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Letter to the editor

✾ WaldenPond.press ✾ Tuesday 17 May 2022 ✾ Ben Doherty ✾ 1 minute read ✾

Hi,

I don't drink Corona beer (because I've got a sodastream so I can make my own fizzy water whenever I like) but their marketing line "from where you'd rather be" is pretty great. That's where I'm putting my brain while I'm writing this. I'm imagining myself in a comfy armchair, with a never ending cup of tea that's always the right temperature. (I'm getting most of my reading time, in real life, on the bus at the moment.)

The cover image is from Iceland, which is more of a raging waterfalls than a secluded pond kind of place. But, I think that's where I'd rather be, at least this week.

Lots of love

Ben

Some things you might like to know

If you've intentionally gone offline, you might want to know a few things without having to reach for Google.

Short Link Codes

You'll see that there are words that have numbers next to them, like this. If you look at the end of this article you'll see that these numbers correspond to some footnotes. Often these will have a 4 character code—like this LUXe—next to them. Links in articles on the web are invisible, and when you look at them, often they'll look like this:

https://ben-evans.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b98e2de85f03865f1d38de74f&id=38bdf575f2&e=583c97593d

Which looks pretty nasty if you need to type it into your browser to visit the site.

Fear not! There is a solution. On the Walden Pond website there is a green blob in the top left. If you click on it, you can type in your code and press go. It'll take you to that site.

I find that if I'm reading offline, that if I highlight (with a highlighter or a coloured pencil) the links I'm interested in, I can go back to them as a batch. You might want to make a little mark on the side of the page too so that you can flick back to it without having to search too much.

Why the name "Walden Pond"?

Henry Thoreau was an American transcendentalist philosopher, naturalist, essayist and poet. He wrote a pretty famous book called Walden while shacked up in a cabin by Walden Pond (which is a lake in Massachusetts).

He was making a show of being far from the madding crowd. But was only 2 miles away from town, and would get his mum to do his laundry. This isn't taking a swipe at Thoreau for being disingenuous, I think it was smart. He was managing his attention, not living in a state of nature, and not living in a state of perpetual hyperstimulation.

I named Walden Pond—the zine—after the technique, not the place. (See the essay by Venkatesh Rao: Against Waldenponding.) It talks about how you can unplug strategically to manage your attention, without going full unabomber.

Everyone's circumstances change, usually pretty frequently. So if you know you've got a bit of cabin time coming up, and you want a longer edition, or you're about to go into intense crunch time, and want a shorter edition, or even to pause for a while, you can go to the payment details page and change your edition length, or pause your subscription. There's a blog article about it too.

If you find yourself thinking "This article would be much better in one column, rather than two" then we've got you covered. Tag the article in Pocket with wp1col and it'll come out full width. This should be great for thing like poems.

The Science of the Best Fresh Pasta

✾ seriouseats.com✾ Sunday 7 March 2021✾ Niki Achitoff-Gray✾ 27 minute read✾

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

Fresh pasta is easy to make and worth the effort. Photographs: Vicky Wasik, unless otherwise noted

Guess what? If you have flour in your kitchen, you can make pasta. Right now. Got eggs, too? You have everything you need to whip up a batch of silky-smooth fettuccine. Have some cheese or vegetables lying around? You could be sitting down to fresh ravioli, tortellini, or a hearty lasagna in under two hours.

And yet, if you do a quick search for pasta recipes, chances are you’ll walk away more confused than confident. Some call for flour and whole eggs, others for additions of water or oil. Weight versus volume measurements, kneading times, resting conditions—it’s all over the map.

It’s not just a lay cook’s issue, either. When I was in culinary school, I had a series of instructors who only left me more disoriented. Some insisted on oil, others on salt, still others on additional yolks or a splash of water. Prescribed kneading and resting times often contradicted each other. One instructor told us to hang the pasta to dry for at least 10 minutes before cooking it; others had us keep it tightly wrapped until the moment it was dropped in the pot.

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

Photograph: Robyn Lee

So how’s a girl to choose the very best way? If you’re this girl, you obsess. You make batch after batch—dozens and dozens of batches, in fact—to find out. You walk around dusted and streaked with flour, crumbly bits of dough crusted to the end of your sleeves. You make spreadsheets and charts, and sometimes you maybe even cry.

