosenberg's “Amityville Horror”, and of course no one who's seen it can forget Stanley Kubrick's singular, unnerving horror entry, "The Shining". Digging deeper there were 60's and 70's genre variations like Dan Curtis' “Burnt Offerings", the erotic horror of Elio Petri's "A Quiet Place in the Country", and Carlos Enrique Taboada's haunted schoolhouse-set "Even the Wind is Afraid". But of course the Haunted House owes it's origins to much, much older traditions in literature, as purviewed in The Guardian's, "Halloween Spirits: Literature's Haunted Houses". Traceable back to the 18th century bit of disquieting paranoia and creeping melancholy that is Horace Walpole's “Castle of Otranto”. Predating Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Daphne du Maurier, M.R. James, Ann Radcliffe, H.P. Lovecraft, and as The Paris Review notes, "The Draw of the Gothic", in all who would follow in their footsteps over the centuries since. Photo credit: Simon Marsden

Hands Up. It's Showtime. “Federal Agents Push into American Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority” | The New York Times

Now is the political moment to revisit Kurt Andersen's 2017 Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, “Hands Up. It’s Showtime.”. In it Anderson provides an analysis of the events around Ferguson Missouri, the associated paramilitary response, institutional rhetoric offered as it's rationale, and the ensuing representation seen in the media. “I’ve been studying Americans’ accelerating penchant for blending the fantastical into the real world", writes Anderson, "from Disneyland to reality TV, from themed restaurants to war reenactments to ubiquitous porn to Burning Man. So I started seeing evidence of the phenomenon in some very unlikely places - such as the excessive police response to the protests in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., where officers with AR-15s in Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter-Attack Trucks struck me as law enforcement doing war-fighting role play, cops playing soldiers on TV. After Ferguson showed Americans just how militarized our police have become, the Obama administration put restrictions on the federal program that had given police departments billions of dollars worth of military equipment. And I thought of the Ferguson spectacle again last week when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that President Trump would be removing all those new limits on the handouts of military hardware. Mr. Trump, of course, is a stupendous embodiment of my theory of the merger of fantasy and reality. As a business hustler and entertainer, then as candidate and president, he peddles over-the-top make-believe from his branded cologne and “university” and Ceausescu-esque residences to his WWE appearances and “The Apprentice” to the tales about millions of illegal 2016 voters and his predecessor’s birthplace. And he has depicted American cities as centers of “carnage,” turned monstrous cops like Joe Arpaio into celebrities, told the very opposite of the truth - “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years” - and encouraged the police to rough up suspects. Mr. Trump’s view of policing clearly derives from “Dirty Harry” fantasies, with he himself playing the beloved strongman commandant."

We now find ourselves at a social and political crossroads, wherein this "American carnage" has been reenvisioned as our fellow citizens, and can be seen acted out in a number of US cities, such is the case with, “Federal Agents Push into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority”. This has been executed in at least three separate dispatches to cities across the United States, and "From the Start, Federal Agents Demanded a Role in Suppressing Anti-Racist Protests". All of which assigned ludicrous nomenclature like Operation Diligent Valor, and Operation Legend, in addition to the surveillance of protests in at least 15 cities during the months of May and June prior. In the case of the latter, both manned and drone aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, among numerous other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection. These all being aspects of a nationwide operation that deployed resources usually used to patrol US borders for smugglers, trafficking, and illegal crossings. As widely reported in most major newspapers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, New York and The Los Angeles Times, under the claimed auspice of, “The agents in Portland are part of rapid deployment teams assembled by the Department of Homeland Security after Mr. Trump directed federal agencies to deploy additional personnel to protect statues, monuments and federal property during the continuing unrest." The teams, which include 2,000 officials from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard, "are supporting the Federal Protective Service, an agency that already provides security at federal properties." These agents have been dispatched to Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C., Customs and Border Protection have also sent drones, helicopters and planes to conduct surveillance of the protests across the country. But in truth, many of the arrests detailed in the articles contained herein are far removed from the federal sites in question, and no clear crimes are seen being committed in much of the footage or first-person accounts. In addition, as reported by the Los Angeles Times below, federal agents appeared to fire less-lethal munitions from slits in the facade of the federal courthouse, one officer walked the street while swinging a burning ball emitting tear gas, and camouflaged personnel drove in unmarked vans making arrests outside of the federal properties they are deployed to protect. Subsequently, Oregon state officials have a very different take on the motives and objectives of the dispatch of these federal troops, and have confronted the Justice Department and Homeland Security, "Portland Mayor to Trump: Get Your Troops Out of the City".

