In a park just east of Sacramento, Jake Molieri guided us through his service Snakeout where he trains dogs and dog owners how to avoid rattlesnakes on hiking trails and parks. “They are obviously an animal that are dangerous if you get into an altercation and provoking them,” Molieri said. “They are never going to chase you or go after you.”Molieri currently uses his albino rattlesnake called Mr. Cheese for training. However, that snake is not the most ideal one to use for his business. “The only reason we are able to continue operating and continue doing the service is because we use these albino, which is not ideal because they are really hard to acquire,” he said. The State Department of Fish and Wildlife told Molieri he is not allowed to operate if he uses regular rattlesnakes that are found in Northern California. The state claims he violated regulations that protect those animals from being used for profit. “They told me the classes you’re doing are like illegal, you’re illegally commercializing these animals,” Molieri said. However, Molieri claims there is a gray area that needs to be changed. “The regulations they are citing were written back in the day with the idea of like, hey you can’t go out into the woods and catch a bunch of snakes and sell them into the pet trade and the skin industry,” he said. “They’re taking that idea and applying it to this dog class and saying that we’re basically selling the snakes. The snakes are not changing hands. The snakes are my snakes.”He filed a lawsuit to try to get the regulations changed. CDFW said in a statement: “Current regulations prohibit the take or possession of any native species unless specifically permitted by regulation for commercial purposes, as it presents a financial gain to motivate take. That commercial motivation can have negative impacts on native populations.”The lawsuit is still going through the court system. He hopes they can reach an agreement to change regulations that benefit his business and keep snakes safe. “We want to see more snakes being alive, less dogs getting bit and everyone having an understanding that nobody wants to get into an altercation with each other, but the state’s making it really hard,” he said. See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
In a park just east of Sacramento, Jake Molieri guided us through his service Snakeout where he trains dogs and dog owners how to avoid rattlesnakes on hiking trails and parks.
“They are obviously an animal that are dangerous if you get into an altercation and provoking them,” Molieri said. “They are never going to chase you or go after you.”
Molieri currently uses his albino rattlesnake called Mr. Cheese for training. However, that snake is not the most ideal one to use for his business.
“The only reason we are able to continue operating and continue doing the service is because we use these albino, which is not ideal because they are really hard to acquire,” he said.
The State Department of Fish and Wildlife told Molieri he is not allowed to operate if he uses regular rattlesnakes that are found in Northern California. The state claims he violated regulations that protect those animals from being used for profit.
“They told me the classes you’re doing are like illegal, you’re illegally commercializing these animals,” Molieri said.
However, Molieri claims there is a gray area that needs to be changed.
“The regulations they are citing were written back in the day with the idea of like, hey you can’t go out into the woods and catch a bunch of snakes and sell them into the pet trade and the skin industry,” he said. “They’re taking that idea and applying it to this dog class and saying that we’re basically selling the snakes. The snakes are not changing hands. The snakes are my snakes.”
He filed a lawsuit to try to get the regulations changed.
CDFW said in a statement: “Current regulations prohibit the take or possession of any native species unless specifically permitted by regulation for commercial purposes, as it presents a financial gain to motivate take. That commercial motivation can have negative impacts on native populations.”
The lawsuit is still going through the court system. He hopes they can reach an agreement to change regulations that benefit his business and keep snakes safe.
“We want to see more snakes being alive, less dogs getting bit and everyone having an understanding that nobody wants to get into an altercation with each other, but the state’s making it really hard,” he said.
A Baltimore County knitter’s unique scarf is not only vibrant: Each color signifies the daily weather.At her Maryland home, Rose Armentrout has an entire room dedicated to her knitting yarn and needles.”I try to organize it by type,” Armentrout told sister station WBAL-TV. “This bin is the cotton and this bin is the cashmere.”The room serves as Armentrout’s safe space, a sign of her dedication to knitting.”It helps you get through a lot of stuff. My husband and I both have had cancer. He is going through treatment now, so there’s a lot of hours spent sitting at the cancer center. So, I knit,” Armentrout said. “When I was going through treatments, I knitted scarves for all the nurses and doctors.”This year, Armentrout embarked on a project to knit a scarf that reflects the temperature for each day.”I made myself up a card, so I do single-digits is lilac, and 10 to 20 (degrees) is purple; 21 to 30, and so on by 10 digits, within that range,” Armentrout said. “I knit two rows, and whatever color I have decided for that temperature range, it’s like, ‘OK, I accomplished something today.’”Armentrout first saw the idea on Ravelry, a social networking site that connects knitters from all over the world.”My first thought was, ‘That’s weird.’ And then, it was intriguing as I looked into it,” Armentrout said. “The original idea behind it, though, was actually tracking temperature changes. It was about climate change, to see how much it has changed over the years, and how we are being affected by climate change.”As Armentrout completes her first temperature scarf with a few days left in 2025, she plans to wear it proudly.”I’m calling it my ‘Dr. Whoish temperature scarf’ because it’s very Dr. Whoish to me with all the colors, but it’s interesting, too, that you can see from the cold to the hot and back again,” Armentrout said.Armentrout is not finished with her knitting projects. She plans to knit another temperature scarf next year with the temperatures from her mother’s birth year, 1927, and compare them to this year’s temperatures.
A Baltimore County knitter’s unique scarf is not only vibrant: Each color signifies the daily weather.
At her Maryland home, Rose Armentrout has an entire room dedicated to her knitting yarn and needles.
“I try to organize it by type,” Armentrout told sister station WBAL-TV. “This bin is the cotton and this bin is the cashmere.”
The room serves as Armentrout’s safe space, a sign of her dedication to knitting.
“It helps you get through a lot of stuff. My husband and I both have had cancer. He is going through treatment now, so there’s a lot of hours spent sitting at the cancer center. So, I knit,” Armentrout said. “When I was going through treatments, I knitted scarves for all the nurses and doctors.”
This year, Armentrout embarked on a project to knit a scarf that reflects the temperature for each day.
“I made myself up a card, so I do single-digits is lilac, and 10 to 20 (degrees) is purple; 21 to 30, and so on by 10 digits, within that range,” Armentrout said. “I knit two rows, and whatever color I have decided for that temperature range, it’s like, ‘OK, I accomplished something today.’”
Armentrout first saw the idea on Ravelry, a social networking site that connects knitters from all over the world.
“My first thought was, ‘That’s weird.’ And then, it was intriguing as I looked into it,” Armentrout said. “The original idea behind it, though, was actually tracking temperature changes. It was about climate change, to see how much it has changed over the years, and how we are being affected by climate change.”
WBAL
Rose Armentrout embarked on a project to knit a scarf that reflects the temperature for each day.
