ReportWire

Tag: book excerpt

  • The Judy Blume Book That Scandalized a Nation

    [ad_1]

    Living with Tom in New Mexico, Judy had not found the freedom, sexual or otherwise, that she had been after when she left John; to the contrary, she had quickly found herself in another bad marriage. Frustrated, she poured her liberatory aspirations into the book; despite her failure of nerve at the end, Sandy Pressman takes herself for a wilder ride than Judy ever had — flying away to a secret assignation with one lover, sleeping with her brother-in-law at a party (a pool party, where the women ended up drunk and topless), dating the husband of a friend in an open marriage.

    “I was wild,” Judy said. “My fantasies were wild.” She remembered having dinner with her agent, Claire Smith, and Smith’s husband in Brooklyn, after both the Smiths had read a draft of Wifey. “Everyone was so scandalized by it. But [Claire] was not so scandalized so that she wouldn’t sell it. A lot of people wanted me to change my name, warning me I would ruin my lovely career if I published this under my own name.” Before publication, she sent a draft to John. “I said, ‘If there is anything in this book that you don’t want, let me know.’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t care … It’s okay with me.’” Judy wasn’t sure that John ever read it — “I don’t think John ever read any of my books” — but at least she had his blessing.

    While she refused to publish under a pseudonym, she did make one concession to the dictates of decency. In an early draft, Judy had written a scene in which Sandy uses her dog to pleasure herself. “The dog did a little licking of Sandy, and that was very satisfying,” she said. “A little oral sex.” The scene was pure fiction — as an adult, Judy never even owned a dog — but it felt true to Sandy’s character. “It seemed like a good thing to do, [for] somebody who was unfulfilled.” Judy couldn’t remember who asked her to remove the scene; it might have been Claire Smith, or her editor, Phyllis Grann, or Helen Honig Meyer, the publisher of Dell, which oversaw Laurel, Judy’s paperback publisher. Judy heard, second- or thirdhand, that when the book went to Meyer, “she was absolutely scandalized — something to do with [how] her granddaughter liked my books.” Whatever the case, the dog had to go.

    When Wifey was published in September 1978, critics mostly agreed that it was not a good book. The Los Angeles Times critic liked Wifey, calling it “a voyage into reality that is somehow funny in spite of its frustrations and disappointments.” But that was a minority point of view. The Minneapolis Tribune critic said she “didn’t feel much of anything except that there was a lot to wade through on the way to the occasionally risqué,” while the Roanoke Times said the book “meets no needs and offers little fun” and “is a collection of stereotypes performing redundant sexual activities amidst much melodrama and shallow perceptions.”

    It’s hard to credit the assertion that the book “offers little fun,” for, if anything, the book offers too much fun, at the expense of characterization. It’s easy to see how Sandy steps out on her marriage but much harder to make sense of her bizarre internal monologue (using a vinegar douche, Sandy imagines that she is concocting “cunt vinaigrette”), or her willingness to go to bed with any man who comes on to her, including her friend’s husband, whose foreplay involves calling her animal names (“my mountain goat, my baby burro”). The problem, for the novel, is not that Sandy is experimental, adventuresome, or even obscene, but rather that she seems to change from page to page. Judy would later stress her own instability during that period (“I was wild”); it’s hardly surprising that the character onto whom she projected her inner life, the character who conceivably would let a dog go down on her, did not entirely cohere on the page.

    Yet the novel has its strengths, ignored by its critics and, presumably, by its millions of readers, who flocked to the sexy stuff, the inferior pastiche of Erica Jong, Jacqueline Susann, or Anne Roiphe. Sneaking around in the bushes, the old Judy Blume is still there. For one thing, she is still a funny writer, unparalleled at depicting a turtle-swallowing toddler or, it turns out, a predictable husband. “Rules and Regulations for a Norman Pressman Fuck,” one section begins. “The room must be dark so they do not have to look at each other. There will be one kiss, with tongue, to get things going. His fingers will pass lightly over her breasts, travel down her belly to her cunt, and stop. He will attempt to find her clitoris.” And so on, unsparingly.
    Wifey also has, nestled in all the moist valleys between breasts and ass cheeks, insightful writing about racial injustice (there is a subplot about whether the Pressmans should sell their house to a Black family), class tensions (between the Pressmans and their friends, between Norman and his employees), and, as ever, the indignities of being young and female. There is a genuine pathos to the story of Sandy’s twin nieces, agreed by all to be unattractive, thanks to their weight and their noses. When it’s time for the twins’ joint nose jobs, long planned by their mother, Sandy drives her mother into New York City to visit the girls in the hospital. The scene offers a pitiless view of the sexism, and materialism, of the culture in which the girls were being raised.

    “It’s a shame they got the Lefferts’ noses instead of ours,” the twins’ grandmother Mona says to Sandy, their aunt. (Sandy feels the same way; earlier in the book, we read of her surprise that her sister “had produced such unattractive children.”) Mona has it on good authority that although a nose job typically costs $1,800, because they are twins and because of professional courtesy (their father, whom Sandy has slept with, is a gynecologist), “they’re getting a break — two thousand dollars for both.”
    Whatever its merits — and it had some — Wifey was treated by readers and critics as less important than its author. Judy Blume had become one of those celebrities — like Barbra Streisand, say, or Elizabeth Taylor — who was bigger than her body of work. A magazine story about Judy, while occasioned by a new book, could ignore the book and focus on the personal life of the woman who had created it, because that was what readers really wanted to know about. Shortly after the publication of Wifey, two of the country’s most widely read magazines ran long stories about Judy. Neither one could have enhanced her reputation as a serious writer.

    In October 1978, People ran a 2,000-word profile by John Neary, which, with its numerous photographs by his wife, Joan Neary, stretched over five pages. The spread opens with a full-page photograph of Judy looking straight at the camera, in a lacy teddy, leaning back against some sort of comforter or pillow. And it’s all downhill from there. The text of the article is a reasonable summation of her career, beginning with the present (Wifey is a smash, in its third printing, paperback rights sold for $350,000) and looking back at her beginnings (the NYU writing class, early rejection letters). But it is, alas, punctuated by the Blume-ian clichés about her weight (100 pounds, “103 on a fat day,” Judy says) and her youthful appearance. “Judy is always mistaken for a daughter when she answers the door of her sprawling, $140,000 adobe home,” the article says, referring to the house in Santa Fe that she had bought after two years in Los Alamos (the article doesn’t say so, but Kitchens did not contribute to the purchase of their houses). Discussing the impact of Margaret on her career, Judy makes herself sound uncharacteristically naïve: “That was the first time I felt, ‘My God, I really can do this! These people are taking me seriously! This is not just pretend, not just something to keep me out of Saks!’” The quotation may have been Judy’s — a mordant allusion to John Blume, who had made the Saks joke about her writing — but the exclamation points, which drive home the false impression that she is a giddy child or a recovering shopaholic, were People’s added touch.

    Photo: © Joan Neary

    Still, Judy colluded with this lightweight approach, this portrait of the artist as a sex kitten. According to Judy, photographer Joan Neary came up with the idea of posing her in a teddy, and Judy just went along with it. But Neary said that wasn’t so. “As a photographer I never posed anyone for a picture — just hung around long enough for people to relax and forget about me,” Neary said. As for the teddy, Neary said it couldn’t have been her idea: “How would I have known she had that garment?” On the second page of the article, Judy is shown fully dressed but with her arms around Tom’s neck and her legs wrapped around his waist; he is holding her in the air, as if he has just spun her around and they have come to a dizzy stop. The caption reads: “In a playful moment, Judy tells husband Tom, ‘I let you live out your fantasies. This is position No. 32.’”

    On the final page of the article, the photograph at the top shows Judy lying barefoot on a bed, on her stomach, her head propped on one hand, while the other hand holds a pen, scribbling something on a pad of paper. Just as the opening photograph of the piece shows her in bed, wearing skimpy nightclothes, the final photograph implies that she scarcely leaves the bed, save for a change of clothes. Sex, writing — it’s all in the bedroom. The caption under the final photograph reads, “‘I do not see myself as a great novelist,’ she says, ‘but it brings people pleasure, and me pleasure. So why not?’”

    Judy always regretted collaborating with the Nearys. “They knew what People wanted, and they delivered.” The article prompted a disappointed letter from novelist Norma Klein, a friend and frequent correspondent. “When I saw that terrible photo of you in People, dressed in the nightgown with that shy, frightened smile on your face, I practically wanted to cry,” Klein wrote. “It was so pathetic and unnecessary. Don’t play into that.” If the People article manages to erase Judy’s career as a pioneering writer for children, painting her instead as a semi-talented dilettante of adult literature, holed up in the bedroom writing about the pleasure principle, with breaks to give Tom “position No. 32,” the New York Times Magazine article that ran two months later does her the disservice — or was it meant to be a favor? — of overlooking the adult novel altogether. The Times Magazine piece, which mentions Wifey only twice, is by Joyce Maynard, who at 25 was already a literary star herself. Maynard had become precociously famous with the 1972 publication, in the Times Magazine, of “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” an essay that she expanded the next year into a full-length memoir. By the time she wrote the Blume profile, Maynard had dropped out of Yale, moved in with the writer J.D. Salinger (he had sent her a fan letter after reading her essay in the Times Magazine), left Salinger, gotten married, and had a baby. She brought the baby to her interview with Judy in Manhattan.

    By assigning the profile to a 20-something memoirist celebrated for writing about her own adolescence, the Times Magazine was in effect overdetermining the piece that they would get: an appraisal of Judy the children’s writer. “When Judy Blume visits bookstores to autograph copies of ‘Wifey,’ it is the kids who besiege her,” Maynard wrote. “Every week more than 200 of them write her letters — requesting bust-development exercises and asking for more details on how you get a baby. ‘How can I tell my mother that I know some things about sex?’ Or, simply, ‘I am desperate.’” Maynard effectively sidesteps the occasion for the profile — Judy’s new, bestselling, sexy adult novel — to offer an evaluation of her outsize role in youth culture. Maynard is saying to adults, You may have heard about this sensation called Wifey, but are you aware of what the author means to your daughters?

    “Coming of Age with Judy Blume” is a long piece — it was the longest profile of Judy to date — and, with her ample word limit, Maynard limns the basics of Judy’s life. She inserts in the middle, in the heart of the piece, a trip to Bath, Ohio, where she interviews girls and their mothers about the appeal of Judy’s work and explains the twisty road a Blume hardcover can travel: “Then Beth Rice went on a shopping trip with Christiane Boustani and told Christiane’s mother it was O.K. to buy the book. Christiane got the book from Beth after Beth had read it. Heather Benson, age 13, borrowed Forever on a choir trip. Possibly it was Beth Rice’s copy, now covered in brown paper, since one belonging to another girl was confiscated by a teacher at the Bath Middle School. Heather’s mother, Pat, found the copy Heather had, picked it up and was so shocked she couldn’t put it down.”

    Maynard’s Times profile is the rare piece that quotes actual young people about what Judy means to them, and it’s one of the first to connect her popularity with the rising number of parents challenging her books, asking that the books be removed from schools or libraries — a good sign, it’s implied, since it’s the kind of thing that happens to authors only once they get popular. The accompanying photographs are of Judy talking to teenagers and of daughters and mothers quoted in the piece. In short, Maynard takes Judy — and her readership — seriously.

    Nevertheless, certain clichés follow Judy from article to article. Her youthful mien, for example, remains irresistible to the journalist, even the shrewd Maynard: daughter Randy is “often taken for Judy’s sister”; Judy “still has a girlish voice, and in figure she could be about 12 years old”; she “could fit right in as a guest at a seventh-grade slumber party.” More interesting, Judy herself is far too self-deprecating; she’s unwilling or unable to own her talent. “I can’t entirely explain why they [sell], myself,” Judy tells Maynard about her books’ success. “I know I’m no great literary figure.”

    [ad_2]

    Mark Oppenheimer

    Source link

  • ‘Oh My God, They’re Ruining the Show’

    [ad_1]

    From the day it premiered, Twin Peaks had a problem. Audiences wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer; David Lynch and Mark Frost weren’t interested in telling them who killed Laura Palmer. When they agreed to reveal the killer, the network was apparently vindicated. Some 17 million viewers tuned in — the highest ratings the show had achieved since the season-two premiere.

