Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 986
October 8, 2015
Black and Hispanic People Have Longer Hospital Wait Times in America Than Whites
A short study released Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine found that minorities wait, on average, 25% longer to obtain medical care than do whites. The period waiting for care, or “clinic time” for White americans was about 80 minutes. For African-Americans it was 99, and for hispanics it was 105.
The reasons for this disparity and varied and not entirely clear. Face-to-face time with doctors is roughly even across race lines so the disparity may be caused be a number of factors, many of them institutional in nature. According to The Post:
The data suggest that minorities are spending more time interacting with the medical system in other ways: by waiting, or by engaging with the administrative parts of medicine.
Black and Hispanic people also spent nearly 10 minutes longer traveling to their appointments, which added to the time cost of going to the doctor. The authors and an accompanying editorial acknowledge that some of the difference may be accounted for because people are seeking care in different kinds of clinics.
But bias of the hospital staff could also be a factor, as The Post notes. Alexander Green, associate director of the disparities solution center at Massachusetts General Hospital, said he had administered a study a few years ago that showed doctors did sometimes have unconscious (or conscious) biases that affected patient care - from how aggressively they treated them to how hostile they interacted with the patient.
It logicaly follows that other hospital adminstrators would exhibit similar biases, adding minutes to the avergage person of color's wait time. How much of the gap is specifically comprised of these forms of interpersonal racism is unknown, but similar studies on unconscious racial bias suggest it's likely non-trivial.
A short study released Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine found that minorities wait, on average, 25% longer to obtain medical care than do whites. The period waiting for care, or “clinic time” for White americans was about 80 minutes. For African-Americans it was 99, and for hispanics it was 105.
The reasons for this disparity and varied and not entirely clear. Face-to-face time with doctors is roughly even across race lines so the disparity may be caused be a number of factors, many of them institutional in nature. According to The Post:
The data suggest that minorities are spending more time interacting with the medical system in other ways: by waiting, or by engaging with the administrative parts of medicine.
Black and Hispanic people also spent nearly 10 minutes longer traveling to their appointments, which added to the time cost of going to the doctor. The authors and an accompanying editorial acknowledge that some of the difference may be accounted for because people are seeking care in different kinds of clinics.
But bias of the hospital staff could also be a factor, as The Post notes. Alexander Green, associate director of the disparities solution center at Massachusetts General Hospital, said he had administered a study a few years ago that showed doctors did sometimes have unconscious (or conscious) biases that affected patient care - from how aggressively they treated them to how hostile they interacted with the patient.
It logicaly follows that other hospital adminstrators would exhibit similar biases, adding minutes to the avergage person of color's wait time. How much of the gap is specifically comprised of these forms of interpersonal racism is unknown, but similar studies on unconscious racial bias suggest it's likely non-trivial.
“If we came out now, we wouldn’t have a chance in hell”: Shirley Manson looks back at 20 years of Garbage
When Garbage’s “Vow” hit the airwaves in early 1995, the dizzying, electronic- and distortion-warped single sounded like nothing else out there at the time. Lyrically, its complexity was an especially refreshing change of pace: “Vow” explored the dichotomy between a burning desire to exact revenge on a spurned lover—while still trying to shake remnants of intense physical and emotional attraction. As it turns out, unorthodoxy and complexity were also intrinsic to Garbage’s genesis. The Madison, Wisconsin-based group featured Butch Vig, who was then fresh off producing seminal albums by Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth; Vig’s Smart Studios co-founder, Steve Marker; and Vig’s former bandmate, Duke Erikson. At the forefront was a fiery Scotswoman, Shirley Manson, who was most recently in the band Angelfish. Incredibly, Manson actually agreed to join Garbage before she had even collaborated with the other band members. That leap of faith paid off in a big way, however. The group’s 1995 self-titled debut album—an aggressive, riotous amalgamation of hip-hop, electronic music, dance music and guitar-based rock & roll—catapulted Garbage into alt-rock’s upper echelons almost immediately. Not only did “Vow” become a hit, but so did the slinky “Queer,” a contradiction-celebrating “Only Happy When It Rains” and the glassy, dance-oriented “Stupid Girl.” A remastered version of the album, released October 2, only highlights how futuristic “Garbage,” sounded, especially in how tenaciously it tackled feminism, sexuality, self-perception and self-empowerment. Manson checked in from Edinburgh, Scotland, just before midnight her time, a week before rehearsals kicked off for the band’s “20 Years Queer Tour,” which starts Tuesday in San Diego. She reminisced about her fateful decision to join Garbage and about recording the album, what made the unexpected band gel, and the impact the group’s had on her life and popular culture—both then and now. I saw in another interview that you guys were looking for archival material for this release, and were having trouble trying to find it. Oh yeah, just our record labels over the years have basically lost all our content, and nobody really knows where anything is. We did full-camera shoots of gigs and radio performances and TV shows and so on and so forth. It’s just been all lost to the ages, for the most part, along with, artwork, raw materials—you name it. We were originally having a flip out because we couldn’t even find the analog tapes of the first record, and nobody really knew where they were either. [Laughs.] So, you know, welcome to the music industry: They demand that they own all your material and then they just shove it in a cupboard somewhere and forget all about it. It’s frustrating. You finally did discover the tapes. Where did you end up finding them? We did. We found them in a mixture of places. Some of them were in London; some of them were at Smart [Studios] in Madison; and some of them were in Los Angeles. Eventually, after a lot of work on our management’s part and my husband’s, our studio engineer, we tracked everything down. But it took months and months and months of detective work, and it was very frustrating and not for the faint of heart [Laughs.] I was going to say, that’s like the worst scavenger hunt ever. It’s really maddening, though, you know, when you… I mean, I have enough problems with the way the music industry is run at the best times, but when you realize that a business is being run basically by [people] that squander all their investments, it’s bemusing, you know? It’s just ridiculous. Considering that what you guys are making is art, basically, and it’s treated so carelessly, it’s a very odd juxtaposition. It’s treated with contempt, yeah. So, you know, we all got over that that, but it does make me want to send a red alert to all bands, and say, “Be careful with your content.” But then my husband rushed to remind me that that’s not such an issue for people anymore, because it’s all digitally in a library now, whereas back then it was all physical content. So, you know, now everything’s on a computer database somewhere, but our stuff, our shit, is everywhere. [Laughs.] So when you finally did get everything back, what were your takeaways hearing the songs again fresh 20 years later? I was really pleasantly surprised at how I think it still sounds pretty contemporary. You know, I think you could play it on modern radio, and it would still stand out, so I was really proud of that fact. I’m heartened by it. I’m proud of the record; I think it’s an interesting debut. Back then, the music sounded very futuristic to me. Listening to it now, it still feels like that—like it’s a far-off, light years away-type thing. I do think, looking back— and I cannot take any credit for this, because really this came from the band and specifically Butch—I feel like they had a grasp on [where music] was gonna go. They understood that to make a record that could stand up on its own legs, and compete with the kind of records that Butch had been making, they had to make a record that was very different from the records Butch was famous for producing. And in doing so, I think they created kind of a modern archetype almost for contemporary music. You know, music changed then— like, all of a sudden it was fine to steal from all different types of genres and marriage them all together in a melting pot. I think that’s what you mean by futurism, you know. It was a very forward-thinking record. I think you could listen to it today and not necessarily think it sounds that edgy, because we’re all used to hearing records now that are a melting pot like that one was. But at the time, that had not really been done before, you know? I think people forget that. It’s like that was unacceptable. [Laughs.] I think people were very suspicious of us when we first came out with that record, because we were breaking rules that people just did not approve of; they didn’t approve of alt-rock taking elements of pop music and hip-hop and industrial and merging them all together. That was considered really uncool. But we felt that’s what made it unique and exciting, because it hadn’t been done before. People forget just how dominant guitars were in alternative rock in 1995. Like, keyboards were totally out of fashion. In the late ‘90s, there were people like The Chemical Brothers and, you know, even David Bowie—his stuff did get a lot more electronic and merged genres a lot more. But it wasn’t very common when Garbage started. No, no, it wasn’t. And it was also frowned upon. You know, people were expected to stay inside their little boxes. People—particularly music journalists— were very keen on having labels, and God forbid that you break out of your box, you know. I think it made people quite uncomfortable. We definitely encountered a lot of cynicism and suspicions… A lot of people accused us of being fake and not real—not for real. It was interesting how we were treated at first, obviously by our detractors. When you first met everyone in the band, it wasn’t necessarily an instant creative connection. What made you keep plugging away and