Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 891

The man who owned the world: David Bowie made reinvention an art form

ONLY THE BEATLES. That’s the sole comparison that comes to mind when compelled to name a musical act with similar impact and importance. The Beatles, as we all know, changed each year during their still indescribable run, effectively owning the ‘60s. David Bowie, on the other hand, built an entire career on changes, even as he became the peerless satellite so many others orbited around. Also like The Beatles, Bowie put in his time before lifting off and then, once he reallybroke through, he kept on breaking, and changing, and winning. A great deal, understandably, has been said about these changes, with inevitable if ultimately reductive words like chameleon and shape shifter tossed into every encomium. David Bowie elevated reinvention to an art form; he was a genius of changing. About these changes. They weren’t simply haircuts and costume changes (hello, Madonna); they were entirely new identities. And yet and of course, every new character was thoroughly and undeniably David Bowie. This, among so many other things, was what enabled him to remain an innovator who couldn’t be imitated (how can anyone imitate you if you never imitate yourself?). Nor were any of these characters cursory; Bowie transformed himself as well as his music. Although diminished by comparison, none of his better-known acolytes, from envelope-pushers like Eddie Izzard to opportunists like Bono, could have conceivably negotiated their alternately awkward and unabashed milieus without the example set by the Thin White Duke. Champions of the avant-garde are often bored with, even incapable of conventional thinking. Bowie managed to be several steps ahead of the avant-garde, probably because even he couldn’t have imagined where he was headed next. The thing is, when most artists make profound, if indulgent changes (think Neil Young in the early ‘80s), it alienates fans and inexorably seems either forced or facile. Bowie? He changed the world and took everyone with him, and he did it year after year. Even someone unfamiliar with the music need only look at the cover art from album to album. That’s the same person? Well, yes. And no. What was that all about? It seldom seemed calculated or strained; indeed, it’s as though he needed to jump-start his own peripatetic sensibility, and these often eccentric, always endearing identities were delivery devices for the brilliance bubbling beneath the pin-up pretense. Red, bleach blonde or brown, his hair—although forever awesome—was window dressing, his clothes more a nod to his impeccable fashion instincts. Make no mistake, it was always about the music. About that music. “Space Oddity”, “Life on Mars”, “Changes”, “John, I’m Only Dancing”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”, “Aladdin Sane”, “Diamond Dogs”, “Rebel Rebel”…these aren’t merely songs, or even (merely) anthems, they are cultural signifiers, queer escutcheons that at once shield and embolden the outcasts and “others”. Bowie, being the Alpha Outsider, was brave and brilliant, and adamant enough to become The Other, and the changes that followed changed others, allowing others to become something other than the others they might have otherwise been destined to be. There are so many wonderful illustrations, any of which could make a case for whyBowie was more than a pop musician, why he mattered and why he’ll be so desperately missed. For me, it’s a deceptively simple track—from what may be his most consistently satisfying album Hunky Dory—that encapsulates everything he managed to be. “Oh! You Pretty Things”, his little anthem to oddness (and the inevitability of ch-ch-ch-ch-changes) continues to delight, excite and inspire me, even today, as a middle-aged straight white male. I can scarcely fathom how many confused and scared souls Bowie salvaged and empowered. What an artist he was; what a hero he’ll always be. Significantly, Bowie was not simply a front-man, although to be certain he was one of the incendiary stage performers of the last century. He was a musician. Yes, he could play multiple instruments and he could write the songs (nevermind the singing and lyrics, which we’ll never tire of extolling), but his acumen was unassailable, if unconventional. Consider two easily studied examples: the direction he gave Mike Garson for the title track of Aladdin Sane , or the story behind how his uncanny collaboration with Queen during the “Under Pressure” sessions. About those lyrics. Yes, they’re sometimes inscrutable, endlessly open to interpretation (intentional, obviously), but there can be no question that multiple meanings are a result of the layers: he was easily one of the most intelligent—and articulate—wordsmiths of our time. A random sample from the top shelf: “And the stars look very different today”, “Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy”, “We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when”, “Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise”, “In the year of the scavenger, the season of the bitch”, “The shrieking of nothing is killing”, “It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about”… Debate can—and should—now rage forevermore about what Bowie’s post-‘70s legacy means: did he exhaust himself or continue to make boundary-breaking music? A bit of both seems the safest and soundest answer, but opinions and mileage will vary, as they should. Let there be no question whatsoever, though, that he was utterly locked in during the ‘70s. Did anyone own the decade like David Bowie? There were historic runs by Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The Who were going strong, at least until the air went out of the Moon; The Rolling Stones acquitted themselves nicely, for the most part. But from first to last, the string of masterpieces Bowie unleashed is unlikely to ever be equaled. Again, only The Beatles put out so many works with analogous import and influence. Like The Beatles, Bowie didn’t only innovate; he wrought aesthetic and stylistic changes and, like an irrepressible Pied Piper, people followed him wherever he went. Secure prediction: time will only increase our collective appreciation for the extent of what Bowie achieved between ’70 and ’80. This music, for the most part, does not sound dated but remains utterly of its time—including the alternately surreal and intractable Berlin trilogy—and over time, it will define the times in which it was made, the way all our best art manages to do. Take “Aladdin Sane”, please. This miniature masterpiece employs everything brilliant about progressive rock (the musicianship, the audacity) and distills it into not only an accessible, but irresistible package. If one can hear Joy Division and Iggy Pop in the Berlin trilogy, it’s difficult to deny that many varied hitmakers were paying close attention to this uncanny freak with paint on his face. Prog rock started to wear out its welcome for a million mostly good reasons by mid-decade, but the wise ones, especially Ian Anderson and Peter Gabriel, were paying attention, if not taking notes. Across years and styles, it’s impossible to imagine groups (prominent in their own right) ranging from The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys to Duran Duran, onward to Radiohead and Lady Gaga, without Bowie’s blueprint. Bowie was indefatigable and, seemingly, unconquerable. That’s why his death (from cancer, that most banal of diseases) not only astonishes, but offends. If Ziggy Stardust is mortal after all, heaven help the rest of us who may still be kidding ourselves. Where would-be epoch defining entities like John Lennon, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Kurt Cobain—all of whom forged specific connections with him, incidentally—didn’t have the luck or wherewithal to withstand Life on Earth, Bowie did: for himself obviously yet also, one suspected, because he understood it was all bigger than him. Remarkably, as beloved as he became, he got the joke and that was arguably the secret (so impossible, so perfect) to his longevity. In our devolving era of social media attention spans and controversy stirred via electronic one-liners (often anonymous, natch), recalling the courage of Bowie’s convictions is instructive. First and foremost, the closet exodus heard ‘round the world: “I’m gay, and always have been.” That was 1972, and even if, in the moment, this was an act of calculated provocation, it’s the stuff revolutions are made of. Cheers to him for taking the piss out of Andy Warhol way before it was either safe or acceptable (much less imperative). Pivoting from glam to soul and becoming one of the first—and only—white artists to be considered cool enough to appear on Soul Train. Being brazenly ahead of the pack in calling out MTV for its congenital honky-itis in 1983. Appearing in movies by A-List directors like Scorsese (as Pontius Pilate (!) in The Last Temptation of Christ) and Nolan (as Nikola Tesla (!!) in The Prestige). And, all those years later, Bowie being Bowie while sending up an enchanted Ricky Gervais. He was our Oscar Wilde, obviously. Or better yet, a postmodern Dorian Gray, through the glass brightly: bigger than Jesus and not dying for our sins but celebrating them, or else suggesting, quite convincingly, that there were no sins and nothing to be ashamed of. And speaking of shame, where the legions of imitators and fakers have gotten it wrong this millennium, mistaking shamelessness for substance, Bowie endures as s secular saint of the dispossessed. He will remain revered because he was unashamed, and encouraged others to be as well, whoever and whatever they might happen to be that particular day. It’s sunrise and millions weep a fountain. The Black Star has returned to Space. Now he’s gone; now he’s immortal.

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Don’t feel guilty about buying used books: Writers won’t see a dime of that sale, but it’s the long game that counts