    But now that the murder mystery had been resolved, the show had a new, even more vexing problem: If it wasn’t about solving the murder of Laura Palmer, what was Twin Peaks about? Even Bob Iger concedes he may have been too hasty. “Looking back on it now, I’m not convinced I was right,” he said. “Deep down, I felt David was frustrating the audience, but it may well be that my demands for an answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer threw the show into another kind of narrative disarray.” Mark Frost agrees. “We paid a big price for it. You know, that was something that contributed as much as anything to the momentum falling apart.” David Lynch was even blunter. “That killed Twin Peaks,” he said. “Totally dead. Over. Finished.”

    The problem, of course, was that Twin Peaks wasn’t finished. It was in the middle of its second season, and the story would continue, one way or another, for at least 13 more episodes. “Especially network television— when you’re dealing with 22 episodes, and the production monster’s chasing you, you don’t really have any other choice,” says Mark Frost. “I don’t think it had been fully figured out,” says Scott Frost. “Production is like jumping out of a plane. And you have a parachute, but it’s actually not attached to you yet.”

    The resolution of Laura Palmer’s murder isn’t so much a period at the end of a sentence as it is an ellipsis: Leland may be dead, but BOB is still out there, hunting for another host. Or, to put it another way: With the central mystery resolved, the show’s writers had unprecedented freedom to redefine what Twin Peaks could be. “I don’t know if there was a master plan there at all. We got so good at resolving things we thought up that we were kind of fearless about what we put in,” says writer Robert Engels. “That was one of the things that was fun about the show — that we had the sense that we could pretty much do or try anything,” says writer Harley Peyton. “There were times when that took us down weird avenues, but there were times when it took us in absolutely the right direction. I think we took some wrong turns along the way, but that, to me, is part of the process, and part of making something under sort of insane circumstances.”

    There’s a palpable sense of desperation as Twin Peaks — just one episode removed from Leland’s death — manufactures another, flimsier reason for Cooper to stick around town. Targeted (correctly) by the FBI’s internal affairs division for his extralegal undercover mission at One Eyed Jack’s and (incorrectly) for stealing a large amount of cocaine, Cooper is suspended from the FBI and forced to hand over his badge and gun. Twin Peaks had already flirted with turning Cooper, a consummate outsider, into a Twin Peaks insider. (At the very least, it was hard to imagine him saying good-bye, forever, to the Double R’s coffee and cherry pie.) But Cooper’s dismissal from the FBI, even temporarily, altered the show’s fundamental building blocks in a way that proved challenging to reverse. So much care had been put into crafting the show’s look and feel: What happened when you upended it? “We were doomed the day that Agent Cooper turned in his black suit for lumberjack flannel,” says editor-director Duwayne Dunham.

    Twin Peaks had always managed to juggle its darkest moments with its silliest, but the show’s unique tone was becoming harder and harder to balance. “If we made mistakes along the way, one of them was maybe falling in love with comedy a little too much,” says Peyton. “This is the thing you always have to be careful of as a writer: Are you entertaining yourself, or are you entertaining the audience? We were certainly entertaining ourselves, and the hope was that we would entertain the audience as well.”

    No sustained analysis of season two would be complete without a brief survey of some of the show’s wackier story lines. Nadine Hurley waking from a coma with the strength of a superhero and the mind of a teenager? “I was a big comic book fan, so I brought in Nadine’s superpowers, which I thought was hilarious. That’s on me,” says Peyton. The emergence of Lana Milford (Robyn Lively), a black widow who seduces both of the elderly Milford brothers while turning every other man in Twin Peaks — even, uncharacteristically, Cooper — into a drooling idiot? “That was meant to have a supernatural aspect, but that supernatural aspect never actually comes in, so it’s just unresolved,” says Peyton. Ben Horne, trying to reverse the Civil War while delusionally believing himself to be Robert E. Lee? “That idea came about at the same time Ken Burns’s [The] Civil War miniseries happened. Had that miniseries not come out, I doubt that story ever would have gone into the series,” says writer Scott Frost.

    And then there’s what Peyton acknowledges as “the most grievous thing I ever did in the Twin Peaks universe”: James Hurley’s brief, stand-alone detour into a film noir after he crosses paths with a femme fatale named Evelyn Marsh. “James is just such a wonderful actor, and he had this wonderful vibe that sort of made him a perfect fit for that kind of story, which is why we wanted to do it in the first place,” says Peyton.

    At this point in the story, James’s love life has gone full Peyton Place. “The only thing I really, really wish they would have done is kept James with Donna,” says actor James Marshall. “When Laura died, the reality of their attraction came around. And when they got together, they should’ve stayed together. They could help each other through their grief, and you actually see two people heal while everything else is going crazy. Instead: Evelyn Marsh.”

    “The most grievous thing I ever did in the Twin Peaks universe.”
    Photo: ABC

    In a rare subplot that takes place entirely outside Twin Peaks, James — on a sullen solo motorcycle trip after Maddy is murdered — suddenly wanders into a James M. Cain novel. Twin Peaks had nodded at classic noir tropes before; Neff, the insurance agent who alerted Catherine Martell to a shady policy in the show’s first season, was named in tribute to the protagonist of Cain’s 1943 crime classic Double Indemnity. This particular subplot owes Cain an obvious debt and stretches across five episodes, as the married Marsh picks up James at a bar, hires him as a mechanic, sleeps with him, and frames him for killing her husband before having a change of heart and letting him go.

    It is as paint-by-numbers as a noir story can get, and those responsible for translating it to the small screen were just as dubious of the story line as the audience. “You hadn’t seen a character like Evelyn in Twin Peaks. She felt like she came from, I don’t know, Dynasty or something,” says Dunham, who directed one of the episodes in which the Evelyn Marsh subplot unfolds. “I regret that I didn’t do a better job with it. But it just didn’t fit. It was completely wrong, and it was wrong for James. James — that character — would not be attracted to that. James was one of the Bookhouse Boys.” Marshall agrees. “I think there were a lot of actors on the show who were reputable, seasoned actors — who’ve been around a long time — doing exactly what I was scared to do: going to production and fighting for their parts,” he says.

    “So much happened on the show where I didn’t know if my character was coming or going,” said Lara Flynn Boyle. “I called [David Lynch] every day, like, ‘Oh my God, they’re ruining the show.’ He got sick of hearing from me,” says Sherilyn Fenn. “This costumer, in the second season, said, ‘Oh, I’ve got 20 hula skirts.’ And I was like … ‘Do you think Twin Peaks is just this random, let’s-be-weird-to-be-weird? Because it isn’t. It never was.’”

    “It just was getting weird for weird’s sake,” agrees Dunham. “My thing is: That’s not an accurate understanding of David’s work. It’s not just weird for weird’s sake. There’s a purpose and a reason. That’s why, in David’s hands, he can make that stuff work.”

    The problem reached its nadir in “Episode 21,” the first (and only) episode directed by Uli Edel. As the director of the acclaimed, noirish drama Last Exit to Brooklyn, Edel had earned a reputation as a talent to watch. But his abrasive style clashed with the cast, who were justifiably confident, by then, that they knew what they were doing. During the filming of one scene, “Uli said, ‘You’re just furniture to me, man. Just go where I tell you,’” says Michael Horse. “So I go to the crew and said, ‘This guy, Uli, is he good?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, he’s really good.’ And I went to Uli and said, ‘Hey, man, you can say that to me. But if this isn’t Emmy-quality shit, I’ll come to your house and kick your ass.’”

    Horse’s conflict with Edel was a representative example of the cast’s larger sense that Twin Peaks had been handed to some unfit caretakers while Frost and Lynch were busy elsewhere. “I hope I’m not making anybody mad, but they claimed David and Mark were totally on top of the Twin Peaks stuff — that they were giving yeses and noes and overseeing everything in every detail. But I know that, working with David, it was a way different show. So I just don’t believe that,” says Marshall. “I do think that it had an effect on the show. How could it not? You could be the most talented person on earth. You’re not going to be able to imitate David Lynch.”

    It’s true that the Leland reveal in “Episode 14” was Lynch’s last directing credit until the season-two finale. But while there are Twin Peaks fans who believe season two’s missteps were due to Lynch’s absence, it was Mark Frost who spent some time away from the show during its perceived dip in quality. Just as Lynch spent a chunk of Twin Peaks’s first season directing Wild at Heart, Frost took a leave of absence from season two to direct Storyville, a moody, James Spader–starring political thriller. “His absence made things complicated. Certainly for my relationship with David,” says Peyton.

    By this point, Peyton and Engels — long established as two of Twin Peaks’s most reliable writers — had been given producer credits and taken on some duties that, today, would fall under the umbrella of “showrunning.” When Frost went to New Orleans to shoot Storyville, he left Peyton in charge. “It’s not like I had to somehow convene a writers’ room and figure out what we’re going to do next. We know what every episode is going to be, and Mark was talking to me every day,” says Peyton. “But one night — at, like, almost midnight — my phone rings, and it’s Todd Holland. And Todd is freaking out because he just got off the phone with David Lynch, who gave him a raft of script notes that were going to impact his shooting the following morning. Now, I’m already a little irritated, so I say, ‘Look. Ignore David’s notes. He has no business calling you up at 11 o’clock at night with script notes. Just shoot your day and let it be.’ He’s very thankful, and I feel I’ve done my job.”

    “My phone rings the next day. And David yelled at me for ten minutes. And I’m telling you: Ten minutes is a long time to have someone yell at you. His temper … you didn’t see it very often, but I saw it, and he was fucking furious, yelling at the top of his lungs: How dare I? What the fuck am I doing? Who the fuck do I think I am? The phone call, obviously, did not end well. And my relationship with David — whatever relationship I had — that was the end of our relationship.”

    The disagreements among creatives at the top of the show were further complicated by the actors, who continued to use their own power to try to shape the stories written for their characters. “There were some political things that were starting to happen, and I just got out of the way for the whole thing,” says Marshall. “There were several other actors on the show who were vying for different things, and it was like … I didn’t want to be involved in that.”

    Most significant was the scrapping of a plotline that had been simmering since the beginning of season one: the flirtation between Cooper and Audrey Horne. “As far as I remember, we all believed that they were a couple or going to be a couple,” said Tina Rathborne, who directed one of season one’s many sexually charged scenes between Audrey and Cooper. “Audrey’s seduction of Coop seems part of the dual lesson that Coop is learning. He’s learning about his more innocent side, and he’s learning about his darker side, that he’s willing to be seduced by this young girl. This young, somewhat raunchy girl. But he’s also willing to defend his higher side.”

    In season one, Cooper’s so-called “higher side” seemed to win out. When he found Audrey waiting for him, naked, in his bed at the Great Northern, he let her down by gently explaining that what she really needed was a friend. But owing to Kyle MacLachlan and Fenn’s undeniable onscreen chemistry, the writers kept looping Cooper and Audrey back together. Audrey goes undercover at One Eyed Jack’s to help the man she calls “my special agent”; Cooper risks his career to rescue her. When Audrey meets Denise Bryson and feels threatened by the presence of Cooper’s female FBI peer, she marks her territory by planting a kiss on his lips.

    If the writers didn’t want the audience to be invested in a romance between Cooper and Audrey, they were doing a very, very bad job backing away from the story. That’s because they had every intention of doubling down on what had obviously emerged as the show’s most potent will they/won’t they. “David took me to dinner and basically asked me if I was in love with Kyle,” says Fenn. “And I burst out laughing. Not even slightly! He’s a great guy, he’s a nice person, but that’s it. I didn’t have any feelings that way. At all. The truth is that as human beings, he and I didn’t have that kind of chemistry. But those characters, for some really weird reason, did.” Peyton adds, “We were going to do a — ‘romance’ may be the wrong word, but certainly an exploration of the relationship between Audrey and Cooper. That didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen because Kyle refused.”