making things work? Was it kind of the sense that you guys were onto something different? What spurred you on? We got a kick out of one another. We really liked one another, and we laughed a lot, and we had fun making music together. And I think that’s what made us keep coming back to try and make it work. In the process of doing that, we just, by default, became a band. You know, we started to think the same way we started to just find a rhythm together. We were very fortunate. We really did find a chemistry together. [And] for all our foibles and all our little arguments and squabbles, we still have this strange chemistry when we’re all together that really has endured and works for us. It’s special. I wouldn’t recommend anybody else to try and, you know, form a band across the Atlantic with people you’ve never met before, but in our case we really were fortunate. Yeah, I mean, you think about that, that’s such a leap of faith. It’s weird! It’s like preposterous. It is preposterous, that’s such a great word. It was an act of great stupidity, actually. [Laughs.] It paid off! [Laughs.] Yeah, it paid off but, you know, on paper it just looks— like you said— preposterous. You have all three older men living in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, and a girl, a strange creature, from Edinburgh, Scotland— we couldn’t have been more different. I mean, we still are very different human beings, but somehow we enjoy each other. It’s cool. What do you recall most now about making the record? You were in kind of the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. I imagine it was a little bit of fish out of water. I was such a freak. I mean, I really was. I didn’t fit in at all. I couldn’t drive, which you being American will understand how difficult that is when you’re living in a Midwestern town that doesn’t have any real significant form of public transport. I had zero money— I mean, I really had zero money, so I couldn’t afford cabs, I had to walk everywhere, and it was either, you know, 100 degrees or it was -20 degrees. And so I really suffered making that record on a physical level. [Laughs.] I associate that first record with gross discomfort physically and, you know, mentally, because I felt very uncomfortable and I didn’t know the band. I mean, I got along with them, but I didn’t know them. I had no friends, no finances, no transport, and I was really very cut off from home because I couldn’t afford to call home, and I barely ate unless I was in the studio with the band. [Laughs.] I associate it with great discomfort but, you know, it was all part of the crazy ride of it. And I’m so happy that I suffered, because it makes it so much more rewarding when things start going right. To me, I’ve always thought the album drew its power from espousing the idea that nonconformity was empowering. So when you say these things, it makes sense, then, why a lot of the themes evolved the way they did. [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, I guess. [reflective pause] It was just the best we could do at the time, and now, looking back, it was enough. And when you’re an unproven artist, you don’t know if what you’re doing is going to have any value whatsoever. You can just follow your own muse, and hope that other people might be as interested in it as you are. [Laughs.] That’s true. It seems like there might not be as much pressure then, too, because there was no real precedent as a band. I mean, obviously people knew Butch’s work as a producer, but as a band, it was an unproven quantity. Yeah. I mean, I felt no pressure whatsoever that first record. That was all on Butch, you know? And I know for a fact he was stressed, like, beyond my wildest imaginings, you know, because he had a lot to lose. He had a reputation at stake, so I think he took that first record to heart and worked really hard on it and drove himself into the ground. He hardly ever slept; he was constantly at the studio. It was pretty intense. How did kind of the making the album really stretch you as a musician and a person? Well, you know, I was writing for the first time in my life. When they invited me to join the band they said, “You know, we expect you to be a full quarter member of this band. You write, don’t you?” And I instinctively knew that somehow they needed and wanted me to write, so I said, “Yeah, I write! Of course I do!” [Laughs loudly.] And I had never written a word in my life or really ever had the confidence to contribute musically to any recordings I’ve ever been involved in. You know, at the time I could play piano, and I had been a singer in a band and I’d sung with choirs, and I’d played in orchestras, but I had never, ever contributed an idea in any sense whatsoever beyond some backing vocals. I was thrown into a creative melting pot, and I just had to fucking get it together. I just had to; I had no other choice. So I was lucky in that regard: I was just sort of forced into it without having to think about it too much. Sometimes, though, that’s good, because if you overthink things — I mean, as a writer I know I have this problem. I’ll be staring at a blank document overthinking everything, and nothing will happen. You just let yourself go, and that’s when creativity can actually flow. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. If things had turned out any other way, I probably would never, ever be a writer, never ever write a song in my life. By default I’ve been forced into the role, and as such, I was smart enough to understand that this is an incredible opportunity in my life, and I better get my shit together, and I tried, you know? I wanted to try. I was hungry, I wanted a future; I needed a job. I literally had no future when they approached me at all. Well, and then the record took off. I mean, I remember seeing the video for “Vow,” and it was one of those things that was just really aggressive, and it just really grabbed your attention right away. It seemed like that was the start of everything. So what was that like for you, then, I guess, the rocket ship of attention and everything right away? I mean, it was thrilling at first, and then it became incredibly intense and mind-blowing. But you’re right—I mean, “Vow” was the first track that blew up for us, and it created and garnered speed so fast it was shocking. I mean, even our record label was caught off guard. We hadn’t even finished the album by the time there was a little sort of storm about us in the U.K., and garnering force in Australia and in North America all at once. So it was crazy and exciting and exhilarating. Had you guys made this record as a new band in 2015, do you think that it would’ve been received as warmly or would you guys have been able to release it with so little interference? I mean, as a band, if we came out now, we wouldn’t have a chance in hell. We’d been saying this for the last, God, ten years. There’s no way we would’ve been able to enjoy that level of mainstream exposure for an alternative band. It hadn’t happened before—alternative music had never been in the mainstream up until that point of our first record, not really. I mean, there were other bands that enjoyed that explosion with us, but we were all part of a wave of alt-rock being the mainstream musical choice of radio, TV, media. And it hasn’t really been like that since. Yes, there’s successful alternative bands, but they’re not managing to just completely overtake mainstream media. That is true. I mean, it seems like because perhaps there are so many bands, it’s hard to get to the same level of success, because there’s so many other people competing for that same level of success. Yeah, where there’s so much noise and so much access and a different idea every day, and so to maintain any kind of momentum is really difficult for any band. And there’s this obsession by the public to be on top of the brightest, newest, shiniest penny—and, of course, there’s brand new shiny pennies every 30 seconds on the internet. So it’s very hard to garner a lot of following beyond your first record. I mean, there’s always that explosion of a new artist, and they’ll enjoy that crazy run, but then to try and follow that up with a second or a third record is practically unheard of at this point, particularly in alternative rock. As a fan, it’s really fatiguing because it’s hard to keep up with bands you like and that there just is so much to follow. It’s physically difficult. It is, it’s truly exhausting. I mean, I used to really know so much about contemporary music, because I was an avid reader of the music press and I really knew my shit. And now it’s too much. I’m just overwhelmed by it. I don’t even see a jumping in point without spending hours and hours and hours of my day trying to figure it all out and give everything a listen. It’s just impossible. I don’t have the time anymore, so it’s just overwhelming. I feel the same way. It’s kind of like it’s paralysis. I don’t even know where to begin. [Laughs.] I mean, obviously you ask people that you meet. I’m always asking everybody, “What are you listening to? What excites you?” It’s not that I don’t discover new music, but I certainly don’t have that feeling that I used to have of really knowing what is going on in general, you know. It’s just everything is so heavy with noise. Saturated, you know. Saturation point. And it’s more of a surface relationship to music, I guess at least personally. I feel like you used to have a lot more of a personal relationship to an artist or a band and their music. I find that’s harder to cultivate now, which is disappointing to me. Well, it’s interesting— yeah, I think you’re right. We all made deep connections. We were all looking for contact and connections in music, I think, and now it’s become a strange sort of way to define our lifestyles, and I’m not sure people even have the time to make a connection in the same way as we did. You know, everything moves so fast right now. And I’m sure that will change and this is just how things are right now, but everybody’s moving so fast and ripping through information on their phones and watching movies on their telephones on their way to work and reading books and, you know, between working out and going to work and feeding the children or going on a date or, you know, blah blah blah. It’s just everyone’s doing so much all the time. It’s getting manic! [Laughs.] It is. For me, I feel like someone’s grabbing my arms and legs and pulling in different directions, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean it’s super intense, isn’t it? And well, I certainly was created pre-internet so, of course, it’s gonna be more peculiar, more intense for someone like myself, because that’s just— the speed at which everything moves now is still quite foreign to me. But I think it’s intense for— you know, I’ve watched some of my friends’ kids and they seem super stressed, too. [Laughs.] I don’t know why I laugh; it’s not funny. But there’s also great things that come