Recently, writer Kristen Lamb came out swinging in a blog post lamenting that her fellow authors were eager to applaud the longevity of used bookstores, as detailed in a recent Washington Post article. Lamb was blunt about the economics of how authors earn a living: “Want to support a writer in the new year? BUY BOOKS. Writers are NOT PAID for the purchase of used copies.” She went on to say she puts her money where her words are, and backs up her industry with her dollars. “As a professional, I treat my fellow writers-at-arms the way I want to be treated. I do not buy used books as a first choice. If I DO happen to buy a used book, I make sure to purchase at least a digital copy so that writer is PAID for his or her hard work.” No one can argue with the facts Lamb lays out: Writers get paid when a new copy of their book is purchased in a brick and mortar or online store, and may get paid when their book is checked out of a library, depending on their contract terms. With libraries, at the very least, the number of requests and checkouts is carefully tracked. With used bookstores, authors don’t see a dime directly from the purchase, nor can they find out how many people have purchased their books. However, that doesn’t mean that used bookstores are therefore taking money from writers’ pockets, or that shopping in them is akin to piracy and hurting authors’ careers, as Lamb suggests. She’s right that consumers do need to be educated about how their art gets made, and what the real costs involved are. As YouTube vlogger Gaby Dunn so aptly detailed in her Fusion article on the precarious economics of video income earnings, those who consume creative products should be aware of how its creators get paid. That’s a first step toward supporting the work of the writers (and musicians, filmmakers, vloggers, etc.) you want to keep on creating. We may get into writing for the love of it, but it’s also our job. Nobody is arguing with Lamb that writers don’t deserve to be compensated. However, the issue of used bookstores isn’t as black and white as paid vs. unpaid, the dichotomy Lamb sets up. First of all, those buying books in a used bookstore may not be able to afford a new copy. They also may not know that new copy exists because they’ve never heard of a given author before. Used bookstores can afford to be more varied in what they stock, thereby giving customers plenty of options, while shelf space is in higher demand in new bookstores. I’ve discovered plenty of series mysteries in used bookstores, then gone on to buy more in that same series at full price. As the Washington Post put it, “nothing provides a stronger pull than the experience of browsing — getting lost in the stacks, making serendipitous finds, having chance conversations with interesting people.” Lamb also ignores the synergy between print books and other platforms an author may have. The last time I was in a used bookstore, Bruised Apple Books and Music in Peekskill, New York, I spent almost an hour picking up titles and scouring their offerings while my boyfriend looked at records. Eventually, I noticed Karen Alpert’s book of parenting essays, "I Heart My Little A-Holes." I sat down in a conveniently placed chair and read many of them; when I got home, I subscribed to her blog, Baby Sideburns, a blog I would not have known about save for stumbling upon this title. Maybe someone will find a used book and go on to read everything that person has written, or follow their blog, listen to their podcast, follow them on Twitter, attend a reading, tell others about the book, etc. Yes, authors are paid via book sales, but it’s very likely they may have other income streams as well. They aren’t necessarily staking their entire future on one title; instead, each title is one piece of a sprawling pie. During that hour in Bruised Apple, I noted several books I didn’t want to buy at that moment but might want to check out of the library at a later date, jotting down the titles in my phone. Used bookstores are not the end point to a reader’s journey, but often the starting point, not to mention that they are often treasure troves of out-of-print books, many of which might not exist in e-book or audiobook form. As someone who earns about half my income from sales of anthologies I’ve edited, I absolutely get where Lamb is coming from. Of course this feels personal when every sale, and every dollar, counts. Lamb is absolutely correct that, “If you don’t support the little guys they won’t be around.” Writers can’t afford to create books for free. But readers don’t just buy a single book once; the most avid read many books in a year, and seeing or buying a book in a used bookstore may be the start of buying others in digital or print form down the road. I asked some writers I know what they think, and none were as strident as Lamb. Greg Olear, author of the novels "Fathermucker" and "Totally Killer," said this isn’t an either-or situation. “Do I gain financially when someone buys one of my books new as opposed to used? Yes—although in my case, and in the case of many non-best-selling authors, the money I make on that sale goes towards a (modest) advance that will likely never be paid back. But I think it's more likely that someone will either buy my book used, or else not read it at all. It's not about new vs. used. It's about used vs. no sale at all. To most buyers, I think that's the real choice,” Olear explained, noting that, while he’d obviously prefer the new sale, “I want people to read my book, first and foremost.” Cindy Pon, author of young adult novels "Serpentine," "Silver Phoenix" and "Fury of the Phoenix," acknowledged that as a former midlist and current small press author, “It honestly feels like every book sale matters.” But despite that, she added, “I love libraries and used bookstores. I find both are accessible, and an alternative for people who might not be able to afford full price titles. It gives readers a chance to come across novels they might not have otherwise discovered, including older books. I personally have shopped at used bookstores, and although I know that my money will not go directly to the author, I consider it giving books a chance to be ‘rehomed’ and find new readers. I am not at all bothered by readers who buy my titles secondhand.” Robin Epstein, author of 21 books ranging from novels, middle grade advice, nonfiction and children's books, said that while she was dismayed to see copies of her latest novel, "H.E.A.R.," being sold used within weeks of publication, she understands and even encourages used bookstores, which she herself shops in. “I want my books read as widely as possible, but I know the price of a new book can be prohibitive. Libraries and used bookstores are wonderful resources for this reason and democratize reading, which is something I not only consider a pleasure but also a necessity.” Epstein doesn’t see those who shop at used bookstores as cutting in to potential sales of her titles. “I certainly understand Lamb's concern for her bottom line, but I think the argument is specious,” Epstein explained. “There will always be people who want to buy new books, just as there will always be people who line up to see a movie on its release day.” Mystery author Rob Hart, whose first novel, "New Yorked," was published last year, said, “I've always loved used bookstores, and it'd make a hypocrite to come down on them now that I have a book out. I just hope for the best case scenario, that someone finds a book I wrote, reads it, liked it, and looks for more. It sounds cheesy, and it won't pay my daughter's eventual college tuition, but it's true: I'm happy to be read.” As for Lamb’s linking of used bookstores and piracy, romance novelist Tiffany Reisz, author of the bestselling "The Original Sinners" series, had strong words. “Buying a used book is no more piracy than buying a secondhand Christmas sweater at Goodwill. Piracy is more like stealing a new book off a bookstore shelf without paying for it. Every book in a used bookstore has already been bought and the author has received royalties for it.” Reisz, who partnered with new and used bookstore Jan’s Paperbacks to sell signed copies of her books for the 2015 holiday season, was emphatic that used books are akin to any other item that’s resold. “I'd no more apologize for buying a used book than I would for buying a used car." The common thread: Used bookstores are not the enemy. This mind-set was summed up eloquently by Neil Gaiman, who posted a quote by him on his Tumblr two days prior to Lamb’s post that addressed this very topic, stating in part: Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend’s copy. What’s important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read. Now, it takes a certain degree of financial privilege to be able to say, essentially, that buying a book used or new doesn’t ultimately matter to a writer. But there’s a middle ground between not caring where someone purchases your titles and Lamb’s excoriating tone that faults authors for not pushing readers to buy books new when she states [emphasis hers], “And if we ARE going to promote used bookstores (which IS fine) then by GOD educate readers and ask for the sale. Let them know that you will not be paid off that sale and to please also buy a full-price version if they like your book.” Used bookstores are not trying to put authors out of business; they are trying to provide books for eager readers who, as the Washington Post noted, very likely may not even have the option of a new bookstore anywhere nearby. Assuming that used bookstore owners are out to take money from authors’ pockets is an extremely cynical point of view. Whenever I’ve chatted with used bookstore owners, their book knowledge runs deep. They care about books, readers and, I would imagine, authors continuing to write, even if their specific sale is not lining an author’s pockets in cash. Lastly, as someone who’s moved four times in under four years, I’ve had to donate hundreds of books to places like nonprofit used bookstore Housing Works and Goodwill. If someone were in a similar boat and had copies of my books they had to get rid of, would I rather they trashed them or gave them to a used bookstore where someone else could appreciate them? I hope the answer is obvious.Recently, writer Kristen Lamb came out swinging in a blog post lamenting that her fellow authors were eager to applaud the longevity of used bookstores, as detailed in a recent Washington Post article. Lamb was blunt about the economics of how authors earn a living: “Want to support a writer in the new year? BUY BOOKS. Writers are NOT PAID for the purchase of used copies.” She went on to say she puts her money where her words are, and backs up her industry with her dollars. “As a professional, I treat my fellow writers-at-arms the way I want to be treated. I do not buy used books as a first choice. If I DO happen to buy a used book, I make sure to purchase at least a digital copy so that writer is PAID for his or her hard work.” No one can argue with the facts Lamb lays out: Writers get paid when a new copy of their book is purchased in a brick and mortar or online store, and may get paid when their book is checked out of a library, depending on their contract terms. With libraries, at the very least, the number of requests and checkouts is carefully tracked. With used bookstores, authors don’t see a dime directly from the purchase, nor can they find out how many people have purchased their books. However, that doesn’t mean that used bookstores are therefore taking money from writers’ pockets, or that shopping in them is akin to piracy and hurting authors’ careers, as Lamb suggests. She’s right that consumers do need to be educated about how their art gets made, and what the real costs involved are. As YouTube vlogger Gaby Dunn so aptly detailed in her Fusion article on the precarious economics of video income earnings, those who consume creative products should be aware of how its creators get paid. That’s a first step toward supporting the work of the writers (and musicians, filmmakers, vloggers, etc.) you want to keep on creating. We may get into writing for the love of it, but it’s also our job. Nobody is arguing with Lamb that writers don’t deserve to be compensated. However, the issue of used bookstores isn’t as black and white as paid vs. unpaid, the dichotomy Lamb sets up. First of all, those buying books in a used bookstore may not be able to afford a new copy. They also may not know that new copy exists because they’ve never heard of a given author before. Used bookstores can afford to be more varied in what they stock, thereby giving customers plenty of options, while shelf space is in higher demand in new bookstores. I’ve discovered plenty of series mysteries in used bookstores, then gone on to buy more in that same series at full price. As the Washington Post put it, “nothing provides a stronger pull than the experience of browsing — getting lost in the stacks, making serendipitous finds, having chance conversations with interesting people.” Lamb also ignores the synergy between print books and other platforms an author may have. The last time I was in a used bookstore, Bruised Apple Books and Music in Peekskill, New York, I spent almost an hour picking up titles and scouring their offerings while my boyfriend looked at records. Eventually, I noticed Karen Alpert’s book of parenting essays, "I Heart My Little A-Holes." I sat down in a conveniently placed chair and read many of them; when I got home, I subscribed to her blog, Baby Sideburns, a blog I would not have known about save for stumbling upon this title. Maybe someone will find a used book and go on to read everything that person has written, or follow their blog, listen to their podcast, follow them on Twitter, attend a reading, tell others about the book, etc. Yes, authors are paid via book sales, but it’s very likely they may have other income streams as well. They aren’t necessarily staking their entire future on one title; instead, each title is one piece of a sprawling pie. During that hour in Bruised Apple, I noted several books I didn’t want to buy at that moment but might want to check out of the library at a later date, jotting down the titles in my phone. Used bookstores are not the end point to a reader’s journey, but often the starting point, not to mention that they are often treasure troves of out-of-print books, many of which might not exist in e-book or audiobook form. As someone who earns about half my income from sales of anthologies I’ve edited, I absolutely get where Lamb is coming from. Of course this feels personal when every sale, and every dollar, counts. Lamb is absolutely correct that, “If you don’t support the little guys they won’t be around.” Writers can’t afford to create books for free. But readers don’t just buy a single book once; the most avid read many books in a year, and seeing or buying a book in a used bookstore may be the start of buying others in digital or print form down the road. I asked some writers I know what they think, and none were as strident as Lamb. Greg Olear, author of the novels "Fathermucker" and "Totally Killer," said this isn’t an either-or situation. “Do I gain financially when someone buys one of my books new as opposed to used? Yes—although in my case, and in the case of many non-best-selling authors, the money I make on that sale goes towards a (modest) advance that will likely never be paid back. But I think it's more likely that someone will either buy my book used, or else not read it at all. It's not about new vs. used. It's about used vs. no sale at all. To most buyers, I think that's the real choice,” Olear explained, noting that, while he’d obviously prefer the new sale, “I want people to read my book, first and foremost.” Cindy Pon, author of young adult novels "Serpentine," "Silver Phoenix" and "Fury of the Phoenix," acknowledged that as a former midlist and current small press author, “It honestly feels like every book sale matters.” But despite that, she added, “I love libraries and used bookstores. I find both are accessible, and an alternative for people who might not be able to afford full price titles. It gives readers a chance to come across novels they might not have otherwise discovered, including older books. I personally have shopped at used bookstores, and although I know that my money will not go directly to the author, I consider it giving books a chance to be ‘rehomed’ and find new readers. I am not at all bothered by readers who buy my titles secondhand.” Robin Epstein, author of 21 books ranging from novels, middle grade advice, nonfiction and children's books, said that while she was dismayed to see copies of her latest novel, "H.E.A.R.," being sold used within weeks of publication, she understands and even encourages used bookstores, which she herself shops in. “I want my books read as widely as possible, but I know the price of a new book can be prohibitive. Libraries and used bookstores are wonderful resources for this reason and democratize reading, which is something I not only consider a pleasure but also a necessity.” Epstein doesn’t see those who shop at used bookstores as cutting in to potential sales of her titles. “I certainly understand Lamb's concern for her bottom line, but I think the argument is specious,” Epstein explained. “There will always be people who want to buy new books, just as there will always be people who line up to see a movie on its release day.” Mystery author Rob Hart, whose first novel, "New Yorked," was published last year, said, “I've always loved used bookstores, and it'd make a hypocrite to come down on them now that I have a book out. I just hope for the best case scenario, that someone finds a book I wrote, reads it, liked it, and looks for more. It sounds cheesy, and it won't pay my daughter's eventual college tuition, but it's true: I'm happy to be read.” As for Lamb’s linking of used bookstores and piracy, romance novelist Tiffany Reisz, author of the bestselling "The Original Sinners" series, had strong words. “Buying a used book is no more piracy than buying a secondhand Christmas sweater at Goodwill. Piracy is more like stealing a new book off a bookstore shelf without paying for it. Every book in a used bookstore has already been bought and the author has received royalties for it.” Reisz, who partnered with new and used bookstore Jan’s Paperbacks to sell signed copies of her books for the 2015 holiday season, was emphatic that used books are akin to any other item that’s resold. “I'd no more apologize for buying a used book than I would for buying a used car." The common thread: Used bookstores are not the enemy. This mind-set was summed up eloquently by Neil Gaiman, who posted a quote by him on his Tumblr two days prior to Lamb’s post that addressed this very topic, stating in part: Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend’s copy. What’s important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read. Now, it takes a certain degree of financial privilege to be able to say, essentially, that buying a book used or new doesn’t ultimately matter to a writer. But there’s a middle ground between not caring where someone purchases your titles and Lamb’s excoriating tone that faults authors for not pushing readers to buy books new when she states [emphasis hers], “And if we ARE going to promote used bookstores (which IS fine) then by GOD educate readers and ask for the sale. Let them know that you will not be paid off that sale and to please also buy a full-price version if they like your book.” Used bookstores are not trying to put authors out of business; they are trying to provide books for eager readers who, as the Washington Post noted, very likely may not even have the option of a new bookstore anywhere nearby. Assuming that used bookstore owners are out to take money from authors’ pockets is an extremely cynical point of view. Whenever I’ve chatted with used bookstore owners, their book knowledge runs deep. They care about books, readers and, I would imagine, authors continuing to write, even if their specific sale is not lining an author’s pockets in cash. Lastly, as someone who’s moved four times in under four years, I’ve had to donate hundreds of books to places like nonprofit used bookstore Housing Works and Goodwill. If someone were in a similar boat and had copies of my books they had to get rid of, would I rather they trashed them or gave them to a used bookstore where someone else could appreciate them? I hope the answer is obvious.

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Bernie Sanders is no socialist: Socialism is his brand, but he’s a Democrat in every way but name

Bernie Sanders is a stubborn man, a fact I kept coming across as I reported and wrote "Why Bernie Sanders Matters," the unauthorized biography of the Democratic presidential candidate. That trait might explain why he continues to describe himself as a “Democratic Socialist,” even though any mention of the “S-word” turns off many American voters. A recent Gallup poll found that less than half of Americans would vote for a candidate who is a socialist. “Socialist” in an epithet, hurled by conservatives at President Barack Obama to discredit his health care reform efforts. To be sure, Sanders has been gradually moving away from socialism. As a radical student activist in the 1960s, he identified with the Socialist Workers Party. When he first ran for statewide office in Vermont during the 1970s, he described himself as a socialist. In office, he all but glorified the term. Walk into his Senate office and you will see a plaque on the wall honoring Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president five times as leader of the Socialist Party of America. But Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. No way, no how. He’s not even a democratic socialist, as it is practiced in the Scandinavian nations.  Fact is the socialists don’t want Sanders. Here’s why: No Means: Socialism distinguishes itself from capitalism, fascism and other political/economic systems by this fundamental requirement: the state or the community shall own the means of production. That means public ownership and control of corporations, especially major ones like power companies and auto makers. In November Bernie Sanders delivered a speech at Georgetown University to define his brand of socialism. “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production,” he said. So Sanders, by definition, is not a socialist. Money Talks: Sanders believes in the capitalist system. He might advocate reform of capitalism’s current excesses, but he is a capitalist. As a congressman, Sanders successfully stopped the government from bestowing multi-million-dollar bonuses on executives at Lockheed. But he never attacked the company’s basic capitalist premise. Likewise, when peace protestors tried to block the entrance to a GE plant in Burlington when he was mayor, he had them arrested. Socialist Party of USA co-chair Mimi Soltysik sees the world differently: “We don’t see capitalism as a reformable institution.” Sanders does. Bernie the Bomber: Socialists embrace pacifism. War is a last resort. Sanders’s model, Eugene Debs, was jailed for his opposition to World War I. But Sanders has cast vote after vote for sending troops to war and bombing one side or another. When he supported NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Vermonters occupied his office and a staffer quit. He’s voted for sending troops to Afghanistan. He enthusiastically supported Obama’s most recent budget, with a five percent increase in military spending. Tepid Dane: When pressed about his brand of socialism, Sanders often will refer to the Scandinavian nations that practice “democratic socialism.” Northern European countries like Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden have governments that tax heavily and provide excellent free public education and health care, for example. Asked by the Wall Street Journal for his definition, he said: “For me, what democratic socialism is about is to maintain the strong entrepreneurial spirit that we have in this country to continue to produce wealth, but to make certain that the wealth is much more equitably distributed than is currently the case.” So, kinder and gentler capitalism. Democrat Down Deep:  Sanders is a Democrat in every way but the name. Running in Vermont, Sanders had to distinguish himself from Democrats to establish his own brand. But once he got to Congress in 1990, he voted with the Dems, nearly 100 percent of the time. The Democratic establishment funded his 2006 senate campaign, including $10,000 from HillPAC, Hillary Clinton’s funding arm.  He caucused with the Democrats in the Senate. And by the way, he’s running as a Democrat. Nader Not: For many left-leaning Americans, Ralph Nader remains the most progressive leader in America. He and his “Nader’s Raiders” have advocated for the public against corporate America for decades. But Sanders and Nader don’t mix. He refuses to take Nader’s calls. Nader has branded Sanders “The Lone Ranger.” Sanders refused to support Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry,” Sanders said, “I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader.” GOP Mayor: In his first term as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders morphed into a fiscal conservative, after running as a social progressive. He balanced the city’s books, cut taxes and built up reserves. “We‘re going to out Republican the Republicans,” he was quoted as saying. When he ran for office, Sanders undercut the incumbent Democrat by accusing him of playing up to developers who wanted to build condominiums on the Lake Champlain shoreline, rather than public parks. As mayor, Sanders supported the same developer; progressives mounted a referendum to defeat Sanders’s deal with the developer. “We must ask how the Sanders administration’s economic development policies differ from a traditional capitalist approach,” Steven Soifer wrote in The Socialist Mayor. Zionist Leanings: When it comes to Israel, virtually all leftists, progressives and socialists of any stripe side with the Palestinians. In Europe and U.S. college campuses, Israel represents a warmongering oppressor. Note the current BDS movement to boycott Israel and divest investments in the country – driven by leftists. But Senator Sanders has often defended the Israelis and voted on their side. He has voted for billions in foreign and military aid to Israel. Sanders enraged progressives when he supported the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2014. At a town meeting in Cabot, Vermont, he was forced to shout down protesters. Red Scare: Socialism and communism became scary prospects immediately after World War II when the U.S. confronted the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Sanders drew his own line: “When I talk about democratic socialism,” he said in 1990, “what I am not talking about is authoritarian communism – a system which, thank God, is now falling apart; a system which has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people; a system which has been a vicious dictatorship; a system which has run an extraordinary dictatorship in the Soviet Union.” Populism Rules: Add up Bernie Sanders’s sayings and stands over the years, especially after 1980, and they will lead you to a clear conclusion: Sanders is much more like Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana, rather than his socialist icon Eugene Debs. All of which begs the question: why does Bernie Sanders cling to the Socialist brand -- democratic or otherwise? In part, Sanders cannot bear to be associated completely with the Democratic Party. He’s been running against Democrats his whole life. His brand requires him to be the insurgent, the lonely crusader, the radical alternative. Perhaps he truly believes in a more socialist system where the government steps in more stridently to redistribute wealth, ensure quality education for all and provide free health insurance. And maybe Bernie Sanders cannot change his basic philosophy just because it will improve his chances of prevailing. Perhaps it’s true that he’s the one political candidate who will not do the expedient thing, like dropping socialism from his brand. And maybe that’s why voters will look beyond socialism and buy Bernie Sanders, regardless of how he’s defined, by himself or others.

