Oxford University Press's Blog, page 805

Ballmer overbids by one billion

By Adam Grossman

On Sunday, the NBA approved the sale of the Los Angeles Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. From a brand management and crisis perspective, it is easy to see why the NBA wanted to approve this sale as quickly as possible. I, among many others, have written about the damage that current owner Donald Sterling has done to both the team and the league.

From an economic perspective, it becomes clearer why the NBA wanted to approve the sale as well. Using virtually any standard valuation metric that exists today, Ballmer has agreed to vastly overpay for the Los Angeles Clippers.

Finance industry professionals (investment bankers, venture capitalists, and private equity firms) primarily use three valuation approaches: inherent valuation, relative valuation, and comparable valuation. Using any of these approaches, it is virtually impossible to see how the Clippers are worth $2 billion.

To complete a valuation of a sports team, you need to start with understanding an organization’s revenue streams. Six revenue streams account for virtually all money earned by a sports organization. Like many new owners buying sports franchises, Ballmer is betting that two revenue streams will increase significantly to make his investment profitable: media rights and subsidy. Media revenue refers to the television, mobile, and digital distribution agreements signed by an individual organization. Subsidy revenue includes all revenue shared by a sports league with individual franchises.

The Los Angeles Clippers revenue will increase significantly in both areas after the 2015-16 season. Both the team’s local media rights deal and the NBA’s league wide revenue deals expire after that season. According to Forbes, the Clippers’ local television rights deal can increase to as high as $75 million per year from its current $18 million per year value. In addition, the NBA’s league wide media rights deal is expected to double from its current $930 million per year value. This means the Clippers will receive double its current media rights subsidy from a new deal – about $30 million per year.

Minnesota Timberwolves-LA Clippers game at Staples Center. Photo by David Jones, 2012. CC BY 2.0 via davidcjones Flickr.

While this is all great news for the Clippers, it does not make the team worth $2 billion. An inherent valuation approach uses a discounted cash flow model to evaluate an asset’s worth. This essentially means looking at how much profit is generated by an organization and discounting the profits based on the potential risk factors. Factor in both idiosyncratic (risk associated with owning the Clippers specifically) and systemic risk (risk associated with any financial asset). In our analysis, the Clippers generated an estimated $11 million in annual operating profit from now through 2015-16 season. Starting in the 2016-17 season when the new media rights and subsidy revenue streams start, the Clippers would generate $54 million in annual operating profit in perpetuity. Using this approach, we found the Clippers to be worth $1.05 billion.

We don’t want, however, to rely on a single technique for our assessment of the Clippers’ value. Therefore, employ a relative valuation approach that compares a company’s value using a standard valuation metric. The most common metric used is a price to earnings (P/E) ratio. This means that you compare the price of an asset compared to the amount of annual profit that asset is generating. For example, the average P/E ratio on the S & P 500 is currently at 18.3. The Clippers would have an estimated 36.8 P/E ratio given our estimated operating profits after the 2016-17 season after Ballmer purchases the team. Using the average P / E Ratio of the S & P 500 would produce a value of $990 million.

The only real argument that could be made for the Clippers being worth $2 billion would be by using a comparable valuation. With this approach, an investor looks at what other similar assets have been sold for to determine a value. You only have to look at the Clippers’ baseball neighbors to see a team that recently sold for a similar amount. The Los Angeles Dodgers were recently sold for $2.15 billion to a group led by Guggenheim Partners. While both are sports organizations, the Clippers and the Dodgers are actually very different types of properties. Because it has a bigger venue and plays many more games, the Dodgers currently make as much or more in annual ticket sales revenue than the Clippers make from all revenue streams. The Dodgers also recently signed a $7 billion 25-year local media rights agreement that will pay it far more in average annual dollars than any new media rights deal the Clippers could negotiate. A more appropriate comparison would be to examine the Clippers compared to other NBA franchises. The Milwaukee Bucks recently sold for a league record of $550 million. Ballmer is now paying 3.6 times more than the record amount paid for an NBA franchise.

To be fair to Ballmer, both the media rights and subsidy deals could far exceed expert expectations. The Los Angeles Lakers recently signed two new media rights deals for their English and Spanish broadcasts for $4 billion over 20 years, an average of $200 million per year. The NFL has recently signed new media rights deals that pay the league $7.25 billion in annual revenue, an average of $227 million per team. If the Clippers end up receiving $150 million per year in media rights revenue and the NBA contract triples from its current value then we would estimate the team being worth $2.05 billion. It is also likely that ticket sales and sponsorship revenue will increase significantly with a new owner.

