"He changed me"

North Carolina in 2019:

There are quite a few clergy members at the picnic. Another is the Rev. Jerry Miller, whose son came out as gay four decades ago. At first, it wasn't easy for Miller to reconcile his faith with his son's identity.

"My wife and I basically went in the closet because I was a pastor of a Baptist church at that time. And I prayed that God would change my son someday," Miller says. "God didn't change him; he changed me."

Thursday, May 7, 2015

An Arkansas Tea Party group plans an anti-equality rally. Guess what happens next...

There is a big and largely untold story here about cultural and political shifts south of the Mason Dixon Line. They don't get much coverage but I've been noticing items like this.

RUSSELLVILLE, AR -- Hundreds of people marched down Main Street in Russellville for the definition of marriage in Arkansas just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court considers the fundamental question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

The rallies were on the same street at the same time, but were on opposite sides of the street because of people's opposing views on same-sex marriage.

The march started off calm. Nearly 80 people walked on Main Street to the Pope County Courthouse holding signs that read, "One man + one woman = marriage and family" and other signs that supported heterosexual marriage and disagreed with homosexual marriage. The group, which included members of the Tri County Tea Party, headed its own march with a separate march trailing behind.

...

All while hundreds of people rallying at the other march chanted "marriage equality" across the street.

...

That was the message speakers at the original rally tried to get out, but struggled because of the loud chants across the street.

Even though March for Marriage was the first march formally announced, supporters were outnumbered by the crowd across the street.

Outnumbered is a bit of an understatement.

Because I've heard conflicting numbers regarding the folks on both sides of the two rallies in Russellville this weekend, I asked Travis Simpson, a reporter at the Russellville Courier, who was there on the scene on Saturday.

He said the crowd supporting marriage equality was the larger of the two, "no contest." Simpson said he estimated there were perhaps 30 rallying against same-sex marriage, but around 200 on the pro-equality side.

Nor was that the end it.

On Saturday, a group called Pope County for Equality organized a rally in Russellville to show support for marriage equality and LGBTQ civil rights in Arkansas. More than 300 people showed up — quite a significant turnout for a community of under 30,000. Klay Rutherford, an organizer of the event and an undergrad at Arkansas Tech University, sent this report to the Arkansas Times. All pictures are courtesy of Pope County for Equality's Facebook page.

Residents of Pope County gathered in Russellville at 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 2 for a march and rally for marriage equality. Over 300 attendees marched through downtown and congregated at a stage near the historic Missouri-Pacific train depot.

The event was sponsored by Pope County for Equality, an online organization that advocates for the equal treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. Speakers included Dr. MarTeze Hammonds, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Arkansas Tech University; Jeannie Fowler Stone, a proud Christian and an accepting mother of a transgender son; and, James Bittle, a retired sergeant in the U.S. Army who is gay and recently married. Hammonds, Stone and Bittle are all residents of Russellville.

Event organizers said, “Our goal is to be an overwhelming presence of love and acceptance. We aim to lift people up, start discussions, and show our community that we are more than a stereotype. We simply want to bring our community closer together in a setting of love and peace.”

An impromptu marriage proposal took place on stage as Russellville resident Morgan Walker got down on one knee, surprising the crowd and her new fiancé, Silvia Harper (also of Russellville). The band Sad Magick provided entertainment.

The rally was held in part as a response to an event the previous weekend (Saturday, April 25) organized by an Arkansas River Valley Tea Party group in support of defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Protests that weekend were organized by pro-equality individuals not affiliated with Pope County for Equality. While many media outlets downplayed the presence and role of the protesters at the April 25 event, we estimate that there were at least 250 pro-equality protesters and no more than 50 participants among the the anti-equality crowd.

Pope County for Equality would like to thank the Russellville Police Department for their unbiased approach in handling both marches. Despite the surprising turnout at both events, they occurred without incident or injury.

In the fairly near future, I'm planning a deep dive into how the culture and politics of the South are shifting in ways that our standard metrics tend to miss. For now though, just remember that Russellville is in the most Republican part of the state.