Martin Luther King, Rachel Dolezal and Donald Trump: The recurring story of race that has shaped our history

It’s easy to feel a bit cynical about the way the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, has become an American secular saint. King is misquoted or selectively paraphrased by politicians who would have had him investigated or arrested as a contemporary. Or he is framed as a one-issue “man of faith” whose vision of social justice and racial equality went no further than the soaring rhetoric of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and the Voting Rights Act (a law that was radical enough in its own way, and that many of the elected officials who quote King at opportune moments have stealthily worked to defund, defang and disable). King did not live long enough to play a major role in popular organizing against the Vietnam War, but he was clearly heading in that direction. We can only speculate how he would have interacted with the modern feminist movement, or the LGBT movement, both of which were in their infancy in 1968. As we saw King portrayed by David Oyelowo in Ava DuVernay’s fascinating but flawed film “Selma,” he was both a strategist and a theoretician of nonviolent civil disobedience, a confrontational approach to power that goes well beyond “protest.” As developed by Mahatma Gandhi, King and many other people in many other movements, nonviolent civil disobedience requires activists who are prepared to put their safety, their freedom and sometimes their lives at risk, in order to expose the hypocrisy and brutality of ruling elites and the police who serve their interests. We know that King was in Memphis at the time of his death to help organize the city’s exploited and underpaid sanitation workers, and that he understood racism not simply as a matter of legal inequality but also as a question of economic power. He commented on several occasions that poor and disadvantaged whites in the rural South had been encouraged to vent their frustrations by way of racist violence and overt bigotry, directed at the only group worse off than themselves. He would have been fascinated by Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s outreach efforts in poor white neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, and might have wondered how much that had to do with the Chicago Police Department’s assassination of Hampton shortly thereafter. King was a man of his time, and a person whose troubled personal life might have made him an unpalatable political leader today (as “Selma” also made clear). What would he make of America circa 2016, on what would have been his 87th birthday? (It’s startling to realize that King could easily still be alive. He’d be younger than my mother.) No one can answer that question, and I won’t presume to try. One indirect but important legacy of King’s movement is that someone in my position — a white man behind a computer, writing about “race” from a position of presumed journalistic neutrality — is compelled, for both moral and pragmatic reasons, to consider the limits of his own perspective. Can I actually discern and correct for my own level privilege, or detect whatever unconscious attitudes and prejudices I have internalized? By definition, I'm pretty sure I can't. But being aware that those things may be issues for me, or for readers, is an important starting point. On one hand, all is changed, changed utterly, in the years since King’s death, as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said about a different era of political transformation. The dynamics of race in America have altered significantly: In 1968, Latinos were a scattered and disparate group with little sense of collective identity, largely found in California, Texas and New York City. Outside certain urban enclaves, immigrants were nearly invisible. Despite this reshaped context, the contours of American society might look familiar to King, and the patterns of race and racism tend to repeat themselves. If race in America is no longer just a question of black and white, those two invented categories that have haunted our nation’s history have loomed large over the last year. This was the year of Black Lives Matter, and a year of extensive public debate over the nature of the relationship between African-Americans and the police. It was a year that brought us an unfolding series of protests or disturbances or “riots” in African-American neighborhoods, a theme or pattern King would recognize immediately. While the Civil Rights Movement in the American South concerned much bigger and broader issues than policing, the overt violence and repression it provoked from police departments and rural sheriffs attracted worldwide attention, and became an enormous part of King’s struggle for justice. For other black activists of that period — especially the Black Panthers, but also Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam and Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” movement — police violence was a central and defining issue. It was the mechanism by which African-American communities were imprisoned and oppressed, and it was a metaphor that revealed the actual power relationships of American society. It would not be remotely true to say that nothing has changed since those turbulent days of the mid-1960s, but the cyclical recurrence of this issue suggests that those fundamental power relationships have not been addressed. As numerous commentators on Fox News or right-wing radio will tell you, most of the Baltimore police officers apparently implicated in the death of Freddie Gray are themselves black. That would not have seemed conceivable to King or the Panthers, perhaps, and neither would the fact that the United States has twice elected a black president. But those who would argue today that facts on the ground in Baltimore, or in the White House, prove that racism is no longer a factor in policing, in politics or in the exercise of power are deliberately ignoring the lessons of history. (Which is virtually our national pastime. If it stings when snooty foreign intellectuals depict Americans as not merely ignorant about the world but also profoundly incurious, that’s because it’s largely true.) In an especially heartbreaking instance of historical recurrence, we saw an angry young white man commit mass murder in a historic Southern black church, an episode that at first might make King wonder whether anything has changed in America. But the aftermath of that heartbreaking tragedy had unexpected consequences that really did feel like change. Amid the outpouring of national grief, we had an open conversation about the various meanings of the Confederate battle flag and the legacy of the Civil War that would not have been possible even a decade ago. To a large extent I mean a conversation among white people: An elderly female relative from an affluent Southern background told me tearfully that she had never known how hurtful the Rebel flag was to black people, or that it was still used by white supremacists to stir up hatred. It may be fair to say that she had chosen not to know those things, but I believe she was sincere. During the fall semester we saw an eruption of heated protests — first at the University of Missouri, then at Yale, and then at numerous other campuses — over the legacy of racism in higher education. King’s own educational career took him back and forth between predominantly black and predominantly white institutions, and it seems likely he would have recognized the social and cultural pressures at work. You could argue that historical recurrence was at work here as well, on various levels. Although the student protest movement of King’s era was predominantly white, less than a year after his death black students at UCLA led a massive walkout after the university’s firing of Angela Davis, an incident that terrorized the white establishment and polarized the media much as the recent campus controversies have done. Indeed, another recurrent phenomenon King would have recognized all too well was the rising tide of white rage and white backlash, arguably the biggest racial story of America in 2015. (Especially in the sense that those caught up in it do not perceive it as racial at all but as a question of patriotism and national identity, of “making America great again.”) From the perspective of this backlash, the campus protests and Black Lives Matter were blended with the real but exaggerated specter of ISIS and the entirely imaginary invasion of violent immigrants and refugees into an undifferentiated horde of dark-skinned people devoted to destroying the American way of life. Faced with inarguable demographic changes and its own visible shrinkage, the exurban white working class that has fueled Donald Trump’s rise may feel itself embattled as never before. But that too is cyclical, and not particularly new. (In “The Great Gatsby,” the odious Tom Buchanan is reading some book about how immigrants will destroy the nation’s Anglo-American identity.) As King would have told you, it was much the same fear of lost relative privilege and diminished social status that fueled virulent and violent racism in the American South, among people who were themselves marginalized and exploited. Trump himself would look both profoundly familiar and profoundly strange to King, I suspect, as would the intensely racialized nature of the contemporary Republican Party. Various journalists and academics have sought to compare Trump’s version of populism with that of George Wallace, King’s Alabama nemesis, but the differences are more striking than the similarities. Trump appeals almost entirely to delusional and irrational white anger, but it is rhetorically necessary for him to deny being a racist or a xenophobe or any sort of bigot. Wallace embraced bigotry and almost certainly exaggerated it for political purposes; at the beginning and the end of his career, he relied on interracial coalitions to win elections. He was also an old-school Big Government Democrat who funded extensive social welfare programs and cast himself as a champion of the downtrodden, as long as they were the right color. You could almost put it this way: Wallace admitted that whiteness was a crucial and decidedly non-neutral factor in political life, whereas for Trump whiteness is invisible and ubiquitous, like oxygen. This past year also brought us the curious tale of Rachel Dolezal, the “trans-racial” white woman who headed a chapter of the NAACP in the Pacific Northwest while adopting a black identity. Dolezal may seem like a footnote or a punch line to the more consequential story of race in America, but she carries more resonance the more we think about her and revisit her sincere if narcissistic agony. Anyone of King’s generation would have remembered the controversy around “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by white journalist John Howard Griffin, who had his skin chemically darkened and spent six weeks living as an ersatz African-American in the Jim Crow South. King almost certainly knew Walter Francis White, the longtime NAACP leader who had fair hair and blue eyes and by his own admission was largely of European ancestry, but who lived his entire life as a black person. White and Griffin’s stories are different from each other and from Dolezal’s, or from the stories of conflicted or confused racial identity found throughout American history and culture, from Thomas Jefferson’s redheaded slaves to Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” to the career of R&B legend Johnny Otis, who was born as Ioannis Veliotes, the child of Greek immigrants. All of them speak to the paradoxical fact that “race,” at least in the American context, is an arbitrary fiction with no scientific or biological meaning, but a fiction whose truth cannot be denied, that has shaped our nation’s history and defines our individual destiny. It's a story we tell together, with considerable difficulty. But it's not a story we are free to tell by ourselves.It’s easy to feel a bit cynical about the way the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, has become an American secular saint. King is misquoted or selectively paraphrased by politicians who would have had him investigated or arrested as a contemporary. Or he is framed as a one-issue “man of faith” whose vision of social justice and racial equality went no further than the soaring rhetoric of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and the Voting Rights Act (a law that was radical enough in its own way, and that many of the elected officials who quote King at opportune moments have stealthily worked to defund, defang and disable). King did not live long enough to play a major role in popular organizing against the Vietnam War, but he was clearly heading in that direction. We can only speculate how he would have interacted with the modern feminist movement, or the LGBT movement, both of which were in their infancy in 1968. As we saw King portrayed by David Oyelowo in Ava DuVernay’s fascinating but flawed film “Selma,” he was both a strategist and a theoretician of nonviolent civil disobedience, a confrontational approach to power that goes well beyond “protest.” As developed by Mahatma Gandhi, King and many other people in many other movements, nonviolent civil disobedience requires activists who are prepared to put their safety, their freedom and sometimes their lives at risk, in order to expose the hypocrisy and brutality of ruling elites and the police who serve their interests. We know that King was in Memphis at the time of his death to help organize the city’s exploited and underpaid sanitation workers, and that he understood racism not simply as a matter of legal inequality but also as a question of economic power. He commented on several occasions that poor and disadvantaged whites in the rural South had been encouraged to vent their frustrations by way of racist violence and overt bigotry, directed at the only group worse off than themselves. He would have been fascinated by Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s outreach efforts in poor white neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, and might have wondered how much that had to do with the Chicago Police Department’s assassination of Hampton shortly thereafter. King was a man of his time, and a person whose troubled personal life might have made him an unpalatable political leader today (as “Selma” also made clear). What would he make of America circa 2016, on what would have been his 87th birthday? (It’s startling to realize that King could easily still be alive. He’d be younger than my mother.) No one can answer that question, and I won’t presume to try. One indirect but important legacy of King’s movement is that someone in my position — a white man behind a computer, writing about “race” from a position of presumed journalistic neutrality — is compelled, for both moral and pragmatic reasons, to consider the limits of his own perspective. Can I actually discern and correct for my own level privilege, or detect whatever unconscious attitudes and prejudices I have internalized? By definition, I'm pretty sure I can't. But being aware that those things may be issues for me, or for readers, is an important starting point. On one hand, all is changed, changed utterly, in the years since King’s death, as the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said about a different era of political transformation. The dynamics of race in America have altered significantly: In 1968, Latinos were a scattered and disparate group with little sense of collective identity, largely found in California, Texas and New York City. Outside certain urban enclaves, immigrants were nearly invisible. Despite this reshaped context, the contours of American society might look familiar to King, and the patterns of race and racism tend to repeat themselves. If race in America is no longer just a question of black and white, those two invented categories that have haunted our nation’s history have loomed large over the last year. This was the year of Black Lives Matter, and a year of extensive public debate over the nature of the relationship between African-Americans and the police. It was a year that brought us an unfolding series of protests or disturbances or “riots” in African-American neighborhoods, a theme or pattern King would recognize immediately. While the Civil Rights Movement in the American South concerned much bigger and broader issues than policing, the overt violence and repression it provoked from police departments and rural sheriffs attracted worldwide attention, and became an enormous part of King’s struggle for justice. For other black activists of that period — especially the Black Panthers, but also Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam and Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” movement — police violence was a central and defining issue. It was the mechanism by which African-American communities were imprisoned and oppressed, and it was a metaphor that revealed the actual power relationships of American society. It would not be remotely true to say that nothing has changed since those turbulent days of the mid-1960s, but the cyclical recurrence of this issue suggests that those fundamental power relationships have not been addressed. As numerous commentators on Fox News or right-wing radio will tell you, most of the Baltimore police officers apparently implicated in the death of Freddie Gray are themselves black. That would not have seemed conceivable to King or the Panthers, perhaps, and neither would the fact that the United States has twice elected a black president. But those who would argue today that facts on the ground in Baltimore, or in the White House, prove that racism is no longer a factor in policing, in politics or in the exercise of power are deliberately ignoring the lessons of history. (Which is virtually our national pastime. If it stings when snooty foreign intellectuals depict Americans as not merely ignorant about the world but also profoundly incurious, that’s because it’s largely true.) In an especially heartbreaking instance of historical recurrence, we saw an angry young white man commit mass murder in a historic Southern black church, an episode that at first might make King wonder whether anything has changed in America. But the aftermath of that heartbreaking tragedy had unexpected consequences that really did feel like change. Amid the outpouring of national grief, we had an open conversation about the various meanings of the Confederate battle flag and the legacy of the Civil War that would not have been possible even a decade ago. To a large extent I mean a conversation among white people: An elderly female relative from an affluent Southern background told me tearfully that she had never known how hurtful the Rebel flag was to black people, or that it was still used by white supremacists to stir up hatred. It may be fair to say that she had chosen not to know those things, but I believe she was sincere. During the fall semester we saw an eruption of heated protests — first at the University of Missouri, then at Yale, and then at numerous other campuses — over the legacy of racism in higher education. King’s own educational career took him back and forth between predominantly black and predominantly white institutions, and it seems likely he would have recognized the social and cultural pressures at work. You could argue that historical recurrence was at work here as well, on various levels. Although the student protest movement of King’s era was predominantly white, less than a year after his death black students at UCLA led a massive walkout after the university’s firing of Angela Davis, an incident that terrorized the white establishment and polarized the media much as the recent campus controversies have done. Indeed, another recurrent phenomenon King would have recognized all too well was the rising tide of white rage and white backlash, arguably the biggest racial story of America in 2015. (Especially in the sense that those caught up in it do not perceive it as racial at all but as a question of patriotism and national identity, of “making America great again.”) From the perspective of this backlash, the campus protests and Black Lives Matter were blended with the real but exaggerated specter of ISIS and the entirely imaginary invasion of violent immigrants and refugees into an undifferentiated horde of dark-skinned people devoted to destroying the American way of life. Faced with inarguable demographic changes and its own visible shrinkage, the exurban white working class that has fueled Donald Trump’s rise may feel itself embattled as never before. But that too is cyclical, and not particularly new. (In “The Great Gatsby,” the odious Tom Buchanan is reading some book about how immigrants will destroy the nation’s Anglo-American identity.) As King would have told you, it was much the same fear of lost relative privilege and diminished social status that fueled virulent and violent racism in the American South, among people who were themselves marginalized and exploited. Trump himself would look both profoundly familiar and profoundly strange to King, I suspect, as would the intensely racialized nature of the contemporary Republican Party. Various journalists and academics have sought to compare Trump’s version of populism with that of George Wallace, King’s Alabama nemesis, but the differences are more striking than the similarities. Trump appeals almost entirely to delusional and irrational white anger, but it is rhetorically necessary for him to deny being a racist or a xenophobe or any sort of bigot. Wallace embraced bigotry and almost certainly exaggerated it for political purposes; at the beginning and the end of his career, he relied on interracial coalitions to win elections. He was also an old-school Big Government Democrat who funded extensive social welfare programs and cast himself as a champion of the downtrodden, as long as they were the right color. You could almost put it this way: Wallace admitted that whiteness was a crucial and decidedly non-neutral factor in political life, whereas for Trump whiteness is invisible and ubiquitous, like oxygen. This past year also brought us the curious tale of Rachel Dolezal, the “trans-racial” white woman who headed a chapter of the NAACP in the Pacific Northwest while adopting a black identity. Dolezal may seem like a footnote or a punch line to the more consequential story of race in America, but she carries more resonance the more we think about her and revisit her sincere if narcissistic agony. Anyone of King’s generation would have remembered the controversy around “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by white journalist John Howard Griffin, who had his skin chemically darkened and spent six weeks living as an ersatz African-American in the Jim Crow South. King almost certainly knew Walter Francis White, the longtime NAACP leader who had fair hair and blue eyes and by his own admission was largely of European ancestry, but who lived his entire life as a black person. White and Griffin’s stories are different from each other and from Dolezal’s, or from the stories of conflicted or confused racial identity found throughout American history and culture, from Thomas Jefferson’s redheaded slaves to Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life” and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” to the career of R&B legend Johnny Otis, who was born as Ioannis Veliotes, the child of Greek immigrants. All of them speak to the paradoxical fact that “race,” at least in the American context, is an arbitrary fiction with no scientific or biological meaning, but a fiction whose truth cannot be denied, that has shaped our nation’s history and defines our individual destiny. It's a story we tell together, with considerable difficulty. But it's not a story we are free to tell by ourselves.