    For years, the official story has been that MacLachlan rejected the plotline because he didn’t believe Cooper would get involved with a high-schooler. There’s a solid plot justification for that argument; Cooper did, after all, gently reject Audrey for the same reason back in season one. But whatever the merits of that argument, there’s no question that offscreen dynamics were also in play. At the time, MacLachlan was dating Lara Flynn Boyle, whose push for Donna’s unconvincing bad-girl makeover in season two was judged, by some, to have been a response to Fenn getting more attention for her coquettish performance.

    “I still remember talking with Mark [Frost],” says Peyton. “Mark was saying, ‘No, we’re going to draw a line in the sand. We can’t do this. We planned this pretty carefully, and it’s going to upend our second season.’ Then Kyle went into Mark’s office with David. I remember waiting and waiting and waiting. And then he came out and said, ‘No, we’re not doing it.’ And that was because David was the one who was basically saying, ‘We’re going to go with what the actors prefer.’ The thing about David that I learned over time is that he will sort of do anything for the actors. And because he’ll do anything for them, they will do anything for him.”

    Whatever the underlying reasons for it, even those who were frustrated by MacLachlan’s justification now concede it was better that the Cooper-Audrey plotline didn’t move forward. “It’s hard to say, because nowadays, I would say, ‘No, we can’t do that, because he’s in a position of power and she’s much younger.’ All the things Kyle was saying. It’s easy to say he did it because of Lara Flynn Boyle. But who knows why?” says Peyton. “I mean … he did end up with a love interest who was the same age [as Audrey]. And she was from a convent, for crying out loud.”

    Cooper’s formerly cloistered paramour was Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), a half-sister of Norma Jennings whose sudden arrival in Twin Peaks was written to fill in the gap where the Cooper-Audrey romance would have been, and actor Heather Graham knew what she was walking into. Prior to being cast, Graham had already made her way into the outskirts of Lynchland by co-starring, opposite Benicio del Toro, in a Calvin Klein commercial Lynch directed. But playing a woman capable of instantly bewitching Dale Cooper would be an entirely different challenge, and Graham met Lynch at his home to discuss the character — after he showed off another ongoing project. “He was doing some kind of experiment where he was putting meat into this kind of art piece and letting ants crawl on it,” says Graham.

    Graham recalls Lynch describing Annie as “a finely tuned machine. Like a Ferrari or a sports car that’s very amazing — but that it can be easily thrown off-balance, if something goes wrong.” Peyton had a blunter appraisal: “Sad to say, Annie was — at least when the character was initially conceived — a damsel in distress. And not a great deal more than that,” he says.

    “When we said, ‘Okay, well, who’s going to sweep Audrey off her feet?’ [Harley Peyton] said, ‘Well, it should be a singing cowboy.’”
    Photo: ABC

    Audrey, for her part, got a new love interest of her own — though not before the show teased a flirtation between Audrey and Bobby, who was briefly positioned as Ben Horne’s new right-hand man. “I don’t know if they were definitely going to go with it. I thought they were definitely going to go with it, and we had those moments,” said Dana Ashbrook. “I think it was either a MacGuffin, or a change of someone’s mind, or I don’t know. It was so on the fly, always, the story.” In the end, Bobby stayed true to Shelly — though not before Gordon Cole planted a kiss on her — and Audrey got her own new love interest in John Justice Wheeler, a dashing young businessman-pilot played by Billy Zane. “It was Harley who came up with [John Justice Wheeler],” says Mark Frost. “When we said, ‘Okay, well, who’s going to sweep Audrey off her feet?’ he said, ‘Well, it should be a singing cowboy.’”

    Wheeler does, in fact, throw on a cowboy hat, take Audrey on a picnic, and serenade her with a rendition of the cowboy folk standard “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Fenn herself was unconvinced. “He’s a really nice guy. But the first time I met him was at 6 in the morning. And he goes, ‘What would you do if I leaned over the table and kissed you?’ And I go, ‘I’d have a problem with that.’” Still, Wheeler’s routine is enough, apparently, to knock Audrey’s crush on Cooper out of her brain entirely; the episode’s script describes her as “warm and certain” as she reassures Wheeler that she doesn’t have feelings for anyone else.

    With Cooper and Audrey splintering off into their own separate love stories — and much of the other main cast engaged in their own semi-stand-alone arcs — Twin Peaks needed both a villain and an event to justify weaving everything back together. If there was anything that bound Twin Peaks’s many threads in the back half of the second season, it was the simmering threat of Cooper’s insane former partner Windom Earle, revealed early in season two as having escaped custody hell-bent on revenge. Though it wasn’t clear at the time, Earle’s clash with Cooper would become Twin Peaks’s most significant arc following the resolution of Laura’s murder. “That was supposed to be short-lived,” says Engels. “I talked those guys into hiring [Kenneth Welsh]. He was a friend of mine, and they just loved him, so that character became bigger.”

    After escaping a mental institution and stalking Cooper to Twin Peaks, Earle engages Cooper in a grotesque version of the daily chess game they played when they were partners. Whenever Earle takes a piece, he commits an equivalent murder; the loss of a pawn, for example, leads to the murder of a drifter with no direct connection to the larger narrative.

    Once Cooper realizes the game Earle is playing, he’s savvy enough to build a strategy not aimed at winning the game, but at protecting the pieces remaining on his side of the board. Still: You’d think he’d be smart enough to realize that protecting his queen is paramount — especially since he’s simultaneously falling in love with Annie, whose innocence and lack of worldliness makes her an especially ripe target. And you’d definitely think he’d be smart enough to recognize the danger when the Giant literally appears in front of him, waving his arms and mouthing the word no, after Annie suggests she’ll enter the Miss Twin Peaks pageant. But when Cooper falls in love, it seems, his deductive powers vanish; just a few episodes earlier, he flirts with Annie at the Double R, then walks right by the not-especially-well-disguised Windom Earle.

    If there was anything that bound Twin Peaks’s many threads in the back half of the second season, it was the simmering threat of Cooper’s insane former partner Windom Earle, played by Kenneth Welsh.
    Photo: ABC

    All these plotlines converge in the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks, which also turns out to be the last gasp of the comedy-focused storytelling that had come to the forefront of the first season. The Miss Twin Peaks pageant was designed, among other things, to bring the increasingly scattered group of characters back together: Donna Hayward, Shelly Johnson, Lucy Moran, Nadine Hurley, Lana Milford, and Annie Blackburn all compete, and Norma Jennings, Doc Hayward, Pete Martell, and Dick Tremayne all play a role in judging the pageant. Though she had been targeted by Windom Earle alongside Donna and Shelly just a few episodes earlier, Audrey is noticeably absent for much of the competition. “I called David right away and said, ‘I’m not doing it,’” says Fenn. “No fucking way. Audrey was there, but I didn’t, like, parade up and down a fucking catwalk in a bathing suit.”

    Goofy as it is, the levity feels welcome before Twin Peaks takes its final plunge into the darkness. Lana Milford does something called “contortionistic jazz exotica,” and Lucy Moran does a dance that ends in the splits, which led to actress Kimmy Robertson needing to reassure people that there was no damage to the baby. (Robertson, for the record, was not actually pregnant.) But when Annie Blackburn is crowned Miss Twin Peaks — after a speech that leans heavily on the words of Chief Seattle, a leader of Washington’s Suquamish and Duwamish tribes — Earle, who has infiltrated the Miss Twin Peaks pageant disguised as the Log Lady, makes his move. A queen has been crowned; he’s ready to claim her.

    It’s a strong cliffhanger for the season finale, but that’s not how it originally aired. By this point, ABC’s scheduling of Twin Peaks had become erratic, with lengthy hiatuses in December and January — a problem further exacerbated when the show was preempted by coverage of the Gulf War. After the memorably bizarre cliffhanger of “Episode 23” — which concluded with Josie Packard, revealed as the mysterious shooter who shot Cooper in the season-one finale, somehow trapped in a drawer pull in a Great Northern Hotel room — ABC put the show on hiatus. That troubling sign prompted a fan campaign called COOP, or Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks, to place hundreds of phone calls and send thousands of letters and packages, some containing logs or doughnuts, to ABC. David Lynch goosed the campaign further in a February appearance on Late Night With David Letterman, where the host gamely posted Bob Iger’s mailing address. (“I love annoying these network weasels,” said Letterman.)

    ABC relented, and Twin Peaks returned on Thursday, March 28 — an escape, at last, from the wasteland of Saturday night. But the reprieve was short-lived. Less than a month later, on April 18, 1991, “Episode 27” aired — a return to form that ended, promisingly, with BOB reemerging from the Black Lodge. But anyone intrigued by that cliffhanger was forced to wait nearly two months, to June 10, when the network unceremoniously dumped the final two episodes as a double feature. Though Twin Peaks hadn’t been formally canceled, everyone involved knew the writing was on the wall. “As a phenomenon,” Mark Frost conceded a month before the season-two finale aired, “the show is over.”

    [ad_2]

    Scott Meslow

    Source link

  • ‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s Newest Southern Reach Book

    ‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s Newest Southern Reach Book

    [ad_1]

    But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.

    The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.

    On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”

    (No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)

    Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.

    She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”

    Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”

    This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.

    Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.

    He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.

    “All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”

    Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?

    Excerpted from Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.

    [ad_2]

    Jeff VanderMeer

    Source link

  • Mapping the Marvel Universe in 6 Very Cool Charts

    Mapping the Marvel Universe in 6 Very Cool Charts

    [ad_1]

    Mapping the Marvel universe is not the kind of thing one can do just by snapping their fingers.

    For starters, there are many Earths out there in the multiverse; there are also all kinds of mystical dimensions and other weird locations. But even on just one version of Earth there are many points of interest, from the hometowns of fan-favorite heroes to fictional nations that exist only in comic books. Trying to find every Marvel-ous hangout in New York City? Fuggedaboutit.

    Still, for his latest book of cool charts, that’s exactly what Tim Leong did: map the Marvel universe. For his new book, Marvel Super Graphic, Leong made a diagram of mystical planes, an illustration of the proximity of Kamala Khan’s New Jersey residence to Moon Girl’s Lower East Side lab, and even a Mean Girls–esque illustration of who-sits-where in the Empire State University cafeteria.

    But that’s just the beginning. Leong—who, full disclosure, once served as WIRED’s design director—filled Marvel Super Graphic with charts and graphics about many aspects of the Marvel comic book universe. Check out some geographically-focused highlights from the book above.

    —Angela Watercutter

    [ad_2]

    Tim Leong

    Source link

  • What Really Happened While Filming Hodor’s Fateful ‘Game of Thrones’ Scene

    What Really Happened While Filming Hodor’s Fateful ‘Game of Thrones’ Scene

    [ad_1]

    The exterior of the cave of the Three-Eyed Raven is constructed in a quarry near Ballymena, Northern Ireland—an almost perfect bowl-shaped hollow now filled with scenery, tents, and cabins. The cave’s interior and its various tunnels have been constructed at the studio in Banbridge, and it’s there where we’ll spend the majority of our time. The walls have been covered in moss and the floor strewn with real animal bones. On our first day, we’re also joined by the 85-year-old actor Max von Sydow who plays the Three-Eyed Raven—one of the old guard of actors I love to watch so much. Physically, Max seems more frail than even Margaret John had been, and I worry about him sat for hours in the cold. But just like Margaret did, he can snap into character like an old pro.

    Since I’ve returned to the series, this is the first scene where Hodor has to interact. Meera will talk with him about the food she’s been dreaming of when they reach home. The mention of home and sausages lights up Hodor’s face.

    It’s supposed to be a lovely, lighthearted moment before all hell breaks loose and the undead descend on us, but I just can’t relax. In fact, I feel suffocated by the enormity of everything that’s expected of me. Jesus fucking Christ, Kristian. You need to be on your A game, I tell myself, but I’m agitated, so much so that Jack notices I’m struggling.

    “Are you OK?” he asks after a few takes, which I’ve barely managed to get through. “Are you having difficulty?”