Primary polls, noise and path dependency

As with rational actors and efficient markets, the strong form of the wisdom of crowds theory is too silly to bother with -- a collection of motivated reasoning and epicyles -- but the weak form stands up fairly well and, at the very least, serves as a very useful rule of thumb. Under the right conditions, more heads really are better than one.

When, however, we try to determine how much better, we run into a paradox, or at least a tricky caveat.      We are often most likely to rely on collective opinions when we should trust them the least. This is especially true in cases of limited information.

When reasonable people want to understand something or make a decision, they generally seek out both objective information and informed opinions. Furthermore, being reasonable, they constantly try to gauge the quality of that input and give more weight to the good and reliable. Unfortunately, our ability to judge the information other people are using is less than our ability to judge the information we’re using. This leads to a big problem when everyone is using the same basic set of facts.

If I feel ignorant on a subject, I’m more inclined to rely on your take. If you feel ignorant on a subject, you’re more inclined to rely on mine. Extend this out to a large number of people and limit their ability to share their uncertainty and you can see where this is going.

Which brings us to primary polls, noise and path dependency.

Supporting a candidate partially because other party members support her is not necessarily a bad thing. In a democracy, agreement is a positive and if you believe elections have consequences, it is only ration to consider electability (with the caveat that much of the conventional wisdom about electability is demonstrable bullshit). Six months from now, ignoring the polls when deciding who to support will border on irresponsible.

At the moment, though, the focus on polls and horse race coverage actually damage the democratic process, amplifying noise and creating the illusion of information. With all due respect to Nate Silver and his peers, if they would all just take the next few months off, the country would be better off.

Believe it or not, if I had more time, I'd tie Chucky in with the Joe Biden campaign

I've been meaning to do a thread about how we have come to put irrationally high value on name recognition and known IP. Chipman's argument here -- that this is a clever premise clumsily tied to a deserving cult classic in a way that does disservice to the old and ruins the new -- would be a great fit.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to write that now, so I'm just going to post this and go to bed. Maybe next week.



...

OK, NOW I;m going to bed, but first I stayed up a little longer and checked out this deep dive by Chipman into why there are two ongoing Chucky franchises. If you're into both pop culture and the strange world of intellectual property law (which sadly puts me in the center of the target audience), it's definitely worth your time.

You know the writers are running out of ideas when they start doing cross-overs

From Steve Moore’s New Crypto Start-up Is Dumb Even by Crypto Start-up Standards by Josh Barro

Here’s how Moynihan and Gasparino describe the proposed venture:

“Decentral,” as it is known, will attempt to perform Fed-like duties in terms of regulating the supply of crypto in the same way as the Fed controls the supply of money for the U.S. economy, they contend. It will exchange its own new token for other cryptos; the supply of the new cryptocurrency will be tied to the value of the dollar or some other “stable” valuation method and will be strictly controlled by an algorithm, company officials tell Fox Business.

You may have some questions. Like “What?” or “Why?” or “What could that possibly even mean?” When I read that paragraph, I also had these questions. It sounds like announcing you’re going to start a private “central bank” that trades in gold in order to control the supply and price of gold. How would that possibly work? It wouldn’t, is the short answer.

So I spoke with Moore’s business partner, Sam Kazemian (a 2015 UCLA graduate whose previous venture, Everipedia, is a blockchain-based competitor to Wikipedia), to ask what it would mean for a crypto start-up to “perform Fed-like duties” and “regulate the supply of crypto.” Having spoken with him and gotten more detail on the proposed business plan, I think the “central bank” branding is distracting and it’s most accurate to say that Kazemian and Moore hope to issue a fiat stablecoin. Let me explain what that means. (Spoiler: It’s still not a good idea.)

   

Before we go on, let's pay a quick visit to Everipedia.

The closer you look at Everipedia, which didn’t respond to questions or a request for a list of its most visited pages, the less substantial it appears. Almost every page on the site is copied verbatim from Wikipedia — although not updated as frequently as Wikipedia — and the trickle of entries posted by Everipedia users relate almost exclusively to sensational topics including YouTube trolls, the “meme war of 2017” and the hip hop producer who tattooed an image of Anne Frank onto his face. Other recurring subjects are activists, white supremacists, and people who were shot and killed by police — all topics that seem engineered to capitalize on trending search terms.