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Uber and Lyft’s big new lie: Their excuse for avoiding regulation is finally falling apart

Recently Lyft and General Motors made a grand announcement, with all the hoopla meant to convey that this announcement is a really big deal: ta-daaaa, a joint partnership in which Lyft will develop self-driving cars with GM. GM is going to invest $500 million in Lyft, and GM president Daniel Ammann will join the board of Lyft. Never mind that self-driving cars (beyond test cars) will not appear on the streets anytime soon – and possibly never, due to the severe regulatory and insurance hurdles involved in letting a 3,000-pound machine steer itself with no human at the controls. Nevertheless, that big headline dominated the news cycle, which is so titillated by anything Uber or Donald Trump. Yet the media missed the really big news. It was tucked into the Lyft-GM announcement as a little nugget that no one paid attention to. As reported in the Times:

“G.M. will also work with Lyft to set up a series of short-term car rental hubs across the United States, places where people who do not own cars can pick up a vehicle and drive for Lyft to earn money.”

Stop the presses; say what? Lyft will rent cars to its drivers? As in, instead of a driver bringing their car to Lyft for rideshare profiteering, Lyft will own the cars and provide them to drivers? Apparently so. Lyft president John Zimmer told CNBC “We have thousands and thousands of sign-ups from individuals whose cars don’t qualify, and so we can now market to those individuals who already applied but didn’t have the right car. This is a really great income opportunity, whether or not you have a car.” OK…but…how…is that…any different from…how a taxi company operates? In most taxi companies, a driver pays a “gate” to a taxi company to rent its taxi for the day or evening. The driver keeps the net of his fares after paying the rental gate, which is usually around $100 per shift. The new Lyft-GM business model sure sounds like a taxi company to me. In case the import of this still isn’t clear, I'll spell it out: one of the big claims of Lyft and its other ridesharing competitors, like Uber and Sidecar, is that the reason they should not have to follow the considerable regulations that govern taxi companies is because Lyft/Uber are not in fact taxi companies. According to their view of the world, they are a technology company. They only connect a driver with a passenger as an intermediary; they are a mere software broker of a deal between two separate parties, and so they shouldn’t be regulated like a taxi company. Look, they have said repeatedly, we don't even own any cars…so how can we be a taxi company? In fact, Uber changed its original name, which was UberCab when it was founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp in 2009, to Uber Technologies to provide that regulatory cover. Regulators in the United States have mostly swallowed this ridesharing whopper, hook, line and sinker. They have treated these companies by a different set of rules than taxi companies. As one obvious example, in most cities the number of taxis roaming the streets is limited by a medallion system. The rationale for limiting the number of livery cars is to keep congestion manageable and the wages of drivers high enough to make some kind of living. But Lyft and Uber have refused to accept any limits on their number of drivers (and hence, notice how the streets in so many cities are now increasingly congested – just a coincidence?). In addition, Lyft and Uber – ahem, the technology companies – have refused to pay livery taxes and other fees that taxi companies must pay to local governments, which are an important source of municipal revenue. In New York City, for example, taxis pay a fee that helps support mass public transit; Lyft and Uber refuse to pay any of that. In short, these “non-taxi” companies have fiercely refused to follow virtually any and all local taxi laws, claiming the laws are not applicable because they are technology companies. Consequently, Lyft and Uber have gotten away with using grossly underinsured drivers and faulty background checks (with no fingerprinting, a type of background check that the FBI has estimated has a 43 percent error rate). The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles have sued both companies because they don’t use what is known as a Live Scan (which includes fingerprinting), the highest standard of background check, which most taxi companies in California are required by law to use. The lack of taxi-quality background checks has had tragic consequences. An Uber driver hit and killed 6-year-old Sofia Liu, and badly injured her mother and brother, as they were traversing a crosswalk on New Year’s Eve 2013 in San Francisco. Uber immediately washed its hands of any responsibility or liability, claiming the driver was an independent contractor, not an employee. Yet that driver had a reckless driving record in Florida, including being arrested for driving 100 mph into oncoming traffic while trying to pass another car, which Uber’s faulty background check failed to uncover. Bad things have happened in taxis too, of course, but not being a taxi company has been the whole basis for Lyft and Uber’s avoidance of regulation. Lyft’s latest morphing of its business plan blows its anti-regulation cover out of the water (and usually what one of these companies does, the other copies in a month or two). If drivers are reporting to “hubs” to rent a car from the Lyft-GM operation, how is that any different from a taxi company? The claim that these companies are “technology” and not taxi companies always was laughable. If you go to places like France, Germany, Spain, South Korea – just about anywhere outside the U.S. – it was obvious to their regulators from the get-go that these companies provide the same service as a taxi company. They might connect the driver with a passenger in a new way, but so what? There was a time when taxis did not have electronic meters in them – when they were installed, did that turn those companies into “technology”? It’s only here in the United States that regulators have been so gobsmacked and befuddled. “What is this thing, is it a taxi, is it technology, is it from planet Pluto? MY GOD, HOW DO WE REGULATE IT?” No question, regulators in the U.S. have dropped the ball in city after city and state after state. In France, the two national chiefs of Uber are facing jail time for running an illegal taxi service. Well, now Lyft has done U.S. regulators a big favor. By setting up hubs where drivers can rent cars and then drive for Lyft, the company is making it plainly obvious what should have been obvious all along. These are taxi companies. And they should be regulated as such. These companies have been given a free pass for far too long. No question, ridesharing is here to stay. Many customers find it helpful, and the service has proved its worth. With a view of our streets as a public utility, ridesharing should be incorporated along with existing modes of transportation. Most likely, taxi services and ridesharing will merge over time, as more taxis start using apps and ridesharing companies start renting cars to drivers. But the days when these two different sectors, which provide the exact same service, are regulated by two different sets of rules needs to end.Recently Lyft and General Motors made a grand announcement, with all the hoopla meant to convey that this announcement is a really big deal: ta-daaaa, a joint partnership in which Lyft will develop self-driving cars with GM. GM is going to invest $500 million in Lyft, and GM president Daniel Ammann will join the board of Lyft. Never mind that self-driving cars (beyond test cars) will not appear on the streets anytime soon – and possibly never, due to the severe regulatory and insurance hurdles involved in letting a 3,000-pound machine steer itself with no human at the controls. Nevertheless, that big headline dominated the news cycle, which is so titillated by anything Uber or Donald Trump. Yet the media missed the really big news. It was tucked into the Lyft-GM announcement as a little nugget that no one paid attention to. As reported in the Times:

“G.M. will also work with Lyft to set up a series of short-term car rental hubs across the United States, places where people who do not own cars can pick up a vehicle and drive for Lyft to earn money.”