You make all-egg pastas, pastas made with just whites, pastas made with just yolks, and pastas made with nothing more than water. You try different flours and check resting times at 15-minute intervals for almost an entire day. You taste more ratios of egg yolk to egg white to flour than you care to admit. You add oil, you add salt, you add oil and salt. You wave forkfuls of fettuccine at your friends and family and colleagues, wrangling them into taste test after taste test. You read every book you can get your hands on. Your forearms get totally ripped.

Eventually, you realize there’s no such thing as the perfect pasta.

"there are as many kinds of perfect pasta as you want there to be."

In part, that’s because pasta is very forgiving. It also comes in many shapes and sizes and textures, as well as colors and flavors. Which means that there are as many kinds of perfect pasta as you want there to be.

This isn’t to say that making fresh pasta is unusually easy or unusually difficult. Yes, it’s an intimidating process, especially if you’re not used to working with flour and water. But it’s also an eminently achievable skill, and once you’re comfortable with the basic technique, there’s really no reason why you can’t reap the rewards on a regular basis.

First things first. I’m going to give you a simple, versatile recipe for fresh pasta dough. I’m going to take you through it step by step and show you how your dough should look along the way. And I’m also going to tell you how you can tinker with my recipe on your own time, to get exactly the flavor, texture, and color you desire. I’ll even share a couple of sneaky cheats that’ll save you time when you’re in a rush (and send Italian grandmothers a-rollin’ in their graves).

Is It Worth It?: Fresh Pasta Versus Dried

If you’ve reached this point and you’re wondering why on earth anyone would bother to make pasta from scratch when it’s just a boiling pot of water and a cardboard box away, then it’s time to get acquainted with the fresh stuff. It’s crucial here to understand that fresh pasta and dry pasta are two totally different beasts, each suited to different tasks, and the qualities we look for when making them are accordingly distinct.

Your typical fresh, Italian-style pasta is made from a combination of eggs and flour. As I’ve mentioned, many iterations of this basic formula exist, but this definition should do just fine for now.

The eggs and flour are mixed into a stiff but pliable dough that’s kneaded, rested, and then rolled—usually through a machine—and either cut into strips for noodles or left in sheets that are used to make lasagna or stuffed pastas, like ravioli.

Pros will adjust their basic dough recipe depending on which kind of pasta they’re making; my basic pasta dough will work well for a wide variety of styles.* Fresh pasta is considered superior to dried pasta in several important respects—namely for its tender, silky texture; rich, eggy flavor; and soft yellow hue.

*For the purposes of this post, we won’t be getting into extruded pastas—your penne, rigatoni, macaroni, and so forth—which require different equipment and a substantially different dough formula.

Dry pasta, on the other hand, typically contains no eggs. It’s made by mixing semolina flour—a coarse wheat flour—and water. The two are industrially mixed, shaped, and dried at low temperatures for optimal storage. Not only is it more convenient than fresh pasta, but the denser, firmer texture stands up to (and actually requires) longer cooking times. That same firm texture means it holds up beautifully under heavy, hearty sauces.

The recipe we’ll be breaking down here is for a light, springy, and delicate fresh pasta that’s as well suited to slicing into noodles as it is to making stuffed pastas, which require super-thin, pliable sheets of dough.

How to Make Fresh Pasta, Step by Step

The process of making your own pasta can be broken down into six steps: assembling your equipment, choosing the ingredients, mixing and kneading the dough, resting the dough, rolling out the pasta and cutting it into noodles, and cooking it. I tested a range of variables within each of these steps, honing the recipe based on my findings, until I had my ideal technique down to a science.

There are a lot of pasta-making tools on the market, from pasta-rolling attachments for a KitchenAid stand mixer to fluted pastry wheels and special drying racks. (Here’s a complete list of essential tools for making, cooking, and serving pasta.)

All of these things do perform useful tasks, but pasta predates them by a long shot, and they’re far from necessary. If you have pasta-making experience and you’re looking for a good workout, all you really need is flour, eggs, and a rolling pin. (Actually, you don’t even need a rolling pin if you’re going for pastas like pici, orecchiette, capunti, and other hand-shaped or hand-rolled doughs.) But—since I don’t really like to exercise—I use a pasta maker.

At work, I use a stand mixer attachment; at home, I just use a simple, hand-cranked pasta roller. I also like to keep a bench scraper around, which makes it easier and neater to portion the dough and keep my work space clean.

It’s also helpful to have a parchment-lined sheet tray ready for your rolled-out dough, a kitchen towel and/or plastic wrap to cover it and keep it from drying out, and some extra flour for dusting the pasta to keep it from getting too sticky.