from it, too. I mean, I love the internet, too. There’s so many things I love about it, so… I think it’s just like anything. There’s great things that come from it, and there’s some horror as well, and that’s evolution. That’s how things change and move forward, and we all have to adapt or die. To wrap up then: Twenty years out, where do you see Garbage’s legacy in popular culture, in music or really anywhere? You know, I don’t really think too much in terms of legacy, per se. I mean, there’s so many other artists out there who are genius musicians and incredible singers. None of us in Garbage are particularly amazing at what we do, but we’ve managed to garner our forces to make interesting, eclectic-sounding records that are very unique. You know, you hear one of our records— we don’t sound like anybody else out there. And that, I think, is an achievement—to sound different from literally of millions of bands that the world has been exposed to, I think that’s kind of crazy and cool. [Laughs.] But I do feel in some ways there is a legacy connected to our first record, this debut record, and I wish I could take credit for it, but I really can’t. I had a role in it, a small part in it, I definitely think it would’ve turned out very different had I not been involved, but what I think is our first record’s greatest achievement is it broke down a lot of barriers. And I think that has to be laid at Butch’s feet. He really did create an archetype for a contemporary record and showed the world that you can break down all the boxes, all the cliques and all the genres, and we can make interesting, fresh-sounding music by breaking down the walls. Butch is a very modest man and he never really talks about himself in any grandiose terms. He’s very humble. But I do think he did something quite extraordinary, as it turns out. I’ve been lucky enough to be along on that ride with him and the rest of the band, too.When Garbage’s “Vow” hit the airwaves in early 1995, the dizzying, electronic- and distortion-warped single sounded like nothing else out there at the time. Lyrically, its complexity was an especially refreshing change of pace: “Vow” explored the dichotomy between a burning desire to exact revenge on a spurned lover—while still trying to shake remnants of intense physical and emotional attraction. As it turns out, unorthodoxy and complexity were also intrinsic to Garbage’s genesis. The Madison, Wisconsin-based group featured Butch Vig, who was then fresh off producing seminal albums by Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth; Vig’s Smart Studios co-founder, Steve Marker; and Vig’s former bandmate, Duke Erikson. At the forefront was a fiery Scotswoman, Shirley Manson, who was most recently in the band Angelfish. Incredibly, Manson actually agreed to join Garbage before she had even collaborated with the other band members. That leap of faith paid off in a big way, however. The group’s 1995 self-titled debut album—an aggressive, riotous amalgamation of hip-hop, electronic music, dance music and guitar-based rock & roll—catapulted Garbage into alt-rock’s upper echelons almost immediately. Not only did “Vow” become a hit, but so did the slinky “Queer,” a contradiction-celebrating “Only Happy When It Rains” and the glassy, dance-oriented “Stupid Girl.” A remastered version of the album, released October 2, only highlights how futuristic “Garbage,” sounded, especially in how tenaciously it tackled feminism, sexuality, self-perception and self-empowerment. Manson checked in from Edinburgh, Scotland, just before midnight her time, a week before rehearsals kicked off for the band’s “20 Years Queer Tour,” which starts Tuesday in San Diego. She reminisced about her fateful decision to join Garbage and about recording the album, what made the unexpected band gel, and the impact the group’s had on her life and popular culture—both then and now. I saw in another interview that you guys were looking for archival material for this release, and were having trouble trying to find it. Oh yeah, just our record labels over the years have basically lost all our content, and nobody really knows where anything is. We did full-camera shoots of gigs and radio performances and TV shows and so on and so forth. It’s just been all lost to the ages, for the most part, along with, artwork, raw materials—you name it. We were originally having a flip out because we couldn’t even find the analog tapes of the first record, and nobody really knew where they were either. [Laughs.] So, you know, welcome to the music industry: They demand that they own all your material and then they just shove it in a cupboard somewhere and forget all about it. It’s frustrating. You finally did discover the tapes. Where did you end up finding them? We did. We found them in a mixture of places. Some of them were in London; some of them were at Smart [Studios] in Madison; and some of them were in Los Angeles. Eventually, after a lot of work on our management’s part and my husband’s, our studio engineer, we tracked everything down. But it took months and months and months of detective work, and it was very frustrating and not for the faint of heart [Laughs.] I was going to say, that’s like the worst scavenger hunt ever. It’s really maddening, though, you know, when you… I mean, I have enough problems with the way the music industry is run at the best times, but when you realize that a business is being run basically by [people] that squander all their investments, it’s bemusing, you know? It’s just ridiculous. Considering that what you guys are making is art, basically, and it’s treated so carelessly, it’s a very odd juxtaposition. It’s treated with contempt, yeah. So, you know, we all got over that that, but it does make me want to send a red alert to all bands, and say, “Be careful with your content.” But then my husband rushed to remind me that that’s not such an issue for people anymore, because it’s all digitally in a library now, whereas back then it was all physical content. So, you know, now everything’s on a computer database somewhere, but our stuff, our shit, is everywhere. [Laughs.] So when you finally did get everything back, what were your takeaways hearing the songs again fresh 20 years later? I was really pleasantly surprised at how I think it still sounds pretty contemporary. You know, I think you could play it on modern radio, and it would still stand out, so I was really proud of that fact. I’m heartened by it. I’m proud of the record; I think it’s an interesting debut. Back then, the music sounded very futuristic to me. Listening to it now, it still feels like that—like it’s a far-off, light years away-type thing. I do think, looking back— and I cannot take any credit for this, because really this came from the band and specifically Butch—I feel like they had a grasp on [where music] was gonna go. They understood that to make a record that could stand up on its own legs, and compete with the kind of records that Butch had been making, they had to make a record that was very different from the records Butch was famous for producing. And in doing so, I think they created kind of a modern archetype almost for contemporary music. You know, music changed then— like, all of a sudden it was fine to steal from all different types of genres and marriage them all together in a melting pot. I think that’s what you mean by futurism, you know. It was a very forward-thinking record. I think you could listen to it today and not necessarily think it sounds that edgy, because we’re all used to hearing records now that are a melting pot like that one was. But at the time, that had not really been done before, you know? I think people forget that. It’s like that was unacceptable. [Laughs.] I think people were very suspicious of us when we first came out with that record, because we were breaking rules that people just did not approve of; they didn’t approve of alt-rock taking elements of pop music and hip-hop and industrial and merging them all together. That was considered really uncool. But we felt that’s what made it unique and exciting, because it hadn’t been done before. People forget just how dominant guitars were in alternative rock in 1995. Like, keyboards were totally out of fashion. In the late ‘90s, there were people like The Chemical Brothers and, you know, even David Bowie—his stuff did get a lot more electronic and merged genres a lot more. But it wasn’t very common when Garbage started. No, no, it wasn’t. And it was also frowned upon. You know, people were expected to stay inside their little boxes. People—particularly music journalists— were very keen on having labels, and God forbid that you break out of your box, you know. I think it made people quite uncomfortable. We definitely encountered a lot of cynicism and suspicions… A lot of people accused us of being fake and not real—not for real. It was interesting how we were treated at first, obviously by our detractors. When you first met everyone in the band, it wasn’t necessarily an instant creative connection. What made you keep plugging away and making things work? Was it kind of the sense that you guys were onto something different? What spurred you on? We got a kick out of one another. We really liked one another, and we laughed a lot, and we had fun making music together. And I think that’s what made us keep coming back to try and make it work. In the process of doing that, we just, by default, became a band. You know, we started to think the same way we started to just find a rhythm together. We were very fortunate. We really did find a chemistry together. [And] for all our foibles and all our little arguments and squabbles, we still have this strange chemistry when we’re all together that really has endured and works for us. It’s special. I wouldn’t recommend anybody else to try and, you know, form a band across the Atlantic with people you’ve never met before, but in our case we really were fortunate. Yeah, I mean, you think about that, that’s such a leap of faith. It’s weird! It’s like preposterous. It is preposterous, that’s such a great word. It was an act of great stupidity, actually. [Laughs.] It paid off! [Laughs.] Yeah, it paid off but, you know, on paper it just looks— like you said— preposterous. You have all three older men living in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, and a girl, a strange creature, from Edinburgh, Scotland— we couldn’t have been more different. I mean, we still are very different human beings, but somehow we enjoy each other. It’s cool. What do you recall most now about making the record? You were in kind of the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. I imagine it was a little bit of fish out of water. I was such a freak. I mean, I really was. I didn’t fit in at all. I couldn’t drive, which you being American will understand how difficult that is when you’re living in a Midwestern town that doesn’t have any real significant form of public transport. I had zero money— I