commentary

When Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump, it provided political commentators with a goldmine of analytic fodder.  Working through the Palin-Trump team up, there is a lot to untangle.

For instance, how do we make sense of a political climate in which the 2008 vice presidential candidate, who so damaged the presidential campaign of her running mate that he could barely mask his contempt for her on election night, is now a desirable connection?

Or what dynamics were in play that pushed Palin to Trump rather than Cruz, especially given Palin’s support of Cruz in his senate bid?

Or could her endorsement backfire, finally impressing upon moderate Republicans the urgency of nominating Rubio or Bush? And relatedly, what’s up with Rubio falling into the mainstream/moderate category?

While commentators touched on a few of these things, largely, the conversation was dominated by another topic entirely: Sarah Palin’s sweater. more...

Rachel Monroe recently published a fascinating essay on Jared Rutledge, the pickup artist whose Asheville, NC community turned against him after discovering his dehumanizing and degrading comments online. Rutledge’s comments were quite similar to what you might find in much of the manosphere if you go looking—lashing out at women who won’t have sex with him, saying women are only valuable if they are beautiful and submissive, tallying the number of women he has slept with, and going so far as to give them scores.

Rutledge expressed a great deal of remorse for his actions, even trying to make amends by donating to a local rape crisis center (which was rejected). For the story, he told Monroe about his past, and what had drawn him to pickup artistry and the manosphere—anger, bitterness, insecurity, and a feeling that he couldn’t make sense of the world around him. In my own research on manosphere discourse, and what men say about the current state of dating and masculinity, Rutledge is far from alone. Many men turn to these communities to try to make sense of their role in a society that looks very different from their fathers’; the decline of the industrial economy, the end of “The Greatest Generation,” and of course the decades of feminist movement and LGBT activism that have dramatically changed the landscape of gender and sexuality.

The work of author and journalist Susan Faludi has been foundational for my own thinking on the topic, and her account of this problem can shed light on what brings men to the manosphere in the first place. In her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, she writes:

It’s often been observed that the economic transition from industry to service, or from production to consumption, is symbolically a move from the traditional masculine to the traditional feminine. But in gender terms, the transition is far more than a simple sex change and, so, more traumatic for men than we realize. A society of utility, for all the indisputable ways that it exploited men’s health and labor, and in an industrial context broke the backs and spirits of factory workers and destroyed the lungs of miners, had one saving grace: it defined manhood by character, by the inner qualities of stoicism, integrity, reliability, the ability to shoulder burdens, the willingness to put others first, the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice. These are the same qualities, recoded as masculine, that society has long recognized in women as the essence of motherhood. Men were publicly useful insofar as they mastered skills associated with the private realm of maternal femininity. Like mothers tending selflessly to their babes, men were not only to take care of their families but also their society without complaint; that was, in fact, what made them men.

…

In a culture of ornament, by contrast, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered ‘individuality’ that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one. The aspects of this public ‘femininity’—objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing—are the very ones that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are ‘gaining’ the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing. [pp. 38-39]

Britney is on Twitter.

There are two primary things that background this, that are probably necessary to know.

The first is that this past year has been extraordinarily hard for me. The second is that it’s been very difficult to talk openly about.

I’ve always tried to be honest online – about what I’m going through, about what I’m wrestling with, and especially about mental illness, which I think is much less of a forbidden topic of conversation than it used to be but which I also think can still stand to be discussed more than it is, and especially in what we would probably call professional settings.

I’ve done this because I value vulnerability – or I want to. I feel like it’s something to aspire to, in no small part because I absolutely suck at pretending that everything is fine if I have to do so for more than five minutes at a stretch. It’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable no matter what I do, so generally I go with what I regard as the lesser of two evils. When I think I can.

And there’s also that I hope vulnerability might eventually help me.

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“Are you a human?”

I asked this question when answering the phone in a bar the other day. Someone else in the bar did a double take. After I hung up, they asked “Did you just ask someone if they are human?”

“Well, no. I asked a robocall if they were human.” This is what I do when I suspect I’m getting a robocall. As a former telemarketer, I try not to hang up on sales calls and I’m polite to telemarketers so that, when I ask them to take me off their call list, they actually do it. But robots? Even better. No hurt feelings, no nastiness. Just “Are you a human?” Click.

So I wonder how people are responding to the new robocalls in Iowa urging them to support Donald Trump. I imagine for folks in early-voting states—people who are courted so amorously during presidential elections that it must be both flattering and exhausting—that they have one of two reactions: immediately hang up, or listen intently to see if this message will help them to decide who to vote for. And I wonder how Iowans felt about the message itself, which boils down to: I’m a white nationalist and I support Donald Trump. If you are also a racist, you should too.

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In the past few years, a subgenre of curiously self-referential feature stories and opinion pieces has begun to appear in many prominent magazines and newspapers. The articles belonging to this subgenre all respond to the same phenomenon – the emergence of natural language generation (NLG) software that has been composing news articles, quarterly earnings reports, and sports play-by-plays – but what they really have in common is a question on the part of the writer: “Am I doing anything that an algorithm couldn’t be doing just as well?” In some instances, titles like “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?” and “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?” place the author’s uniqueness in question from the outset; sometimes the authors of these pieces also force their readers to wonder whether the text they are reading was written by human or machine. In a New York Times Sunday Review essay from last year, for instance, Shelley Podolny subjects her readers to a mini-Turing Test, presenting two descriptions of a sporting event, one written by a software program and one written by a human, and asking us to guess which is which. (On the Times website, readers can complete an interactive quiz in which they deduce whether a series of passages were composed by automated or human authors.)