The only other thing you’ll need is a few square feet of surface space. A wooden table, a marble countertop, a big cutting board—just find yourself a spot where you can make a big, floury mess.

Pasta recipes call for all kinds of ingredients. But there are two things any pasta recipe absolutely needs: flour and water. That’s because flour and water are how you create gluten, the network of proteins that gives pasta its stretchy texture and bite.

The more you work that dough, the more elasticity it will develop. Striking the right level of gluten development is key to fresh pastas, pizza crusts, and most baked goods. There are, of course, gluten-free pasta doughs, which substitute that protein network with standard gluten alternatives, like xanthan or guar gum and even eggs. (This recipe, for instance, uses a combination of xanthan gum, brown rice flour, and tapioca flour.)

There are many manipulable variables within a pasta dough, and I wanted to try them all. Would the type of flour make a difference? What kind of ratio of flour to egg yolk to egg white would yield the best pasta? Does adding salt or olive oil matter? Yeah, it’s a lot to test. Aren’t you glad I did it all for you?

What Type of Flour to Use for Fresh Pasta

Before we go any further, let’s take a minute to talk flour. Specifically, the three kinds of wheat flour you’ll find mentioned in pasta recipes: semolina, all-purpose, and high-protein, finely milled "00" flour.

At the end of the day, I settled on using all-purpose flour for my recipe. It’s the flour most people already have in their pantries, and it makes great pasta. Any time I refer to "flour" from here on out, I’m talking about your handy bag of AP.

That said, if you want to get more serious, 00 flour, with its powdery texture, can yield even silkier noodles, and semolina adds a heartiness and a rougher texture that’ll help sauces cling better to your noodles. Some folks like to add a combination of semolina and 00—I haven’t tested all the permutations, but stay tuned. I just might take the insanity to a whole new level.

Regardless of what flours you choose to experiment with, I’d recommend familiarizing yourself with basic dough-making techniques using just one type, so that you’ll know what cues to look for.

Egg Whites, Egg Yolks, Water: Identifying the Best Source of Hydration

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

Photograph: Robyn Lee

With my flour selected, it was time to test different sources of moisture. My first step was to make three doughs, keeping the hydration level as consistent as possible across the board. I used three equal measurements of all-purpose flour as my baseline; one batch got water, one batch got egg whites, and the third got egg yolks.** I added just as much as I needed to make the dough come together. This is what I wound up with; you can probably tell which is which.

✤ ✤ ✤I stuck with large eggs for all my tests, and even weighed them to make sure that I was adding consistent amounts of water, protein, and fat to each dough.

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

From left to right: pasta made with an egg yolk–hydrated dough, an egg white dough, and a water-only dough. Photograph: Robyn Lee

The water-only pasta (right) was a total bust—the noodles were bland, mushy, and...well...watery. And the egg white pasta (center) wasn’t much better: Whites are almost 90% water, so, while the noodles weren’t quite as bad as the water-based version, which literally fell apart and stuck to each other in a big, gluey mass, they definitely weren’t winners. The yolks, on the other hand, made a beautiful, golden dough (left). Yolks contain about 48% water, 17% protein, and around 33% fat. More yolks will deliver more color, more egg flavor, and silkier noodles.

Unfortunately, that high fat content complicates things a little bit. Though it’s not exactly scientifically accurate, you can think of that fat as making the gluten proteins all slippery, preventing them from building a strong network—when I tested this using different amounts of olive oil, I found that, sure enough, more oil made for softer, mushier, less elastic noodles. And, to complicate matters even further, I had a really hard time getting the flour and yolks to come together. It was a dry, tough dough that was difficult to mix and knead—not exactly beginner-friendly.

Difficulty aside, an all-yolk pasta may make great noodles, but it’s not sufficiently elastic to use for stuffed pastas, which require a dough that can be rolled more thinly and is, quite simply, bendier. I needed to strike a better balance.

At this point, I knew there was no point in adding water—if I wanted additional moisture, egg whites were definitely a better bet. It seemed clear that my dough was going to require a combination of whole eggs and additional yolks. I ultimately settled on three yolks for every egg white.

What’s that? You like softer, mushier noodles? Good for you. Add a teaspoon of oil to my basic recipe. Want a richer, eggier flavor and a more golden hue? Throw in an extra yolk and add a little more flour. This is your dough.