ESPN’s Bill Simmons recently stated that the sale of the Clippers resembled the purchase of a home without the buyer being able to complete a home inspection. The sale of the Clippers was happening so quickly that it was impossible for Ballmer to know what exactly he was buying. However, Ballmer can (and likely has) completed an inspection of the Clippers similar to the one we just described — and he will discover there is no way to generate a $2 billion valuation for the Clippers.

Adam Grossman is the Founder and President of Block Six Analytics (B6A). He has worked with a number of sports organizations, including the Minnesota Timberwolves, Washington Capitals, and SMG @ Solider Field, to enhance their corporate sponsorship and enterprise marketing capabilities. He is the co-author of The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry with Irving Rein and Ben Shields. Read his previous blog posts.

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What is a book?

In recent weeks, a trade dispute between Amazon and Hachette has been making headlines across the world. But discussion at our book-laden coffee tables and computer screens has not been limited to contract terms and inventory, but what books mean to us as publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers. So we thought this would be an excellent time to share some ideas on books from some of the greatest minds in our culture. Please share your personal thoughts in the comments below.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”


–Franz Kafka, 1883-1924, Czech novelist

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit.”


–John Milton, 1608-74, English poet

“Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory … In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.”


–Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882-1945, American Democratic statesman, 32nd President of the US 1933-45, and husband of Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘Message to the Booksellers of America 6 May 1942, in Publishers Weekly 9 May 1942

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”


–Joan Didion, 1934-, American writer, The White Album (1979)

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”


–W.H. Auden, 1907-73, English poet

“Choose an author as you choose a friend.”


–Wentworth Dillon, Lord Roscommon, c. 1633-85, Irish poet and critic, Essay on Translated Verse (1684) l. 96

“No furniture is so charming as books.”


–Sydney Smith, 1771-1845, English essayist

“All books are either dreams or swords,


You can cut, or you can drug, with words.”


–Amy Lowell, 1874-1925, American poet, ‘Sword Blades and Poppy Seed’ (1914)

“Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”


–E.M. Forster, 1879-1970, English novelist, Howard’s End (1910), ch. 22

“A good book is the best of friends, the same to-day and for ever.”


–Martin Tupper, 1810-89, English writer

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”


–Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, English courtier

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island.”


–Walt Disney, 1901-66, American film producer

“There is no book so bad that some good cannot be got out of it.”


–Pliny the Elder, AD 23-79, Roman senator

“I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”


–Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-78, French philosopher

“All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.”


–John Ruskin, 1819-1900, English critic

Ever since the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations published over 70 years ago, this bestselling book has remained unrivalled in its coverage of quotations both past and present. Drawing on Oxford’s dictionary research program and unique language monitoring, over 700 new quotations have been added to this eighth edition from authors ranging from St Joan of Arc and Coco Chanel to Albrecht Durer and Thomas Jefferson.

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                Related StoriesFishing in the “roiling” waters of etymologyPolitics and cities: looking at the roots of suburban sprawlChanging focus 

Fishing in the “roiling” waters of etymology

By Anatoly Liberman

Those who will look up the etymology of roil and rile will have to choose between two answers: “from Old French” or “of uncertain origin.” Judging by my rather extensive and constantly growing database, roil and rile have attracted little attention, though Professor Bernhard Diensberg (Bonn) wrote a book on the fortunes of the diphthongs oi and ui in Middle English (it appeared in 1985) and devoted an informative section to those words. Non-specialists may wonder how anyone can write a book on such a subject. “No problem,” as waiters (servers) say in my area when I thank them. English words with oi continue to rile etymologists by their stubborn refusal to disclose their origin. Just try to investigate the history of foist, hoist, ploy, or hoity-toity, and you’ll never get out of this morass. One of the difficulties that plague the inquisitive mind is that oi and i constantly play leapfrog. Dictionaries (or perhaps your own experience) will tell you that a doublet of hoity-toity is hightly-tighty, that joist is related to gist, that many people pronounce point and oil as pint and ile, and so it goes. And it is not for nothing that Crocodile Dundee had a “knoife,” while in the speech of many Britishers the number preceding ten is noin.

Returning to our subject, one cannot be sure whether rile and roil are different words or variants of the same verb. The prevailing opinion is that rile is indeed a dialectal variant of roil, and most dictionaries say: rile—see roil. In any case, be it roil or rile, its country of origin seems to have been France. The cautious statement “origin uncertain/unknown” usually refers not to the homeland of the English verb but to its putative French source (etymon). However, Skeat, who always indicated where each word originated, put a question mark and wrote (? F.). I think the first reasonable French etymology of roil goes back to Francis Henry Stratmann, the author of an important Middle English dictionary.