Also unlike Wikipedia, a collaborative nonprofit encyclopedia launched in 2001, Everipedia has its eye on revenue. The site offers a service in which individuals and businesses can pay an annual fee in exchange for a custom-made Everipedia entry that receives “full-time monitoring for updates and preventing vandalism,” starting at $299 per year. Its home page claims that it is “free from ads,” but ads periodically appear on the site, and a link at the bottom of every page labeled “Advertise” links to information for prospective sponsors. Maghodam has trumpeted the site’s growing traffic, but its Alexa score indicates limited popularity.

Which these days is enough to net you $30 million.

Now back the main stage.

For a number of reasons, Moore and the founders of Decentral would like to avoid backing their stablecoin 1:1 with traditional currencies. The premise behind their venture: What if you could have a coin that was stable but that wasn’t backed by a whole bunch of stable assets? What if, like a central bank, you found a way to issue currency and achieve a stable price not through backing by valuable reserves but by fiat — that is, through reliance on a reputation for stability plus certain open-market operations designed to influence the value of the currency you have issued?

Of course, there are some problems with this idea.

...

Sovereign governments fail at this despite having advantages that Decentral will not. For example, they can levy taxes. They regulate banks that take deposits and issue loans in the fiat currency and adjust the supply of that currency by telling them how much they must hold in reserve. They also preside over economies in which people are likely to feel compelled to hold and use the local currency — because they have to pay taxes in it, for example. Nobody will need to pay taxes in Decentral’s coin.

Kazemian told me he understands these concerns, and that is why Decentral will begin its operations with a more traditional stablecoin model, achieving a stable price by holding other stablecoins in full and equal value to the coins Decentral itself will issue.

He said a key reason the company brought Moore onboard was to help understand how big it would need to get in order to successfully behave like a central bank and issue a stable fiat currency. “When it is big enough, when it’s the kind of self-fulfilling prophesy of the Fed,” Kazemian said, they would pivot to a model similar to the Fed’s, in which the currency isn’t fully backed by reserves.

That's right, Moore is supposed to be the economic brains of the operation

Paul Krugman is just scratching the surface here, but it's a valuable scratch

In fairness, this is only a prelude to a longer talk, but even if he stopped here, Krugman would deserve credit for clearly laying out points that are vitally important and should be obvious but are all too often ignored. Part of the problem, I think, is that the mainstream centrist press, especially the paper Krugman writes for, tends to be overwhelmingly deferential toward the rich and the powerful. That, however, is a topic for another post.

While popular discourse has concentrated on the “1 percent,” what’s really at issue here is the role of the 0.1 percent, or maybe the 0.01 percent — the truly wealthy, not the “$400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff” memorably ridiculed in the movie Wall Street. This is a really tiny group of people, but one that exerts huge influence over policy.

Where does this influence come from? People often talk about campaign contributions, but those are only one channel. In fact, I’d identify at least four ways in which the financial resources of the 0.1 percent distort policy priorities:

1. Raw corruption. We like to imagine that simple bribery of politicians isn’t an important factor in America, but it’s almost surely a much bigger deal than we like to think.

2. Soft corruption. What I mean by this are the various ways short of direct bribery politicians, government officials, and people with policy influence of any kind stand to gain financially by promoting policies that serve the interests or prejudices of the wealthy. This includes the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.

3. Campaign contributions. Yes, these matter.

4. Defining the agenda: Through a variety of channels — media ownership, think tanks, and the simple tendency to assume that being rich also means being wise — the 0.1 percent has an extraordinary ability to set the agenda for policy discussion, in ways that can be sharply at odds with both a reasonable assessment of priorities and public opinion more generally.

Tuesday Tweets

I've probably said this before, but I wonder how much of the postwar futurism that seems wildly optimistic today would have been viable if nuclear thermal rockets and fusion reactors had progressed as expected.