The Golden Ratio: Determining the Right Hydration Level

To figure out exactly how much flour to use with my eggs—to find my ideal hydration level, technically speaking—I made five batches of dough. Using the same ratio of yolk and egg white for each, I began with four ounces of flour and, moving in half-ounce increments, added flour to each batch until I could no longer get the dough to come together.

After I’d kneaded these doughs for 10 minutes each, they looked like this:

Once I’d let them rest for 30 minutes (more on resting times shortly!), I attempted to roll out all five doughs. The wettest dough and the driest dough were completely unworkable. They simply wouldn’t pass through the roller—one was incredibly sticky, while the other crumbled into dry clumps.

Sometimes, a longer resting time can help a dough hydrate more, and it is possible that the driest of these could be rehabilitated with additional time. We’ll get to the pros and cons of long rests in a bit.

Ultimately, the sweet spot that I, and my blind-tasters, settled on was one whole egg (1.4 ounces white and 0.6 ounce yolk) and two yolks (1.2 ounces yolk) for every five ounces of flour. The dough represented by the pasta strands on the left was so wet that the noodles stuck together; the one on the right was dense and almost stiff. The middle pasta, our unanimous winner, was made with a dough that was relatively easy to mix and knead, but not so wet that the pasta stuck to the roller or itself. It tasted good, looked good, and had that signature delicate, satiny texture.

To Salt or Not to Salt?

My dough was almost perfect. The only other thing I wanted to test was whether I’d get even better flavor by adding salt directly to the dough, instead of just my cooking water or sauce. The simple answer is yes. Do it!

Salting pasta water is still well and good, but there’s no compelling reason not to salt your dough. I tried both fine-grained iodized salt and slightly coarser kosher salt, and both work; I prefer the flavor of kosher salt. Just don’t use a coarse sea salt, which will keep your dough from developing a silky-smooth texture.

Hypothetically, you could salt your pasta even more and skip salting your pasta water, but I choose to make a dough that still tastes good after cooking in salted water, since it gives me a little more flexibility in the flavor of the final product—I can make and freeze batches of dough and then decide on a case-by-case basis how salty I want my pasta to be.

At this point, we’re working with 10 ounces of flour, a teaspoon of salt, and two whole eggs, plus four additional yolks. This will make four to six servings and can be halved or doubled as desired.

If you have a good food processor, you can go ahead and toss all your ingredients in and let it run until it forms a big ball. Let it keep whipping around in there, or take it out and knead it with your hands. You can get to a similar point with a stand mixer, using your dough hook attachment.

But I gotta admit: I love making pasta by hand. It’s a little more work, but it’s satisfying, fun work. It also gives you a lot more control.

"Mixing by hand guarantees that you can adjust your dough as you’re working"

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: When I’m making pasta at home, I don’t measure my flour. Sure, I’ll weigh out a rough amount, but when you’re working with flour and eggs, there are a lot of variables that you simply can’t control. Your eggs might be slightly bigger or smaller; it might be an especially humid or dry day. All of these things will affect how much flour you’ll need. Mixing by hand guarantees that you can adjust your dough as you’re working, ultimately allowing you to develop your ideal texture with greater precision. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Make a Well

Weigh out your flour and pour it onto your surface in a pile. Then, with your fingers, make a hole in the center. You’ll want it to be relatively wide—at least four inches—to accommodate all those eggs.

Now add your eggs to the center. These photos show the old-school technique, in which you actually whisk the eggs once they’re on the countertop, but there’s no reason you can’t whisk them ahead of time. Add any other ingredients you’re using—salt and/or oil.

Step 2: Mix

Using a fork or your fingertips, gradually start pushing the flour into the pool of egg. Keep adding flour until it no longer makes sense to use the fork—the dough will be wet and sticky, but will hold together as a single mass.

Step 3: Knead

At this point, take out your bench scraper and scrape off any dough sticking to your fork or your hands. Then, begin to fold additional flour into the dough with the bench scraper, turning the dough roughly 45° each time, to more evenly incorporate the flour. Once the dough feels firm and dry and can form a craggy-looking ball, it’s time to start kneading.

I’m not gonna lie: Kneading is a pain in the butt. It’s a lot of work, but you’ll want to be firm and persistent. An under-kneaded pasta won’t have the same kind of snappy spring as a properly worked dough, and you may even wind up with bubbles or bits of unincorporated flour. It’s almost impossible to over-knead a dough, though, since it’ll eventually build up so much elasticity that it won’t allow you to continue.