Stop the presses; say what? Lyft will rent cars to its drivers? As in, instead of a driver bringing their car to Lyft for rideshare profiteering, Lyft will own the cars and provide them to drivers? Apparently so. Lyft president John Zimmer told CNBC “We have thousands and thousands of sign-ups from individuals whose cars don’t qualify, and so we can now market to those individuals who already applied but didn’t have the right car. This is a really great income opportunity, whether or not you have a car.” OK…but…how…is that…any different from…how a taxi company operates? In most taxi companies, a driver pays a “gate” to a taxi company to rent its taxi for the day or evening. The driver keeps the net of his fares after paying the rental gate, which is usually around $100 per shift. The new Lyft-GM business model sure sounds like a taxi company to me. In case the import of this still isn’t clear, I'll spell it out: one of the big claims of Lyft and its other ridesharing competitors, like Uber and Sidecar, is that the reason they should not have to follow the considerable regulations that govern taxi companies is because Lyft/Uber are not in fact taxi companies. According to their view of the world, they are a technology company. They only connect a driver with a passenger as an intermediary; they are a mere software broker of a deal between two separate parties, and so they shouldn’t be regulated like a taxi company. Look, they have said repeatedly, we don't even own any cars…so how can we be a taxi company? In fact, Uber changed its original name, which was UberCab when it was founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp in 2009, to Uber Technologies to provide that regulatory cover. Regulators in the United States have mostly swallowed this ridesharing whopper, hook, line and sinker. They have treated these companies by a different set of rules than taxi companies. As one obvious example, in most cities the number of taxis roaming the streets is limited by a medallion system. The rationale for limiting the number of livery cars is to keep congestion manageable and the wages of drivers high enough to make some kind of living. But Lyft and Uber have refused to accept any limits on their number of drivers (and hence, notice how the streets in so many cities are now increasingly congested – just a coincidence?). In addition, Lyft and Uber – ahem, the technology companies – have refused to pay livery taxes and other fees that taxi companies must pay to local governments, which are an important source of municipal revenue. In New York City, for example, taxis pay a fee that helps support mass public transit; Lyft and Uber refuse to pay any of that. In short, these “non-taxi” companies have fiercely refused to follow virtually any and all local taxi laws, claiming the laws are not applicable because they are technology companies. Consequently, Lyft and Uber have gotten away with using grossly underinsured drivers and faulty background checks (with no fingerprinting, a type of background check that the FBI has estimated has a 43 percent error rate). The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles have sued both companies because they don’t use what is known as a Live Scan (which includes fingerprinting), the highest standard of background check, which most taxi companies in California are required by law to use. The lack of taxi-quality background checks has had tragic consequences. An Uber driver hit and killed 6-year-old Sofia Liu, and badly injured her mother and brother, as they were traversing a crosswalk on New Year’s Eve 2013 in San Francisco. Uber immediately washed its hands of any responsibility or liability, claiming the driver was an independent contractor, not an employee. Yet that driver had a reckless driving record in Florida, including being arrested for driving 100 mph into oncoming traffic while trying to pass another car, which Uber’s faulty background check failed to uncover. Bad things have happened in taxis too, of course, but not being a taxi company has been the whole basis for Lyft and Uber’s avoidance of regulation. Lyft’s latest morphing of its business plan blows its anti-regulation cover out of the water (and usually what one of these companies does, the other copies in a month or two). If drivers are reporting to “hubs” to rent a car from the Lyft-GM operation, how is that any different from a taxi company? The claim that these companies are “technology” and not taxi companies always was laughable. If you go to places like France, Germany, Spain, South Korea – just about anywhere outside the U.S. – it was obvious to their regulators from the get-go that these companies provide the same service as a taxi company. They might connect the driver with a passenger in a new way, but so what? There was a time when taxis did not have electronic meters in them – when they were installed, did that turn those companies into “technology”? It’s only here in the United States that regulators have been so gobsmacked and befuddled. “What is this thing, is it a taxi, is it technology, is it from planet Pluto? MY GOD, HOW DO WE REGULATE IT?” No question, regulators in the U.S. have dropped the ball in city after city and state after state. In France, the two national chiefs of Uber are facing jail time for running an illegal taxi service. Well, now Lyft has done U.S. regulators a big favor. By setting up hubs where drivers can rent cars and then drive for Lyft, the company is making it plainly obvious what should have been obvious all along. These are taxi companies. And they should be regulated as such. These companies have been given a free pass for far too long. No question, ridesharing is here to stay. Many customers find it helpful, and the service has proved its worth. With a view of our streets as a public utility, ridesharing should be incorporated along with existing modes of transportation. Most likely, taxi services and ridesharing will merge over time, as more taxis start using apps and ridesharing companies start renting cars to drivers. But the days when these two different sectors, which provide the exact same service, are regulated by two different sets of rules needs to end.

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Trump slams Cruz as a hypocrite

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (AP) — Donald Trump is slamming Republican presidential rival Ted Cruz as a "great hypocrite" for tapping big financial institutions for loans while portraying himself as an anti-establishment outsider.

Trump kept the new feud between the two front-runners alive in New Hampshire and on Twitter before a tea party convention in South Carolina at which both are appearing.

In the last Republican debate, Trump offered a passionate defense of New York City in response to Cruz's claim that he represents "New York values" out of step with conservatives.

At the tea party meeting, Cruz didn't mention Trump by name. But he urged activists to back a consistent conservative — meaning, not Trump.

Trump challenges Cruz for taking loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank when he was running for his Texas Senate seat.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (AP) — Donald Trump is slamming Republican presidential rival Ted Cruz as a "great hypocrite" for tapping big financial institutions for loans while portraying himself as an anti-establishment outsider.

Trump kept the new feud between the two front-runners alive in New Hampshire and on Twitter before a tea party convention in South Carolina at which both are appearing.

In the last Republican debate, Trump offered a passionate defense of New York City in response to Cruz's claim that he represents "New York values" out of step with conservatives.

At the tea party meeting, Cruz didn't mention Trump by name. But he urged activists to back a consistent conservative — meaning, not Trump.

Trump challenges Cruz for taking loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank when he was running for his Texas Senate seat.

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The latest threat to the rainforests: A Peruvian highway could displace the Amazon’s last uncontacted tribes

LIMA, Peru — Peru has been basking in kudos from officially declaring a vast new national park in the remote Amazonian wilderness known as Sierra del Divisor.

President Ollanta Humala traveled there over the weekend to unveil the park — nearly 5,500 square miles of stunning tropical rainforest, home to numerous threatened species, including jaguars and various kinds of monkey.

He was under international pressure to protect the area from illegal logging, the cultivation of coca — the key ingredient in cocaine — and the construction of clandestine roads.

Humala even claimed the park will “help us purify the air of the world.”

That sounds like great news, just in time for the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this month.

There’s just one catch.

Just 48 hours before the president’s grand gesture, Peru’s congress took a landmark vote that potentially compromises Manu National Park, the country’s most famous Amazonian protected area, and the neighboring Amarakaeri Indigenous Reserve, home to some of the last uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world.

If signed into law, the legislation would authorize the regional government to push a freeway through the buffer zones of both protected areas, declaring the project of “national interest.”

But the regional authorities aren’t waiting: Construction is already underway, even without the necessary environmental impact study or other permits.

The road’s backers argue it is the only way to bring development to impoverished jungle communities, where some live their entire lives without ever seeing a school or a doctor and most homes have no electricity or running water.

But some leading officials strongly disagree. The Environment Ministry and national park officials were so incensed they put out a joint statement expressing their “profound rejection” of the freeway.

They warned that the road would serve to “validate unlawful activities” by enabling the unchecked passage of fuel to illegal mining and timber cutting sites.

They added it would mean an “invasion of indigenous territories” and would “risk the lives” of uncontacted tribes, who lack immunity to common colds and other diseases to which they have never previously been exposed.

Diego Saavedra, an Amazon expert at the Lima-based nonprofit Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR in its Spanish initials), accused the Peruvian government and congress of “hypocrisy” and greenwashing.

Peru has been making a concerted effort over the last couple of years to polish its environmental credentials, which came under the global spotlight when Peru hosted last December’s UN climate conference, known as COP20.

“Their discourse for COP20 has been all about reducing the national carbon footprint, of reducing deforestation, but then they take decisions like this one, which flies in the face of that,” Saavedra added.

Peru’s Environment Ministry was only founded in 2008, as a condition of a trade treaty with Washington. The administration of President George W. Bush demanded it after coming under pressure from US environmentalists.

Saavedra said the ministry is doing the right thing by condemning the proposed new jungle road, but lacks the influence within the government of the economy and energy ministries, with whom it regularly clashes.

“The Environment Ministry lacks the resources or power to really have a voice within the government when these kinds of strategic decisions are made,” Saavedra said.

The president might now be expected to back his environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, and refuse to sign the controversial bill into law.

But Humala, a taciturn former army officer who has previously attempted to push through unpopular mining projects, has given no indication so far of what he plans to do.

LIMA, Peru — Peru has been basking in kudos from officially declaring a vast new national park in the remote Amazonian wilderness known as Sierra del Divisor.

President Ollanta Humala traveled there over the weekend to unveil the park — nearly 5,500 square miles of stunning tropical rainforest, home to numerous threatened species, including jaguars and various kinds of monkey.

He was under international pressure to protect the area from illegal logging, the cultivation of coca — the key ingredient in cocaine — and the construction of clandestine roads.

Humala even claimed the park will “help us purify the air of the world.”

That sounds like great news, just in time for the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this month.

There’s just one catch.

Just 48 hours before the president’s grand gesture, Peru’s congress took a landmark vote that potentially compromises Manu National Park, the country’s most famous Amazonian protected area, and the neighboring Amarakaeri Indigenous Reserve, home to some of the last uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world.

If signed into law, the legislation would authorize the regional government to push a freeway through the buffer zones of both protected areas, declaring the project of “national interest.”

But the regional authorities aren’t waiting: Construction is already underway, even without the necessary environmental impact study or other permits.

The road’s backers argue it is the only way to bring development to impoverished jungle communities, where some live their entire lives without ever seeing a school or a doctor and most homes have no electricity or running water.

But some leading officials strongly disagree. The Environment Ministry and national park officials were so incensed they put out a joint statement expressing their “profound rejection” of the freeway.

They warned that the road would serve to “validate unlawful activities” by enabling the unchecked passage of fuel to illegal mining and timber cutting sites.

They added it would mean an “invasion of indigenous territories” and would “risk the lives” of uncontacted tribes, who lack immunity to common colds and other diseases to which they have never previously been exposed.

Diego Saavedra, an Amazon expert at the Lima-based nonprofit Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR in its Spanish initials), accused the Peruvian government and congress of “hypocrisy” and greenwashing.

Peru has been making a concerted effort over the last couple of years to polish its environmental credentials, which came under the global spotlight when Peru hosted last December’s UN climate conference, known as COP20.

“Their discourse for COP20 has been all about reducing the national carbon footprint, of reducing deforestation, but then they take decisions like this one, which flies in the face of that,” Saavedra added.

Peru’s Environment Ministry was only founded in 2008, as a condition of a trade treaty with Washington. The administration of President George W. Bush demanded it after coming under pressure from US environmentalists.

Saavedra said the ministry is doing the right thing by condemning the proposed new jungle road, but lacks the influence within the government of the economy and energy ministries, with whom it regularly clashes.

“The Environment Ministry lacks the resources or power to really have a voice within the government when these kinds of strategic decisions are made,” Saavedra said.

The president might now be expected to back his environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, and refuse to sign the controversial bill into law.

But Humala, a taciturn former army officer who has previously attempted to push through unpopular mining projects, has given no indication so far of what he plans to do.

LIMA, Peru — Peru has been basking in kudos from officially declaring a vast new national park in the remote Amazonian wilderness known as Sierra del Divisor.

President Ollanta Humala traveled there over the weekend to unveil the park — nearly 5,500 square miles of stunning tropical rainforest, home to numerous threatened species, including jaguars and various kinds of monkey.

He was under international pressure to protect the area from illegal logging, the cultivation of coca — the key ingredient in cocaine — and the construction of clandestine roads.

Humala even claimed the park will “help us purify the air of the world.”

That sounds like great news, just in time for the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this month.

There’s just one catch.

Just 48 hours before the president’s grand gesture, Peru’s congress took a landmark vote that potentially compromises Manu National Park, the country’s most famous Amazonian protected area, and the neighboring Amarakaeri Indigenous Reserve, home to some of the last uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world.

If signed into law, the legislation would authorize the regional government to push a freeway through the buffer zones of both protected areas, declaring the project of “national interest.”

But the regional authorities aren’t waiting: Construction is already underway, even without the necessary environmental impact study or other permits.

The road’s backers argue it is the only way to bring development to impoverished jungle communities, where some live their entire lives without ever seeing a school or a doctor and most homes have no electricity or running water.

But some leading officials strongly disagree. The Environment Ministry and national park officials were so incensed they put out a joint statement expressing their “profound rejection” of the freeway.

They warned that the road would serve to “validate unlawful activities” by enabling the unchecked passage of fuel to illegal mining and timber cutting sites.

They added it would mean an “invasion of indigenous territories” and would “risk the lives” of uncontacted tribes, who lack immunity to common colds and other diseases to which they have never previously been exposed.

Diego Saavedra, an Amazon expert at the Lima-based nonprofit Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR in its Spanish initials), accused the Peruvian government and congress of “hypocrisy” and greenwashing.

Peru has been making a concerted effort over the last couple of years to polish its environmental credentials, which came under the global spotlight when Peru hosted last December’s UN climate conference, known as COP20.

“Their discourse for COP20 has been all about reducing the national carbon footprint, of reducing deforestation, but then they take decisions like this one, which flies in the face of that,” Saavedra added.

Peru’s Environment Ministry was only founded in 2008, as a condition of a trade treaty with Washington. The administration of President George W. Bush demanded it after coming under pressure from US environmentalists.

Saavedra said the ministry is doing the right thing by condemning the proposed new jungle road, but lacks the influence within the government of the economy and energy ministries, with whom it regularly clashes.

“The Environment Ministry lacks the resources or power to really have a voice within the government when these kinds of strategic decisions are made,” Saavedra said.

The president might now be expected to back his environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, and refuse to sign the controversial bill into law.

But Humala, a taciturn former army officer who has previously attempted to push through unpopular mining projects, has given no indication so far of what he plans to do.

LIMA, Peru — Peru has been basking in kudos from officially declaring a vast new national park in the remote Amazonian wilderness known as Sierra del Divisor.

President Ollanta Humala traveled there over the weekend to unveil the park — nearly 5,500 square miles of stunning tropical rainforest, home to numerous threatened species, including jaguars and various kinds of monkey.

He was under international pressure to protect the area from illegal logging, the cultivation of coca — the key ingredient in cocaine — and the construction of clandestine roads.

Humala even claimed the park will “help us purify the air of the world.”

That sounds like great news, just in time for the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this month.

There’s just one catch.

Just 48 hours before the president’s grand gesture, Peru’s congress took a landmark vote that potentially compromises Manu National Park, the country’s most famous Amazonian protected area, and the neighboring Amarakaeri Indigenous Reserve, home to some of the last uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world.

If signed into law, the legislation would authorize the regional government to push a freeway through the buffer zones of both protected areas, declaring the project of “national interest.”

But the regional authorities aren’t waiting: Construction is already underway, even without the necessary environmental impact study or other permits.

The road’s backers argue it is the only way to bring development to impoverished jungle communities, where some live their entire lives without ever seeing a school or a doctor and most homes have no electricity or running water.

But some leading officials strongly disagree. The Environment Ministry and national park officials were so incensed they put out a joint statement expressing their “profound rejection” of the freeway.