mean, I really had zero money, so I couldn’t afford cabs, I had to walk everywhere, and it was either, you know, 100 degrees or it was -20 degrees. And so I really suffered making that record on a physical level. [Laughs.] I associate that first record with gross discomfort physically and, you know, mentally, because I felt very uncomfortable and I didn’t know the band. I mean, I got along with them, but I didn’t know them. I had no friends, no finances, no transport, and I was really very cut off from home because I couldn’t afford to call home, and I barely ate unless I was in the studio with the band. [Laughs.] I associate it with great discomfort but, you know, it was all part of the crazy ride of it. And I’m so happy that I suffered, because it makes it so much more rewarding when things start going right. To me, I’ve always thought the album drew its power from espousing the idea that nonconformity was empowering. So when you say these things, it makes sense, then, why a lot of the themes evolved the way they did. [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, I guess. [reflective pause] It was just the best we could do at the time, and now, looking back, it was enough. And when you’re an unproven artist, you don’t know if what you’re doing is going to have any value whatsoever. You can just follow your own muse, and hope that other people might be as interested in it as you are. [Laughs.] That’s true. It seems like there might not be as much pressure then, too, because there was no real precedent as a band. I mean, obviously people knew Butch’s work as a producer, but as a band, it was an unproven quantity. Yeah. I mean, I felt no pressure whatsoever that first record. That was all on Butch, you know? And I know for a fact he was stressed, like, beyond my wildest imaginings, you know, because he had a lot to lose. He had a reputation at stake, so I think he took that first record to heart and worked really hard on it and drove himself into the ground. He hardly ever slept; he was constantly at the studio. It was pretty intense. How did kind of the making the album really stretch you as a musician and a person? Well, you know, I was writing for the first time in my life. When they invited me to join the band they said, “You know, we expect you to be a full quarter member of this band. You write, don’t you?” And I instinctively knew that somehow they needed and wanted me to write, so I said, “Yeah, I write! Of course I do!” [Laughs loudly.] And I had never written a word in my life or really ever had the confidence to contribute musically to any recordings I’ve ever been involved in. You know, at the time I could play piano, and I had been a singer in a band and I’d sung with choirs, and I’d played in orchestras, but I had never, ever contributed an idea in any sense whatsoever beyond some backing vocals. I was thrown into a creative melting pot, and I just had to fucking get it together. I just had to; I had no other choice. So I was lucky in that regard: I was just sort of forced into it without having to think about it too much. Sometimes, though, that’s good, because if you overthink things — I mean, as a writer I know I have this problem. I’ll be staring at a blank document overthinking everything, and nothing will happen. You just let yourself go, and that’s when creativity can actually flow. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. If things had turned out any other way, I probably would never, ever be a writer, never ever write a song in my life. By default I’ve been forced into the role, and as such, I was smart enough to understand that this is an incredible opportunity in my life, and I better get my shit together, and I tried, you know? I wanted to try. I was hungry, I wanted a future; I needed a job. I literally had no future when they approached me at all. Well, and then the record took off. I mean, I remember seeing the video for “Vow,” and it was one of those things that was just really aggressive, and it just really grabbed your attention right away. It seemed like that was the start of everything. So what was that like for you, then, I guess, the rocket ship of attention and everything right away? I mean, it was thrilling at first, and then it became incredibly intense and mind-blowing. But you’re right—I mean, “Vow” was the first track that blew up for us, and it created and garnered speed so fast it was shocking. I mean, even our record label was caught off guard. We hadn’t even finished the album by the time there was a little sort of storm about us in the U.K., and garnering force in Australia and in North America all at once. So it was crazy and exciting and exhilarating. Had you guys made this record as a new band in 2015, do you think that it would’ve been received as warmly or would you guys have been able to release it with so little interference? I mean, as a band, if we came out now, we wouldn’t have a chance in hell. We’d been saying this for the last, God, ten years. There’s no way we would’ve been able to enjoy that level of mainstream exposure for an alternative band. It hadn’t happened before—alternative music had never been in the mainstream up until that point of our first record, not really. I mean, there were other bands that enjoyed that explosion with us, but we were all part of a wave of alt-rock being the mainstream musical choice of radio, TV, media. And it hasn’t really been like that since. Yes, there’s successful alternative bands, but they’re not managing to just completely overtake mainstream media. That is true. I mean, it seems like because perhaps there are so many bands, it’s hard to get to the same level of success, because there’s so many other people competing for that same level of success. Yeah, where there’s so much noise and so much access and a different idea every day, and so to maintain any kind of momentum is really difficult for any band. And there’s this obsession by the public to be on top of the brightest, newest, shiniest penny—and, of course, there’s brand new shiny pennies every 30 seconds on the internet. So it’s very hard to garner a lot of following beyond your first record. I mean, there’s always that explosion of a new artist, and they’ll enjoy that crazy run, but then to try and follow that up with a second or a third record is practically unheard of at this point, particularly in alternative rock. As a fan, it’s really fatiguing because it’s hard to keep up with bands you like and that there just is so much to follow. It’s physically difficult. It is, it’s truly exhausting. I mean, I used to really know so much about contemporary music, because I was an avid reader of the music press and I really knew my shit. And now it’s too much. I’m just overwhelmed by it. I don’t even see a jumping in point without spending hours and hours and hours of my day trying to figure it all out and give everything a listen. It’s just impossible. I don’t have the time anymore, so it’s just overwhelming. I feel the same way. It’s kind of like it’s paralysis. I don’t even know where to begin. [Laughs.] I mean, obviously you ask people that you meet. I’m always asking everybody, “What are you listening to? What excites you?” It’s not that I don’t discover new music, but I certainly don’t have that feeling that I used to have of really knowing what is going on in general, you know. It’s just everything is so heavy with noise. Saturated, you know. Saturation point. And it’s more of a surface relationship to music, I guess at least personally. I feel like you used to have a lot more of a personal relationship to an artist or a band and their music. I find that’s harder to cultivate now, which is disappointing to me. Well, it’s interesting— yeah, I think you’re right. We all made deep connections. We were all looking for contact and connections in music, I think, and now it’s become a strange sort of way to define our lifestyles, and I’m not sure people even have the time to make a connection in the same way as we did. You know, everything moves so fast right now. And I’m sure that will change and this is just how things are right now, but everybody’s moving so fast and ripping through information on their phones and watching movies on their telephones on their way to work and reading books and, you know, between working out and going to work and feeding the children or going on a date or, you know, blah blah blah. It’s just everyone’s doing so much all the time. It’s getting manic! [Laughs.] It is. For me, I feel like someone’s grabbing my arms and legs and pulling in different directions, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean it’s super intense, isn’t it? And well, I certainly was created pre-internet so, of course, it’s gonna be more peculiar, more intense for someone like myself, because that’s just— the speed at which everything moves now is still quite foreign to me. But I think it’s intense for— you know, I’ve watched some of my friends’ kids and they seem super stressed, too. [Laughs.] I don’t know why I laugh; it’s not funny. But there’s also great things that come from it, too. I mean, I love the internet, too. There’s so many things I love about it, so… I think it’s just like anything. There’s great things that come from it, and there’s some horror as well, and that’s evolution. That’s how things change and move forward, and we all have to adapt or die. To wrap up then: Twenty years out, where do you see Garbage’s legacy in popular culture, in music or really anywhere? You know, I don’t really think too much in terms of legacy, per se. I mean, there’s so many other artists out there who are genius musicians and incredible singers. None of us in Garbage are particularly amazing at what we do, but we’ve managed to garner our forces to make interesting, eclectic-sounding records that are very unique. You know, you hear one of our records— we don’t sound like anybody else out there. And that, I think, is an achievement—to sound different from literally of millions of bands that the world has been exposed to, I think that’s kind of crazy and cool. [Laughs.] But I do feel in some ways there is a legacy connected to our first record, this debut record, and I wish I could take credit for it, but I really can’t. I had a role in it, a small part in it, I definitely think it would’ve turned out very different had I not been involved, but what I think is our first record’s greatest achievement is it broke down a lot of barriers. And I think that has to be laid at Butch’s feet. He really did create an archetype for a contemporary record and showed the world that you can break down all the boxes, all the cliques and all the genres, and we can make interesting, fresh-sounding music by breaking down the walls. Butch is a very modest man and he never really talks about himself in any grandiose terms. He’s very humble. But I do think he did something quite extraordinary, as it turns out. I’ve been lucky enough to be along on that ride with him and the rest of the band, too.