Weather Control was a big, seriously discussed topic for decades that seemed to drop off the radar at the close of the 20th Century. Any thoughts as to the decline? https://t.co/jntlg9cdo2

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 22, 2019

Here's one for the social scientists in the audience.

We could survey economists on whether they agree if only we had those tools

— Chris Blattman (@cblatts) June 21, 2019

I took survey design at UChicago with an expert at NORC, he said out of all the disciplines he works with economists were the hardest explain survey design effects to (sometimes he'd force them to watch people take the survey so they'd see people's confusion)

— Jeff Mosenkis (@mosenkis) June 23, 2019

Keep this in mind when we come back to the voter suppression thread.

Its definitely awkward to say that "we don't want college students to vote because they will probably vote against us", but holding yourself out as the champion of parking rights over voting rights is a weird position. pic.twitter.com/O1nrovs4qA

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) June 21, 2019

When studies favor the predictions of social psych crowd over the economists, people are always surprised, even though that seems to be how things generally break.

It's as if people care about anonymous strangers, or have principles (or something). But, this varies dramatically across societies. https://t.co/zOXugxLMl3

— Joe Henrich (@JoHenrich) June 20, 2019

Presented without comment.

"The Tesla manual says the driver should hold the wheel at all times"... so where are people getting the idea that it is safe to use Autopilot with their hands off the wheel?

What a mystery. I guess we may never know. pic.twitter.com/anUi8thkXW

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 20, 2019

The smarter commentators (Pierce, Marshall) are starting to point out that, while you can never entirely dismiss the election chances of a sitting president and a lot can happen in a year and a half, the odds against Trump pulling off a legitimate (or even semi-legitimate) win in 2020 are looking pretty high. More on this soon.

I don't make predictions, but it sure seems like Trump could get trounced in 2020: https://t.co/unFOMHKt3U

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 21, 2019

There's even a Gwyneth Paltrow connection

There's a lot to unpack in this piece by Reeves Wiedeman, but here are a few points I want to highlight.

Its core business is simple: lease offices from landlords — the company owns hardly any real estate — slice them up, and rent them out in smaller portions with an upcharge for cool design, regular happy hours, and a more flexible short-term lease. There are hundreds of co-working companies around the world, but what has long distinguished WeWork is Neumann’s insistence that his is something bigger. In 2017, Neumann declared that WeWork’s “valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” He has long maintained that categorizing WeWork as a real-estate concern is too limiting; it is a “community company” with huge ambitions. “We are here in order to change the world,” Neumann said that same year. “Nothing less than that interests me.”

We've seen a lot of tech messiahs promising disruptive transformation over the past few years, but I can't recall a case where this level of grandiosity rested on a business plan as mundane as subletting office space. Say what you will about Elon Musk, he could promise big.

Here, it's almost like we've moved past the need to ground the god complexes in even the suggestion of a viable argument.

And what Neumann has accomplished is staggering: WeWork now has 466,000 members working out of 485 locations in more than 100 cities in 28 countries. Its revenue has grown from $75 million in 2014 to $1.8 billion last year. Three years ago, it had 1,000 employees; today, it has 12,000 and is adding 100 every week. It has installed 22 million square feet of the glass partitions that have defined an era of workplace aesthetics, and last fall, it became Manhattan’s largest tenant. (In Central London, it is second only to the British government.) In the wake of Uber’s (disappointing) debut on the New York Stock Exchange, the We Company is now America’s most highly valued start-up, at $47 billion — at least for the moment. At the end of April, Neumann announced that the company had filed paperwork to begin the process of an IPO.

Inside the company, however, employees and executives describe an environment that can be marked by the chaos, churn, and misbehavior that have come to characterize hypergrowth start-up life, not to mention questions about its business: WeWork lost $1.9 billion last year. But WeWork has already reshaped the commercial real-estate world, and it has its eyes on the rest of our lives. As Neumann recently told a person close to the company, he believes that WeWork’s size and scale could put it in a position to help deal with some of the world’s largest problems, like the refugee crisis, saying, “I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me.”

I probably shouldn't have to say this, but hitting $1.8 billion in revenue when you're losing $1.9 billion isn't actually  all that staggering an accomplishment.