As Armentrout completes her first temperature scarf with a few days left in 2025, she plans to wear it proudly.
“I’m calling it my ‘Dr. Whoish temperature scarf’ because it’s very Dr. Whoish to me with all the colors, but it’s interesting, too, that you can see from the cold to the hot and back again,” Armentrout said.
Armentrout is not finished with her knitting projects. She plans to knit another temperature scarf next year with the temperatures from her mother’s birth year, 1927, and compare them to this year’s temperatures.
In 2019, when the Thai government announced plans to turn an abandoned tobacco factory in the nation’s smoggy capital into a public park, Bangkok-based landscape architect Chatchanin Sung saw an opportunity to address another of the city’s chronic problems: flooding.
For Bangkok, a city of 11 million sitting on low-lying swampland, the management of its water has increasingly become a matter of survival. With the capital facing more frequent and extreme rainfall as well as rising sea levels due to climate change, experts have warned that entire swaths of the city may be underwater within the next few decades.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
Like Los Angeles, where intensifying droughts and floods have revealed limitations of conventional flood control systems like the L.A. River, Chatchanin felt that Bangkok’s own stormwater infrastructure had reached its tipping point.
An aerial view shows pathways through the Benjakitti Park in Bangkok.
(Krit Phromsakla Na Sakolnakorn / Associated Press)
Decades of rapid urban development have encased the city with impermeable concrete surfaces that hinder the natural drainage of water. As a result, the city’s network of over 1,600 urban canals, which were once used for transporting goods and people but now primarily act as stormwater channels, are regularly overwhelmed.
“Because the canal water mixes with public sewage, the water quality is really bad,” Chatchanin said. “The park project was an opportunity to absorb and clean this water.”
To design the new space, a 102-acre expansion to the pre-existing Benjakitti Park, Chatchanin partnered with Kongjian Yu, a Beijing-based landscape architect who has long advocated what is known as a “sponge city” model of urban water management.
The idea is that, unlike “gray” infrastructure, which is designed to flush water away as quickly as possible, cities like Bangkok can mitigate flood risk simply by making its surfaces more absorbent like a sponge, capturing stormwater before it can turn into runoff that pollutes streets and strains drainage systems.
Their winning design, which was opened to the public three years ago, was realized in just 18 months and reflects the idea that such urban water management systems can also provide valuable aesthetic and recreational benefits to communities.
Today, the former brownfield is a popular bird-watching spot. It features forested walkways alongside badminton and pickleball courts built in repurposed cigarette warehouses, all the while capturing and cleaning water.
People take a rest at Benjakitti Park in Bangkok.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
Fed by a nearby canal, a long system of wetlands containing thickets of aquatic plants removes pollutants from the water as it winds around the park’s perimeter, releasing what’s left into a large pond dotted with small islets.
This, alongside the park’s porous landscape and additional retention ponds, enable it to capture 23 million gallons of stormwater during Bangkok’s rainiest months. The water that’s entering permeable earth instead of being blocked by concrete is helping to replenish natural underground reservoirs that benefit humans and the environment.
“Last year we had really heavy rains,” Chatchanin said. “The park also flooded but eventually absorbed it much more quickly.”
The park’s long system of wetlands contains thickets of aquatic plants that remove pollutants from the water.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
She pointed to the pond, which no longer had the foul odor or the oily sheen of the canal despite being just a few steps away. Dragonflies buzzed overhead — a common sign, she noted, that the water is clean.
Chatchanin acknowledged that one park alone can’t fix Bangkok’s water issues. But its modest success might, at the very least, encourage cities to rethink their relationship to water.
“People want fast answers,” Chatchanin said. “But hiding the problem is no solution. You can’t just raise your house on stilts, or flush out the water. It all comes back in the end.”
The idea that cities need to adapt to — not outrun — their floods has been a lifelong preoccupation of Kongjian Yu, whose work with sponge cities has earned him the prestigious Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and comparisons to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park.
Yu traces its beginnings to a near-death experience he had as a child growing up in rural China.
At the time just 10 years old, Yu had been playing on the banks of his village’s river, which was more voluminous than usual due to heavy monsoon rains, when he suddenly found himself being swept away by the powerful currents.
What saved him were the river’s reeds and willows, which slowed the water and gave him a chance to pull himself out.
Kongjian Yu’s work has earned him comparisons to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park.
(Gilles Sabrié / For The Times)
“My experience in these villages, my experience with the river and the creek, taught me how to live with nature,” he said.
Later, Yu earned a landscape ecology degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and spent two years in Los Angeles working for SWA Group before returning to China in 1997.
Dismayed that the rapidly modernizing country had lined its cities with concrete dams and channelized waterways, Yu began writing to local mayors, warning of the risks of this approach and advocating instead for “rewilding natural water systems.”
“Sponge cities follow three principles: retain, slow down and embrace water,” Yu said. “That means removing all unnecessary concrete and pavement.”
At first, his ideas found few sympathetic ears. Some people, he recalled, sent letters to the Communist Party claiming he was “a spy from the U.S. sent to demolish Chinese infrastructure.”
But things changed in 2012, when severe flooding in Beijing destroyed thousands of homes and killed 79 people, some of whom were caught off-guard in the street.
A man uses a signboard to signal motorists driving through flooded streets following a heavy rain in Beijing. Flooding prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to adopt Yu’s “sponge city” philosophy as a national agenda.
(Associated Press)
“Every sort of paradigm shift, you need a crisis,” Yu said. “People dying in the street — that was the critical point.”
The floods prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to adopt Yu’s sponge city philosophy as a national agenda in 2015. Since then, the government has pledged more than $28 billion to help fund over 33,000 sponge city projects in 90 cities, aiming to have them capture and reuse at least 70% of their rainwater by 2030.
By 2020, over 40,000 sponge city projects were completed nationwide, contributing to around 3.8 trillion gallons of rainwater being recycled that year, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. The ministry noted that this amount was equal to about one-fifth of China’s annual urban water supply.
Many, like Bangkok’s Benjakitti Park, are wetlands designed to address urban flooding. Others, like a mangrove forest built on the banks of a river in the tropical southern city of Sanya on Hainan Island, act as a natural buffer against saltwater intrusion and coastal erosion from rising sea levels.
“The idea is to not build too close to the water in order to create a buffer zone,” Yu said. “Instead of building a wall, we allow the water to come in.”
Women stop near ponds and water plants at the “Fish Tail” sponge park that’s built on a former coal ash dump site in Nanchang in north-central China’s Jiangxi province.
(Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
This approach, said Yu, has made sponge city projects uncomplicated and low-cost compared with conventional solutions, deployable just about anywhere.