    “Yes, it’s awful,” the words tumble from me. Hodor’s subtle tics used to come easily to me, but now I’m tying myself in knots trying to express them. I explain to Jack the mad journey I’ve been on for the past year, and the personal journey I’ve been on, too. I’m finding stepping back into inhabiting someone other than myself very hard. Then I stop. Did I just say all of that … to a director I don’t know? I think. Years ago, I would have kept silent, like when my back was breaking in the Great Hall. I stop talking and watch Jack’s eyes carefully. Is he going to understand? Help me work this out? Or dismiss me and move on?

    “OK, just take it easy,” he smiles.

    “I’ll be fine, but everyone might need to be a bit patient,” I say quickly. Jack gives me a shoulder squeeze.

    “Just relax. It will all come flooding back,” he reassures me.

    Jack is right, just like John Ruskin had been years ago. And after a while, I do start to remember: Do not overthink Hodor; do not overthink your performance. As the morning wears on, Hodor reappears like an old friend.

    [My stunt double] Brian is also worth his weight in gold. As soon as the magical shield keeping us safe in the cave vanishes and the wights and White Walkers come for Bran, we need to hotfoot it out. This means take after take of me pulling Isaac on the sled, which is attached on runners to the tunnel floor. Thankfully, Brian will take the reins on many of these shots—the shots where my face is not in view. My back hasn’t yet completely recovered, and this also gives me the chance to concentrate on what’s ahead. Besides, Isaac has gotten even heavier in the intervening years.

    [ad_2]

    Kristian Nairn

    Source link

  • “Are You Saying No to Elon Musk?”: Scenes from the Slash-and-Burn Buyout of Twitter

    “Are You Saying No to Elon Musk?”: Scenes from the Slash-and-Burn Buyout of Twitter

    [ad_1]

    At around 9:00 a.m. on October 27, 2022, Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, summoned his leadership team into one of the large glass-doored conference rooms that lined the suite of offices on the seventh floor of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. After months of tension and worry, there was a grim clarity in the air—Musk was finally completing the acquisition.

    Twitter’s top-ranking employees crammed into the room. Agrawal’s deputies were there, as well as vice presidents from finance, product, human resources, and sales. Even more executives dialed in on video conference from New York and around the globe, their faces tiling the screen at the end of the room.

    It was clear to everyone there that it was Agrawal’s last meeting. He sat at the conference room table, CFO Ned Segal by his side. The mood was somber—everyone in the room understood that many among them might soon be swept away by Elon Musk’s tsunami.

    No one was more likely to be fired than Agrawal. For months, Musk had made clear his disdain for Twitter’s chief executive in barbed tweets, curt text messages, and explosive video calls. Agrawal had taken most of Musk’s outbursts quietly, advised by Twitter’s battalion of lawyers not to argue with the billionaire or speak about the deal to employees—or even executives—because anything he said might leak to the media.

    After months of near-silence to the wider group, Agrawal spoke, remaining calm and analytical. “We might close today,” he announced. The court-imposed deadline for Musk to complete the transaction was the next day, Friday, but it seemed he could get it done a day early. Agrawal told the executives he was proud of what they’d accomplished.

    There was no agenda, he told everyone, and opened the discussion. “What’s going to happen now?” one executive in attendance asked. Segal tried to explain how the closing would work but said candidly that no one could be sure. After all, the man on the other side of the transaction was unpredictable.

    There was plenty of work left to do to finalize the deal, but Agrawal allowed Twitter’s leaders to riff, share, and ask anything they wanted. They had never had a meeting quite like it before. Sales executives wanted to know what they should tell advertisers. Human resources leaders wanted to know what they could tell employees, and when they were allowed to share any information.

    Then one of the employees in the room broached the question that everyone was thinking but no one dared say: “What’s going to happen to you guys?”

    Segal repeated the same line he’d told employees before. “I haven’t talked to him,” he said. “I’ll remain open until I do.” Agrawal nodded along.

    “Each of you needs to make your own decision,” Agrawal said.

    The executives had endless questions, but their leaders had few answers.

    Segal could sense their frustration and, after months of facing unanswerable questions, he cracked. Fighting to keep his composure, he told them he didn’t know what was coming next. “People remember how you handle yourself when it’s hard, not when it’s easy,” he said, his voice choking with emotion. He tried to express the weight of the responsibility all of them had—to the company and to each other—to see the sale through.

    Several of the executives in the room were startled to see Segal, normally polished, perky, and on message, get emotional. As the meeting ended, some of them embraced each other, while others hung back to say their goodbyes to their bosses.

    Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who was Musk’s close friend and de facto finance shepherd in the deal, had told Twitter’s team on Wednesday that he had all the money in place to close the transaction. It was a pleasant surprise to Segal, who, upon learning that Gracias had the funds, nudged the board. They should move up the close, the chief financial officer suggested. Finishing the transaction early would leave Musk one less day to back out. While Twitter’s leadership had no idea where some of Musk’s money was coming from—new, undisclosed investors had joined Musk’s take-private effort—they were more than willing to take his $44 billion.

    Members of Twitter’s finance teams had adopted a gallows humor approach to the deal and made a joke of trying to track Musk’s money. When he sold new tranches of Tesla stock and filed the required public disclosures of the transactions, they tallied up his funds, trying to figure out if Musk had enough cash on hand to buy their company. At one point, Musk’s lawyers also accidentally sent Twitter’s finance team a full spreadsheet of all the people and investment firms from which they solicited money. That screwup was immediately followed by a legal threat to the Twitter recipients to delete the email and its contents.

    Of course, there was no way of knowing where the billionaire kept all his money or how he planned to use it. Twitter employees debated whether Musk was sitting on a secret stash of cryptocurrency or had obtained fresh margin loans using his private SpaceX shares as collateral. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Musk borrowed $1 billion from SpaceX that October, paying the money back with interest the following month.

    To Twitter, it didn’t really matter where Musk’s money came from—so long as he paid. But given how many agreements Musk had already tried to break, nothing was certain. There was a world where the richest man on earth, they believed, could test the court-appointed deadline by saying he simply did not have the available funds to do the deal.

    In a normal transaction, the buyer would be transparent with the seller about where his funds were flowing from. But Musk, in what Twitter executives believed was an effort to protect his investors from scrutiny, had dumped all the funds into a single account so that Twitter couldn’t trace their origins.

    On a call with Segal and Twitter’s finance executives and lawyers on Thursday, Gracias changed his tune. His boss was actually short, Gracias explained. Musk was missing more than $400 million, and Gracias demanded that Twitter wire money from its own coffers to Musk so that the deal could close. Segal was dumbfounded. Robert Kaiden, Twitter’s strait-laced chief accounting officer, and the half dozen other people who listened in to the conversation couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

    [ad_2]

    Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

    Source link

  • The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

    The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

    [ad_1]

    Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.

    Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”

    “Call your supervisor!” she told him.

    Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper cable.

    “We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll return home when you leave for duty.”

    In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

    The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.

    A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”

    As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment, and even raw metal fresh from the mines into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.

    [ad_2]

    Vince Beiser

    Source link

  • The Woman Who Engineered Donald Trump’s Rise From the Ashes of 2020

    The Woman Who Engineered Donald Trump’s Rise From the Ashes of 2020

    [ad_1]

    DeSantis told Trump and Stepien that he thought Wiles lied and leaked to the press.“Fair enough,” Stepien replied. “But you won, and so did Donald Trump in Florida in 2016.”

    Trump made the final decision. “We’re hiring Susie.” She was back in the fold by the beginning of July.

    The most immediate prospect for reasserting control over his party—which would also double as a test of rank-and-file fidelity to him and his MAGA movement—would be picking and choosing among the GOP candidates announcing for office in 2022 and issuing a battery of his trademark “complete and total” endorsements. But without any kind of process in place for Trump to make endorsements, he had already begun to endorse candidates haphazardly, doling out his support to Republicans that Donald Trump Jr. and some of his aides viewed as “squishy,” or not sufficiently MAGA, like Kansas senator Jerry Moran, who in their view had been too critical of Trump’s trade policies and was not sufficiently loyal.

    At the end of February, his closest remaining political advisers were summoned to Mar-a-Lago to start charting out how they would approach things like endorsements.

    It was a strange and empty time at Trump’s club. COVID-19 had scared off some of its members (the next month, the club would be temporarily shut down by an outbreak of the coronavirus). Other members had left after Trump’s 2020 loss and January 6, when it became clear to them the hefty membership fee was worthwhile only when Trump was in power. Being associated with someone who inspired a bloody attack on the Capitol didn’t have the same social clout as being associated with a president.

    The meeting was held in the empty tea room at Mar-a-Lago, a dining room just off the main living room. Trump’s former campaign managers, Brad Parscale and Bill Stepien; Justin Clark, a White House lawyer and deputy campaign manager; Dan Scavino; Jason Miller; and Corey Lewandowski sat in banquet chairs around a table with a white tablecloth. After working in the White House and on Trump’s 2020 campaign, they found the setup oddly informal.

    There was no set agenda. No one was in charge, and—unusual for Trumpworld—no one was angling to be. Trump wanted to be a political Godzilla, but at the moment he barely had the capacity to send out an email, let alone fundraise. Among the top priorities they discussed that afternoon was sorting out who was going to do mail, and some kind of process for making endorsements, so as to block people from pushing their friends on Trump. Word had already gotten back to Trump Jr. that Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s ally and golfing buddy, had been lobbying endorsements.

    For those who had worked for Trump since 2016, having clearly delineated roles and responsibilities was a novel concept—an exciting change of pace, actually.

    And even if not much came from the meeting beyond an online process for candidates to make endorsement requests and a weekly call, there was also the sense in the group that if Jared Kushner had run things in 2020, it was Donald Trump Jr. who was going to assume a larger role moving forward.

    Kushner and Trump’s son were both wealthy, Ivy League–educated men, born just three years apart, but they had very different views of the world. After Kushner he served as a top adviser to Trump in the White House, he and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, were eager to move on and reingratiate themselves with the jet-set New York crowd, while Trump Jr. looked forward to disappearing into the wilderness of Pennsylvania to hunt deer and was eager to make his own mark on the MAGA movement.

    Don Jr., as he was referred to, made clear that when it came to his dad’s political capital, they needed to be scrupulous: Unless Trump was getting something in return, or unless the candidate in question proved they were true believers or allies, Trump wasn’t going to give out his endorsement.

    One idea came from Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist who had worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign as war-room director under Steve Bannon and went on to work closely with Don Jr. He suggested that candidates answer a one-page questionnaire about their positions on issues like immigration and foreign policy, and whether they would endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024. Everyone loved the idea, and questions were drafted. But the idea was later scrapped by Trump himself.

    Trump’s small team of advisers also needed to figure out fundraising vehicles that could drop money into upcoming midterm races. Save America, a leadership PAC, was formed right after the election, and Trump planned to use that to pay for staff and political expenses. In addition to Save America, a new super PAC, Make America Great Again Action, was created to raise and spend an unlimited amount of money on advertising in upcoming midterms races.

    Trump had just announced his first endorsements—for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary turned gubernatorial candidate in Arkansas, and for Moran in Kansas—but he was eager to start endorsing more and was hell-bent on upending the campaigns of the Republicans who supported his impeachment or he felt had crossed him in the 2020 election.

    [ad_2]

    Meridith McGraw

    Source link

  • As Biden and Trump Square Off in Their First Debate, Let’s Revisit Why Trump Won the 2016 Showdowns

    As Biden and Trump Square Off in Their First Debate, Let’s Revisit Why Trump Won the 2016 Showdowns

    [ad_1]

    Don’t worry about it, Little Marco …. Low energy …. You are the single biggest liar….

    The first 2024 presidential debate is set for Thursday, and there may be wisdom in the old adage: Past is prologue. A case can certainly be made that one of the main reasons Donald Trump earned his party’s nomination in 2016—and went on to win the general election—is because of the sheer must-see spectacle of his off-the-rails debate performances. Eight years later, a sizable audience will be either tuned into the faceoff, to be hosted by CNN, or will spend time scrolling through the online highlight reel. In preparation, it is useful to consider why those bygone showdowns played to Trump’s strengths.

    It is a given, of course, that Trump went into the early debates with a substantial advantage against the large GOP field. The main reason: he was a reality TV star, extremely comfortable with the medium of television and in tune with the audiences at home and in the studio. Experience in reality TV—a genre that is untethered to the real world—allowed Trump to parse the truth and make up facts on the fly, behavior that proved especially effective when courting a public with a compromised rumor-immune system.