They warned that the road would serve to “validate unlawful activities” by enabling the unchecked passage of fuel to illegal mining and timber cutting sites.

They added it would mean an “invasion of indigenous territories” and would “risk the lives” of uncontacted tribes, who lack immunity to common colds and other diseases to which they have never previously been exposed.

Diego Saavedra, an Amazon expert at the Lima-based nonprofit Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR in its Spanish initials), accused the Peruvian government and congress of “hypocrisy” and greenwashing.

Peru has been making a concerted effort over the last couple of years to polish its environmental credentials, which came under the global spotlight when Peru hosted last December’s UN climate conference, known as COP20.

“Their discourse for COP20 has been all about reducing the national carbon footprint, of reducing deforestation, but then they take decisions like this one, which flies in the face of that,” Saavedra added.

Peru’s Environment Ministry was only founded in 2008, as a condition of a trade treaty with Washington. The administration of President George W. Bush demanded it after coming under pressure from US environmentalists.

Saavedra said the ministry is doing the right thing by condemning the proposed new jungle road, but lacks the influence within the government of the economy and energy ministries, with whom it regularly clashes.

“The Environment Ministry lacks the resources or power to really have a voice within the government when these kinds of strategic decisions are made,” Saavedra said.

The president might now be expected to back his environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, and refuse to sign the controversial bill into law.

But Humala, a taciturn former army officer who has previously attempted to push through unpopular mining projects, has given no indication so far of what he plans to do.

LIMA, Peru — Peru has been basking in kudos from officially declaring a vast new national park in the remote Amazonian wilderness known as Sierra del Divisor.

President Ollanta Humala traveled there over the weekend to unveil the park — nearly 5,500 square miles of stunning tropical rainforest, home to numerous threatened species, including jaguars and various kinds of monkey.

He was under international pressure to protect the area from illegal logging, the cultivation of coca — the key ingredient in cocaine — and the construction of clandestine roads.

Humala even claimed the park will “help us purify the air of the world.”

That sounds like great news, just in time for the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this month.

There’s just one catch.

Just 48 hours before the president’s grand gesture, Peru’s congress took a landmark vote that potentially compromises Manu National Park, the country’s most famous Amazonian protected area, and the neighboring Amarakaeri Indigenous Reserve, home to some of the last uncontacted tribes anywhere in the world.

If signed into law, the legislation would authorize the regional government to push a freeway through the buffer zones of both protected areas, declaring the project of “national interest.”

But the regional authorities aren’t waiting: Construction is already underway, even without the necessary environmental impact study or other permits.

The road’s backers argue it is the only way to bring development to impoverished jungle communities, where some live their entire lives without ever seeing a school or a doctor and most homes have no electricity or running water.

But some leading officials strongly disagree. The Environment Ministry and national park officials were so incensed they put out a joint statement expressing their “profound rejection” of the freeway.

They warned that the road would serve to “validate unlawful activities” by enabling the unchecked passage of fuel to illegal mining and timber cutting sites.

They added it would mean an “invasion of indigenous territories” and would “risk the lives” of uncontacted tribes, who lack immunity to common colds and other diseases to which they have never previously been exposed.

Diego Saavedra, an Amazon expert at the Lima-based nonprofit Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR in its Spanish initials), accused the Peruvian government and congress of “hypocrisy” and greenwashing.

Peru has been making a concerted effort over the last couple of years to polish its environmental credentials, which came under the global spotlight when Peru hosted last December’s UN climate conference, known as COP20.

“Their discourse for COP20 has been all about reducing the national carbon footprint, of reducing deforestation, but then they take decisions like this one, which flies in the face of that,” Saavedra added.

Peru’s Environment Ministry was only founded in 2008, as a condition of a trade treaty with Washington. The administration of President George W. Bush demanded it after coming under pressure from US environmentalists.

Saavedra said the ministry is doing the right thing by condemning the proposed new jungle road, but lacks the influence within the government of the economy and energy ministries, with whom it regularly clashes.

“The Environment Ministry lacks the resources or power to really have a voice within the government when these kinds of strategic decisions are made,” Saavedra said.

The president might now be expected to back his environment minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, and refuse to sign the controversial bill into law.

But Humala, a taciturn former army officer who has previously attempted to push through unpopular mining projects, has given no indication so far of what he plans to do.

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David Bowie was my North Star: My peace and escape was in his music, especially side two of “Hunky Dory”

About the time I reached adolescence, my dad started to disappear. For days at a time. Without explanation. Even when he was around, he was aggressively unavailable. This was tough on my mom, who worked long hours in a psychiatrist’s office, as well as my younger siblings. During those years, the household offered moments of warmth, but mostly alternated between desolation and hostility. I found peace and escape in music. My first love was Joan Jett. When, as a 10-year-old, I spent most of the spring trapped in a hospital bed with a mysterious inner-ear imbalance, she was there boasting about her bad reputation from the little flip-top turntable on my window ledge. That summer, after my equally mysterious recovery, I was listening to the radio in my own bedroom when KZEW played an episode of the King Biscuit Flower Hour that featured a Joan Jett concert. I cocked my head as Eric “Roscoe” Ambel broke into the opening riff of “Rebel Rebel.” What was this? This wasn't a Joan Jett song. It brimmed with drama, wrapped its power chords in layers of meaning. Text and subtext. Disenfranchisement and desire. The sound of dirty fingernails. The next day I rode my bike to Half Price Books and Records on McKinney Avenue and paid $3.99 for a battered copy of "Changes One Bowie." Its iconic black-and-white cover sat propped up in my room for the next handful of years. Before long it felt like a family photograph. This dapper, distinguished gentleman with a twinkle in his eye might be an uncle or an ancestor. He might be my dad. I saved my meager allowance. I stole small sums from my mom’s unattended purse in the dead of night. I rode my bike to Half Price almost every day looking for whatever Bowie albums I could afford and didn't yet own. I wedged the arm up on my turntable, tricking the device into playing one side of an album on endless repeat. I would sleep that way, side two of "Hunky Dory," for instance, playing 18 times while I caught my six hours of sleep before another day of school where no one understood me like David Bowie did. I'd escaped the public school system for what I thought would be the gentler environment of an all-boys private school in Dallas. But cruelty in adolescent boys proved ubiquitous. They told me I was a faggot. They knocked me to the ground, held me down, and whispered it into my ear. I wondered if it was true. I didn't know what I was. I would sit in my room and study the album cover of the U.S. release of Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold The World." He looked so beautiful lounging on a chaise with his long hair and his brocade dressing gown. Was I what they said? I decided that I was different from them regardless of whom I wound up wanting to sleep with. They were mundane and ignorant. I had so much more in common with this bold, strange artist to whom I devoted so many hours. I took up the guitar. I learned to play his songs. I began to write my own songs. I became an acolyte, soaking up Bowie’s catalog and following the splintering trails off into his influences. My identity became ever more tied up in that of my hero. He was my secret guide through this wilderness, his music my personal handbook for survival. And then he released "Let’s Dance." This artist from the 1970s, whose records I'd dug out of dusty bins in second-hand shops, was suddenly wall-to-wall on the nascent MTV network. He was all over the radio. He was drifting out of overhead speakers in Safeway supermarket and Northpark Mall. I remember hiding in the bathroom at a seventh grade back-to-school mixer after Marla Cotton’s new boyfriend, a tight end on the JV squad at another school, had announced upon arrival that his whole purpose in coming to Bent Tree Country Club that night was to find me and “kick that little faggot’s ass.” I'd called my mom and begged her to come pick me up, but there would be a half hour before she could rescue me. When Marla’s new boyfriend finally did find me, in a stall in the men’s room off the ballroom’s foyer, he cornered me. Literally. He planted his palm on my forehead and pushed the back of my head into the tiled corner, muttering in his impossibly low voice, “You like that, you little faggot?” The chipper keyboard stabs of “Modern Love” wafted in from the ballroom, and cut through the buzzing in my ears. The fact that this new Bowie belonged to everyone complicated my relationship to his body of work but didn't diminish it. “Yeah. It's cool,” I’d say. “But I'm really into his older stuff.” When the Serious Moonlight Tour rolled through Dallas’s Reunion Arena, my girlfriend’s big sister got us tickets. Our seats were in the lower bowl, directly stage left. We watched the show through the rigging, looking at the band in profile. I thrilled with anticipation as each song drew to a close. I imagined him constructing the setlist, testing the audience with new album tracks and deep cuts, rewarding the audience with old favorites and the hits that currently owned the airwaves. I clearly saw what he was doing that night as a job, with logistics and strategies and responsibilities. Toward the end of that night’s concert, during the break between the main body of the set and the encore, the band ran off stage right and Bowie slipped off stage left, descending a few steps down a short flight of stairs behind a massive column of speakers directly in front of us. I watched from 75 feet away as a crewmember handed Bowie a towel and a lit cigarette. Another member of his crew placed a sweaty highball glass on the railing next to him. My idol stood alone for a moment, a towel around the shoulders of his soft yellow suit, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He pressed the icy highball glass to his forehead. Seventeen thousand people chanted his surname, a mantra, an invocation. As the adulation built to a frenzy around him, he took a quiet moment to himself. I watched him, and, in that moment, discovered something about myself: I wanted that job. After that, everything I did was toward that end. I wrote songs constantly, pushing through the terrible ones to get to the merely bad, knowing experience was the only way to improvement. I went to underground rock clubs and made friends with the musicians. I did my first gig at 15 and recorded my first album at 17. On that album, I covered an obscure Bowie tune called “When I'm Five,” a song he'd written in the late 1960s, sung from the perspective of a 4-year-old boy. Despite being a seventh-generation Texan, I sang that song and all the others on that album with a hint of a British accent. I kept going. Through poverty and squalor. Past obstacles and heartbreak. I kept going. I saw my path. I followed my North Star, Bowie. And I wound up making a life out of music. I write songs, and travel the world singing them for people. I stand on the side of the stage mopping my brow while the audience calls me back for an encore. I've been lucky enough to meet and even work with many of my heroes. But I never met Bowie. I have a friend who for years encouraged me to write a letter to David Bowie in the hopes of collaborating with him. My friend could guarantee that someone in his inner circle would deliver the letter, along with a glowing recommendation, to Bowie. I wrote the letter in my head a million times, but never committed it to paper. I think I was afraid to lose him. I love what he gave me, who he is in my life. What if that changed somehow? Rejection, disappointment, who knows? A human can't really be a North Star, can they? I couldn't stomach the possibility of life without David Bowie. And then I did lose him. We all did. But I look up in the sky and I see him. And I hear him in my head. And I always will.About the time I reached adolescence, my dad started to disappear. For days at a time. Without explanation. Even when he was around, he was aggressively unavailable. This was tough on my mom, who worked long hours in a psychiatrist’s office, as well as my younger siblings. During those years, the household offered moments of warmth, but mostly alternated between desolation and hostility. I found peace and escape in music. My first love was Joan Jett. When, as a 10-year-old, I spent most of the spring trapped in a hospital bed with a mysterious inner-ear imbalance, she was there boasting about her bad reputation from the little flip-top turntable on my window ledge. That summer, after my equally mysterious recovery, I was listening to the radio in my own bedroom when KZEW played an episode of the King Biscuit Flower Hour that featured a Joan Jett concert. I cocked my head as Eric “Roscoe” Ambel broke into the opening riff of “Rebel Rebel.” What was this? This wasn't a Joan Jett song. It brimmed with drama, wrapped its power chords in layers of meaning. Text and subtext. Disenfranchisement and desire. The sound of dirty fingernails. The next day I rode my bike to Half Price Books and Records on McKinney Avenue and paid $3.99 for a battered copy of "Changes One Bowie." Its iconic black-and-white cover sat propped up in my room for the next handful of years. Before long it felt like a family photograph. This dapper, distinguished gentleman with a twinkle in his eye might be an uncle or an ancestor. He might be my dad. I saved my meager allowance. I stole small sums from my mom’s unattended purse in the dead of night. I rode my bike to Half Price almost every day looking for whatever Bowie albums I could afford and didn't yet own. I wedged the arm up on my turntable, tricking the device into playing one side of an album on endless repeat. I would sleep that way, side two of "Hunky Dory," for instance, playing 18 times while I caught my six hours of sleep before another day of school where no one understood me like David Bowie did. I'd escaped the public school system for what I thought would be the gentler environment of an all-boys private school in Dallas. But cruelty in adolescent boys proved ubiquitous. They told me I was a faggot. They knocked me to the ground, held me down, and whispered it into my ear. I wondered if it was true. I didn't know what I was. I would sit in my room and study the album cover of the U.S. release of Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold The World." He looked so beautiful lounging on a chaise with his long hair and his brocade dressing gown. Was I what they said? I decided that I was different from them regardless of whom I wound up wanting to sleep with. They were mundane and ignorant. I had so much more in common with this bold, strange artist to whom I devoted so many hours. I took up the guitar. I learned to play his songs. I began to write my own songs. I became an acolyte, soaking up Bowie’s catalog and following the splintering trails off into his influences. My identity became ever more tied up in that of my hero. He was my secret guide through this wilderness, his music my personal handbook for survival. And then he released "Let’s Dance." This artist from the 1970s, whose records I'd dug out of dusty bins in second-hand shops, was suddenly wall-to-wall on the nascent MTV network. He was all over the radio. He was drifting out of overhead speakers in Safeway supermarket and Northpark Mall. I remember hiding in the bathroom at a seventh grade back-to-school mixer after Marla Cotton’s new boyfriend, a tight end on the JV squad at another school, had announced upon arrival that his whole purpose in coming to Bent Tree Country Club that night was to find me and “kick that little faggot’s ass.” I'd called my mom and begged her to come pick me up, but there would be a half hour before she could rescue me. When Marla’s new boyfriend finally did find me, in a stall in the men’s room off the ballroom’s foyer, he cornered me. Literally. He planted his palm on my forehead and pushed the back of my head into the tiled corner, muttering in his impossibly low voice, “You like that, you little faggot?” The chipper keyboard stabs of “Modern Love” wafted in from the ballroom, and cut through the buzzing in my ears. The fact that this new Bowie belonged to everyone complicated my relationship to his body of work but didn't diminish it. “Yeah. It's cool,” I’d say. “But I'm really into his older stuff.” When the Serious Moonlight Tour rolled through Dallas’s Reunion Arena, my girlfriend’s big sister got us tickets. Our seats were in the lower bowl, directly stage left. We watched the show through the rigging, looking at the band in profile. I thrilled with anticipation as each song drew to a close. I imagined him constructing the setlist, testing the audience with new album tracks and deep cuts, rewarding the audience with old favorites and the hits that currently owned the airwaves. I clearly saw what he was doing that night as a job, with logistics and strategies and responsibilities. Toward the end of that night’s concert, during the break between the main body of the set and the encore, the band ran off stage right and Bowie slipped off stage left, descending a few steps down a short flight of stairs behind a massive column of speakers directly in front of us. I watched from 75 feet away as a crewmember handed Bowie a towel and a lit cigarette. Another member of his crew placed a sweaty highball glass on the railing next to him. My idol stood alone for a moment, a towel around the shoulders of his soft yellow suit, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He pressed the icy highball glass to his forehead. Seventeen thousand people chanted his surname, a mantra, an invocation. As the adulation built to a frenzy around him, he took a quiet moment to himself. I watched him, and, in that moment, discovered something about myself: I wanted that job. After that, everything I did was toward that end. I wrote songs constantly, pushing through the terrible ones to get to the merely bad, knowing experience was the only way to improvement. I went to underground rock clubs and made friends with the musicians. I did my first gig at 15 and recorded my first album at 17. On that album, I covered an obscure Bowie tune called “When I'm Five,” a song he'd written in the late 1960s, sung from the perspective of a 4-year-old boy. Despite being a seventh-generation Texan, I sang that song and all the others on that album with a hint of a British accent. I kept going. Through poverty and squalor. Past obstacles and heartbreak. I kept going. I saw my path. I followed my North Star, Bowie. And I wound up making a life out of music. I write songs, and travel the world singing them for people. I stand on the side of the stage mopping my brow while the audience calls me back for an encore. I've been lucky enough to meet and even work with many of my heroes. But I never met Bowie. I have a friend who for years encouraged me to write a letter to David Bowie in the hopes of collaborating with him. My friend could guarantee that someone in his inner circle would deliver the letter, along with a glowing recommendation, to Bowie. I wrote the letter in my head a million times, but never committed it to paper. I think I was afraid to lose him. I love what he gave me, who he is in my life. What if that changed somehow? Rejection, disappointment, who knows? A human can't really be a North Star, can they? I couldn't stomach the possibility of life without David Bowie. And then I did lose him. We all did. But I look up in the sky and I see him. And I hear him in my head. And I always will.