During the dot-com boom, a company called Regus became a stock-market darling by offering similar but much blander flexible offices. In 2000, Fast Company published a story about Regus titled “Office of the Future,” highlighting its efforts to bring “community” to the workplace. But the bubble burst and Regus went bankrupt. The company recovered and rebranded as IWG, but its existence presents another conundrum for WeWork. IWG currently has roughly 3,000 locations and 2.5 million customers worldwide, numbers that dwarf WeWork’s. IWG is profitable and now has a hipper, WeWork-ish offering. It is publicly traded and worth around $3 billion.

I'm just going to stop now.

"Start your day a little bit better"

A fun piece of marketing history from a magazine that's consistently better than it ought to be.

 In many ways, the cereal flake is the perfect consumer product. It's easy to produce, easy to sell, and surprisingly lucrative. To this day, cereal comes with an eye-popping profit margin of 50 percent. These merits became clear to Charles Post, a failed suspender salesman who moved to Battle Creek in 1895. Post began selling knock-off versions of Kellogg's products with a twist of his own—advertising. At the time, advertising was associated with snake-oil salesmen and con artists. But Post, who had a background in sales, didn't mind drizzling a little snake oil on his product. He published pamphlets with titles such as "The Road To Wellville" and claimed his cereal, Grape-Nuts, could cure appendicitis, improve one's IQ, and even "make red blood redder." By 1903, he was clearing $1 million a year.

Across town, Dr. Kellogg refused to sully The San's reputation with heathen advertising, and his profits suffered as a result. W.K., however, had no such qualms and set out to emulate Post. In his first national campaign, he told women to "Wink at your grocer, and see what you get." (Answer: a free box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes.) Within a year, he'd sold 1 million cases of cereal. With the leading cereal makers embracing such unabashed hucksterism, it was clear that cereal's connection to its fundamentalist roots had come to an end.
...

But the real winner was a cereal called Force. Its mascot, Sunny Jim, was a strutting, top-hatted gentleman who became so popular in newspapers and magazines that other cereal makers rushed to create their own mascots. For a cereal called Elijah's Manna, Charles Post even tried putting a picture of the prophet on the label. Although the product was eventually pulled, one industry ground rule had been established: Every box needs a character.

Before long, cereal makers had an insatiable appetite for finding the right mascot, regardless of the cost. During the Depression, Post Toasties decided to use cartoon animals on its boxes and paid its cartoonist $1.5 million in the first year. That artist was Walt Disney, and he used the earnings to build the Disney empire.

Cereal's total reliance on advertising meant that it was essential for companies to keep up with new forms of media. Quaker Oats, for example, hitched its sales to the rise of radio in a Dennis the Menace type who frequently interrupted his adventures to extol the virtues of Wheaties, Skippy was the first cereal character directly marketed to children. As it turned out, kids ate him up, and cereal producers learned an important lesson: Children are suckers. The flood of kid-friendly, cereal-shilling characters that followed reads like a Who's Who of American iconography, including the Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, and Buck Rogers. By the 1960s, cereal advertisers were devoting 90 percent of their budgets to reaching children.

Repost -- We'll be revisiting this again

Thursday, March 2, 2017

There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.

In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.

Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.

Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely,  to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.

The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.

Running out of snarky Musk titles

I know we've covered this before, but this is such an apt example of how Elon Musk still doesn't get engineering, despite being surrounded by some of the most brilliant people in the fields of aerospace, transportation and artificial intelligence. They spend endless hours briefing him on technical subjects, and as long as he stays on script, he seems to grasp the concepts. The moment he starts to ad lib, however, his lack of comprehension becomes painful to watch.

There is a certain mindset that you find in pretty much all fields of applied mathematics (engineering, statistics, computer science, etc.), at least among the competent. It's a tendency to think in terms of complex systems, ranges,constraints,  trade-offs. Musk does exactly the opposite. He seems to believe that evaluating a design is done by taking a bunch of numbers, picking the best ones and shoving them together.

That compares an average speed with a top speed, and a real-world number with a theoretical number. One input: what's the throughput of an exit? You can't squirt those pods onto a street one a second at 155 mph.