“Governor Brown said in an interview that she asked the acting homeland security secretary, Chad F. Wolf, to remove federal officials from the streets and that he refused. She said the Trump administration appeared to instead be using the situation for photo-ops to rally his supporters. “They are provoking confrontation for political purposes,” Ms. Brown said. Mr. Wolf, who arrived in Portland on Thursday, called the protesters a “violent mob” of anarchists emboldened by a lack of local enforcement. In response Wolf dispatched, “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland”, and to which, "Portland Mayor Demands Trump Remove Federal Agents from City". In a statement, "Brown, said Trump was looking for a confrontation in the hopes of winning political points elsewhere, and for a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic, which is causing rising numbers of infections in Oregon and across the nation. Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, said arresting people without probable cause was “extraordinarily concerning and a violation of their civil liberties and constitutional rights”. The Oregon attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said she would file a lawsuit in federal court against the US Department of Homeland Security, the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Federal Protection Service, alleging they have violated the civil rights of Oregonians by detaining them without probable cause. She will also seek a temporary restraining order against them. The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon said the federal agents appear to be violating people’s rights, which “should concern everyone in the United States”. But beyond generating content for the media cycle and current and future political campaigns, the normalizing effects of such misuses of power will have other far-reaching implications as noted by Jason Stanley, Yale philosophy professor and author of “How Fascism Works”. “Now, the spectacle should already worry us, because he did the spectacle in Lafayette Square,” Stanley writes, referring to Trump’s violent clearance of peaceful protesters from a park near the White House in June. "Then he did the spectacle in Portland. And when you allow too much spectacle, as it gets worse over time, people start to say, ‘This has been happening for awhile, what’s the big deal?’ The spectacle normalizes, and then you can’t tell - say it’s November - you can’t tell if it’s still spectacle any more."

Illustration credit: Daniel Zender

Laura Spinney: “It Takes a Whole World to Create a New Virus, Not Just China” | The Guardian

A notable read, from expertise in the intersection of science and social history, from Laura Spinney, the author of "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World", which is widely considered, "The Deadliest Disease in History". From which The Guardian's review of the book offers some, "Painful Lessons of the 1918 Flu Pandemic". Taking in the complexity of the market, class, poverty, and changes in agriculture and livestock farming in China, Spinney's “It Takes a Whole World to Create a New Virus, Not Just China”, weighs the consequences and benefits of, "The Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million into China’s Cities" expected to unfold over the course of the next decade, and the "Pitfalls that Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City". Considering their application to a country in flux, and to a people in dislocation, of which there are two coexisting and conflicting views in relation to their (and our) accelerated participation in globalization. From The Guardian: "The reason we shouldn’t call the Sars-CoV-2 virus causing global misery the “Chinese virus” is the same reason we shouldn't blame an outbreak of eczema on an upper arm where it originates: there is clearly a superficial weakness there, but the real cause lies elsewhere. All the evidence gathered to date suggests that the now notorious Chinese “wet markets” places selling live and dead animals for human consumption - provide an opportunity for coronaviruses to jump easily from animals to people. It happened with the Sars-CoV virus in 2002-3 - which was contained before it caused a pandemic - and it has happened again with its close relative, Sars-CoV-2."

"But to understand why the emergence of such zoonoses has accelerated in recent decades, you have to understand the forces putting those viruses in our path. They are political and economic. They have to do with the rise of industrial-scale farming concerns in China and the resulting marginalisation of millions of smallholder farmers. In order to survive, those farmers have moved into the production of more exotic species; animals that were once eaten only for subsistence. But the bigger operations have pushed the farmers out geographically too, as they have taken up more prime farming land. The smallholders have been forced closer to uncultivable zones such as forests, where bats - reservoirs for coronaviruses - lurk. The stars have aligned, and not in a good way, to channel bat viruses through intermediate mammalian hosts such as pangolins, and into humans. Even so, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, the problem could still be regarded as uniquely Chinese. But there are two reasons why that’s not true. First, with the opening up of China, its agribusiness has ceased to be wholly Chinese-owned. It is a big recipient of foreign direct investment Second, as the American pandemic expert, David Morens, and his colleagues pointed out last month in the New England Journal of Medicine we’ve been watching a similar drama unfold over a much longer timescale with influenza - the disease that has caused more pandemics in the history of humanity than any other. Flu viruses that infect animals, including poultry and pigs, have periodically spilled over into humans ever since we domesticated those animals millennia ago."