‘Rileyed’: the word has nothing to do with the story

Roil1 surfaced in the fourteenth century and meant “roam about.” Then there is a long chronological gap (and such gaps never augur well for etymological studies) until the end of the eighteenth century. Besides that, there is roil2-3 “make turbid,” “vex.” Roil1 partly merged in its meanings with roll, and the other roil (it is not clear whether we have one item or two) merged with rile, whose recorded history begins in 1724. The first edition of the OED was not sure whether all those verbs were related and cited obsolete French ruiler “to mix mortar,” a sense rather remote from what one would expect. But in 1918 Ernest Weekley observed that ruiler looks like a continuation of Old French rouiller, whose derivative rouil “mud” has been attested and fits the required meaning. The online edition of the OED does not object to Weekley’s etymology but offers a more cautious formulation.

The plot thickens (that is, the morass gets deeper) when we look around and notice rail “to complain (about something); use abusive language.” Hence the noun raillery with a much nicer meaning, and close to it we find rally “treat with good-humored ridicule.” This then is the sum: roil, rile; rail, and roll. For each of them a plausible etymon has been suggested: Old French roillier or rouiller (? from Latin regulare “regulate”; so Skeat), rotulare, from Latin rotululus “roll,” a diminutive form; compare late Latin rotula “little wheel”), and ragulare, from ragere “to bellow, howl.” According to an old conjecture, rile is an independent formation, not a dialectal doublet of roil, and a noun rather than a verb, as allegedly shown by Middle Engl. ryall ~ riall “foam, fermentation,” from Old French roille ~ rouille, ultimately from Latin robigo “rust.” Another hypothesis traced roil to some verb like Icelandic rugla “to confound,” but the phonetic barrier between rugla and roil cannot be overcome. No doubt, the origin of our group is “uncertain.”

The sound complex rag is notorious for its etymological obscurity: compare Engl. rag “to scold, rate,” a close synonym of rail. And of course, “scold; disturb; vex” look like related senses. Ragamuffin was once the name of a petty devil, perhaps originally a creature that made a lot of noise, but this is guesswork. Those interested in the origin of Engl. rogue and ragman (as in ragman’s roll, the etymon of rigmarole, the latter being pronounced by everybody I know as rigamarole) will find some information in my post “Old slang: rogue” (12 May 2010). Swedish hippies were called raggare (the word is still very much alive in Sweden), while in the Old Germanic languages the root rag- alternated with arg- and was a gross insult. Thus, when one sees Latin ragere, one cannot help thinking of all those Germanic words.

Not only words tend to tie themselves up in knots

I have no quarrel with the French etymons of roil (and its brother rile), rail, and roll. Perhaps they ultimately do go back to the late Latin verbs most dictionaries cite, but I would like to note two things. First, the habit of finding Latin etymons for obscure French words has nowadays much less appeal than it had a hundred and even fifty years ago. Second, of interest is the statement in the entry rail “complain,” as it appears in the OED online: “…probably of imitative origin.” “Imitative” is often hard to distinguish from “sound symbolic.”

In any case, I believe that this guess has potential. It might be useful to remember that  one of several verbs listed under rail means “rattle,” and one of the verbs listed at roil means “to flow”; “to flow” occasionally also means “to make a lot of noise,” with reference to “roiling waters” (there are good examples in Middle High German and Old Icelandic). We have roil “wander,” “flow,” “rattle,” “stir up,” and “vex,” alongside rail “use abusive language.” In the rile ~ roil group, only roll has a clearly ascertainable origin. When the rest of the “family” appeared in English, its members were probably influenced, at least to a certain degree, by the similar-sounding verb roll and began to interact with it and one another. That is why it is so hard to disentangle them and decide which sense belong to which verb and how many senses each of them has.

This situation reminds me of the problem I encountered while researching the origin of troll ~ droll, trill, and trawl. Nice Romance etymons have also been given for all of them, but the group is probably sound imitative (see the post “Between troll and trollop,” 3 January 2007). Words tend to tie themselves up in knots. Following the established format, dictionaries devote a special entry to each of them, but it might be more profitable to follow the practice of old lexicographers and feature both individual words and, when expedient, whole nests. Perhaps roll ~ rile ~ roil ~ rail is a good candidate for such a nest.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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Image credit: (1) The Bitter Drunk by Adriaen Brouwer. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Python vert /Morelia Viridis. Photo by marie. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via raym5 Flickr.