    Not to belabor the obvious, but Trump knew how to treat politics itself as a reality show. In the first few months of the primaries, skeptics had viewed his candidacy as little more than his way of burnishing his brand. Full stop. Yet once Trump had gotten a debate or two under his belt, he realized—as did the political and media establishments—that he had found his political métier. In short order, the cable and network news divisions began to cast him in the lead.

    Soon, they were marketing the presidential race like a prime-time series. On two dozen evenings, TV provided live coverage of the primary and caucus results. Over the course of 15 months, beginning in August of 2015, there were 31 debates, town halls, and forums. In addition, Trump’s campaign rallies and primary night speeches were sometimes broadcast or streamed live.

    Jeff Zucker, for one—then the boss at CNN—was going all-in for Trump. No wonder: he’d been the executive at NBC who’d help steer the success of Trump’s own reality show, The Apprentice. Roger Ailes, then running Fox News, also saw the candidate as his kind of marquee talent: loud, brash, unpredictable, and physically imposing, all of which translated into ratings catnip. In no time, this saturation coverage on cable and broadcast got viewers hooked on The Great Race. The debates became, in effect, an episodic TV series, in simulcast. The program merged three formats, all of which had been perfected during the 1990s: the reality show, the talk/opinion show, and the monthslong TV-news saga, from “Conflict in the Gulf” (’90–’91), to the O.J. Simpson “Trial of the Century” (’94–’95), to the March to Impeachment (’98-’99), not to mention Bush v. Gore (’00–’01).

    The debates—and the race itself—turned out to be tailor-made for a reality-TV character like Trump: the serialized nature of the contest, the faux suspense, the obsession with process. So, too, was the fixation on the week’s winners (“We are going to win big-league, believe me”) and losers (“I like people who weren’t captured”). This was a format Trump knew intimately. And he solidified his hold on voters early by appearing in a setting that suited his showman’s flashiness and his insult-comic style.

    As the Republican candidates lined up on the debate stage, Trump would typically be positioned at the center lectern. He would field more questions than his competitors. The setting had hints of Survivor and The Apprentice. At times, the moderators would focus less on the candidates’ policies than on their views about one another: “Senator Cruz, you suggested Mr. Trump ‘embodies New York values.’ Could you explain what you mean by that?” This line of questioning encouraged conflict and helped amplify Trump’s tendency to razz his rivals. Meanwhile, the postmortems by experts would reverberate for days across websites, social media, the print press, and the news and opinion programs, prolonging the agony and the exegesis.

    All along, Trump was playing by reality-TV rules. He didn’t “prepare.” He played his malaprops and bluster as authenticity. He and his surrogates “spun” his performance in pre-interviews and post-interviews. He inserted his family into the process, which helped bolster his appeal and fill out his back story. He spread hearsay (“I’m hearing…”; “Everybody is saying…”). When things weren’t going his way, he blamed his mic or his earpiece. He cast doubt on the moderators. He whined and he sulked and he scowled.

    Trump seemed to have the facility to say whatever sounded sensible or outrageous in the moment. He would build a “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border—which Mexico would pay for. He would alter his positions, debunk fellow candidates he’d previously praised, deny saying things he’d actually said. And all of it went relatively un-fact-checked by his opponents—or even the moderators. While the other presidential hopefuls on the debate stage gave responses that were based IRL, by and large, Trump played virtually. He understood that on reality programs the cleverest half-truth could mortally wound an opponent, and the craftiest player would often win—and win over his audience.

    [ad_2]

    David Friend

    Source link

  • How Advertising Broke the World

    How Advertising Broke the World

    [ad_1]

    Disclosure: Longtime journalist Steven Brill is the founder or cofounder of a number of publications and companies, including NewsGuard, where he is the co-CEO and coeditor in chief. Among other services, NewsGuard offers advertisers brand-safety services aimed at countering the pitfalls of unvetted programmatic advertising. This story is excerpted from his new book, The Death of Truth.

    In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin. It wasn’t that the legendary champion of American capitalism had an alter ego who woke up every morning wondering how he could help finance Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda network. It was because Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News’ global website network.

    Nor was it because a marketing executive at Geico had decided that advertising on the Russian disinformation outlet was a good idea. That would have been especially unlikely, not only because of the Buffett connection, but also because Geico stands for Government Employees Insurance Company and has its roots dating to the 1930s, providing insurance to civilians and members of the military who worked for the American government, not its Russian adversary.

    In fact, no one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?

    Geico’s ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts. The numbers involved are mind-boggling. If Geico’s advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers.

    Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company’s ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News’ sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others.

    Every workday, approximately 2,500 people sit at desktops or laptops using these programmatic advertising algorithms to spend tens of millions of dollars an hour. They work at advertising agencies scattered around the world, or, in the case of some major companies, at their in-house advertising shops. Their titles might be “programmatic specialist,” “programmatic associate,” or “campaign manager.” What they have in common is that they are usually in their first jobs out of college. Although many work from home post-Covid, if they are in the office, they sit at carrels in large open spaces that resemble the trading floor of a stock brokerage.

    A Keyboard Replaced Mad Men

    Let’s call our archetype specialist Trevor, and assume that he works in the programmatic advertising unit of one of the five major global advertising agency holding companies. He probably has a salary of $60,000 to $80,000 a year. Trevor will be logged in to what is known as a demand-side platform. Think of it as a kind of stock exchange for buying advertising instead of shares of a company. The demand-side platform is where all of the available advertising space on every page of every website in the world that the platform has assembled as its inventory is made available to a buyer like Trevor.

    In proximity, or in close touch if working remotely, will be another junior staffer with a title of “media buyer,” “planner,” or “campaign manager,” whose job is to make sure that the advertising effort, or “campaign,” that has been planned by higher-ups on the creative and planning teams is communicated to Trevor. This includes loading the actual ad for the product onto the demand-side platform for deployment, and also giving Trevor, sitting in front of the demand-side platform’s dashboard, the all-important targeting decisions that the planners have made: Who should be reached with what message? Yes, humans are still involved in picking the sales strategy and creating the message (although generative AI may change that, too). However, humans do not decide which publisher—the local newspaper website, or a website posing as a local news site but publishing Russian propaganda—gets the ad.

    [ad_2]

    Steven Brill

    Source link

  • With ‘Lies and Weddings,’ Kevin Kwan Dives Back Into Ultrarich Drama

    With ‘Lies and Weddings,’ Kevin Kwan Dives Back Into Ultrarich Drama

    [ad_1]

    “Can they really?” Francis said, feeling sick to his stomach. All this time, he’d thought Augie was finally safe, that she had finally married money.

    Prince Julius poured himself another glass of scotch. “This is why we are so relieved that Augusta accepted Maxxie. My boy is just so goddamn lucky to marry into the Gresham family! That’s one big worry off my mind. He’s your problem now, ho ho ho.”

    The wedding banquet was the pièce de résistance of the nuptial weekend. Upon arriving at Bellaloha, the dinner guests followed the torch-lit path into the rain forest, where they came upon one long curving banquet table for three hundred that snaked playfully between towering trees and verdant bushes. Not content with the natural beauty of the flo a, Arabella had demanded that each tree be festooned with flowers, and hovering over the middle of the table was a floral sculpture canopy composed of thousands of orchids, dahlias, and Icelandic poppies. At the very center of the banquet was a gigantic banyan tree with thousands of ancient roots descending from the branches, and hundreds of flickering lanterns were entwined in the roots, casting a magical glow onto everyone. As the guests supped on Dover sole à la Augusta on the eighteenth-century Greshamsbury Sèvres that had not been used since Edward VII had come to stay when he was still the Prince of Wales (3), Jackie was by the side of the stage, in the midst of fitting a remote microphone onto Rufus’s jacket collar, when Arabella came rushing up.

    “Rufus,are you giving the first toast?”Arabella excitedly inquired. “That’s the plan.”

    “Very good. Now, will you be saying nice things about a certain somebody?”

    “I plan to say very nice things about Augie and Maxxie, yes, after I humiliate them for a few rounds, of course.”

    “That’s not what I’m talking about. Will you have something special to announce in your speech?”

    “Something special?” Rufus looked confused.

    “About a certain entente cordiale, perhaps?”

    “Mother, English please. I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”

    “Oh come on, no need to be coy with me,” Arabella giggled. “I’m talking about your petit plaisir de l’après-midi? A little bird told me that you spent the better part of the day holed up in Solène de Courcy’s suite at the Mauna Lani.”

    Rufus rolled his eyes. “Solène sprained her ankle and exposed her bleeding knee to water contaminated with flesh eating bacteria. Eden had her on so many antibiotics I had to make sure she didn’t have a bad reaction.”

    “Is that what you were doing? Making sure she had no bad reaction?” Arabella sniggered gleefully.

    “Precisely. And she spent an hour giving me advice on how to improve my art career—unsolicited, I might add.”

    “How kind of her. She’s such a sensible girl. Now, you must repay the favor by saying something nice about Solène and her mother during your toast.”

    “You want me to mention Solène and her mother during my toast to the bride and groom?”

    “Why not? Haven’t the de Courcys been the highlight of your weekend?”

    Rufus gaped at his mother. “Wait a minute. Have you been trying to set me up with Solène all this time?”

    “I know it might be a little premature, but it would be so fun to give our audience a little preview of what’s coming next season.”

    “Next season? Do you think we’re living in a television series? Let me make this very simple for you: Solène de Courcy is a very nice girl, but it’s never going to happen in a million years. She’s not my type.”

    Arabella looked at her son in exasperation. “Not your type? What’s wrong with you? She’s one of the most beautiful women on the planet! She has an exclusive modeling contract with Chanel!”

    “Mum, when will you realize that I don’t give a damn about any of that?”

    “I don’t understand . . . Bea told me things were going perfectly!”

    “How would Bea know what’s going on? I haven’t seen her for days.”

    “I’m going to murder those silly girls! Bea’s too distracted by her photo shoots, and Eden has been an utter failure.”

    “What does Eden have to do with any of this?”

    “Bea and Eden are rooting for you to fall in love with Solène! They both adore her. Everyone adores her. Why can’t you?”

    “Eden’s been part of your maniacal plans?”

    “She was supposed to earn her keep, but it looks like she’s been far too distracted herself, sleeping with that Freddy guy.”

    “Wait—what? Eden and Freddy are not sleeping together!”

    “Of course they are. They’re having a torrid fling. Eden’s desperately been trying to catch Freddy since the moment he arrived on that ridiculous shark boat. And you don’t even know the half of it, that stupid girl has been so careless that she’s gotten herself—”

    Rufus rushed off before she could finish.

    At the other end of the banquet table, Nicolai Chalamet-Chaude (Wetherby/Dragon/Eton/Balliol) was in the midst of explaining to Eden how Hawaii had become quite the haven for billionaires (“You’ve got Larry in Lanai, Mark and Priscilla kicking it in Kauai, and Pierre over in Oahu”) (4) when Rufus came rushing up with an unmistakably urgent look. “Eden, may I have a word?”

    “Of course. Baron, if you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Eden said politely.

    Rufus grabbed her by the hand and led her down a pathway, cutting through a thicket of bushes until they found a quiet clearing in the forest.

    A warm crimson glow filtered through the trees, making everything seem otherworldly.

    “Everything okay?” Eden asked.

    “Yes. Are you okay?”

    “I am, now that you’ve rescued me from that man.”

    “Good, good. I just need to know something . . .”

    “Yes?”

    “Are you sleeping with Freddy Farman-Farmihian?”

    “What in the world would make you think that?”

    “Er . . . I just . . . you’ve spent all afternoon with him.”

    “And you spent all afternoon in Solène’s room, not that I’d ever ask what happened in there.”

    “Nothing happened with Solène! Well, nothing I initiated anyway. She did lunge at me several times, but when I rebuffed her, she started ranting that I couldn’t get it up and was too intimidated by her success.”

    “Solène lunged at you?”