That said, you don’t want to keep the dough out for too long, lest it begin to dry out. Around 10 minutes of kneading will allow you to get a smooth ball of dough without having to worry about drying.

To knead, simply press the heel of your hand into the ball of dough, pushing forward and down. Rotate the ball 45° and do it again. You’ll want to keep going until the dough no longer looks powdery—it should have a smooth, elastic texture, similar to a firm ball of Play-Doh. If your dough feels wet and tacky, add more flour as necessary.

If it feels too dry, don’t add water unless it literally cannot hold together. This is what "too dry" looks like:

If, as with the dough above, incorporating water seems really necessary, I recommend using a spray bottle, which will allow you to add very small amounts of water to a large surface area of dough. If your dough looks wetter than the photo above, it’s probably fine. Just keep kneading.

Once you have your ball of kneaded dough, wrap it tightly in plastic, and either jump down to the resting section below or follow our instructions for...

Refrigerating or Freezing Fresh Pasta Dough

If your plan is to make your fresh pasta in advance and come back to it later, this is where you can pause your work. Once the dough is wrapped in plastic, stick it in the fridge, but be forewarned that it will gradually acquire a grayish tinge—which won’t affect flavor or texture, but does make for a disappointing presentation. To give it more time, tuck the wrapped ball into a zipper-lock bag, removing as much air as possible, and freeze it for up to three weeks.

When you’re ready, thaw it in the refrigerator until it’s soft and pliant to the touch. It’s time to talk resting.

Now that you’ve built up that gluten network, you have a dough that’s incredibly elastic and springy. The resting period allows the flour to continue to hydrate, and the gluten network to relax. Most experts will tell you that if you tried to roll out your dough at this point, disaster would ensue—your dough would be too dry and too elastic to roll out.

If we were working with rolling pins only, that would probably be true—the dough would just keep snapping back. But we’re in the 21^st century, and it’s a little more complicated than that.

Here are six doughs. The one all the way on the right wasn’t rested at all. The one on the left rested for six hours. In between them are doughs that rested for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, and three hours.

I rolled the six-hour and the no-rest doughs once, through the widest setting on my pasta roller, to see what would happen.

You can see that the unrested dough, up top, is freaking out. It’s all rough and jagged, because the rolling has essentially snapped those little gluten bonds in half. But as I continued to roll it through increasingly thinner settings, it took on a much smoother texture. By the end, there was very little visual difference between the two.

Ultimately, I rolled out and cooked all six doughs. Was there a difference between them? Yes. The dough that hadn’t rested at all was a little harder and firmer, a little more rubbery. The doughs that had rested for an hour or longer were almost identical.

It’s sort of like the difference between food processor pesto and pesto made with a mortar and pestle. The former isn’t bad, but the latter is definitely superior. It also takes a lot longer.

In the case of the pasta dough, the extra time is just downtime; you’re not expending both time and effort. But if you’re looking for a quicker method, this is where you can cheat. No rest, or just a few minutes’ rest, is not going to make inedible pasta. In fact, it’ll make pretty damn good pasta. It is, however, a trade-off, and only you can say whether or not it’s a worthwhile one.

Take a deep breath and give yourself a pat on the back—you’re almost done. And hey—this part’s pretty fun!

Cut your dough into four pieces, set one aside, and wrap up the rest. Use a rolling pin to flatten the dough to at least half an inch thick. Try to keep the shape and size relatively even from end to end. This will make our later steps a little easier.

Then, turn to your pasta maker. For this stage, you’ll want the flat roller—the ones with teeth come later. Adjust it to the widest setting (on most machines, it’s labeled either "0" or "1"). If you’re using a stand mixer attachment, set it to a medium-low speed. If you’re hand-cranking, you’ll just want to be steady and consistent. First-timers may want to work with a partner, so that one person can crank the machine and the other can feed the dough into the rollers.

Now we’re ready to do a first pass. Simply feed the dough into the roller, like so:

You’ll want to gently support the exiting end with the flat of your hand or your index finger. Send it through the first setting until it passes through without resistance—at least three times. Then turn the dial to the next setting.

This will narrow the space between the rollers, pressing your pasta even thinner. You’ll notice it getting quite a bit longer as you proceed. You’ll want to pass the dough through the rollers at least two or three times for each of the first three settings. Later settings will require only one or two passes, though.

Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are, mistakes happen. The pasta goes through funny and doubles up, or it gets a hole. That’s where laminating comes in.

Laminating is basically a process of folding the dough into a smaller package and feeding it back into the pasta maker. The main argument for laminating has to do with the final texture of your dough, but it’s also a great way to patch up any pesky holes.

There are two basic types of folds you can do, pictured below. It’s easiest to laminate before your dough has gone any further than the third-setting stage—as it gets longer, it becomes almost impossible to feed back into the machine.

One method requires two folds, and the other requires three. I haven’t noticed a difference between these two in my final results, but I personally prefer three folds, because it makes for neater corners and, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a little particular about this stuff. Here’s the three-fold technique:

And this is the two-fold method:

In either case, you’ll want to feed the dough back in at a rotated angle. This allows you to change up the direction in which the roller is pulling the pasta, and I find that the dough is sturdier and more manageable when I’ve laminated at least two or three times over the course of rolling. That said, the difference does seem more pronounced when you’re handling the uncooked dough, versus when you’re actually eating the final product.

But wait! Be careful! What you don’t want to do is forget to turn it back to the widest setting when you put the laminated dough back in. Because...this happens:

Yeah. Not so good.

If you’re planning to make fettuccine, I’d recommend rolling it to the third-to-last setting (usually, that’s labeled "6"). If you’re going to use the dough for ravioli, you’ll want to go a little thinner, since stacking two sheets of pasta will make the edges twice as thick—I go one setting thinner. The pasta will be very delicate and translucent at this point, so handle it with care.

If the dough becomes longer than you can reasonably handle, simply lay it down on a cutting board and cut it in half. Dust one half with flour and cover it with a kitchen towel, then continue rolling the other.

Once you’ve rolled the dough, laminated it, and rolled it again, all the way to your preferred thickness, you’ll want to cover it up with a kitchen towel or plastic wrap to keep the pasta dough from drying out.

Dust some flour onto parchment or wax paper, lay the pasta on top, and continue to sprinkle flour as you fold it over. (No, you shouldn’t lay your pasta on the towel like I did in those photos. Just put it all on the parchment paper.) If you’re working in warm, humid conditions, or if you notice the pasta sticking together, you can instead cut it into approximately 12- to 14-inch sections and place a sheet of lightly floured parchment paper between the layers.

At this point, you can forge onward and make noodles, or you can prepare a stuffed pasta or lasagna. I’ve covered ravioli and tortellini in separate articles, but for now, let’s talk noodles.

This part’s super easy: Just feed a 12- to 14-inch section of dough through the fettuccine or linguine cutter...

...catch it as it comes out...

...dust it with flour, and curl it up into a little nest.

If, for any reason, your pasta winds up sticking to itself, just ball it back up and start over. It sucks, I know. It happens if a room is too hot, or if your dough is a little too hydrated; next time, add more flour or dust the sheets a little more heavily to compensate.

And voilà! You just made pasta! Want an even wider noodle, or a more handmade appearance? Use a sharp knife or a pizza cutter to slice the dough into strips by hand instead.

How to Cook Fresh Pasta

Now here comes the really easy part. Boil up some salted water, and toss those noodles in. They’ll cook quickly—I’m talking 60-seconds quickly—so be ready to taste and drain them almost immediately.

That said, while fresh pasta cooks rapidly, it’s important to make sure that it’s thoroughly cooked. Unlike dry pasta, it actually gets slightly firmer during the first phase of cooking. If you don’t cook it long enough, the egg and flour proteins won’t set, your starch won’t fully hydrate, and you’ll end up with a kinda pasty pasta.

Personally, I like my pasta cooked for around 90 seconds, but you may find that you prefer a shorter or longer boiling time. Just don’t exceed two minutes—that’s when it starts to get mushy.

Ta-da!

From: https://www.seriouseats.com/best-easy-all-purpose-fresh-pasta-dough-recipe-instructions Saved: May 2022

Hating Motherhood

✾ bostonreview.net✾ Thursday 3 March 2022✾ Judith Levine✾ 29 minute read✾

In the early 1970s, a woman moved into my Brooklyn commune. She was older than us, in her thirties, relocating from the Midwest after breaking up with her husband. She stuck to herself; we figured she was getting over the divorce. Then one night in the kitchen, she opened up to a few of us. She had started out conventionally, she said. Straight job, straight partner, and one after another, three kids. Then feminism happened. She realized she was suffocating. “I abandoned my children,” she said, almost in a whisper.