Benjakitti Park, for example, cost $20 million and was built by the Thai army, which had little experience in environmental landscaping. Yu scribbled the design on a napkin during his flight to Bangkok to meet Chatchanin, keeping it simple enough to be achievable — at least in theory — with only a single excavator.
Still, the program hasn’t been without challenges.
Wetlands are often breeding grounds for mosquitoes. And with local governments expected to foot up to 80% of the cost for their projects, much-needed investments from the private sector have been slow to materialize. Meanwhile, critics have pointed out that some of China’s most touted sponge cities, like Zhengzhou in Henan province, have still experienced devastating floods.
“If a city can’t handle a flood, that means it’s not spongy enough,” Yu said.
“Ultimately, it’s not about getting rid of every piece of concrete. It’s about combining gray and green — upgrading the current model.”
Since 2006, Singapore has been turning its own waterways and reservoirs into public parks that also absorb stormwater, an initiative known as the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme.
In the Netherlands, a flood-prone country famous for mastering the art of keeping water out with techniques like land reclamation, the government has also experimented with a softer approach, strategically allowing its rivers to flood in certain areas in order to spare others.
In L.A., too, there has been a growing awareness that the area’s city’s own impermeable flood control system, which discards billions of gallons of rainwater that might otherwise be stored and reused, is overdue for change.
With around 490,000 acre-feet of stormwater available to be captured a year in an area that includes Long Beach and Anaheim, the L.A. area ranks first in the West in stormwater runoff potential and, 19th out of 2,645 urban areas nationwide, according to a Pacific Institute report last year.
Pedestrians use the Los Angeles River Bikeway.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Among the efforts to make the city spongier — and therefore less dependent on imported water — is the Safe Clean Water Program, which L.A. County voters approved in 2018 as ballot Measure W.
The program levies a property tax on impermeable surfaces to provide around $300 million a year in grants for municipal stormwater capture projects.
The aim of the program is to capture 98 billion gallons annually. Experts have said that projects like this in the upper L.A. watershed could simultaneously help prevent flooding downstream.
Yet officials have estimated that it will take decades to achieve this goal, and progress has been slow.
Just 30 acres of green space were added to the county in its first three years, according to a report by Los Angeles Waterkeeper, a local watchdog.
And although the program has recently begun to pick up pace, with around $1 billion allocated across 130 projects, Bruce Reznik, the group’s executive director and a member of the Measure W scoring committee, pointed out there are a host of challenges not present in China’s centralized model.
Among them are scant federal support and the slow, costly bureaucratic processes involved with the program, such as cleaning up contaminated project sites and getting permits. He estimated that the projects the county needs will cost around $50 billion, 10 times what Measure W funding can provide over the next 20 years.
“In terms of expenses, that’s a question a lot of us are asking: Why are these projects so expensive?” Reznik said. “I get that there’s inflation, but man, projects we thought were going to be $10 million are now $25 million. I think we’ve got to figure out ways that we can streamline some of this stuff.”
Special correspondents Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul and Xin-yun Wu contributed reporting from Bangkok and Taipei, respectively.
The violent protest Sunday at a synagogue has prompted Mayor Karen Bass to say Los Angeles should consider rules governing demonstrations and the wearing of masks by those protesting.
Bass on Monday did not offer a proposal but said the city needed to look at the issue — including “the idea of people wearing masks at protests.” A number of pro-Palestinian protesters had their faces covered Sunday.
The mayor, at an afternoon news conference, also said she was seeking city and state funding for additional security measures at places of worship in the city. Hours after the clashes, she ordered the LAPD to increase patrols in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson area where the protest occurred and at religious venues.
Masks have been a part of many pro-Palestinian and some pro-Israeli protests over the war in Gaza, including on college campuses.
When a mob attacked a pro-Palestinian camp at UCLA in May, it was difficult to identify suspects because many wore masks that hid their identities. Police said they would use technology that captures facial images and outlines and compares them with other photos on the internet and social media to put names to faces.
It is unclear how the government could restrict mask use at protests.
During the 2020 George Floyd protests, some health officials urged demonstrators to wear masks to protect against COVID-19. Although coronavirus cases have fallen dramatically since then, masks can still offer protection, especially to those who have underlying health problems.
Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was considering a mask ban on the New York subway, saying she was concerned about people with face masks committing antisemitic acts.
“We will not tolerate individuals using masks to evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior,” Hochul told reporters at a news conference. “My team is working on a solution. But on a subway, people should not be able to hide behind a mask to commit crimes.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams supported the idea, telling reporters that “cowards cover their faces.”
Some civil liberties advocates opposed the idea.
“Mask bans were originally developed to squash political protests and, like other laws that criminalize people, they will be selectively enforced — used to arrest, doxx, surveil, and silence people of color and protesters the police disagree with,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement, according to the Associated Press.
North Carolina has also been talking about a mask ban, citing Gaza war protests. But there has been pushback from some health professionals and people with underlying health problems.
One North Carolina resident told the Washington Post: “I’ve thought I should wear masks with something printed on it like ‘immune deficient’ or ‘cancer patient.’ But we should not have to do that.”
There have been no formal proposals in Los Angeles, and it’s unclear whether the City Council would support the idea.
But a local Anti-Defamation League official expressed support Monday for a mask restriction. Jeffrey Abrams, the ADL’s Los Angeles regional director, stood on stage alongside Bass at the afternoon news conference and said the city needed to do more to protect the community.
“Just as Mayor Bass said, we need to look at every available legal tool, as the city attorney looks at existing anti-masking laws in the state of California,” Abrams said.
The Sunday protest was condemned by top officials including Bass, President Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
A pro-Palestinian protester gets in a car surrounded by pro-Israeli counterdemonstrators near Adas Torah synagogue Sunday.
(Zoë Cranfill / Los Angeles Times)
The protest began Sunday afternoon at the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood but eventually spread into nearby areas over several hours. Fistfights broke out between pro-Palestinian demonstrators — who said they were protesting an event at the synagogue promoting the sale of stolen Palestinian land — and supporters of Israel.
“Yesterday was abhorrent, and blocking access to a place of worship is absolutely unacceptable,” Bass said Monday. “This violence was designed to stoke fear. It was designed to divide. But hear me loud and clear: It will fail.”
“Intimidating Jewish congregants is dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American,” the president said in a statement. “Americans have a right to peaceful protest. But blocking access to a house of worship — and engaging in violence — is never acceptable.”
The law enforcement sources said the event was advertised in Friday’s issue of the Jewish Journal promising to provide information on “housing projects in all the best Anglo neighborhoods in Israel.” “Anglo” is a direct translation from Hebrew meaning “English-speaking.” The ad does not specify where in Israel the real estate is.