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Politics and cities: looking at the roots of suburban sprawl

Our modern-day suburban sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning, yet there might be a simple solution. Benjamin Ross, author of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, argues that the expansion of rail transit would help us to create better places to live. In the interview clips below, Ross explains how the federal government’s regulation of mass transit lay down the roots for the suburban sprawl we see today, and defines two new terms that are key to understanding the future of urban and suburban planning.

The rise and decline of suburbanism

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Not-in-my-backyard” politics

Click here to view the embedded video.

The “New Urbanist Movement”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Benjamin Ross is the author of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. He served as the president of Maryland’s Action Committee for Transit for 15 years, which grew under his leadership into the nation’s largest grass-roots transit advocacy group. Ross is a consultant on environmental problems and served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and EPA Science Advisory Board. He writes frequently on political and social topics in Dissent Magazine and is the author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment.

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                Related StoriesCybersecurity and the cyber-awareness gapChanging focusAfter the storm: failure, fallout, and Farage 

Changing focus

By Richard S. Grossman

For the past half dozen years or so, the first Friday of the month has brought fear and dread to large portions of the United States. This heightened anxiety has nothing to do with the phases of the moon, the expiration of multiple financial derivatives, or concerns about not having a date for the weekend. No, at 8:30 am (Eastern Time) on the first Friday of each month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the unemployment data for the previous month.

The release of the unemployment data sets off a media frenzy, as pundits speculate on the winners and losers. What do the numbers foreshadow for the economy? Have we put the Great Recession behind us? How will Wall Street receive the news? And, perhaps most importantly, how does it affect the Administration’s popularity?

There are plenty of reasons why unemployment should be the “marquee” economic statistic. Unlike other important economic indicators, such as GDP, exports, and new housing starts, the human cost of unemployment is inescapable. On an aggregate level, every tenth of a percent increase in the unemployment rate represents about an additional 200,000 people out of work. It is a lot tougher to conjure up a picture of a 1.2 percent decline in GDP.

On the personal level, when unemployment touches our family, friends, and neighbors, it is hard to ignore.

The unemployment rate has been at the center of a monthly drama since the beginning of the Great Recession. As the economy worsened, the unemployment rate surged upward until it hit 10% of the workforce in October 2009, its highest rate in more than 25 years.

Data Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: Civilian Unemployment Rate (UNRATE); US Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics; accessed 19 May 2014.

With each uptick in unemployment, political analysts wondered out loud if the bad news spelled the failure of the Obama presidency…or the lengthening of the odds against his chances at a second term. For the Administration’s part, the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors typically puts out a statement by 9:30 am on the day of the release, putting the best spin possible on the unemployment data.

Although the unemployment numbers have been and will remain an important economic indicator, in recent months their importance is being overshadowed by another statistic: inflation. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, even though the unemployment rate has fallen consistently since November 2010, when it was 9.8%, until April 2014, when it was 6.3%, it is clear that the economy has not fully recovered from the Great Recession. Wage growth is anemic; there are still an alarming number of discouraged workers (who are no longer counted as unemployed because they have given up looking for work); and GDP growth is sluggish.

Second, despite the continuing weakness in the economy, lower unemployment has raised concerns that that the economy is overheating. Declining unemployment combined with several years of monetary stimulus via quantitative easing and other unconventional methods has led to concerns that inflation may emerge at any moment.

So far, there is little evidence that we are experiencing a sharp upturn in inflation. Nonetheless, concern that emerging inflation will force the Fed to undertake contractionary monetary policy which, in turn, may have adverse effects for both the high flying stock market and the still low flying economy, are now gaining ground.

Don’t expect the unemployment rate to sink into obscurity anytime soon. It has always been an important indicator of the health of the economy and will remain so. Just be prepared for a second media frenzy around the middle of each month—when the inflation indices are released.

Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them and Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800. His homepage is RichardSGrossman.com, he blogs at UnsettledAccount.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @RSGrossman. You can also read his previous OUPblog posts.

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After the storm: failure, fallout, and Farage

By Matthew Flinders

The earthquake has happened, the tremors have been felt, party leaders are dealing with the aftershocks and a number of fault-lines in contemporary British and European politics have been exposed. Or have they? Were last month’s European elections really as momentous as many social and political commentators seem to believe?