“Victoria”: This exciting German thriller, shot straight through in one take, is much more than a novelty
I was going to tell you about the deliberately assaultive opening shot of Sebastian Schipper’s film “Victoria,” in which we see a young Spanish woman dancing by herself in a Berlin nightclub – although we don’t know who she is or where she is at first. The dance floor is illuminated with a brilliant white pulsing strobe light – those with neurological disorders are hereby cautioned – and the soundtrack mimics or transposes the pounding rhythms of the club music without exactly reproducing it. But the terminology here is either wrong or misleading: If that’s the opening shot of “Victoria,” it’s also the concluding shot and all the shots in between. There’s only one shot in the entire film – “film” being a term of art in this case, even more than usual -- and it lasts almost two and a half hours. We have a strange and possibly meaningless epistemological dilemma in contemporary media about what makes certain things “cinema” and other things “television,” and whether there’s really any difference. In many cases the differences are nonexistent or budgetary or purely semantic, and one day soon they may evaporate entirely for everything except the biggest Hollywood spectacles and the artiest outer fringe. But “Victoria” strikes me as a work of cinema, specific to 2015, one that would not and could not have been made for TV. (And that’s true even though I actually watched it at home, on a disc supplied by the distributor.) This is the year that also brought us a feature film shot entirely on the iPhone -- Sean Baker’s intensely colorful Hollywood street drama “Tangerine” – in which you rapidly forget its unusual technical heritage and keep watching for other reasons. In fact, I would rank “Tangerine” among the year’s most memorable films, and “Victoria,” a Berlin night-side odyssey shot in one uninterrupted 138-minute take, is even better. Certainly people have flocked to see it at film festivals because of the technical bravado involved in pulling this off, but “Victoria” is no stunt. It’s an exciting European indie loaded with verve, atmosphere, danger and emotional range; if you didn’t know it was a single-take feature going in, you almost certainly wouldn’t notice. Shooting an entire movie in one go, or at least making it look as if you had, definitely isn’t a new idea, although it has only been possible since the introduction of digital video in the late ‘90s. As far as I know, Mike Figgis’ “Timecode,” made in 2000, was the first true example, and as its title suggests it was essentially a novelty item. Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark,” two years later, was more like a historical tableau vivant than a dramatic feature, delivered as a single 96-minute tracking shot through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In the film era, numerous directors experimented with extremely long takes or simulated one-take movies. Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” consists of eight 10-minute takes (the limit of a standard film magazine); by contrast, Hungarian art-god Béla Tarr’s celebrated “Werckmeister Harmonies” – 39 fixed-camera shots over 145 minutes – is pretty much a hip-hop video. But the challenge met by “Victoria,” and in a different way by “Tangerine,” is of a different order: First make the technical breakthrough obvious, and then make it disappear. Throughout what we might call the first chapter of Schipper’s film, as the Spanish girl, whose name is indeed Victoria (Laia Costa), dances, drinks, leaves the club and hooks up with a quartet of rowdy Berlin guys who may be lovable louts and may be big trouble, I was almost hyperconscious of the camera movements, the way people come in or out of the frame, and the fact that there are no sudden shifts of perspective. But as I got drawn into Victoria’s reckless or impulsive decisions and their mounting consequences, I stopped thinking about that stuff. By the time she finds alone in a predawn café with Sonne (Frederick Lau), the most amiable member of the dubious foursome and the one who’s clearly smitten with her, and plays him one of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes on the piano, I had forgotten it entirely. That moment in the café informs everything that happens later, especially Victoria’s decision to serve as the emergency driver for a mysterious errand that Sonne’s friend Boxer (Franz Rogowski), a skinhead ex-con, must run on behalf of someone he knew in prison. You have a pretty good idea how decisions of that sort turn out in movies, I suspect. It is amazing, without question, that Schipper and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen get Sonne and Victoria from an all-night party movie to an irresistible love story to a startling crime thriller and then to a vicious but inescapable tragedy, by having the actors play the largely improvised script all the way through and without the benefit of any editing whatever. (Apparently it took three tries, and Schipper promised his financiers he would insert jump cuts if he had to.) But it is far more amazing, as with the lurid, oversaturated iPhone colors of “Tangerine,” that the technique serves the story rather than the other way around. The risk and urgency involved in making “Victoria” morph into narrative risk and then human risk, as we watch our wistful gamine – who speaks almost no German and knows almost no one in Berlin – do a blithe tightrope walk between a night of wild bohemian adventure and a situation that could easily end in rape or prison or violent death. Can Victoria find the freedom she seeks? I’ll leave that for you to find out, but this terrifying, seductive and adrenaline-fueled movie has found a new form of freedom for cinema. "Victoria" is now playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the Regal Union Square in New York, and the Nuart Cinema in Los Angeles. It opens Oct. 16 in Boston, Denver, Hartford, Conn., Miami, Minneapolis, New Haven, Conn., Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle; and Oct. 23 in Atlanta, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., St. Louis, Santa Cruz, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., Austin, Texas, Columbus, Ohio, and Des Moines, Iowa, with other cities and home video to follow.
Bernie Sanders, meet your latest and looniest fan base: Comic Con characters are feeling the Bern
Deadpool, Dread Pirate Roberts and the Ghostbusters all agree that Bernie Sanders should be the next President. Watch what the most eccentric characters had to say about who they'll be supporting in the 2016 presidential race: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Comic_..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/SEQ_SE...] 
Deadpool, Dread Pirate Roberts and the Ghostbusters all agree that Bernie Sanders should be the next President. Watch what the most eccentric characters had to say about who they'll be supporting in the 2016 presidential race: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Comic_..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/SEQ_SE...] Deadpool, Dread Pirate Roberts and the Ghostbusters all agree that Bernie Sanders should be the next President. Watch what the most eccentric characters had to say about who they'll be supporting in the 2016 presidential race: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Comic_..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/SEQ_SE...]
Deadpool, Dread Pirate Roberts and the Ghostbusters all agree that Bernie Sanders should be the next President. Watch what the most eccentric characters had to say about who they'll be supporting in the 2016 presidential race: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Comic_..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/SEQ_SE...] Deadpool, Dread Pirate Roberts and the Ghostbusters all agree that Bernie Sanders should be the next President. Watch what the most eccentric characters had to say about who they'll be supporting in the 2016 presidential race: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Comic_..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/10/SEQ_SE...]
Carly Fiorina’s war on math: Her pixie-dust plan to balance the budget and make America perfect
Carly Fiorina's campaign to be the next Republican president – or failing that, the secretary of commerce in the next Republican president’s Cabinet, or maybe the director of the Office of Management and Budget, really, she’ll take anything to feel relevant again, has she mentioned she was the first female CEO of Hewlett-Packard? – continued Wednesday with a deeply hilarious phone interview on “Morning Joe” that had the show’s panelists either laughing at her or choking on their Starbucks coffee off camera. It was hard to tell. “Morning Joe” is as good a place as any for an appearance by a Republican presidential candidate looking for a couple of softballs at which to swing. As they so often do, the crew of MSNBC’s flagship morning show didn’t disappoint. This meant no questions about Fiorina’s claims about the Planned Parenthood videos or her deeply weird statement that the undergraduate degree in medieval history she earned at Stanford 40 years ago qualifies her to lead the fight against ISIS. And yet, even with the fat pitches the panelists grooved down the center of the plate for her, Fiorina still managed to sound as if she has no idea what she was talking about. The whole thing is nine minutes of hilarity as Fiorina tries and fails to sound some of the populist notes that have inflated Donald Trump’s poll numbers, while also attempting to sound like a competent executive with a plan and a Beltway outsider. Does anyone buy Carly Fiorina, she of the $42 million golden parachute that HP strapped to her back when it kicked her out of the Gulfstream she made the company lease for when she had to travel, as a populist sympathetic to the small businesses being crushed by the socialist tyrant Barack Obama? But I want to focus on one exchange, because it exemplifies the way some of the GOP candidates have been scrambling over each other like puppies in the Puppy Bowl to present ever-more-awesome economic plans. It started with Mark Halperin, looking disappointed that Fiorina hadn’t flown to 30 Rock in a helicopter and offered him a ride, asking her if she would pledge to submit a balanced budget in her first term. Now, this is a deeply silly question for lots of reasons, but it’s pretty easy for a Republican presidential candidate to answer. Just say you have a plan to lower the deficit by cutting spending while also cutting taxes to unleash the engine of American capitalism, which will result in so many dollar bills raining down on the Treasury, it will look like a Waka Floka Flame concert. The budget deficit will magically start dropping, and someday, maybe by the end of a second term, voilà! A balanced budget. Instead, Fiorina said this: “Yes, and I think one of the keys to submitting a balanced budget…is starting by knowing where the money is being spent…Where I would start is to submit a plan for zero based budgeting…” Picture the nation’s budget experts snapping to attention at once like a herd of buffalo hearing the distant hunting cries of a Native American tribe. Presidents haven’t used zero based budgeting since Jimmy Carter experimented with it in the late 1970s. That’s because for a concern as large as the federal government, ZBB is a deeply inefficient process. It requires managers to review and justify every single expenditure at the beginning of each budget cycle, so that different departments are competing for money on an equal basis. Federal Cabinet departments are simply too enormous to devote the time or the resources to such a process every year, mostly because by the time they finished, the next fiscal year would be starting. Every once in a while, some congressman writes an editorial or introduces a bill suggesting the government start using ZBB again. It never goes anywhere, because while it might be a useful process for a technology CEO, it is a non-starter for a federal budget. Fiorina’s balanced budget is not only based on an outmoded budgeting practice, it also would require spending cuts so deep you’d need James Cameron and his bathysphere to find them. And how Fiorina could reconcile cutting the budget that deeply while also keeping her past promise to build up our military to crush Vladimir Putin and every other American enemy is something that, alas, no one on “Morning Joe” thought to ask. Granted, every presidential candidate in either party is going to shade his or her economic plans, emphasizing the miraculous possibilities while ignoring the practical questions they inevitably raise. It’s notable that the only other candidate who seems to have even approached a budget as absurd as Fiorina’s is Rand Paul, and even he only promised to balance the budget in five years. But the Republican candidates seem engaged in a game of one-upmanship as to who can conjure the nuttiest economics out of thin air. Jeb! Bush’s plan promises four percent GDP growth indefinitely, a number that the economy has barely ever approached once, much less for four or eight straight years. Not to be outdone, Mike Huckabee blithely promised his economic plan would bring on 6 percent GDP growth. Marco Rubio has promised a balanced budget in ten years while restraining spending and implementing deep tax cuts that would rob the treasury of about $5 trillion in revenues over that time frame. Now here is Carly Fiorina with a vague plan to cut her way to a balanced budget faster than anyone else while unleashing American business to drive the economy into the stratosphere. She might not have impressed the deficit fetishists of “Morning Joe,” but who knows. With the GOP base inclined to hoover up magic pixie dust like a Wall Street trader attacking a cargo hold full of cocaine, that’s a plus. 