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) June 4, 2019

This wouldn't be so bad if Elon Musk were just another clueless CEO, but the myth of the real life Tony Stark has been so internalized by journalists, investors and politicians that it has started to warp our discourse and decision making.

Tuesday Tweets

I've been going back and forth on posting this for years. It makes more sense in periods of high unemployment. Maybe I'll dust it off for the next recession.

Back in the recession, I wondered about sending a new CCC out to thin overcrowded forests. make charcoal of the trees and plow it into the ground. It didn't seem scalable but it might make for an interesting conversation.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 14, 2019

For a long time now, we've been pointing out that the culture of education reform movement left it vulnerable to abuses.

"Home school charters" let families use state $$ to buy Disneyland tickets, horseback riding lessons & more. Even if one claims individual kids benefit from this exposure, implausible to say $ wouldn’t go further & do better in public school classroom. https://t.co/f5dyfOfHk0

— Ed Law Blog (@DerekWBlack) June 16, 2019

If more journalists had actually listened to Margaret Sullivan, journalism (and the country as a whole) would be in better shape.

Kudos to @Sulliview: "The truth is that journalists and pundits are bad at predictions. They should have learned that when Trump — a candidate so manifestly unsuited to be president that he couldn’t possibly win — blew their minds by doing just that." https://t.co/uUfYDgFXG8

— Walter Shapiro (@MrWalterShapiro) June 16, 2019

Another one I'd like to revisit.

@trnsprtst
Is anyone looking at the energy and infrastructure implications of one-day? The shorter the turnaround, the more difficult it is to optimize logistics. That means fewer full loads, less direct routes, less freedom to favor reverse commutes and avoid peak traffic.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 16, 2019

When you can get your summary down to four letters.

Cash https://t.co/oyqltY5Lkg

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) June 15, 2019

No one knows the subtleties of this stuff like Silver.

One interesting fact is that Rasmussen had Republicans winning the popular vote for the US House last year and Democrats actually won it by **9** points, which makes for about twice as bad a fuck-up as any pollster had in 2016. https://t.co/I2nZaoWOnc

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 16, 2019

TBH, not a bad racket to have polls that are consistently skewed toward the GOP. Maybe once per 3 or 4 elections (2016), R's beat their polls, you look like geniuses. The rest of the time, your polls suck, but you BS your way thru it & criticize people who evaluate poll accuracy.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 16, 2019

The sad part is I'm sure this isn't the first time the worlds of cryptocurrency and Perlstein's "the Long Con" have collided

From Madison Malone Kircher writing for New York Magazine.

In the name of the father, the son, and the HODL spirit … amen. Rick Santorum — former Pennsylvania senator, two-time failed Republican presidential candidate, conservative Catholic — is getting into cryptocurrency. He’s an adviser on the board of a new company called Cathio, which says it “provides Catholic organizations with a payments platform that aligns with Catholic values, provides the tools necessary to increase donations and connect with both local and global Catholic communities.” Santorum’s son-in-law is Cathio’s CEO.

From the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog:

There are some other big hitters on the board too, including former US ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, and former head of the US Mint Ed Moy, who also happens to have been an adviser for “bitcoin IRA”, an investment fund that encourages people to put their retirement savings into crypto (what could possibly go wrong, etc). Also on the board — and co-founder of Cathio — is Cameron Chell, chairman of ICOx Innovations, the company that ran Kodak’s infamous “Kodakcoin” ICO, which managed to raise less than 7 per cent of its target.

And in case you never read Rick Perlstein's essential essay...

Opossum is a real mood killer of a safe word

More solid work from the Last Week Tonight team.

And if we committed to tithing to Uber, the company would break even within the decade

You always have to be careful reading too much into an anecdote, particularly one that came to your attention via social media, but they can be instructive. As Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik puts it:

I know there’s sort of a stereotype about a certain sort of painfully obsessed Tesla fan/Elon Musk worshipper that is, likely, an unfair categorization of most Tesla fans. But then you see something like this recent discussion on Reddit’s r/TeslaMotors forum, and you remember that, oh yeah, sometimes stereotypes do come from somewhere.

uhh.... which stage of capitalism is this again? pic.twitter.com/iSHfZ2x6cf

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 12, 2019

Once you're on the list, you're pretty much set.