    “Like a raccoon on meth, but you know I’d never touch her even with a ten-foot pole.”

    “What made you think I was sleeping with Freddy?”

    “My mother told me.”

    “Your mother?” Eden grimaced in disbelief, not comprehending how the countess could have come to that conclusion. “Either your mother’s deranged from all the stress or someone’s been spreading vicious gossip.”

    “No, you’re right, Mummy’s deranged. But I was watching the two of you all weekend . . . dancing at the ball, laughing like old friends during our excursions . . . I’m not sure . . . I got worried.”

    “Worried? Rufus, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I told you, Freddy’s a sweet soul underneath all that swagger.”

    “So you do like him. Today when I saw how intimate you were with him down by the pool, I just—”

    “Intimate?”

    “You were caressing his hand . . .”

    “I was comforting him. He was telling me about his mother, she died when he was twelve.”

    Rufus suddenly felt very foolish. “Oh god, I’m sorry. I’ve gotten everything all wrong, haven’t I? I was sure he fancied you, and I thought that you were trying to make me jealous.”

    “Why on earth would I do that?”

    [ad_2]

    Kevin Kwan

    Source link

  • They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

    They Experimented on Themselves in Secret. What They Discovered Helped Win a War

    [ad_1]

    The Allied soldiers who weren’t killed limped back from the defeat. It was clear now, they needed to be able to creep up to the beaches days before a raid to get up-to-date information. They needed to know where the Nazis had tunneled into the land, placed explosives, or built machine gun nests. None of their ships or boats could get close enough to the shore without being detected, so the Allies needed miniature submarines—and divers. And they needed science to make those things happen.

    By this point, Haldane, Spurway, and the other scientists had already given themselves eight seizures and broken several vertebrae for the cause. That’s because, shortly before the disaster at Dieppe, but not in time to stop it, Haldane and his crew had been asked by the Admiralty to pivot and focus on a new, more specific goal. To help their countrymen and the Allies defeat Hitler, to help end the war, the Allies needed the scientists to use this same work to prepare for missions to scout beaches.

    Five days after Dieppe, not yet knowing of its horror, Haldane and Spurway were working on the next amphibious assault plan. There would be another beach landing, this time in Normandy—and it could not fail.

    Haldane was born in 1892 into the sort of Scottish family whose summer homes have turrets. Stately portraits of ancestors with carefully trimmed facial hair and dresses with miles of pleated fabric looked down from the high walls of their multiple estates. John, called “Jack” in his youth and later “JBS,” had no patience for such pomp. He insisted on keeping an old bathtub full of tadpoles beneath the branches of one majestic apple tree. He was determined to breed water spiders.

    Jack and his sister Naomi were bred into science the way some are bred into royalty.

    Their parents, Louisa and John Scott, seem to have gravitated toward each other because of the same fiercely independent, socially irreverent genius they would pass on to their children. She was a brilliant young woman with golden hair, classical beauty, an affinity for small dogs, and an outspoken confidence that, along with her propensity for the occasional cigarette, marked her as a rebel within the prim upper crust of 1800s Britain.

    He was a researcher, physician, and reader of physiology at Oxford University, and infamously eccentric. He converted the basement and attic of the couple’s house into makeshift laboratories so he could play with fire and air currents and gas mixtures. So could his children.

    By age 3, golden-­haired, chubby-­cheeked toddler Jack was a blood donor for his dad’s research. By age 4, he was riding along with his father in the London Underground while John Scott dangled a jar out the window of the train to collect air samples. The duo found levels of carbon monoxide so alarmingly high, the city decided to electrify the rail lines. The young Haldane was learning how to keep people alive and breathing in worlds where they should not survive.

    By the late 1800s, frequent explosions and gas leaks made mining one of the most lethal jobs in the world, and John Scott Haldane became known among the miners of the country for his willingness to clamber into the narrow, dark, coal-­filled passageways on his mission to make the air supplies safer. At 4 years old, Jack was also exploring coal mines with his father to figure out how people breathed in those cramped, dangerous spaces. That common expression “canary in the coal mine”—still used to describe early detection of any threatening situation—is in existence today because it was Haldane’s idea to use the small, chipper birds to detect gas leaks.

    [ad_2]

    Rachel Lance

    Source link

  • Correction of Errors- An excerpt from Worthy

    Correction of Errors- An excerpt from Worthy

    [ad_1]

    “Your life does not get better by chance; it gets better by change.” -Jim Rohn

    On the outside, all was well. My family was flourishing and happy. The device team had gained momentum and recognition. Despite renewed physical mobility, my world became smaller as I spent more time in meetings and business reviews than with customers or partners, and more effort in defending than enabling the team. I couldn’t shake a growing sense of disquiet and discontent.

    Microsoft was undergoing a cultural shift under the leadership of Kevin Turner, who had been hired by Steve Ballmer to tame Microsoft’s wild, wild west ways. Kevin Turner, known as KT, was a seasoned exec hired as Chief Operating Officer to create a culture of fiscal accountability. KT came to Microsoft like a sheriff slinging a big gun and a saddlebag full of business scorecards.

    “You manage what you measure,” became a popular new saying within Microsoft. The device team was being measured within an inch of our lives. Too big to be treated as a startup that could fly undetected and under the radar, success had put us on the firing line. The scrutiny was understandable given how much the business had grown and how much visibility Wall Street was placing on Surface/Windows tablet sales vs Apple/iPad sales. A battle for the enterprise was underway. There was a lot at stake. But the team was still learning to fly, still building the wings and instrument panel as our plane soared, leaving lots of ways to interpret which direction and how high we were flying.

    KT’s scorecards measured and assigned green, yellow or red to virtually every activity done by sales and marketing teams. Green was good. Red was not. Those whose sales or marketing targets had become red were quickly shot by the big guns. The professed goal was to create targets that were SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound). In reality, goals were set to achieve aggressive targets based more on Wall Street’s expectations than market realities.

    Soon the culture became so scorecard centric and fear-based that managers would do almost anything to avoid missing their targets, even if it sometimes undermined the business and the people. Those who missed their numbers ‘went red’ and were dutifully flogged in a Correction of Errors (COE) business review until they were once again ‘in the green’ and out of the firing line. You could tell which teams were caught in a red Correction of Errors death spiral by their pale pallor and slumped shoulders. Once caught in the grip of a COE, it became a game of survival where people’s self-worth and career were on the line. Businesses stuck in the red were guilty until proven innocent and subjected to weekly inquisition, which only ended once you became green or were reassigned to a new job.

    When people care more about avoiding failure than achieving success, they stop playing to win and begin playing not to lose. There is no winning a game played not to lose. Mistakes can be milestones from which you build and grow or crushing millstones under which you stumble and fall. Accountability creates confidence while flogging creates fear and casualties. I know, because even though my scorecard was usually green, I began to invest more and more energy in avoiding red and defending results rather than taking risks and celebrating successes.

    My top tier sales team began toppling from the time spent logging, reporting and uploading data into a system created by Paul and analyzed by Jason who became so proficient at data slicing and dicing that he was reverently known as The Sword. Juliana took The Sword’s information and smooshed it into an Excel spreadsheet, which spit out a graph that was cut and pasted into PowerPoint slides I pored over prior to presenting from the front line.

    Correction of Error business reviews occurred monthly if green and weekly if red, starting before 8am and ending past 6pm, with patience and humor waning as the minutes slowly passed. The too small conference room was filled with the smell of taco bar, Sterno and fear as two dozen executives responsible for managing billion-dollar businesses sat glassy eyed and numb, avoiding eye contact in case they got asked a precision question they didn’t know how to answer and would throw others under the bus to save themselves. Tensions mounted as chests constricted, anxiously dreading the clock’s advance toward the allotted time to plead your case and receive a verdict…a green stay of execution…or RED! Go to COE jail! Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Only this was not a game. Executives torn to shreds in those meetings often did the same to their teams the following day, until everyone felt like confetti… without the celebration.

    Perhaps one of the more bizarre but well-intentioned gestures of support I received at Microsoft was being handed a tube of Preparation H just prior to entering a COE review. “It’ll reduce the bags and dark circles under your eyes… never show signs of weakness, Jane.” Uh…Thanks? It did indeed help the dark circles under my eyes but did not help me see the dark swirl and strain I carried home each day.

    It was impossible to spend long days at work scrutinizing and wallowing in what wasn’t right, then magically switch gears once home. I know. I tried. My negativity formed a dark cloud that followed me over the threshold, raining toxic thoughts that drowned the good and made it difficult for positivity to get a foothold. Research shows the average person has up to 60,000 thoughts per day and roughly 80%-95% are negative (closer to 100% if in a COE), creating negativity bias.

    People experiencing negativity bias:

    • remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones
    • think about negative things more frequently than positive
    • recall insults better than praise
    • react more strongly to negative stimuli
    • respond more strongly to negative events than to equally positive ones

    Check, Check, Check, Check, Check. Ugh.

    Scott responded by amplifying the negativity I brought home, creating a nasty swirl that began spiraling out of control despite our best efforts. We became so raw that even the most innocent comment chaffed. Our marriage was going red; we needed a COE… without the firing line. I turned to Karla Obernesser, dear friend, marriage counselor and co-founder of WeDoRelationships. I respected and trusted Karla immensely but didn’t want to cross the line from friend to counselor. She told me about Drs John and Julie Gottman, renowned authorities on marriage and creators of the Gottman Method, the world’s leading approach to couples therapy. Karla suggested looking for a Gottman Certified Counselor. I looked for the Gottmans. I didn’t have far to look. Their practice was in Seattle.

    Dr John Gottman is known for conducting 40+ years of research on marital stability. John Gottman can watch a 10-minute conversation between romantic partners and identify patterns of behavior that with 90% accuracy predict divorce in the next six years. So naturally, he wanted to meet with Scott and I before agreeing to counsel us. It was like sitting down beside a very wise, kind, kinda rumpled grandpa wearing a yarmulke in a room filled to the brim with books and papers. But this was no Hallmark movie and John was Dr Gottman, not my grandpa. As we talked, Dr Gottman discreetly assessed and mentally calculated the likely success of our marriage and whether he could help us.

    Over the next months, John guided us through the Gottman Method. He exposed us to information and skills we hadn’t learned or experienced growing up, like how to overcome gridlock, turn toward vs away, make and receive bids for connection. He helped us recreate a shared sense of meaning. We learned having a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative language can predict successful relationships and that happy couples have a 20:1 ratio of positive to negative expressions when simply conversing.  Drs John and Julie Gottman found the four behavioral predictors of divorce or break-up are criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. They call these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

    There was much to learn and unlearn. Change is hard, but Scott and I were motivated. We changed horses, became intentional about noting the positive in one another and learned to fight better because our relationship was worth fighting for. In truth, I have worked more and fought harder for my marriage than anything else in my life. Sometimes it felt our relationship hung by a thread. Not a golden thread, mind you, but a natty piece of twine, frayed and grey, at risk of snapping under the weight. When things got too heavy, friends and counseling lightened my spirit, rekindled my commitment, and helped me hang on until I could dispel the darkness of negativity and find my way back to seeing the positive in Scott, others and life. For me, marriage takes a community effort and requires constant care, maintenance and adjustment.

    In the process of meeting and getting to know us, John encouraged me to put my thoughts and stories to paper, to write a book. He handed me the business card of his publisher (I think it was his publisher?), telling me to call him when I was ready. I taped that business card to the bottom corner of my PC, where my gaze tends to land. It represents hope, I guess. It’s been years since I first taped that card. Over time, the tape starts to curl a bit at the edges. Occasionally, I adhere new tape to the old, so there are now several layers securing that card. But the card stayed stuck. So did our marriage. Without John’s encouragement and counseling, I likely wouldn’t be married, and you likely wouldn’t be reading this book.

    Whatever I focus on becomes bigger while everything else recedes. When I focus on errors, I find plenty. A focus on correcting the errors of others is a mistake that put my relationships in the red at home and at work. Conversely, there is a gob of research by the Gottmans, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, National Institute of Health etc on benefits of positivity and a positive mindset, including:

    • better relationships
    • improved productivity, creativity and engagement
    • improved emotional and physical health
    • reduced stress; happier and more confident
    • attracting positivity and positive people (because it’s contagious and likeable!)