‘Failure’ is a glib and glum word. Its association with all things ‘political’ has become the dominant narrative of recent decades. Indeed, possibly the only surprising element of the success of the anti-European Union and protest parties last month was that they had not achieved success earlier. The share of the anti-EU and protest parties increased from 164 to 229 seats in the European Parliament (21.4% to 30.5%) and there is no doubt that European politics is set to become more fragile and unpredictable as a result. But surely this phenomenon represents not the failure of politics but the success of politics in the sense that widespread public frustration and concern has led to significant change. Put slightly differently, public opinion has changed the balance of power within the political architecture but without the shedding of blood.

Forgive me for daring to make such an unfashionable argument but there is a second issue relating to the subsequent post-earthquake political ‘settling’ – that is that the fallout needs to remember the turnout. This is a critical point. In many ways the people have not spoken as most of them stayed at home or simply had more interesting things to do with their time. Across Europe the average turnout was 43% and in the United Kingdom this figure was down to 34.2%. The highest was Belgium with 90% turnout with its non-enforced system of compulsory voting. Slovakia was at the bottom of the turnout charts with just 13%, but this fact is in itself critical when placed against the danger that mainstream political parties will over-react towards the vocal minority.

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. © European Union 2011 PE-EP/Pietro Naj-Oleari. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via European Parliament Flickr.

To make such an argument is not in any way undermine the need for the established political parties to listen and change. The rise of UKIP in the UK, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Front National in France, and the Freedom Party in Austria — not to mention the far-left wing parties in the form of SYRIZA in Greece or the Five Star Movement in Italy — signals strong social currants that need to be channeled. The fluidity and energy of this current is reflected in Spain’s new leftist party Podemos [We Can]. This party did not even exist eight weeks ago and yet it now has five seats in the European parliament. Change has undoubtedly occurred but the turnout was low and these parties do not represent a coherent political group, ranging from parties with experience of government through to fringe groups and neo-fascists. They are generally a collection of ‘None-of-the-above’ parties.

Enmity from the post-millennium global economic crisis has catapulted these ‘None-of-the-above’ parties into office. The failure of the economic system created its own political fallout and the reverberations were felt in the recent European elections. If democracy works then the mainstream groups in the European Parliament may well demonstrate that reform is possible and respond to voters; if democracy fails then we’ll be left with a terrible choice between more Europe or no Europe that populist and nationalistic parties will exploit in favor of the latter.

Such gloomy predictions lead me – almost inevitably – to a word about Nigel Farage: the King of the ‘none-of-the-above-party’. My holiday reading last week (Cromer, North Norfolk, very nice due to the town being trapped in a time warp) was Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). This is not a funny book but when reading it I could not help but think of King Nigel. He is a joker and for him ‘every pub is a parliament’ but this is both the asset and the problem. His jokes and banter are accessible to everyone and provide a sense of relief or release by opening-up issues that were previously off-limits. For Freud this is the social role and deeper meaning of jokes and humor but the problem for Farage is that he is generally regarded comically rather than seriously. He is a Spitting Image character that does not need a puppet. Although many people may vote for him and his party in what they mistakenly believe to be ‘secondary’ or ‘minor’ elections – they might even do so at the Newark By-election next week – they are far less likely to do so at next year’s General Election.

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and also Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012).

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Mormon pioneer polygamous wives [infographic]

Polygamy is a major part of Mormon history, dating back to the 1800s when Mormon leaders first encouraged it.  While it is now a taboo subject, it had an undeniable impact on Mormon life, as illustrated in this infographic.

Download a jpg or pdf of the infographic.

Paula Kelly Harline has been teaching college writing for over 20 years for the University of Idaho, Brigham Young University, and Utah Valley University. She has also worked as a freelance writer and artist. She currently lives with her husband, Craig, in Provo, Utah. She is the author of The Polygamous Wives Writing Club:  From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women.

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                Related StoriesJosephine Baker, the most sensational woman anybody ever sawFootball arrives in BrazilHistory strikes back: Ukraine’s past and the current crisis 

Josephine Baker, the most sensational woman anybody ever saw

By Melanie Zeck

Perhaps Ernest Hemingway knew best when he claimed that Josephine Baker was the “most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will.” Indeed, Josephine Baker was sensational–as an African American coming of age in the 1920s, she took Paris by storm in La Revue Nègre and relished a career in entertainment that spanned fifty years. On what would be her 108th birthday, Baker’s fans on both sides of the Atlantic still celebrate her legendary charisma.