Protest fliers posted on social media said, “Our Land Is Not For Sale,” and condemned “land theft,” according to an Instagram post from the Southern California chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations office in Los Angeles, said the site of the demonstration was chosen not because it was in front of a synagogue but because of the event it was hosting.
The protest “was in response to the blatant violations of both international law and human rights from agencies that seek to make a profit selling brutally stolen Palestinian land as the Israeli government continues its eight-month-long genocidal campaign and ethnic cleansing in Gaza,” he said in a statement.
“Elected officials and the mainstream media have politicized this incident as religious discrimination as opposed to a human rights issue,” Ayloush added.
Rabbi Hertzel Illulian, founder of the JEM Community Center in Beverly Hills, arrived at Adas Torah on Sunday to worship during afternoon prayer and was confronted by a group yelling into megaphones. Some synagogue visitors were blocked from going inside, he said.
“We could not pray well because these people outside were screaming,” he said.
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Karen Garcia, Richard Winton, Hannah Fry, Nathan Solis
Forty years ago next month, Bruce Springsteen released what would become the album most entwined with his legacy and American culture writ large: Born in the U.S.A. In his new book, out Tuesday, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland, veteran rock critic Steven Hyden explores how it became what it did—and what it meant for Bruce, rock music, and the greater zeitgeist. In this exclusive excerpt, Hyden looks at the medium that introduced many people to the album: the music video.
Bruce Springsteen is not a great music video artist. I am certain that he would not be offended by this statement because I don’t think that being a great music video artist was ever a priority for him. During the Born in the U.S.A. era, music videos were a means to an end.
The most memorable image of Bruce from this era derives from the Born in the U.S.A. album cover shot by Andrea Klein and famed Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz, which was later recreated in the title song’s video. As Dave Marsh relates in his 1987 book Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, Leibovitz shot Springsteen over five or six sessions and amassed a series of photos that depicted him in various epic poses. One such picture—Bruce is dressed in a blue shirt, black leather jacket, and black pants and is captured airborne with his legs stuck at a 45-degree angle—was used for the cover of the “Dancing in the Dark” 12-inch single. Another shot of Bruce leaping in front of the American flag with his right arm frozen in a Pete Townshend–style windmill over his guitar was utilized for the cover of the Born in the U.S.A. tour program.
As for the photo that made the album cover, Leibovitz did not consider it her best work, referring to it dismissively as a “grab shot.” It’s true that, when compared with some of the Born in the U.S.A. outtakes, it’s not as artfully composed. But the photo proved to be a remarkably pliable image that conveyed several messages at once. The white work shirt and blue jeans were shorthand for the album’s working-class themes. The red and white stripes obviously represented America. The focus on Bruce’s ass had sexual overtones. The combined alchemy of these elements communicated the paradoxical idea that Bruce was an everyman and the man of his place and time.
That idea carried over to the first music video he made for Born in the U.S.A., “Dancing in the Dark.” I do not need to repeat the particulars of the “Dancing in the Dark” video because anyone who is remotely familiar with Bruce Springsteen can picture scenes from it in their mind. What’s important is that the video undeniably made him more famous in the short run, and it unquestionably made it easier to make fun of him in the long run. I have a friend who hates Bruce Springsteen, and when he wants to annoy me, he will text me GIFs of Bruce dancing in the “Dancing in the Dark” video because he knows I can’t defend it. That video personifies everything that is corny about Bruce Springsteen and almost nothing that is cool about him.
For a long time, I thought the strangest thing about the “Dancing in the Dark” video was that it was directed by one of my favorite filmmakers, Brian De Palma. A friend of Springsteen and Jon Landau, De Palma stepped in at the last minute after a previous attempt at making a video for the song failed. He was not an obvious choice. Very little about “Dancing in the Dark” aligns textually with De Palma’s cinematic output in any obvious way. A high-IQ pervert best known for making lushly choreographed and technically brilliant thrillers loaded with tawdry sex and graphic violence, De Palma’s work on “Dancing in the Dark” seems incongruously wholesome in comparison.
But subtextually, “Dancing in the Dark” shares at least two attributes with Body Double, the highly controversial and very entertaining Rear Window–Vertigo rip-off that De Palma also made in 1984. The first is that both films sexualize their protagonists. (“Dancing in the Dark” opens by lingering on Bruce’s crotch and butt; Body Double stars Melanie Griffith as a porn star.) The second is that De Palma deftly uses flashy and kinetic imagery to distract the audience from a ridiculous plot. (A rock star singing about his inescapable loneliness while smiling ear to ear with future Friends star Courteney Cox in “Dancing in the Dark” versus a dim-witted actor caught in a convoluted double cross that inexplicably frames him for murder in Body Double.)
Bruce had mixed feelings about the video’s slickness and feel-good pop presentation, though he could also recognize that “Dancing in the Dark” achieved exactly what it was supposed to. As he related to Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in 1984, “I was on the beach and this kid came up to me—I think his name was Mike, he was like seven or eight—and he says, ‘I saw you on MTV.’ And then he says, ‘I got your moves down.’ So I say, ‘Well, let me check ’em out.’ And he starts doin’, like, ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ And he was pretty good, you know?”
Any hardcore Boss-head who still harbors ill will toward “Dancing in the Dark” should go on YouTube and look up the original video that Bruce was forced to abandon. (The footage that leaked is supposedly a rehearsal take, but it provides an adequate approximation of the concept.)
Directed by Jeff Stein, one of the most important early music-video filmmakers and another personal friend of Bruce, this “Dancing in the Dark” presents Bruce Springsteen moving by himself on an all-black stage and against a black backdrop. The concept (I guess?) is that he is dancing near the dark. But that’s all that we see. In a single take, the camera zooms in and out while Bruce robotically tosses his arms and swings his hips. He is wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, tight black pants with black suspenders, and a black headband. His muscles are exposed. His armpit hair is glistening. He looks like a mime attending a Jazzercise class.
According to the excellent 2011 oral history I Want My MTV, Bruce knew in the moment how silly he looked. “He performed one time, we cut the camera, and he walked off the fucking set and didn’t come back,” says director of photography Daniel Pearl, who later shot iconic videos for U2’s “With or Without You” and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.”
“We stood around for half an hour,” Pearl says. “People scoured the building looking for him, and we finally realized, ‘Oh my god, he’s gone.’”
For his next video, Bruce set out to make the gritty version of “Dancing in the Dark.” In the “Born in the U.S.A.” video, we see Bruce onstage with the E Street Band in Los Angeles in 1984. The clean-cut, happy-go-lucky guy from “Dancing in the Dark” has been replaced by a grizzled, screaming arena rocker clad in denim and leather. He is technically lip-syncing, but it’s obvious that the live footage has been aligned with the record in postproduction. We see him really singing—and feeling—this song.