The two major companies involved in the development of algorithmic writing, Automated Insights and Narrative Science, have been around since 2007 and 2010, respectively. Narrative Science’s flagship software product is called Quill, while Automated Insights’s is called Wordsmith: quaint, artisanal names for software that seems to complete the long process that has severed the act of writing from the human hand over the past century and a half. The two companies initially developed their programs to convert sports statistics into narrative texts, but quickly began offering similar services to companies and later started expanding into data-driven areas of journalism. Such data-based reporting is what NLG software does well: it translates numerical representations of information into language-based representations of the same information. And while NLG programs have existed for several decades, they were mostly limited to producing terse reports on a limited range of subjects, like weather events and seismic activity. According to Larry Birnbaum, one of Quill’s architects, “Computers have known how to write in English for years. The reason they haven’t done so in the past is they had nothing to say, lacking access to a sufficient volume of information.”

As Birnbaum explains it, the new natural language generation software has been made possible – or rather, necessary – by the advent of Big Data. The prior limitations on the topics software programs could write about are disappearing, as all realms of human activity become subject to data processing. Joe Fassler notes in The Atlantic that “the underlying logic that drives [algorithmic writing] – scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts – is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data . . . software can generate a prose analysis that’s robust, reliable, and readable.” Hence, automated journalism will continue to expand into less obviously data-driven realms of reporting as new sources of data become available for processing. Meanwhile, the Associated Press and Forbes, to name a few, are already publishing thousands of software-written articles. more...

“Aren’t you glad you’re not there right now?” This is, if personal experience is any indication, the state-mandated response Floridians must give to anyone that claims to be visiting from anything north of the state line. It doesn’t matter the context —a bartender on Hollywood beach, an emergency room physician in North Miami— they are all very happy that you found your way to Florida this winter. The phrase has a wide range of registers though, that go from outright smugness to a thinly veiled request to validate one’s decision to settle down in 2,300 square feet of something called Flamingo Palisades. “Please,” they seem to say, “tell me this is as good as it gets.”

I grew up just north of Miami and even though I have little desire to live on whatever is left of it after the seas rise to their predicted heights, I value the perspective it has given me. Florida sensitizes you to the effort humans put in to turning spaces into places. Florida’s economy is based on the constant re-invention of its own brand, always changing for different demographics and markets. Florida’s cities are the sociocultural equivalents of GMO corn: equal parts science and marketing, growing out of an artificial substrate of designer chemicals and excrement. They are bland and immensely profitable by design. They don’t conform to existing economies of scale, they make their own.

The Sunbelt, that stretch of Post World War II development that became desirable for modern, full-time habitation only after the advent of the air conditioner, isn’t so much a geographic feature as it is an historic anomaly. It is undergirded by cheap fossil fuels, leisure time, a guaranteed (for some) retirement age, and modern architecture. The winters are warm and prices for goods are generally kept at a libertarian low but the car-based transportation system doesn’t really let most people enjoy either of these qualities. Most of your time is spent burning expensive gas in an air-conditioned Hyundai on a gridlocked highway.

Living in one’s car, albeit among a very different set of conditions, was the focus of a recent essay in Fusion by Malcolm Harris. In exploring his titular question “Where Should a Good Millennial Live?,” he reveals that some of the more trendy alternative housing options pitched to younger generations are substantial reductions in the quality of life: houses not much bigger than a box truck or actually living in a box truck in the parking lot of your employer, are being marketed to young adults as the American Dream of the 21^st Century. In addition to living in tiny houses and cars, Millennials are also being encouraged to rehab the leftovers of the post-industrial economy. If you’re not willing to live in something impossibly small, you can always own lots of property laced with lead and asbestos.

Unlike tiny houses or a truck in the parking lot however, the Rustbelt may hold some liberatory potential. Before we get to that though, I would like to sort out all of the promises and fanfare that has surrounded Rustbelt living and describe why the most publicized reasons for moving to the Rustbelt are not what makes it so interesting. more...

As a rule, parents tend to experience concern about their children’s wellbeing. With all of the decisions that parents have to make, I imagine it’s near impossible not to worry that you are making the wrong ones, with consequences that may not reveal themselves for years to come. This is why recommendations from professional organizations are so important.  They offer the comfort of a guiding word, based presumably in expertise, to help parents make the best decisions possible.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is one such organization, and they have some things to say about children and screen time. However, what they have to say about children and screen time will be revised in the next year, and no doubt, many parents will listen intently. NPR interviewed David Hill, chairman of the AAP Council on Communications and Media and a member of the AAP Children, Adolescents and Media Leadership Working Group. Although Hill did not reveal what the new recommendations would advise, the way he talked about the relationship between screens and kids did reveal a lot about the logic that drives recommendations.  The logic that Hill’s interview revealed made clear, once again, the need for theory to inform practice. More specifically, those who make practical recommendations about technology should consult with technology theorists. more...

2015 was full of trends that we loved to hate: the dress, minions, vaping, hoverboards… it has been a veritable cornucopia of listicles and memes bemoaning the sad state of popular culture. But one stands out to me as particularly partisan, capable of tearing families apart, more controversial than the pumpkin spice lattes or Crocks of years past. That’s right—I’m talking about the man bun. more...

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I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. In all honesty I probably will not watch it until I can assure that I will see a high definition version for free through whatever means comes to my disposal. What I have seen, the cross-promotions, the essays, and the toys, tells me everything I need to know to assess it as a piece of culture. Star Wars is not a movie, it is a platform for media and a financial vehicle. Star Wars has plot like America has elections. It’s almost a formality, the official pomp heralding in a new wave of characters, theories, and controversies. If we black box the film itself and instead look at all of the culture that spews out from its unknown (to me) depths, I think we get a much more cohesive (I’d even go so far as to say honest) assessment of the entire event. more...