What Is Your Problem?

Nobody bought more Michael Jackson vinyl LPs than we did of “Thriller.” The euphoria for anything associated with that album was cross-racial and intergenerational. Upon visiting anybody’s house, I’d ask if they had a copy. If the answer was “no,” I’d turn into a 1980s sitcom kid and say something like, “What is your problem?” (I would have been 7, 8 or 9.) If the answer was “yes,” I’d ask to play it, and while it was on, I’d lie on the floor and take long drags on the album’s inside photo: Jackson, in a white suit, lying on his side, one leg bent, looking at us. On the knee of his bent leg is a tiger — a tiger cub. I stared with deep longing. He was so pretty, with his absurd curls and isosceles triangle of a nose and creamy brown face. I’m calling it a photo when, really, it was a centerfold. But what did I want from that picture? What did I want from Jackson? Friendship? A handshake? A souvenir? A hug?

From here.

Political Science

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

From here.

Being As Far As We Are

That can mean big money for the families of kidfluencers. Kyler Fisher, the father of 2-year-old identical twins who have more than two million followers on Instagram, said a sponsored post on the girls’ account could fetch between $10,000 and $20,000.

The twins, Taytum and Oakley, have promoted car seats and Carnival Cruise Lines on Instagram. They are also central to the success of their parents’ YouTube channel, Kyler & Mad, which has about three million subscribers. Promotions on the family YouTube channel can draw $25,000 to $50,000.

Fans are so interested in the family that their third child, due the first week of March, already has 112,000 Instagram followers.

“My kids complete the package, man,” Mr. Fisher said. “If we didn’t have the girls, I can’t imagine being as far as we are.”

From here.

The Dark Side

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

Chloe cries for a while in the break room, and then in the bathroom, but begins to worry that she is missing too much training. She had been frantic for a job when she applied, as a recent college graduate with no other immediate prospects. When she becomes a full-time moderator, Chloe will make $15 an hour — $4 more than the minimum wage in Arizona, where she lives, and better than she can expect from most retail jobs.

The tears eventually stop coming, and her breathing returns to normal. When she goes back to the training room, one of her peers is discussing another violent video. She sees that a drone is shooting people from the air. Chloe watches the bodies go limp as they die.

She leaves the room again.

From here. The story of those who moderate content on Facebook is haunting and infuriating.

Bad News Stuff

Quasars arise from supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies; they are the brightest objects in nature, and can be seen clear across the universe. As standard candles, quasars aren’t ideal because their masses vary widely. Nevertheless, the researchers identified some regularities in the emissions from quasars, allowing the history of the cosmos to be traced back nearly 12 billion years. The team found that the rate of cosmic expansion deviated from expectations over that time span.

One interpretation of the results is that dark energy is not constant after all, but is changing, growing denser and thus stronger over cosmic time. It so happens that this increase in dark energy also would be just enough to resolve the discrepancy in measurements of the Hubble constant.

The bad news is that, if this model is right, dark energy may be in a particularly virulent and — most physicists say — implausible form called phantom energy. Its existence would imply that things can lose energy by speeding up, for instance. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist, has referred to it as “bad news stuff.”

From here.

Are We Still Capable of Such Smallness?

Are we still capable of such smallness? The minuscule human figures in a Thomas Cole painting, dwarfed by overwhelming mountains and an engulfing sky, once embodied an American ideal, the purposeful melting away of individuality in order to attain some higher awareness, or to join in a collective or simply to find space to think. With our societal volume dial turned all the way up (and possibly broken), so many of us overexposed and all too present, does quiet any longer have this pull, or does it just make us itch for our phones? And if we can still shut our eyes and cover our ears, become details of the landscape, should we? Is it morally acceptable at this moment? What’s waiting for us beyond the noise if we try?

From here.

Every Film Is Political

Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: “entertainment” movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.

From The Logic of Images by Wim Wenders. Not just films, of course.

A More Flexible Frame

Writing online has always been a good way for me to get ideas out in front of me where I can see them properly.  Which is another way of saying I reached a personal completion of the goals of the game but kept playing it in weird ways.

But the elder game notion is fascinating to me.  Given that I’m never going to blog like it’s 2001, or 2009, or 2010… and I wanted a more flexible frame to present thoughts and not fully baked considerations (there’s an elder blog phrase for you, from Simon Reynolds on Blissblog, once a distant blogging relation of mine) and status notes/images and even station idents if I feel like it.  These things are, in large part, captured in the net of elderblogging, in that they are things that surround “a blog” without actually, kind of, beinga blog.  Tumblelogs gave us permission for quotes and asides and photos to be in the weave of a blog, and, without wanting to get into the ancient hellscape of blogging about blogging, it’s sometimes worth considering how the vocabulary of writing online evolved over the years.

From Warren Ellis’s newsletter this week. Things I’m thinking a lot about, especially as I restart this place as a going concern again. The “elder game” mention is a reference to this.

The New World

Winter has arrived with savage consequences for digital publishers, including BuzzFeed. In the space of two weeks, about 2,100 jobs have been lost across the media, with many disappearing from purely digital publishers. BuzzFeed’s layoffs amounted to 15% of its total staff, a loss of around 220 jobs across all departments, including in its widely admired New York newsroom. On Friday, Vice, another media company once associated with fast growth, said it would lay off 10% of its workforce, while last month, the phone company Verizon, which owns Huffington Post and Yahoo, cut 800 workers in its media division. In the UK, the Pool, a website aimed at women launched in 2015 by radio presenter Lauren Laverne and magazine editor Sam Baker, went into liquidation, with 24 journalists facing redundancy.

Many of these layoffs played out in real time on Twitter as journalists reported on the fumbling and often ineptly cruel ways in which they were let go. Reporters at Vice knew of the layoffs and sometimes had their email accounts closed before being told by the company they were among the casualties.

From here.

The Big Question

Following Stone’s indictment on Friday, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani scoffed, “Another false-statement case? God almighty.”

But it is unclear if the special counsel shares that view. While Mueller has not accused any American of criminally coordinating with Russia, the lies meticulously unspooled by his prosecutors over 20 months have not been mere quibbles.

They have documented various falsehoods by Trump advisers that masked efforts by people in his orbit to develop inroads with Russia and leverage that country’s hacking of Democratic emails.

The remaining question — for both Mueller’s team, as it works on a final investigative report, and for the American people — is why.

Did the president’s men lie to protect a still-hidden dark secret about the campaign’s interaction with Russia, engaging in a broad effort to obstruct the probe — one that included perhaps even Trump?

Did they lie to avoid diminishing Trump’s victory by acknowledging Russia played a role in his election?

Did they each lie for their own reasons, taking their cue from the president — who has told many whoppers of his own, including about Russia?

From here.