Don’t call Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” or he will send you pictures of his fingers for the next 25 years
Graydon Carter, the longtime editor of Vanity Fair, has just revealed the depths of Donald Trump's deep narcissism, recalling a time more than 25 years ago when he slighted the thin-skinned megalomaniac and the resulting and ongoing response from Trump in his latest editor's letter: 
Like so many bullies, Trump has skin of gossamer. He thinks nothing of saying the most hurtful thing about someone else, but when he hears a whisper that runs counter to his own vainglorious self-image, he coils like a caged ferret. Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago. To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby. The most recent offering arrived earlier this year, before his decision to go after the Republican presidential nomination. Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: “See, not so short!” I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, “Actually, quite short.” Which I can only assume gave him fits."I don’t call it thin-skinned, I’m angry,” Trump recently told CBS' Scott Pelley, complaining of an unfair media that "write lies" and "write false stories.”
Newsflash: Hillary Clinton is a politician. Why do some pundits find that so hard to understand?
In keeping with the general policy thrust of her presidential campaign, which has been more unapologetically liberal than many expected, Hillary Clinton announced on Wednesday that she did not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade agreement that’s become the focal point of liberal discontent with President Obama. “[B]ased on what I know so far,” Clinton wrote in a statement, “I can’t support this agreement.” It didn’t do enough, she said, to protect American workers. Clinton’s language was vague and lawyerly enough that there may be less to this opposition than meets the eye: “As of today,” she told PBS, “I am not in favor of what I have learned about it.” But even if her remarks about TPP weren’t as stridently oppositional as some in the press have suggested, the fact that Clinton was opposing the deal at all surprised some journalists — most especially those who recall the years she spent promoting the deal, which she once called the “gold standard,” as secretary of state. A few journalists weren’t surprised so much as dismayed. “This is such a nakedly political move from Hillary,” tweeted Politico’s Danny Vinik, who argued that the version of the TPP Clinton now opposes is more liberal than the one she’d previously backed. Vox’s Ezra Klein went much longer on a similar theme, writing that Clinton’s new stance made her look “like the kind of candidate who puts polls in front of policy,” which he found to be “unnerving.” It gave credence, he argued, to the idea that Clinton was “unusually poll-tested and calculating, even for a politician.” From my perspective, however, the strange and unsettling behavior wasn’t coming from Clinton. Sure, I was a little surprised to hear her oppose the deal (at least ostensibly) — but only a little. Clinton is indeed capable of excess cautious and shameless opportunism; and it’s very easy to imagine that her announcement was driven more by fear of Sen. Bernie Sanders than doubts about the TPP’s substance. But that’s just another way of saying she’s a politician who is trying to stay in tune with voters. What’s so disconcerting about that? If you’re someone who wants your president to be the kind of politician who “tells it like it is” and is too “authentic” to cater their positions to voters’ whims, then I get it. I’d argue that all politicians do these things to one degree or another, and that what matters more than integrity in a president is whether they can get things done. But Clinton truly does struggle more than most politicians when it comes to hiding her motivations. So I can understand how her TPP reversal could lead you to recoil on almost aesthetic grounds. With regard to Klein and those who share his concerns, though, that’s not the dynamic. These people are hyper-sophisticated when it comes to understanding how politics really functions, both on the campaign trail and behind the scenes. They understand that American government is structured in a way that incentivizes candidates to remain as close as they can to the mushy middle of public opinion. They’re not callow idealists; they understand how this game and system works. And yet this rather ho-hum announcement from Clinton has them clutching their pearls. I don’t get it, in all honesty. But here’s my best attempt at an explanation. Throughout Klein’s piece, he laments the distance between the Hillary Clinton, the politician and Hillary Clinton, the wonk. Despite being “one of the most serious policy wonks to ever run for president” and having a “sterling” reputation for grasping nearly any issue, Clinton, Klein writes, has a history of being “swayed by polls or interest groups.” Rather than campaigning on a promise to be technocrat-in-chief, in other words, Clinton often does what voters — but not policy experts — think is best. To Klein, a self-described “wonk” who tends to view politics through a pseudo-academic lens, this concession to raw democracy is a mistake. “[I]t’s not a great way,” he writes, “for Clinton to show she's willing to make some unpopular decisions if they lead to better policy.” Yet although Klein says that a willingness to go against voters’ desires “has political benefits that don't show up in narrow issue polls ,” he doesn’t elaborate. The question-begging assumption that a good politician should follow experts instead of voters goes completely unaddressed. Klein thinks Clinton would be much better off if she got rid of “[p]olitically convenient changes” and sold herself as “an extraordinary policy mind who understands these issues better than her challengers, and so can be trusted to make better decisions on them.” I think that’s pretty terrible advice, quite frankly; campaigning as a know-it-all does not seem to me like a recipe to win. Then again, if you’re inclined to think that policy experts have all the answers, wanting a philosopher-king president makes sense. But that is decidedly not how most Americans feel. In theory, at least, they’re still committed to democratic self-government. Which means that they want to vote for someone who will listen to them, even if they diverge from the elite consensus. That’s what Clinton is trying to do, however awkwardly. And if Klein finds it so disturbing, he may want to think about whether it’s really Clinton who’s bothering him, or if his problem is with the structure of American governance instead. 