Born in St. Louis as Freda Josephine McDonald, Josephine’s early years were marked by financial struggles and racial conflict. She managed to escape what promised to be an otherwise dismal future with her innate ability to charm others through singing and dancing. Having taken the surname of her second husband (she had already been married once before at the age of thirteen), Josephine Baker left for New York City. She started out as a chorus girl in Shuffle Along, a vaudeville revue by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and subsequently starred in Blake’s Chocolate Dandies. Later, she performed at New York’s renowned Plantation Club where she was “discovered” by producer Caroline Dudley and asked to be in La Revue Nègre. As part of Dudley’s assemblage of performers, Baker traveled to Paris in 1925, where she received rave reviews for her opening night performance at Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. Shortly thereafter, she appeared on stage at the Folies-Bergère wearing only a “skirt” of bananas, a costume for which she became famous and one which left an indelible impression on the audience. After this, she often danced scantily clad, exuding a kind of exoticism that captivated her Parisian public.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Successful live performances led to her foray into film, beginning in 1927 with La Sirène des Tropiques. By 1930, she had dabbled in a career as a singer, having recorded for both Odeon and Columbia Records. Her Columbia recordings included songs such as “J’ai deux amours,” which she would perform at the Casino de Paris, one of the city’s great music halls. The Casino’s impresario, Henri Varna, not only showcased Baker’s talents, but he insisted that she act with the pizzazz and mystique of a superstar. To enhance her image, Baker was given a pet leopard named Chiquita, adorned with a diamond studded collar. The pair delighted (and occasionally shocked) the French public.

In the mid-1930s, she starred in two films, including Zouzou (1934), Princess Tam Tam (1935), neither of which was made readily available to the American public for another fifty-plus years. She also appeared in Moulin Rouge (1939), Fausse Alerte (1945), An Jedem Finger Zehn (1954), and Carosello Del Varietà (1955), but, as she also realized when doing studio recordings, she was only truly in her element on the stage.

After completing Princess Tam Tam, she returned to New York to appear in the Ziegfeld Follies, which featured choreography by George Balanchine, music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and notable performers including Bob Hope. In spite of the Follies’ display of talent, its appearance in New York was subjected to intensely vitriolic reviews. Some of the reviews attacked Baker specifically, by mapping current racial stereotypes and crippling expectations onto her and her performance–expectations which had not affected her career in France in such an irrevocably stark manner.

Although Baker was hurt by the Follies’ flop and the discrimination she faced in her home country, she chose to remain in the United States for the time being. In 1936, she announced her plans to open a night club on East 54th Street called Chez Josephine Baker. Within a year America’s racist climes became too much to bear and Baker returned to France, but France was no longer the utopian escape it once had been. Initial tensions with Germany and the subsequent German occupation ultimately made it very difficult for African-American entertainers to earn a living in France, despite the fact that they had been thriving just a decade earlier.

Portrait of Josephine Baker by Carl Van Vechten, 1951. Public domain via Library of Congress.

Baker, who had married a French Jew, Jean Lion, in 1937, soon became involved in the Resistance, eventually working out of Casablanca as an air auxiliary lieutenant. She received the Croix de Guerre in recognition for her services in the Resistance. Those services included carrying classified information, written in invisible ink on her sheet music, to Portugal for transmission to England.

During World War II, she performed for American and British troops and war workers. These appearances put to rest all rumors circulating in the press that she had died, rumors prompted by the fact that she suffered a series of illnesses in the 1940s.

She reemerged in the 1950s as a staunch supporter and champion of human and civil rights. In 1951, she cancelled an appearance at the NAACP meeting in Atlanta because she, as an African American, was refused lodging. In 1959, returned to the stage to raise funds for the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme–LICRA).

Her most demonstrative gesture was to come. Beginning in 1953, Baker adopted the first of twelve children representing different races and ethnicities. She called her brood the “Rainbow Tribe,” and they are featured in Matthew Pratt Guterl’s book Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard University Press, 2014). They lived in a fifteenth-century castle, “Les Milandes,” which Baker purchased in 1947 but relinquished under extreme financial duress in 1968. Fortunately, her friend and supporter, Princess Grace, offered Baker and her tribe a home in Monaco.

As she aged, Baker found it increasingly challenging to maintain her career on the stage, but she persevered. In fact, on 8 April 1975, she gave a triumphant performance at the Bobino Theatre in Paris, which seemed to foreshadow prosperous days to come. That was not to be.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Four days later, on 12 April 1975, Baker went to sleep and never woke up. Thousands of adoring fans paid their respects, and nearly 2,000 mourners, led by Princess Grace, attended funeral services in Monaco, where Baker was buried.