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“Writing about sex may have led me to writing about religion”: Tom Perrotta on theocracies, “The Leftovers” and why “The Scarlet Letter” is a coming-out story

In his foreword to the newly released Penguin Classics edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter," Tom Perrotta admits at the outset that he found the book boring when he read it in high school. Rereading it as an adult, he found it “far stranger and more beautiful than anything I’d read in a long time.” When looked at in the context of other 19th century novels about women who commit sexual sins, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne emerges as “a hero,” Perrotta writes, “a strong woman at peace with her own conscience.” In his own novels, from "Election" to "Little Children" to "The Leftovers," as well as the movie and television projects based on all three, Perrotta has wrestled with many of the same issues that preoccupied Hawthorne: sex, sin, guilt and punishment. In your foreword to this new edition, you write that you “totally misunderstood and woefully underestimated” "The Scarlet Letter" when you first read it in high school. I have a feeling you’re not alone. But why do you think that is? Should we all go back and reread it? Well, yes we should! And I think that it’s both a question of my being in high school, and being in high school, in my case, in the 1970s. I think what happened back in the seventies is that puritan America seemed somehow further away than it does now. I think that it was like, maybe a kind of a high or low point depending on how you look at recent history in terms of the sexual revolution, in the sense that we had liberated ourselves from our religious past. I mean, that’s how it felt to me as a lapsed Catholic kid. You couldn’t relate to that overarching theme of everyone being driven by guilt? I think I was probably too young to see it as a metaphor for other things. I really saw it as a book about the terrible old days where a sexual transgression that seemed completely innocuous to me would ruin this woman’s life, and that a whole society would need to punish her for eternity. I just saw it as sort of, “thank God we’re not there anymore.” And then there’s this scrim of archaic language. It’s one of the things I talk about in the foreword. I don’t think I understood that Hawthorne was writing about events 200 years earlier than when he lived. So he was writing a historical novel. Right, because it’s written in 1850, but it was set in 1650 … Yeah, so he’s writing one kind of historical novel. And I’m reading another kind of historical novel. I couldn’t see that this was Hawthorne looking back, feeling a kind of similar relationship to the past that I did. So yeah, I think it’s those two things: the sexual attitude seemed completely antiquated to me, and the language felt antiquated. I think that I missed the ways in which it was a book with real current significance. And I will just say, in the intervening years I grew up, and I became much more aware of the oppressive weight of religion on even this culture, let alone cultures in other parts of the world. And I had to understand that lots of women are living even a crueler version of Hester’s fate where a sexual transgression will lead not just to shame, but to death. It feels like we’re going backward since the seventies in a lot of very real ways, especially in terms of sexual morality, or just the consequences of getting caught on the wrong side of that equation if you’re a woman. Yeah. And theocracy, which seemed like such a strange and distant idea to me, is in fact a reality in a lot of the world right now. And we’ve had our own struggles with the religious right attempting to impose their version of theocracy on the rest of us. I don’t think that’s happened, but I’ve certainly felt the weight of it in a way I didn’t in the 1970s. In a 2013 New York Times interview, you say "The Scarlet Letter’s" only real competition is "The Great Gatsby," “another short, nearly perfect book that illuminates something essential about the American character.” And I’m curious: If you had to boil it down, what is the essential American thing that "The Scarlet Letter" illuminates? Well, "The Scarlet Letter" to me is almost the flip side of "Gatsby." "Gatsby" is really about the individual freeing himself from community and finding that freedom as the way to wealth and power and happiness. And "The Scarlet Letter" really is about the community weighing down the individual. So you can almost say, “this is where we started, and this is where we got to later.” But they’re both stories about individuals kind of, I wouldn’t say at war with their community, but in a very complex attempt to liberate themselves from their community so that they can live their lives. In the larger sense, they’re both about freedom. The difference between "Gatsby" and "The Scarlet Letter," isn’t it to some extent just a difference of what you need to survive? I mean, in the 1920s you could kind of place yourself outside the community if you had enough money. In the 1650s, how would some woman with a child – I mean, she needs her community for basic survival. Interestingly, Hawthorne does deal with that in the book. He says that she could leave. She could go to another place. She could go back to Europe and kind of blend in somewhere else. Or she could head into the wilderness. He even suggests that she could probably find a place with the native people, which seemed like a pretty interesting thing to propose. But she stays? The narrator speculates that there is something that draws people back to the place where a defining event occurred, that she almost had to live out her story among the people who were defining her. And in fact she does, and she wins that battle over the long term. They come to value her and to forget her past. She outlives the shame, in effect. And she outlives both of the dudes who have tried to ruin her life. It’s kind of a shockingly hopeful ending given how dark the story feels at times.  Yeah, it’s kind of remarkable. In this new foreword I compare it to both "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina." All three of them are 19th century novels of the adulterous woman. It’s just that, of course, Hester’s not a 19th century woman, she’s a 17th century woman. But oddly she’s the one who manages to find a way forward. The other two women are trapped and end up killing themselves. And Hester endures and, in an interesting way, prospers and transforms her shame into a kind of power. One thing that I sort of framed the foreword around, because I was talking about the way the world has changed since the mid-seventies when I read the book, was that I could read it as a sort of a coming-out story. Hester has to wear her letter and everybody knows who she is, and the fact that she doesn’t hide it, I think allows her to… it causes her suffering, it isolates her, but it also gives her strength. And the book is very clear about the strength that comes from the letter. It almost reads like a Puritan superhero. She’s got an A on her chest like Superman has an S on his. And Dimmesdale [the minister who fathered her illegitimate child] is in the closet, and his shame and guilt eat him from the inside. Issues of faith, guilt, fear and freedom come up a lot in "The Leftovers," the HBO series based on your book, which you also write and executive-produce. While it’s not an exact parallel with "The Scarlet Letter," there are so many concerns that feel shared, especially an interest in religion – both the part of religion that attempts to explain the unexplainable, and the part of religion that’s about social control. I know a lot of your earlier work is about ethical and moral questions. But I feel like the really explicit stuff about religion has only occurred in the last two books. Is this a new interest, or an interest you always had? I don’t think I have a personal interest in the sense that – I’m not a religious person, I don’t feel the need for it – but I have felt it as a political force. So think my way into religion, especially in "The Abstinence Teacher," was to think about religion as a political and cultural force, and that led to "The Leftovers." But in a funny way, it’s another thing I talk about in this foreword, when the people at Studio 360 got in touch they were like, oh your work really overlaps with "The Scarlet Letter," and they were talking about "Little Children" and the sex offender. It’s such an interesting thing to think of Hester as a sex offender, because by our standards she’s not a scary person – she’s not endangering children. But of course to her community she was a very dangerous, destabilizing force. I think that writing about sex may have led me to writing about religion! I know you’ve worked on previous projects that went from page to screen before, but this is your first ongoing series. How terrifying is that freedom, to keep pushing the story forward? Is it exhilarating, exciting, frightening? It’s all those things! Last year was really a roller coaster for us, because we had created this new ad hoc family of Kevin and Nora and Jill and the baby. So we could do anything with them. And you know, I’ve never had that experience of just sort of making things up so quickly, not living with it over time. As a novelist, I was a little more terrified of than Damon [Lindelof, the show’s other executive producer], who has worked in TV and is always sort of on the high wire, because you have to start telling a story without really knowing where you’re going to take it. I just noticed that he was much more calm about what he didn’t know than I was. It didn’t comfort me. I think his feeling is just to be patient and the answer will come to you. He’ll wait till the very last second, but the answer does come. He’s been doing it for so long that he understands that’s just part of the process, and I just needed to learn that. So, you didn’t map out the whole arc of season two before you started shooting episodes? No, I think any form of writing you can know something, but you don’t even know what you don’t know sometimes. The story leads you to the next question. Some of those questions you can anticipate far in advance and some of them really are I think built into this process of discovery. There was a lot of discovery and improvisation, which in retrospect is really the exciting thing about it, but when you’re in the throes of it it’s quite frightening. Have you already started working on season three? I’m heading to LA in just a few days. It’s the standard TV configuration. We have about five or six writers on staff, and we go to an office, and we meet every day and talk our way through the story. Once we get to writing the episodes, Damon cowrites every one of those and the rest of us share writing duties. Is it fun? You’ve been writing alone for years. That part has been great. In some ways my writing life was exactly what I dreamed of. I got to go downstairs, eat my breakfast, and then go up to my office and stay there for as long as I felt like; it’s a real luxury, but then it starts feeling lonely. I started to be excited by the idea of collaborating, which I came to through screenwriting projects before, but this has been much more like a job. You know, I have an office, I have a bunch of coworkers. That’s a lot of fun. It also involves the usual human friction, which can be good and bad. But on the whole it’s exactly what I hoped for.In his foreword to the newly released Penguin Classics edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter," Tom Perrotta admits at the outset that he found the book boring when he read it in high school. Rereading it as an adult, he found it “far stranger and more beautiful than anything I’d read in a long time.” When looked at in the context of other 19th century novels about women who commit sexual sins, Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne emerges as “a hero,” Perrotta writes, “a strong woman at peace with her own conscience.” In his own novels, from "Election" to "Little Children" to "The Leftovers," as well as the movie and television projects based on all three, Perrotta has wrestled with many of the same issues that preoccupied Hawthorne: sex, sin, guilt and punishment. In your foreword to this new edition, you write that you “totally misunderstood and woefully underestimated” "The Scarlet Letter" when you first read it in high school. I have a feeling you’re not alone. But why do you think that is? Should we all go back and reread it? Well, yes we should! And I think that it’s both a question of my being in high school, and being in high school, in my case, in the 1970s. I think what happened back in the seventies is that puritan America seemed somehow further away than it does now. I think that it was like, maybe a kind of a high or low point depending on how you look at recent history in terms of the sexual revolution, in the sense that we had liberated ourselves from our religious past. I mean, that’s how it felt to me as a lapsed Catholic kid. You couldn’t relate to that overarching theme of everyone being driven by guilt? I think I was probably too young to see it as a metaphor for other things. I really saw it as a book about the terrible old days where a sexual transgression that seemed completely innocuous to me would ruin this woman’s life, and that a whole society would need to punish her for eternity. I just saw it as sort of, “thank God we’re not there anymore.” And then there’s this scrim of archaic language. It’s one of the things I talk about in the foreword. I don’t think I understood that Hawthorne was writing about events 200 years earlier than when he lived. So he was writing a historical novel. Right, because it’s written in 1850, but it was set in 1650 … Yeah, so he’s writing one kind of historical novel. And I’m reading another kind of historical novel. I couldn’t see that this was Hawthorne looking back, feeling a kind of similar relationship to the past that I did. So yeah, I think it’s those two things: the sexual attitude seemed completely antiquated to me, and the language felt antiquated. I think that I missed the ways in which it was a book with real current significance. And I will just say, in the intervening years I grew up, and I became much more aware of the oppressive weight of religion on even this culture, let alone cultures in other parts of the world. And I had to understand that lots of women are living even a crueler version of Hester’s fate where a sexual transgression will lead not just to shame, but to death. It feels like we’re going backward since the seventies in a lot of very real ways, especially in terms of sexual morality, or just the consequences of getting caught on the wrong side of that equation if you’re a woman. Yeah. And theocracy, which seemed like such a strange and distant idea to me, is in fact a reality in a lot of the world right now. And we’ve had our own struggles with the religious right attempting to impose their version of theocracy on the rest of us. I don’t think that’s happened, but I’ve certainly felt the weight of it in a way I didn’t in the 1970s. In a 2013 New York Times interview, you say "The Scarlet Letter’s" only real competition is "The Great Gatsby," “another short, nearly perfect book that illuminates something essential about the American character.” And I’m curious: If you had to boil it down, what is the essential American thing that "The Scarlet Letter" illuminates? Well, "The Scarlet Letter" to me is almost the flip side of "Gatsby." "Gatsby" is really about the individual freeing himself from community and finding that freedom as the way to wealth and power and happiness. And "The Scarlet Letter" really is about the community weighing down the individual. So you can almost say, “this is where we started, and this is where we got to later.” But they’re both stories about individuals kind of, I wouldn’t say at war with their community, but in a very complex attempt to liberate themselves from their community so that they can live their lives. In the larger sense, they’re both about freedom. The difference between "Gatsby" and "The Scarlet Letter," isn’t it to some extent just a difference of what you need to survive? I mean, in the 1920s you could kind of place yourself outside the community if you had enough money. In the 1650s, how would some woman with a child – I mean, she needs her community for basic survival. Interestingly, Hawthorne does deal with that in the book. He says that she could leave. She could go to another place. She could go back to Europe and kind of blend in somewhere else. Or she could head into the wilderness. He even suggests that she could probably find a place with the native people, which seemed like a pretty interesting thing to propose. But she stays? The narrator speculates that there is something that draws people back to the place where a defining event occurred, that she almost had to live out her story among the people who were defining her. And in fact she does, and she wins that battle over the long term. They come to value her and to forget her past. She outlives the shame, in effect. And she outlives both of the dudes who have tried to ruin her life. It’s kind of a shockingly hopeful ending given how dark the story feels at times.  Yeah, it’s kind of remarkable. In this new foreword I compare it to both "Madame Bovary" and "Anna Karenina." All three of them are 19th century novels of the adulterous woman. It’s just that, of course, Hester’s not a 19th century woman, she’s a 17th century woman. But oddly she’s the one who manages to find a way forward. The other two women are trapped and end up killing themselves. And Hester endures and, in an interesting way, prospers and transforms her shame into a kind of power. One thing that I sort of framed the foreword around, because I was talking about the way the world has changed since the mid-seventies when I read the book, was that I could read it as a sort of a coming-out story. Hester has to wear her letter and everybody knows who she is, and the fact that she doesn’t hide it, I think allows her to… it causes her suffering, it isolates her, but it also gives her strength. And the book is very clear about the strength that comes from the letter. It almost reads like a Puritan superhero. She’s got an A on her chest like Superman has an S on his. And Dimmesdale [the minister who fathered her illegitimate child] is in the closet, and his shame and guilt eat him from the inside. Issues of faith, guilt, fear and freedom come up a lot in "The Leftovers," the HBO series based on your book, which you also write and executive-produce. While it’s not an exact parallel with "The Scarlet Letter," there are so many concerns that feel shared, especially an interest in religion – both the part of religion that attempts to explain the unexplainable, and the part of religion that’s about social control. I know a lot of your earlier work is about ethical and moral questions. But I feel like the really explicit stuff about religion has only occurred in the last two books. Is this a new interest, or an interest you always had? I don’t think I have a personal interest in the sense that – I’m not a religious person, I don’t feel the need for it – but I have felt it as a political force. So think my way into religion, especially in "The Abstinence Teacher," was to think about religion as a political and cultural force, and that led to "The Leftovers." But in a funny way, it’s another thing I talk about in this foreword, when the people at Studio 360 got in touch they were like, oh your work really overlaps with "The Scarlet Letter," and they were talking about "Little Children" and the sex offender. It’s such an interesting thing to think of Hester as a sex offender, because by our standards she’s not a scary person – she’s not endangering children. But of course to her community she was a very dangerous, destabilizing force. I think that writing about sex may have led me to writing about religion! I know you’ve worked on previous projects that went from page to screen before, but this is your first ongoing series. How terrifying is that freedom, to keep pushing the story forward? Is it exhilarating, exciting, frightening? It’s all those things! Last year was really a roller coaster for us, because we had created this new ad hoc family of Kevin and Nora and Jill and the baby. So we could do anything with them. And you know, I’ve never had that experience of just sort of making things up so quickly, not living with it over time. As a novelist, I was a little more terrified of than Damon [Lindelof, the show’s other executive producer], who has worked in TV and is always sort of on the high wire, because you have to start telling a story without really knowing where you’re going to take it. I just noticed that he was much more calm about what he didn’t know than I was. It didn’t comfort me. I think his feeling is just to be patient and the answer will come to you. He’ll wait till the very last second, but the answer does come. He’s been doing it for so long that he understands that’s just part of the process, and I just needed to learn that. So, you didn’t map out the whole arc of season two before you started shooting episodes? No, I think any form of writing you can know something, but you don’t even know what you don’t know sometimes. The story leads you to the next question. Some of those questions you can anticipate far in advance and some of them really are I think built into this process of discovery. There was a lot of discovery and improvisation, which in retrospect is really the exciting thing about it, but when you’re in the throes of it it’s quite frightening. Have you already started working on season three? I’m heading to LA in just a few days. It’s the standard TV configuration. We have about five or six writers on staff, and we go to an office, and we meet every day and talk our way through the story. Once we get to writing the episodes, Damon cowrites every one of those and the rest of us share writing duties. Is it fun? You’ve been writing alone for years. That part has been great. In some ways my writing life was exactly what I dreamed of. I got to go downstairs, eat my breakfast, and then go up to my office and stay there for as long as I felt like; it’s a real luxury, but then it starts feeling lonely. I started to be excited by the idea of collaborating, which I came to through screenwriting projects before, but this has been much more like a job. You know, I have an office, I have a bunch of coworkers. That’s a lot of fun. It also involves the usual human friction, which can be good and bad. But on the whole it’s exactly what I hoped for.

