"Much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness... But what I found striking about Ramaswamy..."

"... both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing. Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind.... [H]is current comfort with [the word]  'woke' works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base... I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life" (NYT)

"Gasoline cars are among the last remnants in our daily lives of the pistoning industrial age — machines powered not by quietly streaming electrons..."

"... but by noisy, fiery explosion, by sequential gears and timing belts, by the primal growl of thermal expansion. America’s overreliance on cars has been ruinous, but... let’s remember, too, how the gas-powered car helped realize a quintessentially American idea of liberty: the freedom to roam just about anywhere you please. Yes, I’m romanticizing the automobile.... But as critical as I’ve been of cars, I can’t deny loving driving and loving it in a primal way — loving the thrum of a revving engine, loving slaloming in and out of turns on a windy country road, loving simply going very far, very fast, conveyed by fire. And here’s another confession: I’ve never felt anything approaching this sort of exhilaration in an electric car...."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Gas-Powered Cars Are an Environmental Catastrophe. I’ll Miss Them Anyway" (NYT).

"It’s not unreasonable to think Carlson’s Twitter move could work awfully well. It could also further tweak the meaning of 'show.'"

"That word once described the thing you saw on TV as you sat on your sofa. Now it means podcasts and YouTube series and Twitch livestreams. But what is a show by cable’s formerly biggest star on a site that was once known strictly as a place for microblogging? It could be a long video posted every day; it could be short clips posted all the time; it could be something like a Twitter Space, an interactive conversation with fans; it could be some new format entirely.... Carlson’s Fox News show attracted an audience of about 3.3 million viewers per night last year.... [H]is Twitter video sent out this week to announce the new show... has been viewed more than 25 million times.... [If] Carlson charges his fans $5 a month; he’d need only about 330,000 subscribers — about a tenth of his average nightly TV viewership — to match his earnings at Fox.... Carlson could very well become Twitter’s... such superstar.... Carlson on Twitter could be more popular, more pernicious and more powerful than ever before. Yikes."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Tucker Carlson on Twitter Could Work Awfully Well" (NYT).

5:28 a.m.

Actual sunrise time 5:29. In reality, the first bit of sun came at 5:32...



I've scanned the headlines and stories this morning, but nothing meets my standard. The closest I came to something bloggable was "I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing/Why do American cities waste so much space on cars?" by Farhad Manjoo (NYT).

This is not a complaint! No news is good news, so perhaps no bloggable news is good news. See you later!

"[W]e should spend more time considering the real possibility that every problem we face will get much worse than we ever imagined."

"The coronavirus is like a heat-seeking missile designed to frustrate progress in almost every corner of society, from politics to the economy to the environment.... In a book published more than a decade ago, I argued that the internet might lead to a choose-your-own-facts world in which different segments of society believe in different versions of reality. The Trump era, and now the coronavirus, has confirmed this grim prediction. That’s because the pandemic actually has created different political realities. The coronavirus has hit dense, racially diverse Democratic urban strongholds like New York much harder than sparsely populated rural areas, which lean strongly to the G.O.P.... The virus’s economic effects will only create further inequality and division.... The virus-induced recession could further destroy the news industry and dramatically reduce the number of working journalists in the country, our last defense against misinformation.... Let us not squander another crisis. We need to take a long, hard look at all the ways the pandemic can push this little planet of ours to further ruin — and then work like crazy, together, to stave off the coming hell."

From "The Worst Is Yet to Come/The coronavirus and our disastrous national response to it has smashed optimists like me in the head" by Farhad Manjoo (NYT).

I don't think it's "the number of working journalists" in the country that is "our last defense against misinformation." You can have a huge number, but if they're all bad, and they're all participating in misinformation, they're no defense at all.

The last defense against misinformation is your own mind.

"For as long as the internet has been around, the story of media has been one of fragmentation and atomization."