A woman as sensational as Josephine Baker indubitably lives on–a number of books and articles have been written about Baker’s life, including five autobiographies. Her life and career have also served as inspiration for biographies, novels, films, plays, a musical, a restaurant, and even a tribute featuring a woodwind quintet. In 2007, the Grammy Award-winning woodwind quintet “Imani Winds” released Josephine Baker: A Life of Le Jazz Hot! in celebration of Baker’s centennial. The recording features two original pieces composed by Imani members that depict Baker’s life, including French horn player Jeff Scott’s seven-movement La Belle Sirène Comme le Comédien and flautist Valerie Coleman’s Suite: Portraits of Josephine.

These and other materials about Josephine Baker, including a robust clipping file, can be found at the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) in Chicago.

Founded at Columbia College Chicago in 1983, The Center for Black Music Research is the only organization of its kind. It exists to illuminate the significant role that black music plays in world culture by serving as a nexus for all who value black music, by promoting scholarly thought and knowledge about black music, and by providing a safe haven for the materials and information that document the black music experience across Africa and the diaspora.

Melanie Zeck is the Managing Editor of the Black Music Research Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the Center for Black Music Research. She is currently co-authoring a book (OUP, forthcoming) on aspects of black music history with Samuel A. Floyd Jr., CBMR founder and Director Emeritus.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The Noto decision and double state income taxation of dual residents

By Edward Zelinsky

Lucio Noto worked for Mobil and ExxonMobil in Virginia and Texas before retiring in 2001. In his retirement, Mr. Noto and his wife Joan maintain homes in Greenwich, Connecticut and in East Hampton, New York. For state income tax purposes, the Notos are residents of both Connecticut where they are domiciled and New York where they spend at least 183 days annually at their second home.

During his employment in the oil industry, Mr. Noto earned stock options and deferred compensation. In 2005 and 2006, he exercised these stock options at considerable gain and also received the deferred compensation he had earned earlier during his employment. Both New York and Connecticut taxed the resulting income in full without providing a credit for the income tax levied by the other. Consequently, the Notos, as dual residents of both the Empire State and the Nutmeg State, paid double state income taxes on their stock option and deferred compensation income.

The New York Supreme Court (the Empire State’s trial court) recently upheld this double state income taxation by holding that New York could tax the Notos’ income in full, even though Connecticut taxed that income as well. The Noto court correctly applied the tax and constitutional law as it today governs dual state residents like the Notos. While double taxation of dual state residents is currently legal, such double taxation is neither fair nor economically efficient.

Tax by Phillip Ingham. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

In a recent article in the Florida Tax Review, I argue that, as a matter of both tax policy and constitutional law, it is time to apportion state personal income taxes to eliminate the double state income taxation of dual residents like the Notos. As to income which two or more states tax only on the basis of residence, such states should apportion, based on the dual resident’s relative presence in each state of residence. This apportioned approach would eliminate the double taxation of dual residents’ incomes and would comport better with modern patterns of residence and mobility.

The Noto decision illustrates the need to eliminate the double state income taxation of dual residents. In a case like the Notos’, New York and Connecticut should each tax only a pro rata share of the Notos’ option-derived and deferred compensation income based on the days the Notos spend in each of these two states of residence.

On days when a dual resident lives in his second state of residence, the first state provides no services which justify taxing the part of the individual’s income properly apportioned to the time in his second state of residence, the state which provides services on those days. Part-year benefits do not justify full-year taxation. The status quo is economically inefficient as the specter of double residence-based taxation causes unproductive tax-motivated behavior to avoid such taxation. Such economically unproductive behavior inhibits individuals from moving across state lines as they would without interference by tax considerations.

So far, the US Supreme Court has been unwilling to declare unconstitutional the kind of double state taxation imposed upon dual state residents like Mr. and Mrs. Noto. Moreover, most states have been unwilling to abate such double taxation by extending a credit for the tax imposed by the taxpayer’s second state of residence. The result is the kind of double taxation imposed on the Notos by New York and Connecticut.

It is easy to dismiss this type of double state income taxation as a quandary of the proverbial one percent. However, the problem of double residence-based personal income taxation, once limited to the very rich, is moving down the income scale as more individuals maintain second residences in different states, e.g., the Baby Boomer retiree who establishes a winter home in a warm climate; the dual career couple that balances the demands of work and family by maintaining two homes in different states.