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HBO’s upscale “Sesame Street”: Why Elmo and Grover in the land of “Girls” and “Game of Thrones” makes perfect sense

The poster for the 46th season of “Sesame Street,” premiering tomorrow, reads—in the portentous words used by a thousand headlines—“Brought to you by the letters HBO.” Big Bird is holding up the “B,” of course, while Cookie Monster is taking a bite out of the “O.” Elmo is enthusiastically holding up the “H” with a fitting hug. The poster showcases five of the six characters that are the pared-down cast of the revamped “Sesame Street”—Abby Cadabby, Grover and Oscar the Grouch round out the regular cast. (Oscar, naturally, couldn’t be convinced into a photo shoot, and is instead replaced with regular guest Count von Count, who comes in every episode to introduce the number of the day.) The winsomeness of the poster—paired with “Sesame Street’s" signature knowing wink to its adult audience—is almost enough to sweeten what feels like a bitter and sad deal for fans of that amorphous thing called the public good. Following increasing financial woes, “Sesame Street’s" production company, the award-winning Sesame Workshop (previously called the Children’s Television Workshop) announced this summer that it had inked a deal with premium (and, it should be said, adult) cable network HBO for a five-year deal sponsoring “Sesame Street.” Dwindling DVD sales hit “Sesame Street’s" revenue stream hard, meaning that the ever-resourceful crew behind the show—usually tasked with finding new ways to engage and educate 2- to 5-year-olds—instead had to seek out an entirely new funding model. Under the deal with HBO, “Sesame Street” will air the new episodes of its 46th season exclusively on the premium network until September 2016, at which point PBS member stations will start carrying it for free. If there was ever a single, dry, media business story that encapsulated America’s own anxiety about the tension between the public and private sectors, conservative and liberal values, the 1 percent and the other 99, the past and the future—this is it. In Forbes, Charles Bramesco questioned the moral authority of the private sector and lamented the lack of funding for National Endowment for the Arts; at the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby applauded “Sesame Street’s" move to HBO as the death knell of public television. The president of the Parents Television Council told the New York Times:

"Kids are getting squeezed in the middle… In order to watch original episodes of the most iconic children’s program in television history, parents are now forced to fork over about $180 per year and subscribe to the most sexually explicit, most graphically violent television network in America. I can’t imagine a greater juxtaposition in television than this."

The discussion around “peak TV” and the rise of “disruptive,” “nontraditional” viewing patterns sounds esoteric and interesting until it turns into descriptors for why a 46-year-old children’s show—one that has reached out to one of the most vulnerable populations in America, lower-income children—is now prevented from living out its mission. Change comes at the expense of the most vulnerable, and in this situation, it feels like “Sesame Street” is being taken away from the audience that needs it most. This is an ideological proving ground, one that takes a beloved artifact of liberal ideals and subjects it to the unreliable creative impulses of the free market. We can stomach Adam Sandler films and gratuitous female nudity, up to a point, but when it comes to our children—and worse, the neediest children—surely, surely, the free market is not a substitute for values, education, imagination, and hope. It’s hard not to feel this, watching the first two episodes of “Sesame Street” that were released to critics. The opening credits have been reworked to be vivid and high-definition in a way that is overwhelming to my ancient eyes. Abby Cadabby, a new Muppet to me (she joined the cast in 2006), is an unheard-of interloper; Elmo, who is now a fixture of “Sesame Street,” is to my mind still a recent upstart. Computer graphics add to Abby’s magic spells and Elmo’s fantasies, and every 10 minutes, the characters exhort the viewer to get up and move, in what is, I presume, a strong push against childhood obesity. But the truth is, I have not watched “Sesame Street” in a very long time. James Poniewozik, in his excellent review, expressed remorse at the bygone days of “Sesame Street”—but observes that to most kids, there’s likely no discernible difference at all between “Sesame Street” on HBO and the same show on PBS. Sesame Workshop had already been planning to make many of the formatting changes unveiled on HBO, following the ever-evolving habits of American kids; adult viewers might remember offbeat grime with nostalgia, but “Sesame Street” hasn’t looked like that for years. And indeed, even the nine-month waiting period for new episodes hardly matters to preschoolers, who a) are more than happy to watch things on repeat, ad nauseum and b) might even learn more from repeat viewings than new episodes. Furthermore, as Poniewozik observes drily: “It’s not as though scientists are discovering new numbers and letters.” Furthermore, it’s not exactly as if “Sesame Street” was fully publicly funded before. As is related by Jessica Goldstein at ThinkProgress, before the HBO deal, PBS was only funding 10 percent of “Sesame Street’s" production costs—despite being synonymous with the brand of “Sesame Street,” especially in political debates, such as that famous moment in 2012 when Mitt Romney slammed Big Bird, and the defunding push of the Reagan years. HBO was actually the first suitor to recognize how important it was to maintain the show’s presence on PBS. Other networks probably wanted exclusivity; that is, after all, what networks do. Now HBO is fully funding the show’s rumored $20 million per year budget—a budget with millions of dollars of built-in educational research on child development that has been proven, multiple times, to be nearly as beneficial as preschool. And PBS will still manage distribution on its end, much as it did before, to its approximately 350 member stations. The only difference is nine months—nine months, and a fully funded “Sesame Street.” As Dr. Michael Rich, the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and a member of PBS Kids Next Generation Advisory Board, told Goldstein: “The reality is, I think the purity of Sesame Street is not the revenue streams going to or from it so much as it is the mission-driven people who create it.” Other “Sesame Street” advocates express similar sentiments. Though something essential about the identity of “Sesame Street” has been shelved, it’s also part of a recognizable evolution that many creative entities have gone through: the move to corporate sponsorship. Once I got used to the HBO format—and entered into a delightful sequence where Tracee Ellis Ross tries to go to Bed with her Blanket but is interrupted by a Bear, a Basketball, a Beaver and Big Bird—it became more clear to me: “Sesame Street” is still “Sesame Street;” it's the rest of the world that has changed. I wonder if HBO won’t change even more. After all, the premium network skews liberal and intellectual because its subscribers skew that way; this is a network that dominates awards and media coverage, not through ratings victories but through incisive conversation-creation. (And also sometimes ratings.) HBO can incorporate non-exclusivity and a relationship with PBS into its balance sheet, because HBO knows its subscriber base very well; being sympathetic to public television is not about doing the right thing, in this case, but about good business. PBS is part of “Sesame Street’s" brand, just as the show is part of the network’s brand; HBO’s investment wouldn’t be worth as much if the public-interest portion of “Sesame Street’s" mission was divorced from the Muppets and the music. There is no network that is better at branding, acquisition and staying authentic to its subscribers than HBO, and I say that with mingled respect and scorn. It’s very good pandering, and I just happen to be their perfect target. The problem is that HBO could change its mind, or change its mission, for so many different reasons. I’d like to think that an interest in art and intellectualism goes hand in hand with the public good, but maybe it doesn’t. If America does transform into a land where Trump is our president-dictator and every person of color is deported back to their great-grandparents' place of birth, maybe HBO spends less money on projects like “The Wire” and “The Jinx” and devotes its attentions to “Another Glorious Day in Trump’s America,” narrated by Sean Penn. Subscriber rates and programming missions could go in any number of ways, dictated by that invisible hand that the economists are always talking about. Relying on a corporation’s altruism is a doomed strategy; maybe that’s why Sesame Workshop cautiously signed on to just a five-year partnership. On the other hand, HBO probably has more invested in America continuing to be a place with a liberal elite that feels bad about themselves than in Trump’s America; to be frank, HBO appears to have more enthusiasm for maintaining liberal values and the middle class than the majority of politicians in Washington. I’d love for “Sesame Street” to be a publicly funded institution. But in this world, the world we live in, it’s probably safer in the branded hands of HBO.

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