"Thanks to all these new formats, new business models, and new distribution technologies, we’ve been drowning in an unprecedented level of choice in movies, music, TV shows, books and, especially, sources of news. As a result, everything is personalized and polarized — we’re all split into social-media-selected tribes, where our consumption of news and culture feels constantly shaped by a privacy-invading algorithmic determination of one’s innermost sense and sensibility. And yet, in the last few years, something counterintuitive has been happening with mass media: It’s been getting more mass.... Across the cultural industries, blockbusters are getting blockbustier: Despite the barrage of choice, more of us are enjoying more of the same songs, movies and TV shows. We are not nearly as siloed as we tend to think we are.... While the internet has made a mess of our politics, it’s starting to do something remarkable for our culture businesses...."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "This Summer Stinks. But at Least We’ve Got 'Old Town Road'/Lil Nas X’s smash single shows how digital media is creating a shared global culture in an otherwise atomized age" (NYT).

Do you agree with that — the internet has made a mess of our politics, but it's doing something remarkable for our culture businesses? I'd say, first of all, the "more" in "more of us are enjoying more of the same" is less when you're looking at songs, movies, and TV shows than it is when you're talking about politics. The same song has been #1 since last March, but what percentage of Americans love it enough to enjoy seeing it maintain this conspicuousness? Probably less than the number that loves having Donald Trump as President.

Politics involves much more consensus, fine-tuning the same issues. Substantively, it's boring. And yet it's required. Whether you participate or not, the power that will be exercised will be over you too. Music and movies and TV can be completely fragmented, and you can pay attention to anything you want and ignore whatever you want, and the effect, if any, is diffuse and mostly indirect. When we come together at all over a song/movie/TV show it feels special. It feels like unity. But it was entirely voluntary and we're free to disperse at will. And that seeming unity wasn't even a majority. Politics demands that we come together, en masse, over and over, about dealing with problems that — unlike songs — don't have an off switch.

"The 'Mona Lisa' moment is a sense of despair at the impossibly crowded... room devoted to the Mona Lisa... a scene of pure chaos..."

"... as tour groups jostle and throng and sometimes shove one another in hopes of getting close enough to snap a cellphone picture of the world’s most famous painting.... The Mona Lisa moment can be had in the galleries of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which has become so crowded that serious art lovers now avoid it...  The problem isn’t just crowds, or noise or distraction; it is the annihilation of one of the essential components for viewing art, which is extended individual contemplation... In the late 19th- and throughout much of the 20th century, museums stood as temples of art, delivering lessons about the 'civilizing' value of culture. In the middle of the last century, new generations of museum leadership began to stress more populist ideas of openness and equality in the gallery experience. That second age of American museums — the Age of Access — has bred the seeds of its own destruction, generating a cultural experience that attracts enormous crowds, but without giving them any substantial engagement with the materiality or cultural complexity of the art itself.... Are contemporary art museums, in fact, providing something of value to the public?"

From "This new museum doesn’t want Instagram or crowds. Does that make it elitist?" by Philip Kennicott, the art and architecture critic at WaPo. Kennicott isn't suggesting excluding the riffraff to make way for the thoughtful, nuanced people. That would be plainly elitist. His answer, befitting an architecture critic, is architecture — things like narrowing hallways to choke the flow of crowds.

This subject connects to something we were talking about 2 days ago, "‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There?" by Farhad Majoo (NYT).

The Farhad Majoo article clearly fit with my longterm interest in the problems of travel. I almost want to say the impossibility of travel. Museums are a subcategory of travel, since travelers often see the museums of the places they travel to, and in my personal experience, museums are at the top of what I've wanted to do when traveling. I see that Kennicott called museums "impossibly crowded," and maybe that was just hyperbole, but I think he's seeing what I'm seeing. The presence of other people changes the environment from the place you want to see, so the place you want to go no longer exists. Traveling there is literally impossible.

Is that elitist? I'd say, no. It's just aesthetically sensitive and aware. It's only elitist if you think your sensibilities justify excluding the people who don't mind the problems as they continue to crowd the places that you'd go to if they were virtually empty. If you cede these places to the other people, you're the opposite of an elitist. You're a populist.

And that reminds me of how I felt when Donald Trump won the election.