In this environment, the traditional acquiescence to double state income taxation of dual residents is no longer acceptable. Congress could eliminate this double taxation through a federal law requiring states to apportion income when taxpayers are residents of two or more states. The US Supreme Court could reach the same result by requiring under the Constitution’s Commerce and Due Process Clauses that states apportion the income of dual residents. The states could, on their own, move toward such apportionment, either by unilateral adoption of rules of apportionment (including tax credits) or by mutual agreement.

The kind of double state income taxation imposed upon dual state residents like the Notos is an anomaly in the 21st century. In the interests of fairness and economic efficiency, this anomaly should be eliminated by requiring states to apportion the income of dual residents.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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Discussing gay and lesbian adults’ relationships with their parents

By Corinne Reczek

The growing support for same-sex marriage rights represents an important shift in the everyday lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the United States today. However, the continued focus on same-sex marriage in the media, by states, and by local governments, and by scholars and researchers leaves other arenas of the family lives of gay and lesbian adults relatively unexplored.

Of course, like all other Americans, gay and lesbian adults have primary relationships outside of their romantic partnerships. The adult child-parent tie is one of the most enduring and central of our social relationships, with most parents and children having weekly contact, exchanging support and love, and of course experiencing conflict. Indeed gay and lesbian adults keep in steady contact with their family of origin members–most especially parents–as they age into adulthood. Yet, we know virtually nothing about the nature of these intergenerational ties for gay and lesbian adults. While some attention has been paid to the importance parents for LGBTQ adolescents, what happens to the adult child-parent relationships of gay and lesbian adults as they age into mid- and later-life? Do they remain intact? Or are they estranged? Do adult children experience conflict or support? What do these relationships look like?

Family jump by Evil Erin. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is important to pay attention to the adult child-parent relationships of gay and lesbian adults. A child’s non-heterosexual identity has been shown to be associated with negative interactions with later-life parents; later-life parents may be especially unable to accept their gay or lesbian child because they grew up in a sociopolitical era where a gay or lesbian identity was unspeakable at best and pathological at worst. As a result, gay men and lesbian women appear to have fewer family confidants than heterosexuals, and tend to rank social support from friends as more consistent and important than support from family. Yet, gay men and lesbians do maintain contact with parents, even if parents are disapproving of children’s’ sexual identity. How, then, are these relationships negotiated and understood by adult children?

In a recent study on gay men and lesbians in long-term intimate partnerships, I show that there are specific markers of support and strain in gay and lesbian adult child-parent ties. For example, parents demonstrate their support of a gay or lesbian adult child by inclusion through language such as “in-law,” affirmations of support by joining gay rights advocacy groups, and via the integration into every day and special events in ways similar to other adult children. I also found that gay and lesbian adult children know their parents are accepting because parents rely on adult children and their partners for social support and caregiving. While providing social support to parents may be time-consuming and stressful, it is critical for parental well-being and provides an important opportunity for parents to demonstrate trust in gay and lesbian adult children.

The picture, of course, isn’t entirely rosy. The gay and lesbian intergenerational tie is embedded within broader institutional norms of heterosexuality and homophobia, and these broader structural constraints of homophobia and heterosexism contour these negative family interactions–with implications for both generations well-being. It appears, in the present study, that conflict is experienced in ways that are similar to when conflict is experienced in other central aspects of identity or life circumstances, such as religious values, finances, and unemployment. For example, adult children might experience significant rejection in their everyday encounters with parents and experience traumatic events of disownment by their parents. Moreover, adult children suggest that they are scared that their property may be usurped by a parent, rather than be taken care of by a partner, if something were to happen to them.

There’s hope for people who have strained relationships with their parents, however. Key moments, such as family death, illness, or injury, were described as transformative in ways that altered the structure of the adult-child-parent tie from negative to positive. Also, there has been remarkable legal and social change over the past decade, including the federal and state-level legalization of same-sex marriage and decreased public and institutional stigma against gay and lesbian identities. Given this social change, there is strong potential for changing the nature of conflictual intergenerational relationships. Clearly, the years after these social and legal changes may provide new opportunity for supportive intergenerational relationships for adult children coming of age in a new social and political era.

Dr. Corinne Reczek is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Dr. Reczek’s research focuses on gay and lesbian families, including relationships between parents and gay and lesbian adult children, same-sex marriage, and the health of minor children in same-sex relationships. Her work was most recently published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences, her article “The Intergenerational Relationships of Gay Men and Lesbian Women” is freely available to read now” You can find Corinne on Twitter @CorinneReczek.

The Journals of Gerontology® were the first journals on aging published in the United States. The tradition of excellence in these peer-reviewed scientific journals, established in 1946, continues today. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B® publishes within its covers the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

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