When we don’t see Bruce, we see clips of the America that the song describes—people lined up outside of a check-cashing business, a one-eyed mustachioed guy drinking a beer, ROTC soldiers going through their paces, a military cemetery lined with endless headstones. The dissonance of the “Dancing in the Dark” video is that the tone, mood, and imagery contradict the lyrics and Bruce’s usual persona. (He doesn’t even play guitar in the video.) But “Born in the U.S.A.” is a literal depiction of the song and Bruce’s idea of himself. It’s as “honest” as his music videos get.
The personnel for “Born in the U.S.A.” was just as illustrious as the makers of “Dancing in the Dark.” Director John Sayles was celebrated for making authentic slice-of-life indie films like Return of the Secaucus 7 and Baby It’s You. (The latter film includes several Springsteen songs on the soundtrack.) Per Bruce’s instruction to make a down-and-dirty video, Sayles shot in 16 mm, a choice that belies the world-class cinematographers on the project: Ernest Dickerson (who later shot Do the Right Thing) and Michael Ballhaus (who subsequently filmed Goodfellas).
Bruce opted to use Sayles again for the next two videos, though the director took Springsteen’s video image in yet another direction. In “I’m on Fire” and “Glory Days,” Bruce acts. He’s playing the characters in the songs, though it really feels like one character. In “I’m on Fire,” he is a greasy mechanic who contemplates an affair with a flirtatious (and largely unseen) rich woman. In “Glory Days,” he is a construction worker and family man who fantasizes about pitching against the San Diego Padres. He is also the frontman of a bar band that happens to look exactly like the E Street Band.
“I’m on Fire” features Bruce’s best performance as an actor. He is tasked with looking lustful, then reticent, as he hops in the woman’s Cadillac and takes it on a late-night drive to her home in the Hollywood Hills. The clip’s most theatrical moment is a crane shot in Bruce’s bedroom, which lowers the camera into his face as he rouses himself from bed during a sleepless night. His sheets do not appear to be soaking wet, but the look on his face effectively conveys the feeling of a freight train running through the middle of his head. Of all the Born in the U.S.A. music videos, this seems the most like a short film. When Bruce reaches his moment of truth and decides to slip the keys into the mailbox rather than ring the woman’s doorbell, you can hear the clang of the keys in the box, emphasizing the video’s brief but coherent narrative.
“I’m on Fire” is the leanest of the Born in the U.S.A. videos, which was appropriate for the album’s leanest-sounding hit. The song was cooked up in the studio quickly and extemporaneously, with Bruce stroking out a rockabilly guitar figure against Max Weinberg’s metronomic beat. Upon hearing the chorus, Roy Bittan was inspired to compose a simple but expressive one-note synth intro.
On an album loaded with big-sounding rock songs, “I’m on Fire” is a departure point. It’s also the song that sounds the most like an ’80s pop hit, which might be why it’s the Born in the U.S.A. track that has been covered by the widest spectrum of artists from beyond Bruce’s usual rock wheelhouse. “I’m on Fire” has entered the worlds of indie electronic (Chromatics, Bat for Lashes), alternative pop (Tori Amos), mainstream country (Kenny Chesney), mainstream pop (John Mayer), British folk (Mumford & Sons), and many places between.
The tension of the “I’m on Fire” video is, of course, sexual in nature. Just as the song exudes desire, the video creates an instant patina of longing. And yet the story (like Bruce’s lyrics) is about not following through on what the protagonist wants. Positioning Bruce as a carnal creature who is ultimately chaste was yet another ingenious way to make him mean different things to different audiences. “I’m on Fire” invites the audience to envision Bruce as the kind of man who could indulge in a naughty night of passion with a married woman but chooses not to do so. The “I’m on Fire” video was like a prophylactic for the Boss’s libidinous side. He could be the stud and the virgin simultaneously.
In “Glory Days,” we see Bruce as a wannabe baseball player. He’s not observing this person, as he does in the song. He is portraying a father, with a wife and a young son, who still likes to pretend that he’s a major-league pitcher. Basically the opposite of the real Bruce Springsteen, but also a decent approximation of a “regular” guy in 1985, starting with the love of baseball, which could still be credibly called the national pastime. The five largest television audiences for the World Series ever occurred over consecutive years right before the release of Born in the U.S.A., with 1978 coming in at no. 1, followed by 1980, 1981, 1982, and 1979.
Aside from the flag, baseball was the most straightforward symbol of the American spirit to put in a music video in the mid-’80s. The game was still popular, but it also felt like a romantic remnant of the nation’s past. And that suited “Glory Days,” and not only because of the lyrical allusion to the sport. Like baseball, rock ’n’ roll was still a big deal in the mid-’80s mainstream, but it looked backward. And amid all the displays of technological know-how on the rest of Born in the U.S.A., “Glory Days” is a throwback to the garage-rock formalism of The River. The band sounds loose and jocular, Bittan’s synthesizer has been supplanted by Danny Federici’s organ, and the portending of personal/political doom that permeated the preceding singles is replaced by a feel-good party vibe. Even Bruce’s sidekick, Little Steven, is back in the fold again during the video’s bar-band sequences.
And at the center of it all was what we will call “the Bruce Springsteen Character,” a perfect leading man for MTV. In the videos for “I’m on Fire” and “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen is portrayed as soft-spoken, a little shy, hardworking, slightly dim, and fundamentally decent. If you were to make a list of “average working-class person” clichés and turn that list into a person, it would be the Bruce Springsteen Character from these videos.
This person was not the “real” Bruce Springsteen. And I don’t just mean that in the most obvious sense, which is that Bruce was a millionaire rock star and not a blue-collar laborer with a family. The real Bruce Springsteen liked old movies, books about American history, and above all his own company. He was a pensive loner with depressive tendencies. He was complicated.
You don’t get any of that from the simpleton you see in his videos. But the Bruce Springsteen Character overwhelmed reality. And that was helpful to the real Bruce Springsteen’s career—until it suddenly wasn’t.
The impact of MTV imprinting images permanently on an artist’s career would be more apparent after the ’80s, but at least one expert could recognize it in the moment. In 1985, a New York University professor named Neil Postman published a best-selling work of cultural criticism called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, a screed against the influence of television on contemporary life. The central argument of Amusing Ourselves to Death is that the transition from a print-based form of public conversation (which Postman argues reached its epoch during the mid-19th century, when Americans happily sat through seven-hour debates between presidential candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas) to a televisual one has made it impossible to properly convey substantive facts and thoughts.