Parul Sehgal has a devastating review of the latest from Naomi Wolf, but while Sehgal is being justly praised for her sharp and relentless treatment of her subject, she stops short before she gets to the most disturbing and important implication of the story.
There's an excellent case made here that Wolf's career should have collapsed long ago under the weight of her contradictions and factual errors, but the question of responsibility, of how enablers have sustained that career, and how many other journalistic all-stars owe their successes to the turning of blind eyes.

For example, Sehgal's review ran in the New York Times. One of, if not the most prominent voice of that paper is David Brooks. If you'll recall, Brooks got his sinecure (and if NYT opinion writer doesn't qualify, I don't know what does) in part because of a widely read article based largely on fabrications. There were no consequences for Brooks when this came out, or when similar complaints were raised later.

That her advice can contradict itself from book to book doesn’t appear to distress her (she fluctuates between regarding women as all-powerful sorceresses and abjectly dependent). The method has worked too efficiently, and at every stage of her life — as a young woman protesting beauty standards (“The Beauty Myth”) through motherhood (“Misconceptions”) and, later, the aging of her parents (“The Treehouse”), as she has grappled with her ambition (“Fire With Fire”) and her sex life (“Vagina”). Always the books are lit by a strange messianic energy, shored up by dubious data and structured around a moment of crisis and revelation as some veil — some long-held notion — falls away.

Recently, we had the opportunity to witness such a revelation in real time. Wolf was a guest on a BBC radio program, publicizing her new book, “Outrages,” a study of the criminalization of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era. She spoke passionately about discovering “several dozen executions” of men, including teenagers, accused of having sex with other men.

“Several dozen executions? I don’t think you’re right about this,” the host, Matthew Sweet, said, very politely filleting one of Wolf’s central claims. What Wolf regarded as evidence of executions — the notation of “death recorded” on court records — indicated, in fact, the opposite, that the judge had recommended a pardon from the death sentence. Sweet said he could find no evidence that anyone had ever been executed for sodomy in Victorian Britain, and furthermore, that Wolf mistakenly regarded sodomy in the court records as referring exclusively to homosexuality when, in fact, it was also used for child abuse. “I can’t find any evidence that any of the relationships you describe were consensual,” he pointed out.

It was a surprisingly cordial interaction, however. Wolf took the news on the chin, and later expressed her gratitude: “It’s such an important story and I welcome the chance to correct these two out of hundreds of citations and make it perfect.” Her publishers regretted the error but stated they believed the overall thesis still held.

…



Her first, career-making book, “The Beauty Myth,” is well-known for exaggerating the number of women who died of anorexia (Wolf stated that anorexia kills 150,000 women annually; the actual figure at the time, in the mid-1990s, was said to be closer to 50 or 60). One academic paper found that fully 18 of the 23 statistics about anorexia in the book were inaccurate and coined a term — “WOLF” (Wolf’s Overdo and Lie Factor) — to determine the degree to which Wolf was wrong: “On average, a statistic on anorexia by Naomi Wolf should be divided by eight to get close to the real figure.”

…


Throughout it all, she remains impervious to criticism. “I’m lucky,” she said in a recent profile in The Guardian. “I had a good education. I know my books are true.”

Not accurate or factual, but true. This is a key to understanding why charges of sloppiness or misrepresentation don’t seem to stymie, or even embarrass, writers like Wolf (or Jared Diamond and Annie Jacobsen, who have both been involved in similar scandals in recent weeks, facing them with the same blithe indifference). The issue isn’t simply that publishers don’t spring for fact-checking and leave writers vulnerable to making such errors. These writers see themselves in service of something larger than grubby reporting. “The important thing is that these stories are told,” Wolf recently told The Times of London. They are the emissaries of great stories, suppressed stories, and if they take liberties or eschew careful research — as consistently as Wolf has done — it is because they believe they have a right to them, that the story, the cause, somehow sanctions it.