"But the factory farms that produce our food today ratchet up the virulence of those flu viruses just before they spill over. This ratcheting up has been documented in Europe, Australia and the US more than it has in poor or emerging economies, and it’s what gave rise to the last flu pandemic in 2009. The first cases of that pandemic were recorded in California, but nobody calls it the American flu - and it’s right that they don’t, if only because American farms aren’t wholly American-owned either. China, for one, has invested in them. It’s not just the industries that produce our food that are creating the conditions in which new zoonoses emerge. Logging, mining, road-building and rapid urbanisation are also contributing, and the profits from those are shared internationally too. “We have created a global, human-dominated ecosystem that serves as a playground for the emergence and host-switching of animal viruses,” wrote Morens et al. The resulting diseases are suffered locally at first, as is reflected in their names - Ebola and Zika virus diseases and Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, to name just three - but the irony is that some of them, such as HIV and Covid-19, go on to become global. It’s hard not to see a terrible natural justice in that. That doesn’t mean China shouldn’t be held accountable for its shortcomings. Americans know where their weak points are - they include agricultural fairs, where pigs and humans come together - and they police them ferociously. Their infectious disease experts can detect a virus circulating in a herd and generate a vaccine to it within hours. The Chinese have got better at this lately. They now vaccinate their poultry flocks against a dangerous flu virus, H7N9, which first infected humans in 2013, for example. But nearly 20 years after Sars-CoV spilled over in a wet market, those places still appear to be a liability."

"Controlling that animal-human interface is obviously important, but it shouldn’t blind us to the bigger problem, which is those globalised industries. Economists use the term “tragedy of the commons” to describe a shared resource - common grazing land, say - that is spoiled by individuals acting in their own self-interest. It has been applied to the climate crisis, but as University of British Columbia geographer Luke Bergmann and his colleagues have pointed out it doesn’t quite fit what has happened here. In the case of these industries, it would be more accurate to say that they have excluded the nearly 8 billion of us who depend on the commons from participating in their governance. Yet we are bearing the costs of their industrial exploitation, in the form of pandemic disease. We have our share of responsibility, as individuals, in the foods we choose to eat and the lifestyle choices we make generally. There are a lot of us on this planet and sustaining us is costly. But as has become increasingly clear, these industries have decoupled themselves from consumer choice; they’re driving it rather than responding to it. It’s time we took back the commons, which means voting for politicians who will hold those industries accountable, rather than ones who deflect the blame. We need leaders who understand that the treatment for this particular eruption cannot only be topical, it has to be systemic too." Illustration: Eva Bee

Emotional Support with Fur: "Why Are So Many Animals Now in Places Where They Shouldn’t Be?" | The New Yorker

With domestic pets being included in facets of life previously reserved for their human counterparts, Peter Haldeman's New York Times piece on the accessorizing of pets with their own glamour and lifestyle products, speculates as to the causal source; "Some think this is because of the steady uptick in childless households, "Others point to the atomizing effects of the internet on inter-human relations". There's also the matter of people placing their relationship with their pets in higher regard than their civic or community considerations, or even their fellow human beings. This growing market catering to the inclusion of domestic pets in all imaginable public and private settings, statistically relates to the origins of the recent string of high profile cases of "Emotional Support, With Fur, Drawing Complaints on Planes". The desire for the presence, comfort and security offered by domestic pets in social settings has also become a facet of post-adolescent life, as "Campuses Debate Rising Demands for ‘Comfort Animals’". “Do we have people trying to get their pet across as an assistance animal? Sure,” said Jamie Axelrod, director of disability resources at Northern Arizona University, where requests for support animals rose to about 75 last year from single digits a few years ago. “Do we have people who legitimately require one? We do. You have to rely on a treatment provider’s ethical sense that they’re doing what’s right for their patient,” Mr. Axelrod added. “But it’s a new gray area.”

The question of permissions and the assertion of animal-companionship in public and private spaces was plumbed by Patricia Marks for The New Yorker as a escalating series of social experiments in, "Pets Allowed: Why are So Many Animals Now in Places Where They Shouldn’t Be?". Fundamentally animal access, and their inclusion in public life, is a question of lawfulness and consideration for the safety, health, and regard for other citizens in public space and private businesses. In response to the escalating abuses, and frequency of applications for being made an exception to the law across America, “People are Taking Emotional Support Animals Everywhere. States are Cracking Down”. According to Washington State law, as with most of the United States, there is no legally recognized standing for the owners of dubiously licensed emotional support animals. “These documents do not convey any rights under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, and the Department of Justice does not recognize them as proof that the animal is a service animal,” said the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice in its answers to frequently asked questions about the act." Yet business owners and instances of public space where pets are not allowed, find themselves in double-bind, as the ADA also specifically prohibits cities, merchants and others from requiring proof that a animal is a service animal. It allows, in fact, only two questions: "Is the animal a service animal required because of a disability?" And: "What work or task has the animal been trained to perform?" Painting credit: Cassius Coolidge