A lasting concept from Amusing Ourselves to Death is the information-action ratio. The concept expresses the connection between what people hear and what it compels them to do. To put it in extremely simple terms: When people learn that fire will burn them, they will know not to touch it. Postman argues that modern media in the mid-’80s created so much unnecessary information that it amounted to disinformation, ultimately paralyzing and confusing consumers and taking them farther away from the truth, while ostensibly making them better informed.
Postman’s work has obvious resonance in the social media era, when the information-action ratio seems even more relevant than it did for television. But what Postman writes can also be applied to how MTV fixed musicians in fleeting images that gave false (or incomplete) impressions of their overall work, even while flooding the airwaves with that artist’s music.
The example people always give of this phenomenon is Cyndi Lauper, a talented singer-songwriter whose 1983 debut album, She’s So Unusual, moved 16 million units worldwide on the strength of a colorful NYC punk persona forwarded in videos like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Time After Time.” The common wisdom is that Lauper became so connected to her She’s So Unusual image—red hair, pawnshop clothes, a proclivity for hanging out with the wrestler Lou Albano—that it hampered her overall career.
An element of this argument rings true. When most people picture Cyndi Lauper, they conjure images almost exclusively from the videos she put out in 1983 and ’84. But the suggestion that those videos hurt her in the long run isn’t really accurate. One of the biggest songs of her career, “True Colors,” is the title track from her second record, released in 1986. Her third album, A Night to Remember, spawned another top-10 hit, “I Drove All Night,” in 1989. It’s true that none of her albums after that produced a hit song, but almost every pop star starts to fade by the fourth record. There’s no evidence that the ubiquity of She’s So Unusual hurt her overall. On the contrary, her career arc feels pretty typical.
In the case of Bruce Springsteen, however, the distorting effect of the Bruce Springsteen Character from those mid-’80s music videos truly has had far-reaching consequences. The most common criticism of Bruce Springsteen by people who don’t like Bruce Springsteen’s music is that he is not the person that he sings about in his songs. Springsteen’s critics find the fact that he is a rich man who sings about poor people to be inauthentic. Anytime these people want to criticize Bruce Springsteen about anything—the price of his concert tickets, his political stances, the preponderance of the word “factory” in his lyrics—this is what they go back to: He is a phony because he is not really the Bruce Springsteen Character.
Now, this also happens to be the laziest criticism of Bruce Springsteen. It’s like condemning Robert Downey Jr. for being a witty millionaire who is not actually Iron Man in real life. But it’s also understandable why the disconnect exists.
If Bruce had made a video for “Nebraska” in which he portrayed the song’s convicted-murderer narrator, nobody would think he was an actual murderer. (Though this would have been no more fanciful than presenting Bruce as a crane operator like the “Glory Days” video does.) But his public persona would have been darker and more disturbing. He would have come across as a less menacing Lou Reed. And he would have been expected to live up to that image. Any story about him being kind to children or a good tipper for waitresses would be commercially precarious.
This is the opposite scenario in which Bruce found himself during Born in the U.S.A. How do I know this is true? From Bruce Springsteen’s own actions. The way he reacted to his own fame shows that he has been locked in a decades-long fight against the Bruce Springsteen Character. On the cover of the follow-up to Born in the U.S.A., 1987’s Tunnel of Love, Bruce wears a dark suit, a white shirt, and a bolo tie, and leans against a white Cadillac, a deliberate departure from the blue-collar wardrobe of the previous album cycle. In the song “Better Days” from 1992’s Lucky Town, he sings derisively about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.” Many years later, in his career-spanning one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway, he opens with a confession: “I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life!” he says. “I’ve never done any hard labor. I’ve never worked 9-to-5. I’ve never worked five days a week. Until right now.”
It took a full workweek to fight against the Bruce Springsteen Character. And yet that character persists.
Ever since mortgage interest rates jumped in 2022, some Californians have had a strategy: Buy now and, once rates drop, refinance to save hundreds of dollars each month.
The idea — pushed by some real estate agents — was supposed to be a trade-off. The buyer could pick up a home in a slower market, and though interest costs would be high, they wouldn’t stay that way.
The strategy may still work, but so far, high borrowing costs are here to stay. In recent weeks, rates have climbed higher, surpassing 7% for the first time since last year.
If you bought a home with this strategy, The Times would like to speak with you about how it has worked out.
It is a date that should be known by lovers of messy and meaty cheeseburgers everywhere, and especially in Los Angeles.
On Aug. 1, 1966, In-N-Out Burger updated its menu to include the item that would arguably become its most celebrated offering — the Double-Double.
In-N-Out fans have a pioneering fast-food executive to thank: Robert Lang Sr.
In the early days of In-N-Out, which was founded in Baldwin Park in 1948, some diners took to ordering hamburgers with double the meat and cheese. At some point, they were named Double-Doubles. But it wasn’t until 1966 that Lang, who’d worked for the then-burgeoning chain since the early-1950s, decided to officially put the special burger on the menu at a new location in Azusa.
The Double Double from In-N-Out Burger.
(Mariah Tauger/Los Angeles Times)
In-N-Out co-founder Harry Snyder was so taken by the idea that he added the Double-Double to the menu at the company’s five other locations, owner Lynsi Snyder, his granddaughter, wrote in an Instagram post Nov. 30. Of Lang, she said, “He was many special things, and we sure owe him an awful lot.”
Lang died Nov. 28 at 87, according to son Robert Lang Jr. He said his father, who lived in Rancho Cucamonga, had been in good health. The cause was not known.
Lang was born in 1936 in Southern California and grew up in Baldwin Park, the son of a Dutch immigrant father and a German immigrant mother. The family had a namesake dairy near the site that would eventually house In-N-Out’s original drive-in hamburger stand.
While working as a truck driver as a young man, Lang would end his day with a 25-cent burger at In-N-Out, the Orange County Register reported in 2014. He said he always ordered the same thing: “A hamburger with onions. It was my reward.”
Before long, Lang was working at In-N-Out. And at 19, he became co-manager of the In-N-Out in Baldwin Park, making him the youngest manager in the company’s history, Lynsi Snyder wrote on Instagram. Years later, it was a family connection that may have led Lang to put the Double-Double on the Azusa eatery’s menu, his son said.
Lang’s brother-in-law, Jon Peterson, served as the company’s sign painter and would create the menus at the drive-throughs. When it was time to make the menu for the Azusa location, Lang had an idea, his son believes.
“My dad probably told him, ‘Hey, why don’t you put ‘Double-Double’ on the menu?” the younger Lang said.
As for the Double-Double itself, Lang consumed his share of them over the years, but eventually downsized his ambitions. “In his later days he was satisfied with just a cheeseburger,” his son said.