    Check, Check, Check, Check, Check. Yay!

    I couldn’t change the culture at Microsoft. Enduring the constant COE focus on what was wrong was exhausting. But resistance is not futile. My team and others made time to laugh, celebrate, support and reinforce the small things that make big differences. By doing small things often, my relationship with Scott and others went from red to green, from a correction of errors to a celebration of successes. In the process, my view changed, my perspective changed, my future changed. I changed. Because life does not get better by chance; it gets better by change.

    Check.

    [ad_2]

    Jane Boulware

    Source link

  • This Is Where Our Game Began

    This Is Where Our Game Began

    [ad_1]

    Opening day, April 10, 1915, at Washington Park, on Third Avenue between 1st and 3rd Streets in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Tip-Tops (seen in white uniforms) won but finished the season in seventh place out of eight teams.
    Photo: Library of Congress, Bain Collection

    It was always a city game, baseball.

    For all the efforts to slap a pastoral gloss on the sport, for all the attempts to make it about little boys playing in a cow pasture, only someone unfamiliar with the isolation of American farm life could truly believe that baseball came of age in the country.

    What we think of as baseball today is really an urban game.  More precisely, it is “the New York game.”  That’s what modern baseball was first called, and where it was first played.  New York is where its rules were perfected, and where we first kept score.  New York was where the curveball was devised, and the bunt, and the stolen base, and where the home run came into its own.  New York was where admission was first charged to see a game, and where the very first all-star game was played, and the first “world championship.”

    It was in New York, too, where the game’s color line was finally broken, and the reserve clause was made law, and where a players’ league was conceived, and died, and where the first, modern free agent was signed. It was here that the sport’s — or any sport’s — first true superstar emerged, and where the first true baseball stadiums were built. Where sportswriting came into its own, where the first great radio broadcasters plied their trade, and where the first game was televised. It was in New York that the only perfect game in World Series history was pitched, where an expansion team won a World Series for the first time, where 14 World Series were played exclusively within the city limits—and where the World Series was fixed by gamblers.

    Baseball is a game that grew up inextricably linked to the pace, and the customs, and the demands of New York.  It was shaped by the challenges and the possibilities the city had to offer, by its inventiveness and its ambitions, its grandiosity and its corruption.  For the last two centuries, the game’s trajectory has followed the city’s many rises and declines, its booms and its busts, its follies and its tragedies.

    It is not the intention here to enter into the eternal debate over exactly when and where the very first contest involving a bat and a ball took place. Claimants range from Prague to Pittsfield, and just about every burg in between. As David Block notes in Baseball Before We Knew It, ancient hieroglyphics depict Egyptians with bats playing at something called seker-hemat, around 2500 B.C. Berbers in the 1930s were observed playing ta kurt om el mahag, or “the ball of the pilgrim’s mother” — a game one historian theorized was brought to North Africa in the fifth century A.D. by the Vandals, who were credited in turn with inventing the ancient, Northern European game of “longball.” Medieval Normans played grande théque, while their French cousins played la balle empoisonée, the Germans had schlagball, and the Finns played pesapällo.

    Countless other bat-and-ball games evolved under any number of different rules and different names in England. There was hand-in and hand-out, and wicket and cricket, and rounders. There was prisoner’s base, or just “base”; there was tip-cat and one-old-cat; there was feeder, and squares, and northern spell; there was stool-ball, and stobball or stow-ball, and trap ball, and tut-ball; and there was goal ball, barn ball, sting ball, soak ball, stick ball, and burn ball; and round-ball and town ball, and finally — baseball (or base-ball, or base ball).

    The whole welter of English and continental games followed the colonists over to America. On Christmas Day, 1621, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony was enraged to find some of his fellow Pilgrims, “frolicking in ye street, at play openly; some at pitching ye barr, some at stoole ball and shuch-like sport.” At Valley Forge, George Washington was recorded as having taken part in a game of “wicket,” while Lewis and Clark tried to teach a form of “base” to the Nez Perce, and small boys wrote later of watching a grown Abe Lincoln join in their games of town ball: “… how long were his strides, and how his coat-tails stuck out behind, and how we tried to hit him with the ball, as he ran the bases. He entered into the spirit of play as completely as any of us, and we invariably hailed his coming with delight.”

    The first true superstar sports celebrity: Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees.
    Photo: Library of Congress

    The one thing that is clear is that Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with it.  This was widely acknowledged even at the time the myth was first propagated, by a Special Base Ball Commission, handpicked by Albert Spalding in 1905.  Spalding, one of the game’s earliest stars turned team-owner-and-sporting-goods-magnate, was eager to refute the thesis of his friend, Henry Cartwright, that baseball had evolved from the English girls’ game of rounders.  Certain that such antecedents would not serve for the pastime of a young, proud nation just emerging on the world stage, Spalding’s commission seized instead upon the weakest reed imaginable.  This was a letter sent by an aged Western crank named Abner Graves, who would murder his wife in a fit of senile paranoia a few years later.  Graves swore that he had seen Doubleday lay out the whole game one afternoon in 1839 along the banks of the Glimmerglass, in Cooperstown, New York, and that was good enough for the chairman of Spalding’s commission, A.G. Mills.

    Abner Doubleday was the Forrest Gump of the 19th century, a soldier, mystic, and bibliophile with an uncanny ability for being on hand when anything of interest was going on. The first shot of the Civil War, a Confederate cannon blast at Fort Sumter, “penetrated the masonry and burst very near my head,” he later recalled, and in turn he “aimed the first gun on our side in reply to the attack.” He would rise to the rank of major general, sustain two serious wounds, hold the Union line on the first day of Gettysburg, and take the train back to Pennsylvania with President Lincoln, when the president gave his Gettysburg Address. Doubleday read Sanskrit, corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, commanded an all-Black regiment of troops, attended séances at the White House with Mary Todd Lincoln, obtained the first charter for San Francisco’s cable cars, and served as president of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society … but he did not invent baseball.

    Nobody really thought he did, even on Spalding’s commission. A.G. Mills had been friends with Doubleday for 20 years, including a period when Mills was president of the National League. A fellow Civil War officer, Mills had arranged Doubleday’s funeral and his burial at Arlington Cemetery. Yet for as long and as well as he knew him, Mills admitted, he never heard his friend so much as mention baseball. In a brief autobiographical sketch, Doubleday himself wrote that, “In my outdoor sports, I was addicted to” — drumroll, please — “topographical work …”

    Just why anyone took Graves’s claim seriously in the first place is something of a mystery. One of the game’s greatest historians, John Thorn, speculates that this may have come about thanks to feuding factions of Theosophists, who for a time included Spalding. If true, it’s hilarious. Theosophy was an early mix of new age religion, occultism, and spiritualism. It’s as if a group of feuding Scientologists hatched a plot to have L. Ron Hubbard replace Dr. Naismith as the inventor of basketball.

    John Montgomery Ward, who started the Players’ League to compete with the National and American Leagues in 1890. It didn’t last.
    Photo: Library of Congress

    Confronted by reporters years later, Mills fumfahed that his commission had only concluded “that the first baseball diamond was laid out in Cooperstown.”  This was also untrue, but Mills revealed another reason for his commission’s determined gullibility.  That is, the need to move the national game out of the clutches of the dirty, immigrant city:

    “I submit to you gentlemen, that if our search had been for a typical American village, a village that could best stand as a counterpart of all villages where baseball might have been originated and developed — Cooperstown would best fit the bill.”

    And so it would. Though of all the great stars, and the makers of the game that the charming National Baseball Hall of Fame would admit, they would not include … Abner Doubleday.

    By the 1950s, an alternative foundation myth had been set in place, one revolving around how, one fine day in 1846, the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club took the steam ferry over to the Elysian Fields, a pleasure park just across the Hudson from Manhattan in Hoboken, to play the mysterious “New York Base Ball Club” in the very first game of “real” baseball — and got plastered, 23-1. I never understood this one even when I first read about it as an 8-year-old boy. If the Knickerbockers invented the damned game, how did they manage to lose the first one so badly?

    The truth, of course, is that they weren’t the first.  The Knickerbockers were just one of at least six early baseball clubs that by 1846 had already existed for years in Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Their chief contribution, as Thorn puts it, was as “consolidators rather than innovators,” combining and formalizing rules that others were already playing by.  “The Knickerbocker Rules” became “the New York Game,” and by the Civil War it had pretty much wiped out every other form of bat-and-ball game in the country.

    Photo: Penguin Random House

    Baseball became “America’s game,” as Walt Whitman called it, with “the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere …” For Mark Twain it was, “The very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging tearing, booming 19th century.”

    But more than America’s game, baseball was New York’s game. It held its own in a town where the other leading spectator sports were rat-baiting, bare-knuckle boxing, and firefighting (The city’s volunteer fire companies used to brawl with each other for the honor of putting out the town’s incessant conflagrations.). The sport came of age in a city that often seemed hell-bent on its own destruction. A city where not just firefighters fought with each other, but rival police departments did, too, and on the steps of City Hall. Where commuter steamboats raced and exploded in the Hudson, and teamsters whipped and cursed each other as they raced their wagons in the streets. A city prone to riot and mayhem at the drop of a rumor, an island ringed by tanneries, slaughterhouses, knacker’s yards and rendering plants, bucket shops and block-and-fall joints.

    Baseball was played anywhere the space could be found, on empty lots and in the streets, on what had just yesterday had been garbage dumps, pig styes, mud flats, and even river bottoms. It was played not just by gentlemen in pleasure gardens, but by men of every background and description. By Black men and white, Hispanic and Irish — of all classes and professions. There were teams composed solely of shipbuilders, firefighters, actors, postal clerks, bank clerks, ferrymen, newspaper reporters and printers’ devils, government bureaucrats, and ministers. There were the Manhattans, a club made up of policemen; and the Phantoms, who were bartenders, and the Pocahontas Club, who were all milkmen. There were the Metropolitans, who were schoolteachers, and the Columbia club of Orange, New Jersey, who were hatters, and the Aesculapeans of Brooklyn, who consisted entirely of eye doctors.

    Almost from the start, too, the game drew gamblers and touts, ward heelers and con artists, adoring groupies, and loutish “bugs” or “kranks,” as the fans were then known. It was a tough game played in a tough town, and right away, many New Yorkers, especially money men and fixers, politicos and promoters, saw the main chance in it just as they did in everything else. They, too, would contribute much to making the game what it became, the first major team sport in the world.

    From The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, by Kevin Baker. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Kevin Baker.

    [ad_2]

    Kevin Baker

    Source link

  • How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

    How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

    [ad_1]

    Most alarmingly, PlanetRisk began seeing evidence of the US military’s own missions in the Locomotive data. Phones would appear at American military installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—home of some of the most skilled US special operators with the Joint Special Operations Command and other US Special Operations Command units. They would then transit through third-party countries like Turkey and Canada before eventually arriving in northern Syria, where they were clustering at the abandoned Lafarge cement factory outside the town of Kobane.

    It dawned on the PlanetRisk team that these were US special operators converging at an unannounced military facility. Months later, their suspicions would be publicly confirmed; eventually the US government would acknowledge the facility was a forward operating base for personnel deployed in the anti-ISIS campaign.

    Even worse, through Locomotive, they were getting data in pretty close to real time. UberMedia’s data was usually updated every 24 hours or so. But sometimes, they saw movement that had occurred as recently as 15 or 30 minutes earlier. Here were some of the best trained special operations units in the world, operating at an unannounced base. Yet their precise, shifting coordinates were showing up in UberMedia’s advertising data. While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

    Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error—in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.

    Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?

    Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.

    And the same executive remembered leaving another meeting with a different government official. They were on the elevator together when one official asked, could you figure out who is cheating on their spouse?

    Yeah, I guess you could, the PlanetRisk executive answered.

    But Mike Yeagley wouldn’t last at PlanetRisk.