"The Amazon Effect": How the Dot-Com Juggernaut Dominated Nearly Everything This Year | The New Republic

Essential reading for all consumers this past December in the pages of The New Republic to be found in Alex Shepard's "Amazon Dominated Nearly Everything This Year". Particularly notable when one considers the contributing effect this will have on the cultural character, retail landscape, competitive housing environment, and wealth stratification in their host city, when Amazon chooses it's second corporate headquarters. Not to mention the conditions of the workplace environment and it's corporate ethos, as detailed in the New York Times extensive expose of last year, "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace". Further plans to expand into physical retail were also revealed in recent months, "Why Amazon Just Opened a Physical Bookstore", with upwards of 300 of their bookstores speculated to open nationwide. Or, as Gizmodo puts it, "Amazon Will Open Physical Bookstores Because Life is a Practical Joke Played on Us All". Of less levity, the documentation of the "Amazon Effect" continues on NPR this morning in their feature "Big Behemoth?: How Amazon Could Upend the U.S. Economy", with Stacy Mitchell co-director of the Institute for Self-Reliance, and author of "Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities". She is joined by James Marcus, editor at Harper's Magazine, and author of "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut". As they discuss the nature of the Amazon's grip on the economy, as well as the question whether with the company's latest series of acquisitions, it has opened itself up to the grounds of an extensive anti-trust suit.

Concurrently, a limited but informed subset of book consumers are beginning to question their default to Amazon as the go-to for all things print and beyond. This was brought on by 2015's flexing of power in the publishing and distribution world, when Amazon delayed deliveries and prevented pre-orders on titles in relation against the publishers Hatchette Book Group and Bonnier. This heightened awareness would only have caused minor ripples (at best) in consumer response and awareness, if it wasn't for Hachette having an ally in Stephen Colbert and his campaign, "I Didn't Buy It On Amazon". See his dialog on the subject with social activist and writer, Sherman Alexie, for reference. Rallying awareness and solidarity among book retailers, Colbert paired with one of the nation's largest independents, Portland's Powell's Books to drive pre-orders on many titles, as "Indie Booksellers Join Hachette's Battle with Amazon". A few higher profile news and entertainment vehicles have been getting in on the game, positing that in the midst of this all, we take advantage of the existing book retail options we have in our urban centers. Editorial pieces like Stephen Marche's "How to Quit Amazon and Shop in an Actual Bookstore (and Why You Damn Well Should)" giving renewed relevance to Steve Wasserman's essential reading in the pages of The Nation, "The Amazon Effect". Among other consequences of Amazon's dominance, Wasserman discusses what many unwitting consumers are relinquishing, and may not be able to replace, in making the shift to online buying from a single marketplace holding a dominating percentage of the field. All the while many of us live in cities where the (few remaining) independent retail choices still exist. These both read as excellent companion pieces to Tony Sanfilippo on the future of place and community-oriented books retail, "Book Places in the Digital Age".

"Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: May 4 - Sept 4 | "Rei Kawakubo Revealed (Sort Of)" | The New York Times

Begun as a personal artistic endeavor by Rei Kawakubo in the late 1960s and established as a company in 1973, Comme des Garçons found success in Japan in the 1970s, with a menswear line added in 1978. A decade later the company had a debut show in Paris Fashion Week, where Kawakubo's heavy use of black distressed fabrics, and unfinished seams were striking for their originality and going against the then seamless, refined grain. Throughout the 1980s, Comme des Garçons were often associated with a distressed and punk-oriented style, and an all-black aesthetic, earning its followers the term "crow tribe". An image which stood out boldly against the current zeitgeist of the 1980s, as they were seen in high contrast to daily, leisure, and business colors and dress demeanors in the urban environments of Japan. Pattermaker Junya Watanabe almost instantly began to ascend within the work of the fashion house, in the late 1980s he was promoted to chief designer of women's Tricot knitwear, and then moved on to design for the Comme Des Garçons Homme line. Now featuring his own diffusion line, Junya Watanabe Man, he is most known for his streetwear-influencing and groundbreaking "techno-couture" work of the late 1990s and earliest 2000s. This year their work, presented in "The Met’s Rei Kawakubo Show, Dressed for Defiance", is on exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The New York Times Sunday Magazine feature and interview, "Rei Kawakubo Revealed (Sort Of)" focuses on the four decades of Comme des Garçons' creation of subversive, gender-bending clothes for men, begun at a time when no one else, in Japan or otherwise, were endeavoring to do so.