Among his other innovations, Lang came up with the idea to put marketing verbiage on the protective lap mats given to drive-through guests. “In the early days, the mats had a little map of the San Gabriel Valley and had the stores numbered on it,” his son said.
Lang also was tapped by Harry Snyder to create In-N-Out’s first official handbook. To prepare it, his son said, Lang would visit with Snyder, who’d “recite to him how to cook a burger, how to cook fries and so on.”
“He wrote down what Harry told him — it was basically how to run a store,” said Lang’s son.
Over the years, the elder Lang held several positions at In-N-Out — he served as a store manager and division manager — before becoming a so-called “QFC evaluator,” said his son, explaining that the acronym stands for “Quality, Friendliness and Service.”
“He was there forever,” said Christina Snyder Monahan, the widow of Rich Snyder, who took over and grew the chain after his father Harry died in 1976. “Rich loved and trusted him and thought very highly of him. He had the utmost faith and confidence in him. Bob’s values and who he was were integral to what In-N-Out was and became. He really knew the grassroots values of In-N-Out and carried that forth.”
Lang retired from In-N-Out in the 2000s, and spent his time golfing, traveling and sometimes teaching a history course at In-N-Out University. He recently had occasion to revisit his half-century-plus with the company, which is now based in Irvine and has nearly 400 locations, when he attended its 75th anniversary celebration in October.
During the gathering at the the In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip, Lang posed for photographs and even signed autographs. “He felt just overjoyed,” his son said. “At first he was probably shocked that people asked him for autographs.”
Lang was a positive example for his son — and provided career inspiration. Robert Lang Jr. joined In-N-Out in 1973 and rose through the ranks over the course of 45 years to become executive vice president of operations before retiring about five years ago.
“I started out peeling onions and taking out the trash, just like my dad,” he said. “I wanted to be like him, to honor the person that he was.”
Lang was married three times. He is survived by wife Lynn Lang; sister Nancy Peterson; children Robert Lang Jr., Mike Lang, Kelly Delizo and Andrea Hernandez; 11 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Times staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.
A congestion-busting idea to toll many of Tauranga’s main arterial routes has been labelled “ludicrous” and “unfair” by people who could be forced to pay more to drive to the supermarket.
Others worry it would push the cost of living higher and one business owner says it might prompt him to move.
In one scenario of how a variable road-pricing idea being considered by Tauranga City Council might work, commuting between the CBD and Pāpāmoa in peak hours five days a week could cost more than $2400 a year.
A council commissioner, however, says that example was “illustrative” and the council was only seeking feedback on whether it should further investigate the potential issues and benefits of the “SmartTrip” road-pricing idea.
Tauranga was looking at a variable road-pricing system, with a report presented to its council suggesting a system of access and distance-based charges for using certain roads in and out of the city centre could be a potential solution to traffic congestion.
It would have more than 100 entry and exit points, require up to 100 cameras and would first need a law change to take effect.
Priced roads included State Highway 2 and SH29A, plus local roads such as Turret Rd.
Academic philosophers these days do not tend to be the subjects of overwhelming attention in the national media. The Oxford professor William MacAskill is a notableexception. In the month and a half since the publication of his provocative new book, What We Owe the Future, he has been profiled or excerpted or reviewed or interviewed in just about every major American publication.
MacAskill is a leader of the effective-altruism, or EA, movement, whose adherents use evidence and reason to figure out how to do as much good in the world as possible. His book takes that fairly intuitive-sounding project in a somewhat less intuitive direction, arguing for an idea called “longtermism,” the view that members of future generations—we’re talking unimaginably distant descendants, not just your grandchildren or great-grandchildren—deserve the same moral consideration as people living in the present. The idea is predicated on brute arithmetic: Assuming humanity does not drive itself to premature extinction, future people will vastly outnumber present people, and so, the thinking goes, we ought to be spending a lot more time and energy looking out for their interests than we currently do. In practice, longtermists argue, this means prioritizing a set of existential threats that the average person doesn’t spend all that much time fretting about. At the top of the list: runaway artificial intelligence, bioengineered pandemics, nuclear holocaust.
Whatever you think of longtermism or EA, they are fast gaining currency—both literally and figuratively. A movement once confined to university-seminar tables and niche online forums now has tens of billions of dollars behind it. This year, it fielded its first major political candidate in the U.S. Earlier this month, I spoke with MacAskill about the logic of longtermism and EA, and the future of the movement more broadly.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jacob Stern: Effective altruists have been focused on pandemics since long before COVID. Are there ways that EA efforts helped with the COVID pandemic? If not, why not?
William MacAskill: EAs, like many people in public health, were particularly early in terms of warning about the pandemic. There were some things that were helpful early, even if they didn’t change the outcome completely. 1Day Sooner is an EA-funded organization that got set up to advocate for human-challenge trials. And if governments had been more flexible and responsive, that could have led to vaccines being rolled out months earlier, I think. It would have meant you could get evidence of efficacy and safety much faster.
There is an organization called microCOVID that quantifies what your risk is of getting COVID from various sorts of activities you might do. You hang out with someone at a bar: What’s your chance of getting COVID? It would actually provide estimates of that, which was great and I think widely used. Our World in Data—which is kind of EA-adjacent—provided a leading source of data over the course of the pandemic. One thing I think I should say, though, is it makes me wish that we’d done way more on pandemics earlier. You know, these are all pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I think EA did very well at identifying this as a threat, as a major issue we should care about, but I don’t think I can necessarily point to enormous advances.
Stern: What are the lessons EA has taken from the pandemic?
MacAskill: One lesson is that even extremely ambitious public-health plans won’t necessarily suffice, at least for future pandemics, especially if one was a deliberate pandemic, from an engineered virus. Omicron infected roughly a quarter of Americans within 100 days. And there’s just not really a feasible path whereby you design, develop, and produce a vaccine and vaccinate everybody within 100 days. So what should we do for future pandemics?
Early detection becomes absolutely crucial. What you can do is monitor wastewater at many, many sites around the world, and you screen the wastewater for all potential pathogens. We’re particularly worried about engineered pathogens: If we get a COVID-19-scale pandemic once every hundred years or so from natural origins, that chance increases dramatically given advances in bioengineering. You can take viruses and upgrade them in terms of their destructive properties so they can become more infectious or more lethal. It’s known as gain-of-function research. If this is happening all around the world, then you just should expect lab leaks quite regularly. There’s also the even more worrying phenomenon of bioweapons. It’s really a scary thing.