In keeping with the general policy thrust of her presidential campaign, which has been more unapologetically liberal than many expected, Hillary Clinton announced on Wednesday that she did not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade agreement that’s become the focal point of liberal discontent with President Obama. “[B]ased on what I know so far,” Clinton wrote in a statement, “I can’t support this agreement.” It didn’t do enough, she said, to protect American workers. Clinton’s language was vague and lawyerly enough that there may be less to this opposition than meets the eye: “As of today,” she told PBS, “I am not in favor of what I have learned about it.” But even if her remarks about TPP weren’t as stridently oppositional as some in the press have suggested, the fact that Clinton was opposing the deal at all surprised some journalists — most especially those who recall the years she spent promoting the deal, which she once called the “gold standard,” as secretary of state. A few journalists weren’t surprised so much as dismayed. “This is such a nakedly political move from Hillary,” tweeted Politico’s Danny Vinik, who argued that the version of the TPP Clinton now opposes is more liberal than the one she’d previously backed. Vox’s Ezra Klein went much longer on a similar theme, writing that Clinton’s new stance made her look “like the kind of candidate who puts polls in front of policy,” which he found to be “unnerving.” It gave credence, he argued, to the idea that Clinton was “unusually poll-tested and calculating, even for a politician.” From my perspective, however, the strange and unsettling behavior wasn’t coming from Clinton. Sure, I was a little surprised to hear her oppose the deal (at least ostensibly) — but only a little. Clinton is indeed capable of excess cautious and shameless opportunism; and it’s very easy to imagine that her announcement was driven more by fear of Sen. Bernie Sanders than doubts about the TPP’s substance. But that’s just another way of saying she’s a politician who is trying to stay in tune with voters. What’s so disconcerting about that? If you’re someone who wants your president to be the kind of politician who “tells it like it is” and is too “authentic” to cater their positions to voters’ whims, then I get it. I’d argue that all politicians do these things to one degree or another, and that what matters more than integrity in a president is whether they can get things done. But Clinton truly does struggle more than most politicians when it comes to hiding her motivations. So I can understand how her TPP reversal could lead you to recoil on almost aesthetic grounds. With regard to Klein and those who share his concerns, though, that’s not the dynamic. These people are hyper-sophisticated when it comes to understanding how politics really functions, both on the campaign trail and behind the scenes. They understand that American government is structured in a way that incentivizes candidates to remain as close as they can to the mushy middle of public opinion. They’re not callow idealists; they understand how this game and system works. And yet this rather ho-hum announcement from Clinton has them clutching their pearls. I don’t get it, in all honesty. But here’s my best attempt at an explanation. Throughout Klein’s piece, he laments the distance between the Hillary Clinton, the politician and Hillary Clinton, the wonk. Despite being “one of the most serious policy wonks to ever run for president” and having a “sterling” reputation for grasping nearly any issue, Clinton, Klein writes, has a history of being “swayed by polls or interest groups.” Rather than campaigning on a promise to be technocrat-in-chief, in other words, Clinton often does what voters — but not policy experts — think is best. To Klein, a self-described “wonk” who tends to view politics through a pseudo-academic lens, this concession to raw democracy is a mistake. “[I]t’s not a great way,” he writes, “for Clinton to show she's willing to make some unpopular decisions if they lead to better policy.” Yet although Klein says that a willingness to go against voters’ desires “has political benefits that don't show up in narrow issue polls ,” he doesn’t elaborate. The question-begging assumption that a good politician should follow experts instead of voters goes completely unaddressed. Klein thinks Clinton would be much better off if she got rid of “[p]olitically convenient changes” and sold herself as “an extraordinary policy mind who understands these issues better than her challengers, and so can be trusted to make better decisions on them.” I think that’s pretty terrible advice, quite frankly; campaigning as a know-it-all does not seem to me like a recipe to win. Then again, if you’re inclined to think that policy experts have all the answers, wanting a philosopher-king president makes sense. But that is decidedly not how most Americans feel. In theory, at least, they’re still committed to democratic self-government. Which means that they want to vote for someone who will listen to them, even if they diverge from the elite consensus. That’s what Clinton is trying to do, however awkwardly. And if Klein finds it so disturbing, he may want to think about whether it’s really Clinton who’s bothering him, or if his problem is with the structure of American governance instead.
In keeping with the general policy thrust of her presidential campaign, which has been more unapologetically liberal than many expected, Hillary Clinton announced on Wednesday that she did not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade agreement that’s become the focal point of liberal discontent with President Obama. “[B]ased on what I know so far,” Clinton wrote in a statement, “I can’t support this agreement.” It didn’t do enough, she said, to protect American workers. Clinton’s language was vague and lawyerly enough that there may be less to this opposition than meets the eye: “As of today,” she told PBS, “I am not in favor of what I have learned about it.” But even if her remarks about TPP weren’t as stridently oppositional as some in the press have suggested, the fact that Clinton was opposing the deal at all surprised some journalists — most especially those who recall the years she spent promoting the deal, which she once called the “gold standard,” as secretary of state. A few journalists weren’t surprised so much as dismayed. “This is such a nakedly political move from Hillary,” tweeted Politico’s Danny Vinik, who argued that the version of the TPP Clinton now opposes is more liberal than the one she’d previously backed. Vox’s Ezra Klein went much longer on a similar theme, writing that Clinton’s new stance made her look “like the kind of candidate who puts polls in front of policy,” which he found to be “unnerving.” It gave credence, he argued, to the idea that Clinton was “unusually poll-tested and calculating, even for a politician.” From my perspective, however, the strange and unsettling behavior wasn’t coming from Clinton. Sure, I was a little surprised to hear her oppose the deal (at least ostensibly) — but only a little. Clinton is indeed capable of excess cautious and shameless opportunism; and it’s very easy to imagine that her announcement was driven more by fear of Sen. Bernie Sanders than doubts about the TPP’s substance. But that’s just another way of saying she’s a politician who is trying to stay in tune with voters. What’s so disconcerting about that? If you’re someone who wants your president to be the kind of politician who “tells it like it is” and is too “authentic” to cater their positions to voters’ whims, then I get it. I’d argue that all politicians do these things to one degree or another, and that what matters more than integrity in a president is whether they can get things done. But Clinton truly does struggle more than most politicians when it comes to hiding her motivations. So I can understand how her TPP reversal could lead you to recoil on almost aesthetic grounds. With regard to Klein and those who share his concerns, though, that’s not the dynamic. These people are hyper-sophisticated when it comes to understanding how politics really functions, both on the campaign trail and behind the scenes. They understand that American government is structured in a way that incentivizes candidates to remain as close as they can to the mushy middle of public opinion. They’re not callow idealists; they understand how this game and system works. And yet this rather ho-hum announcement from Clinton has them clutching their pearls. I don’t get it, in all honesty. But here’s my best attempt at an explanation. Throughout Klein’s piece, he laments the distance between the Hillary Clinton, the politician and Hillary Clinton, the wonk. Despite being “one of the most serious policy wonks to ever run for president” and having a “sterling” reputation for grasping nearly any issue, Clinton, Klein writes, has a history of being “swayed by polls or interest groups.” Rather than campaigning on a promise to be technocrat-in-chief, in other words, Clinton often does what voters — but not policy experts — think is best. To Klein, a self-described “wonk” who tends to view politics through a pseudo-academic lens, this concession to raw democracy is a mistake. “[I]t’s not a great way,” he writes, “for Clinton to show she's willing to make some unpopular decisions if they lead to better policy.” Yet although Klein says that a willingness to go against voters’ desires “has political benefits that don't show up in narrow issue polls ,” he doesn’t elaborate. The question-begging assumption that a good politician should follow experts instead of voters goes completely unaddressed. Klein thinks Clinton would be much better off if she got rid of “[p]olitically convenient changes” and sold herself as “an extraordinary policy mind who understands these issues better than her challengers, and so can be trusted to make better decisions on them.” I think that’s pretty terrible advice, quite frankly; campaigning as a know-it-all does not seem to me like a recipe to win. Then again, if you’re inclined to think that policy experts have all the answers, wanting a philosopher-king president makes sense. But that is decidedly not how most Americans feel. In theory, at least, they’re still committed to democratic self-government. Which means that they want to vote for someone who will listen to them, even if they diverge from the elite consensus. That’s what Clinton is trying to do, however awkwardly. And if Klein finds it so disturbing, he may want to think about whether it’s really Clinton who’s bothering him, or if his problem is with the structure of American governance instead.