Host and interviewer Alice Gregory attends the staff-only show of this season's work as her point of entry; "The models themselves seemed beside the point, redundant. With their tulle-stuffed skirts and plastic-wrapped heads, they looked like characters sprung from the mind of Lewis Carroll. And yet, as hard as I tried to force myself to pay attention to them, I was continually distracted by the dozens of employees sitting across from me, each dressed in head-to-toe Comme des Garçons - a band of ideologues in wait. Most had bangs and wore no jewelry. There were ruffled jackets made of washed wool, Arcimboldo-printed gowns accessorized with allergy masks. The skirts were long and layered, the ankle socks plentiful, the shoes flat, the Peter Pan collars oversize. They mixed seasons and lines (there are 18 under the Comme des Garçons label) to dizzying effect; some men wore women’s clothes, some women wore men’s clothes. It was like being in the middle of “Art of the In-Between,” the Rei Kawakubo retrospective mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art - but more urgent and immersive, as though the archive of her work had come to life. Even the most oddly dressed woman is seldom doing anything all that transgressive with her appearance. We assume that women care about how they look, even when they don’t want to look pretty, so when they don kooky hats or outsize suits or shave their heads or apply rouge with purposefully grotesque abandon, it’s taken to be merely an outlandish variation on expected behavior. Meanwhile, an eccentrically dressed man - not a dandy in the Beau Brummell mold but someone plainly interested in creating new and jarring shapes with his body and clothes - is a rare and electrifying sight. In refusing to telegraph the traditional goals of male fashion (power, utility, wealth), it can seem as though he has renounced capitalism itself - even if the price of doing so is equal to a series of consecutive mortgage payments."

"When I met Kawakubo, this is what I wanted to talk to her about: her approach to making clothing for men, whether or not she had thoughts about the state of masculinity in 2017, how designing men’s wear is different (or similar) to creating women’s wear. I wondered if perhaps the tighter constraints of masculine dress codes allowed, in fact, for more creativity and fun. I didn’t expect real answers. Kawakubo is notorious for her gnomic pronouncements (e.g., “The void is important”) and her anachronistic, otherworldly embodiment of what it means to be a genius. Once, in response to a journalist’s question, Kawakubo drew a circle on a piece of paper and walked away. To my surprise, I did not find the designer particularly aloof or monastic in her bearing. Flanked by her husband and translator, Adrian Joffe, who is also the company’s president, Kawakubo projected a kind of plain and quiet professionalism, though the topic of masculine versus feminine wares appeared to agitate her. “Men seem to have more courage to try new things now, not only in Japan but all over the world,” she said, wondering aloud why women have become “so quiet,” and why, these days, it’s the men who buy and wear the showpieces. Women, comparatively, have become more conservative. “It’s a bit upsetting,” she said. “If you have an insight into that, it might help with my business.” It’s true that while there are certainly women who consider themselves dedicated fans of Comme des Garçons (in the early days, they were known in Tokyo as “the crows,” since Kawakubo and her followers were so devoted to the color black), the company seems to hold an even more special place in the hearts of men."

"Though Kawakubo described Comme des Garçons’ male clientele as comprising students and men with creative jobs - “Anyone who is not free in his work probably is not wearing our clothes” - she admitted that the so-called rules of men’s wear (subdued colors, suiting materials, professional silhouettes) make designing for men more interesting, especially as someone with a self-imposed edict to always be creating new, never-before-seen garments. “The basics of clothing lie in men’s fashion,” she has said. The male ardor for Comme des Garçons is, at least in part, a kind of gratitude for a gender-fluid approach to fashion design that has gone mainstream in recent years but was practiced by Kawakubo, virtually alone, for decades. She shrank suit jackets to Chanel topper proportions, made handsome (no other word for it) skirts out of gabardine and tacked schoolgirl collars on otherwise office-ready white button-downs. She gave men a way of opting out of society while still remaining in it. For nearly a century, there had been little to no innovation in men’s wear - a steady, conservative beat of sensible, timeless clothing. Then suddenly, Kawakubo appeared like a sorceress, materializing a new and more permissive way of appearing in the world that changed not only fashion but, on a small scale, maleness itself. Now, 40 years after she began designing men’s wear, her philosophical heirs - Thom Browne, Raf Simons, Craig Green, to name a few - are everywhere. This, finally, is their time."