ADDED: When I went to Paris in the 90s, I didn't bring a camera. I had a sketchbook, and the comments to this post — exploring the idea of seeing the parts of the museum where the crowds don't  — made me remember this page:



AND: Here's something I wrote in my Paris notebook that's quite relevant to this post. Transcribed verbatim: "I spent so much time today at the museum — walking all over the Louvre — there is so much here that you get numb, you don't care. If you had to travel from church to church to see each piece, it would mean much more. But as it is, you get to the point where you traipse along, casting your eyes about to see if anything really grabs you (oh, yeah, they're about to deliver a second axe chop to the neck of a saint who's not dead yet! That's cool — heh, heh. I saw some kids pointing this out — & aren't they on the same wave-length perhaps as the artist — in his time). One américain says, 'Let's skip this shit' & I don't think 'What a crass/ignorant little man!' I think 'I know exactly how you feel.' But much is good. I don't mean to slight it. It's just that one really doesn't prefer culture in one humongous globule! And yet in our modern world, great art has been globbed up in large Louvrish hunks, so this is the only way you can see it. For a normal look, you must look at the art of your own time, as the medievals viewed crosses and chalices in their own churches, localized and, not unimportantly, imbued with meaning: the beliefs that they shared with the art & artists themselves."

"Every summer, the most popular European destinations get stuffed to the gills with tourists, who outnumber locals by many multiples, turning hot spots into..."

"... sweaty, selfie-stick-clogged, 'Disneyfied' towns... Advocates of curbing tourism say too many visitors are altering the character of historic cities, and making travel terrible, too. 'It’s a level of tourism which is degrading the enjoyment that residents have, but it’s also degrading the tourist experience, because the tourist who is endlessly queuing behind backpacks of hundreds of other tourists is not discovering the real or the authentic place,' said Justin Francis, the chief executive of Responsible Travel, a company that arranges 'sustainable' travel for customers....You can’t talk about overtourism without mentioning Instagram and Facebook — I think they’re big drivers of this trend... Seventy-five years ago, tourism was about experience-seeking. Now it’s about using photography and social media to build a personal brand. In a sense, for a lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than the experience.'"

From "‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There?" by Farhad Majoo (NYT).

The wrong kind of people are traveling, for the wrong reasons. How can they be pushed back? Is the microaggression of that NYT piece enough or is more heavy handed environmentalism and "cultural appropriation" talk needed? Who are the right people to travel? The NYT doesn't want to say the elite... but I bet it's what they think.

Personally, I'm reinforced in my travel aversion, and I confess to my elitism. I don't want to go to a Disneyfied European destination that has its gills stuffed with "sweaty" selfie-takers who are "degrading" themselves and "degrading" the lives of the actual Europeans, who might otherwise be available for encounters with those who travel for the right reasons.

"So many writers have produced 'I went offline, and here is what I learned' stories that they became a tedious cliché years ago."

"Cliché or no, however, those stories had one thing in common: the writers of them all actually went offline. Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for The New York Times, took a different tack. He didn’t go offline at all: he just said he did, in a widely discussed column. Manjoo wrote about what he learned from his two months away from social media, and dispensed avuncular advice to his readers about the benefits of slowing down one’s news consumption. But he didn’t really unplug from social media at all. The evidence is right there in his Twitter feed, just below where he tweeted out his column: Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000. In an email interview... he stuck to his story, essentially arguing that the gist of what he wrote remains true, despite the tweets throughout his self-imposed hiatus...."

Writes Dan Mitchell at Columbia Journalism Review.

The deplorable notion that Twitter should kick out Donald Trump.

Addressed by the NYT's Farhad Manjoo in "Twitter Has the Right to Suspend Donald Trump. But It Shouldn’t."

If you think private entities should engage in censorship because they have a legal right to do it, you should be ashamed of your lack of free speech values.

This has been a big topic of mine for a long time. I'll just refer you to:

1. "When did the left turn against free speech?"

2. "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News."

"But if you’re not a gamer and you’re not looking for a new kitchen, V.R. is, at this point, just too immersive for most media."

"A few minutes after donning my goggles, I came to regard my virtual surroundings as a kind of prison. Yes, V.R. is a prison of fantastical sights and sounds and one that is at moments irresistibly exciting, but it’s a prison nevertheless," writes Farhad Manjoo in The NYT, who thinks virtual reality is especially bad for porn. He was afraid to try it himself, so he quotes some tech editor named Mike Wehner:

“I don’t care who you are, there’s a fantastic chance you know the paralyzing fear that shoots up your spine when you’re watching a smidgen of erotica and you think you hear the door open, a creak from the stairway or even a random footstep... That feeling is amplified to an insane degree when you can’t actually see or hear what is happening around you, and it’s not an experience that is conducive to self pleasure.”