“Boom!” 5 reasons to love Jeopardy’s new star Matt Jackson
Matt Jackson, a 23-year-old paralegal from Washington, D.C., has won $230,610 on an 8-day "Jeopardy" victory lap. Perhaps more importantly, he has also won the love of the Internet, giving us not just the most thrilling "Jeopardy" hot streak since Ken Jennings, but also some of the funniest and most meme-able show moments in years (apart from the time a contestant got Alex Trebek to say "Turd Ferguson," naturally). Here are five reasons to fall in love with Matt Jackson: His smile: Matt Jackson begins every episode with a smile, and it is a sight to behold: A vaguely sinister, slow-burn smile that ranks up there with the Joker's satanic grimace and Vanessa Bayer’s toothy beam as one of the great pop-culture grins of our generation. via GIPHY His catchphrase When he gets really pumped about getting an answer, Jackson shouts “boom!” and pounds his palm against his fist. It's exactly the sort of delightfully quirky gesture/catchphrase combo just crying out for a viral remix. Oh yep, there it is: He’s not afraid to steamroll Alex Trebek Jackson is an intense, hyper-focused speed demon, so much so that Trebek sometimes has to tell him to slow down. We love it. (As fake Sean Connery would say: Suck it, Trebek!) His love of “Hamilton” Much like the rest of us, Matt Jackson can’t get enough of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop history musical “Hamilton," explaining that he prepared for his appearance on the show by repeating "I am not throwing away my shot” — a line from the show -- over and over again. He’s making "Jeopardy" cool again: “Jeopardy” is the kind of thing that tends to fade in and out of the conversation, only really galvanizing public interest when it has some sort of genuine suspense or narrative arc to it. But the combination of a compelling character like Jackson and the prospect of another Jennings-level winning streak is the kind of thing that easily turns the show from casual viewing to must-see TV. Lin-Manuel agrees: https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status... Jackson, a 23-year-old paralegal from Washington, D.C., has won $230,610 on an 8-day "Jeopardy" victory lap. Perhaps more importantly, he has also won the love of the Internet, giving us not just the most thrilling "Jeopardy" hot streak since Ken Jennings, but also some of the funniest and most meme-able show moments in years (apart from the time a contestant got Alex Trebek to say "Turd Ferguson," naturally). Here are five reasons to fall in love with Matt Jackson: His smile: Matt Jackson begins every episode with a smile, and it is a sight to behold: A vaguely sinister, slow-burn smile that ranks up there with the Joker's satanic grimace and Vanessa Bayer’s toothy beam as one of the great pop-culture grins of our generation. via GIPHY His catchphrase When he gets really pumped about getting an answer, Jackson shouts “boom!” and pounds his palm against his fist. It's exactly the sort of delightfully quirky gesture/catchphrase combo just crying out for a viral remix. Oh yep, there it is: He’s not afraid to steamroll Alex Trebek Jackson is an intense, hyper-focused speed demon, so much so that Trebek sometimes has to tell him to slow down. We love it. (As fake Sean Connery would say: Suck it, Trebek!) His love of “Hamilton” Much like the rest of us, Matt Jackson can’t get enough of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop history musical “Hamilton," explaining that he prepared for his appearance on the show by repeating "I am not throwing away my shot” — a line from the show -- over and over again. He’s making "Jeopardy" cool again: “Jeopardy” is the kind of thing that tends to fade in and out of the conversation, only really galvanizing public interest when it has some sort of genuine suspense or narrative arc to it. But the combination of a compelling character like Jackson and the prospect of another Jennings-level winning streak is the kind of thing that easily turns the show from casual viewing to must-see TV. Lin-Manuel agrees: https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status...
October 7, 2015
I hate your kids. And I’m not sorry.
I was 19 when I held a baby for the first and last time. On a street in New York City, a harried-looking mother with an infant in one arm and a stroller piled high with shopping bags strode up to me and asked if I could hold her child while she bent to tie her shoe. Before waiting for an answer (which I think I can safely assume she had assumed would be yes), she thrust the baby into my uncertain arms. At 5’2” and with a bit of a baby-face of my own, I’m not an especially threatening presence. Likely, this woman had selected me for the task of cradling her child because I look like the last person who would be a monster. Yet, as she straightened up and saw me holding her smiling, gurgling infant at arm’s length, a confused and nauseated look on my face, I could tell that in that moment, she thought me one. I identify as a childfree woman, one of a growing demographic of young people for whom having children is not only not in their present, but not in their future, either, entirely by choice. (Syntactically, the childfree are distinguished from the childless—those who want children but cannot or do not have them—because the latter term implies that one is “less” something for not having offspring.) For many, the decision to be childfree is a matter of practicalities: a baby would not fit in with their career and lifestyle, or they aren’t financially secure, or they haven’t yet found The One. While all those things are true in my case, the main reason is much simpler: I basely, emphatically, viscerally hate children. I can’t remember a time when I felt anything more positive than contempt for children, even when I was a child myself. From (quite literally) the time I could talk, I announced my intent that I never wanted children, and as a little girl, I never had even the slightest inclination towards baby dolls. As an only child of older parents, I spent much of my time around middle-aged adults, and found I far preferred their company to that of my agemates. As an adult, my dislike seems to be rooted in my nature, stemming from the same sort of inborn, primal (if opposite) urge as those who desperately want them. I think of myself as “not a kid person” much in the same way that someone else might feel they’re “not a cat person” or “not a dog person”; it is not a conscious choice, but a natural state of being. But whereas cat- and dog-haters get a pass from society, there is something singularly off-putting to others about having an aversion the young of one’s own species. Other childfree women have felt this resultant animosity, and have tried to preempt others’ judgment. From data-driven news stories to personal essays—including those in the excellent new collection “Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Children,” edited by Meghan Daum—almost each story by and about childfree women seems to include apologetic, vehement protestations that such women are not baby-haters. (“We do not hate kids,” Daum writes in her introduction, “and it still amazes me that this notion is given any credence.”) Nearly every woman-authored piece on the topic, both in Daum’s collection and elsewhere, is defensive about an implied dislike of children, and those that aren’t are instead evasive of it. (Notably but perhaps unsurprisingly, men who dislike children are more outspoken about it, and far less stigmatized.) Childfree women are often characterized as doting and dedicated aunts, godmothers, professionals or community volunteers whose lives are full of children they love, even if they ultimately—some pined for children in the past—do not want any of their own. I have no doubt that such characterizations are true, and that many childfree people do in fact love children; that is their reality. But by failing to account for the possibility that there are baby-haters among us, by attempting to subvert the ugly stereotype before it even arises, such authors negate the experiences of—and even the existence of—those of us for whom our reality is in fact one of baby-hating. And by denying that we exist—especially for women, society’s designated nurturers, who feel this stereotype especially acutely—we are denied the chance to prove that, contrary to what one may instinctively characterize us as, this particular facet of our personalities, our identities as baby-haters, does not make us bad people. I firmly believe that some of us were simply born without the nurturing gene and with biological clocks that nature neglected to wind. My baby-hating doesn’t come from a place of malice. I don’t wish children ill; I just want them to stay the hell away from me. I’m not a situational baby-hater, either; though a child behaving badly might cause me to shoot some side-eye or make a snarky comment, my inherent dislike of children does not significantly lessen when a kid behaves well, even if I do find them slightly more tolerable. (As Kate Christensen writes of her boyfriend in her essay in “Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed” and which I can wholeheartedly relate to, “Seeing other people with their kids, no matter how cute they are, only reinforces his knowledge that he doesn’t want them.”) I can count on one hand all the children I’ve seen in my life that have struck me as cute. On the subway, if I see even a well-behaved child heading for the empty seat next to mine, I will move across the train car, all the while raising the volume on my music. On a recent outing to the Bronx Zoo, a small child mistakenly grabbed my hand instead of her mother’s, and I instinctively recoiled as if the toddler’s touch had sent 10,000 volts of electricity coursing through my body. I’m not the only baby-hater out there. While I am fairly open about my views, other women have confessed to me in hushed tones their dislike—even hatred—of children or doubt over whether they might ever want any. In fact, even as the stigma against baby-haters persists, science shows that there’s probably a little baby-hater in all of us: new research demonstrates that nothing kills happiness quite like having a baby does. I know, I know; by now, the childed among you are probably thinking me a horrible person, an opinion you would likely hold no matter what else I say. So I won’t sit here and regale you with tales of what I good person I am, because frankly, that would be overcompensating. While I try to be a good person, the truth is, most of the time, I’m no better than average. But despite my baby-hating tendencies, I can definitively say that I am not a bad person: I don’t lie, cheat, or steal; I try to be a good friend and to be kind to others, generally; and I have a strict set of personal moral principles to which I hold myself, foremost among which is to do as little harm possible to other living things. I suspect that such qualities are true of most closeted baby-haters. We’re just like everyone else until we express the opinion that, in the eyes of society, instantly transforms us from Regular Person to Baby-Hating Monster, despite any other positive attributes we might possess. So, to escape judgment, we go about our baby-hating business quietly as we contribute to the world around us. We are your journalists, your professors, your bartenders and baristas. We are your siblings, your colleagues, your friends. If you are my friend and you decide to have a baby, I will feel nothing but genuine joy for you, because as your friend, I value your happiness. I will bring you meals and toys and those adorable little baby shoes (which I will find far cuter than the kid itself), and I will always lend a sympathetic ear when you’re tired and need to vent. I will do so with glee and sincerity, because you are my friend and I love you. But I will still hate your baby, and for that, I will not apologize.