In terms of labs, possibly we want to slow down or not even allow certain sorts of gain-of-function research. Minimally, what we could do is ask labs to have regulations such that there’s third-party liability insurance. So if I buy a car, I have to buy such insurance. If I hit someone, that means I’m insured for their health, because that’s an externality of driving a car. In labs, if you leak, you should have to pay for the costs. There’s no way you actually can insure against billions dead, but you could have some very high cap at least, and it would disincentivize unnecessary and dangerous research, while not disincentivizing necessary research, because then if it’s so important, you should be willing to pay the cost.
Another thing I’m excited about is low-wavelength UV lighting. It’s a form of lighting that basically can sterilize a room safe for humans. It needs more research to confirm safety and efficacy and certainly to get the cost down; we want it at like a dollar a bulb. So then you could install it as part of building codes. Potentially no one ever gets a cold again. You eradicate most respiratory infections as well as the next pandemic.
Stern: Shifting out of pandemic gear, I was wondering whether there are major lobbying efforts under way to persuade billionaires to convert to EA, given that the potential payoff of persuading someone like Jeff Bezos to donate some significant part of his fortune is just massive.
MacAskill: I do a bunch of this. I’ve spoken at the Giving Pledge annual retreat, and I do a bunch of other speaking. It’s been pretty successful overall, insofar as there are other people kind of coming in—not on the size of Sam Bankman-Fried or Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, but there’s definitely further interest, and it is something I’ll kind of keep trying to do. Another organization is Longview Philanthropy, which has done a lot of advising for new philanthropists to get them more involved and interested in EA ideas.
I have not ever successfully spoken with Jeff Bezos, but I would certainly take the opportunity. It has seemed to me like his giving so far is relatively small scale. It’s not clear to me how EA-motivated it is. But it would certainly be worth having a conversation with him.
Stern: Another thing I was wondering about is the issue of abortion. On the surface at least, longtermism seems like it would commit you to—or at least point you in the direction of—an anti-abortion stance. But I know that you don’t see things that way. So I would love to hear how you think through that.
MacAskill: Yes, I’m pro-choice. I don’t think government should interfere in women’s reproductive rights. The key distinction is when pro-life advocates say they are concerned about the unborn, they are saying that, at conception or shortly afterwards, the fetus becomes a person. And so what you’re doing when you have an abortion is morally equivalent or very similar to killing a newborn infant. From my perspective, what you’re doing when having an early-term abortion is much closer to choosing not to conceive. And I certainly don’t think that the government should be going around forcing people to conceive, and then certainly they shouldn’t be forcing people to not have an abortion. There is a second thought of Well, don’t you say it’s good to have more people, at least if they have sufficiently good lives? And there I say yes, but the right way of achieving morally valuable goals is not, again, by restricting people’s rights.
Stern: I think there are at least three separate questions here. The first being this one that you just addressed: Is it right for a government to restrict abortion? The second being, on an individual level, if you’re a person thinking of having an abortion, is that choice ethical? And the third being, are you operating from the premise that unborn fetuses are a constituency in the same way that future people are a constituency?
MacAskill: Yes and no on the last thing. In What We Owe the Future, I do argue for this view that I still find kind of intuitive: It can be good to have a new person in existence if their life is sufficiently good. Instrumentally, I think it’s important for the world to not have this dip in population that standard projections suggest. But then there’s nothing special about the unborn fetus.
On the individual level, having kids and bringing them up well can be a good way to live, a good way of making the world better. I think there are many ways of making the world better. You can also donate. You can also change your career. Obviously, I don’t want to belittle having an abortion, because it’s often a heart-wrenching decision, but from a moral perspective I think it’s much closer to failing to conceive that month, rather than the pro-life view, which is it’s more like killing a child that’s born.
Stern: What you’re saying on some level makes total sense but is also something that I think your average pro-choice American would totally reject.
MacAskill: It’s tough, because I think it’s mainly a matter of rhetoric and association. Because the average pro-choice American is also probably concerned about climate change. That involves concern for how our actions will impact generations of as-yet-unborn people. And so the key difference is the pro-life person wants to extend the franchise just a little bit to the 10 million unborn fetuses that are around at the moment. I want to extend the franchise to all future people! It’s a very different move.
Stern: How do you think about trying to balance the moral rigor or correctness of your philosophy with the goal of actually getting the most people to subscribe and produce the most good in the world? Once you start down the logical path of effective altruism, it’s hard to figure out where to stop, how to justify not going full Peter Singer and giving almost all your money away. So how do you get people to a place where they feel comfortable going halfway or a quarter of the way?
MacAskill: I think it’s tough because I don’t think there’s a privileged stopping point, philosophically. At least not until you’re at the point where you’re really doing almost everything you can. So with Giving What We Can, for example, we chose 10 percent as a target for what portion of people’s income they could give away. In a sense it’s a totally arbitrary number. Why not 9 percent or 11 percent? It does have the benefit of 10 percent being a round number. And it also is the right level, I think, where if you get people to give 1 percent, they’re probably giving that amount anyway. Whereas 10 percent, I think, is achievable yet at the same time really is a difference compared to what they otherwise would have been doing.
That, I think, is just going to be true more generally. We try to have a culture that is accepting and supportive of these kinds of intermediate levels of sacrifice or commitment. It is something that people within EA struggle with, including myself. It’s kind of funny: People will often beat themselves up for not doing enough good, even though other people never beat other people up for not doing enough good. EA is really accepting that this stuff is hard, and we’re all human and we’re not superhuman moral saints.
Stern: Which I guess is what worries or scares people about it. The idea that once I start thinking this way, how do I not end up beating myself up for not doing more? So I think where a lot of people end up, in light of that, is deciding that what’s easiest is just not thinking about any of it so they don’t feel bad.
MacAskill: Yeah. And that’s a real shame. I don’t know. It bugs me a bit. It’s just a general issue of people when confronted with a moral idea. It’s like, Hey, you should become vegetarian. People are like, Oh, I should care about animals? What about if you had to kill an animal in order to live? Would you do that?What about eating sugar that is bleached with bone? You’re a hypocrite! Somehow people feel like unless you’re doing the most extreme version of your views, then it’s not justified. Look, it’s better to be a vegetarian than to not be a vegetarian. Let’s accept that things are on a spectrum.
On the podcast I was just on, I was just like, ‘Look, these are all philosophical issues. This is irrelevant to the practical questions.’ It’s funny that I am finding myself saying that more and more.
Stern: On what grounds, EA-wise, did you justify spending an hour on the phone with me?
MacAskill: I think the media is important! Getting the ideas out there is important. If more people hear about the ideas, some people are inspired, and they get off their seat and start doing stuff, that’s a huge impact. If I spend one hour talking to you, you write an article, and that leads to one person switching their career, well, that’s one hour turned into 80,000 hours—seems like a pretty good trade.