    As the company looked to turn Locomotive from a demo into a live product, Yeagley started to believe that his employer was taking the wrong approach. It was looking to build a data visualization platform for the government. Yet again, Yeagley thought it would be better to provide the raw data to the government and let them visualize it in any way they choose. Rather than make money off of the number of users inside government that buy a software license, Mike Yeagley wanted to just sell the government the data for a flat fee.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • “Get Me the F–king Tape”: How Ron DeSantis’s “Build the Wall” Ad Put Him on the Outs With Trump

    “Get Me the F–king Tape”: How Ron DeSantis’s “Build the Wall” Ad Put Him on the Outs With Trump

    [ad_1]

    Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump were, for the moment, great political allies. The two were even developing a friendship that, impressively, seemed to transcend the campaign trail. What was on the horizon, though, was not so idyllic.

    Much of that, at least early on, was driven by DeSantis’s wife.

    Casey DeSantis was born in Ohio in 1980 and met her future husband on a driving range at the University of North Florida. The two were married in 2009, less than three years before DeSantis’s congressional run. Hindsight, and anyone with even a cursory understanding of modern Florida politics, will tell you that this fact provides a snapshot of the politically ambitious mindset of the couple. And anyone who understands DeSantis’s thought processes will divulge that Casey—a former Jacksonville television personality—is the most influential adviser and powerful force in DeSantis’s universe. This force was put on display during the general gubernatorial election as DeSantis’s campaign prepared the now infamous “Build the Wall” ad.

    Few things during DeSantis’s 2018 campaign got more attention—and triggered more outrage among libs, another desired outcome—than the Trump-worshipping TV spot that featured Ron and Casey’s daughter Madison paying tribute to Trump’s southern border wall. The ad shows DeSantis using gleeful baby talk, encouraging Madison to “build the wall” as she plays with building blocks. In the same ad, he reads to his then infant son, Mason, from a book meant to evoke Trump’s former reality show, The Apprentice. “You’re fired!” DeSantis reads before noting to Mason, “That’s my favorite part.” The ad concludes with DeSantis using a Make America Great Again campaign sign to teach Madison to read.

    The ad was narrated by Casey DeSantis, who played the main role in the ad but who was anything but supportive behind the scenes. Though she was a lifelong conservative and DeSantis’s most trusted adviser by a long shot, she had never been a natural Trump supporter. She thought the TV ad was at best silly and at worst humiliating and was completely opposed to running it. And Ron DeSantis would not green-light the spot without her approval.

    “Casey was apprehensive about the wall commercial,” said a former DeSantis campaign staffer. “She did not have a great deal of comfort in [Ron’s] marrying himself to Trump. But the ad was not going to run without her approval, and they had to convince her to agree. There were direct conversations on this.”

    Despite her initial protests, Casey finally relented. She understood that Trump’s power with the Republican base was at its peak. He could make political fortunes and end them, all in a single tweet. If Ron DeSantis was to continue on the promising political trajectory he and Casey had laid out, she knew she had to swallow her pride and play the part.

    “She values winning and destiny way more than love, or hate, or however you want to say it,” the former campaign staffer said. “It was part of a winning strategy. [DeSantis] needed Trump in many ways, and Trumpism was winning Republican primaries at that point. Just look at how Adam Putnam begged to be accepted into Trump’s world even after Trump endorsed DeSantis.”

    [ad_2]

    Matt Dixon

    Source link

  • The Unvarnished Story of George Santos and His Mother

    The Unvarnished Story of George Santos and His Mother

    [ad_1]

    Hanging over the whole saga of George Santos, the congressman from New York who made up almost everything, is his mother, Fatima Devolder. One person who helped on a Santos political campaign remembers his voice getting shaky whenever he’d bring up his mother, even long after her 2016 death from cancer.

    The two were very close, and family members remember her spoiling him as a child. “She was always making up excuses for what he did,” one relative said. Theirs was a boisterous home, a Queens basement apartment that sometimes hosted rats, but also happiness. Holidays were a big deal, featuring fried food from Fatima’s native Brazil. The TV played constantly, a very American condition. While Santos’s father Gercino was often the primary breadwinner, working as a house and building painter to support the family, Fatima cared for Santos and cleaned houses. She and Santos and Santos’s sister Tiffany were a tight unit, before and after Fatima’s relationship with Gercino ended. She was devoted to her offspring, posting on Facebook in Portuguese not long before she died, “I love my children, they are my everything ♥♥♥♥♥.”

    There were also moments throughout Santos’s life when his mother would leave him for a spell in one place or another. He would stay with a relative while she went to Brazil. One time, when he was grown and she returned to New York, Fatima’s roommate remembered Santos frequently checking in on his mother, even though he lived some distance away. It seemed that Santos missed her.

    At various points, they cohabitated, even when he was an adult. It could sometimes be tense. Another roommate remembers them fighting about everything you can imagine—cigarettes, money—and sometimes, Fatima would retreat to her bedroom and just cry. Santos would say horrible things to her, tell her to leave the house—“his” house, he’d say. This too would become a trait of his; he’d flip a switch, and threaten the nearest of friends or kin.

    But there was often something pushing him back to his mother.

    Santos’s sister, Tiffany, once left a “review” on his political Facebook page calling him a “son who dedicated his life to give our mother the most comfortable life when she was loosing [sic] her fight to cancer.” Santos’s care for Fatima is even stenciled into Queens public records. On Christmas Eve 2015, Santos appeared in housing court for failing to pay $2,250 in rent, and the complete audio recording of the proceeding reveals him saying matter-of-factly that his mother was staying with him, “for health issues.”

    He talks not only about his deep feelings for his mother, but also his great pride in her life. Santos has called Fatima “the first female executive at a major financial institution.” He cites her prominence in local Republican politics, calling her “active with the party as a donor for over two decades.” He fondly remembers her leaving her “nine to five” to canvass for Rudy Giuliani, and bringing young Santos along. And he has clucked about her escape from the South Tower on 9⁄11, the way she got caught up in the “ash cloud.” There is good reason to believe that none of this is true.

    City, state, and federal campaign finance databases show no evidence of political donations. She does not appear to have been a registered voter in New York, and her immigration records betray no sign that she was even a US citizen, though she worked for years to legalize her status and at one point had a green card. The 9⁄11 story is also questionable at best: In her own immigration paperwork, she claimed she was not in the United States that year. One entry from June 2001—just before the attacks—lists her current address as Niterói, Brazil. Santos continues to insist his mother was at Ground Zero, and perhaps she reentered or remained in the country in a way not reflected in the documents. Immigrants and employers sometimes tell tall tales on their applications about dates, details, and locations. But the son’s full claim about his mother’s 9⁄11 experience has further holes, including the campaign bio in which he says in successive sentences that Fatima was a financial executive and that she was “in her office in the South Tower” on the tragic day. People who knew her remember nothing about Wall Street jobs or Wall Street wealth.

    [ad_2]

    Mark Chiusano

    Source link

  • “You’re Telling Me That Thing Is Forged?”: The Inside Story of How Trump’s “Body Guy” Tried and Failed to Order a Massive Military Withdrawal

    “You’re Telling Me That Thing Is Forged?”: The Inside Story of How Trump’s “Body Guy” Tried and Failed to Order a Massive Military Withdrawal

    [ad_1]

    The absurdity of the situation was captured in McEntee’s interview with the January 6 Committee:

    Q: Is it typical for the Presidential Personnel Office to draft orders concerning troop withdrawal?

    McEntee: Probably not typical, no.

    Because they were so out of their depth, McEntee and his assistant ended up reaching out to Macgregor again—they didn’t know how to arrange the document they were working on. “I was called on the phone by one of McEntee’s staffers who was having trouble formatting the order and getting the language straight,” Macgregor recalled. The retired colonel told the thirty-year-old staffer to open a cabinet, find an old presidential decision memorandum, and copy it.

    Easy enough. The duo wrote up the order, had the president sign it, and sent it over to Kash Patel, the new acting defense secretary’s chief of staff.

    Chaos ensued.

    Upon receiving the order from his chief of staff, Christopher Miller called Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley to his office to discuss next steps. After reading the order, Milley told the January 6 Committee, he looked at Patel, who had just started working at the Pentagon three days earlier.

    “Who gave the president the military advice for this?” Milley asked him. “Did you do this?”

    “No,” Patel answered. “I had nothing to do with it.”

    Milley turned to the acting defense secretary. “Did you give the President military advice on this?” he asked.

    “No. Not me,” Miller answered.

    “Okay, well, we’ve got to go over and see the president,” Milley said, noting his job required him to provide military advice to the commander in chief. “I’ve got duties to do here, constitutional duties. I’ve got to make sure he’s properly advised.”

    And with that, Miller and Milley went to the White House to see Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security advisor.

    “Robert, where’s this coming from?” Milley asked O’Brien. “Is this true?”

    “I’ve never seen it before,” O’Brien told him.

    They were joined in the meeting by retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, the national security advisor to Vice President Pence. “Something is really wrong here,” Kellogg said, reading through the order. “This doesn’t look right.”

    “You’re telling me that thing is forged?” Milley responded in disbelief. “That’s a forged piece of paper directing a military operation by the president of the United States? That’s forged, Keith?”

    [ad_2]

    Jonathan Karl

    Source link

  • Inside James Comey’s Bizarre $7M Job as a Top Hedge Fund’s In-House Inquisitor

    Inside James Comey’s Bizarre $7M Job as a Top Hedge Fund’s In-House Inquisitor

    [ad_1]

    As head of security, Comey reported to Dalio’s longtime deputy Greg Jensen, who seemed eager to prove that he took the protection of Bridgewater’s secrets as seriously as Dalio. With little evidence of actual offending behavior to snuff out, they created their own. Comey helped come up with a plan to leave a binder, clearly labeled as Jensen’s, unattended in the Bridgewater offices. It worked like a charm. Comey watched as a low-ranked Bridgewater employee stumbled upon the binder and began to peruse it. Jensen and Comey put the employee on trial, found him guilty, and fired him, with Dalio’s approval.

    During and after Comey’s era at Bridgewater, tens of thousands of hours of the firm’s internal deliberations, arguments and trials were uploaded into what was called the “Transparency Library” and available for playback for all at the firm.

    Lordy, there was plenty to watch.

    No doubt Comey’s most infamous internal case was his prosecution of Bridgewater co-chief executive officer, Eileen Murray, who stood out like a pimple in Bridgewater’s blue-blooded executive suite. She’d grown up in a housing project in Queens, rarely wore skirts, never married, never had children, and talked frequently about her dogs. A former Morgan Stanley executive, she sent emails off the cuff, all lowercase, with typos, suggesting she was too busy to give anything her full attention.

    The proximate cause of Murray’s lesson in the application of The Principles was innocuous enough. A job candidate mentioned to a Bridgewater executive that he was familiar with the hedge fund’s head of accounting, Perry Poulos, one of Murray’s hires. The job candidate evinced surprise—didn’t they know Poulos had been fired from Morgan Stanley?

    Comey grabbed a former FBI agent on the Bridgewater staff and went to intercept the unsuspecting Poulos. The duo pulled him into a conference room without warning.

    “Hi, guys,” Poulos said.

    “We just want to know, is there anything in your background we should know about?” Comey responded.

    “I had some things there, but it’s all cleared up now.”

    “You wouldn’t mind if we ask a few questions and look a little more?”

    There’s really nothing to find, Poulos said.

    Go ahead. He exited the room, heart racing, and soon found Murray. She knew, as he did, that he had been let go from Morgan Stanley after questions were raised about his expenses. But Murray sensed a larger target at play. “It’s not you,” she told Poulos. “It’s me. They are trying to get to me.”

    Comey called in Poulos for another interview.

    “Did you talk to anyone about this?” Comey asked.

    “No.”

    “Are you sure?”

    “No, I haven’t talked to anyone.”

    “You live with Eileen, don’t you?”

    Knowing Bridgewater’s reputation for intimate relationships, Poulos assumed Comey was sniffing for a romantic angle. During the week, Poulos said, he sometimes spent the evening at Murray’s place, in separate bedrooms.

    “Even that evening, after we spoke, you didn’t talk to her?” Comey asked.

    “I don’t remember saying anything in particular.”

    [ad_2]

    Rob Copeland

    Source link