I had already decided not to have a family. I didn’t think I could manage writing, politics, an erotic life, and kids all at once. A part of me felt that this woman should have thought family life through beforehand, as I had. But I had the advantage of youth, a feminist adolescence. For this reason, another part of me admired her. What courage it must have taken to throw off the patriarchal burden of kinder and kuchen! Mostly, though, I was stunned. Sure, men leave their children all the time. But what kind of woman does this?

Many of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s characters are that kind of woman. “In Ferrante’s world, mothers regularly walk out on their children, neglect or forget about them in favor of writing and/or sexual passion; love and hate, protect and resent, guide and thwart them in equal measure,” writes Jacqueline Rose in Mothers (2018). One of these mothers is Leda, protagonist of the 2006 novel The Lost Daughter, recently adapted for film by Maggie Gyllenhaal. While on vacation at a Greek beach, Leda (played with vulnerable froideur by Olivia Coleman) finds her attention magnetized by a beautiful young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who is engaged in languorous play with her young daughter. This intimacy, both enthralling and claustrophobic, throws Leda back twenty years, when her own two daughters’ ceaseless demands for attention and touch overwhelmed her every attempt to think, read, or even masturbate. Leda leaves her husband and children to pursue an academic career and a love affair, returning after three years. “Children,” Leda tells Nina’s pregnant sister-in-law, “are a crushing responsibility.” Only in the end of the story does she confess her maternal crime. “I’m an unnatural mother,” Leda says, without explanation or excuse.

Not everyone has loved “The Lost Daughter,” but almost all agree that its content is shocking and Gyllenhaal was courageous in making it. The Atlantic’s review is headlined: “The movie that understands the secret shame of motherhood.”

What is the shameful secret? Jeannette Catsoulis answers in the New York Times: the “raw, and even radical . . . notion that motherhood can plunder the self in irreparable ways.” Ferrante agrees. “The risk Leda runs seems to me all in that question,” she writes in an essay. “Can I, a woman of today, succeed in being loved by my daughters, in loving them, without having of necessity to sacrifice myself and therefore hate myself?” Another question might follow: can a woman like Leda choose herself over her children and not be hated?

“The Lost Daughter” is what Ann Snitow called, in a 1992 piece on feminism and motherhood, a “demon text.” Written by white feminists between 1963 and about 1974, this handful of books were in fact more demonized than demonic. Their offense? Imagining that we might “break the inexorable tie between mothers and children” and that a woman’s life could be meaningful without children. Such writing vanished as quickly as it had appeared, Snitow wrote, yet “we have been apologizing ever since.”

The first “demon text” was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan’s exegesis of “the problem that has no name”—the frustration, depression, and anger of women squashed into fulltime “homemaking” and childcare—sparked millions of women into feminist consciousness.

It also bulldozed millions more. Friedan was homophobic: How could women aspire to a career, she wondered, when the only models were “the old-maid high-school teachers; the librarian; the . . . woman doctor . . . who cut her hair like a man”? She was drearily bourgeois. For lack of inspiring mentors, she wrote, too many young women “retreated into the beatnik vacuum.”

But the gravest failing of The Feminine Mystique was its erasure of the people bell hooks called, in 1984, “the silent majority”—the Black, brown, and poor women “most victimized by sexist oppression [and] powerless to change their condition in life.” Presuming to describe the universal condition of Woman, Friedan’s “‘problem that has no name’ . . . actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women,” who longed for fulfilling careers. But who, hooks asked, would mind the house and children when these women were liberated? Friedan’s solution to “the problem” often boiled down to “get a maid”—or, more decorously, a “cleaning woman.” A third of women were already in the workforce, hooks noted. How fulfilled were the babysitters, factory workers, or prostitutes?

Friedan did not acknowledge the status her subjects enjoyed “within a racist, sexist, capitalist state,” hooks wrote. Her denunciation, comprising the first pages of Feminist Theory: from margin to center (1984), became the iconic critique not just of The Feminine Mystique but of the strain of privileged white feminism it helped to bring about.

Friedan’s “new life plan for women”—essentially access to subsidized higher education and daycare—aimed to push the stay-at-home suburban mom onto the commuter train with the men carrying briefcases. But this vision was pro-family: happy wife, happy life. A happy mother herself, Friedan had not an unkind word for motherhood.

The demon texts that followed Friedan’s were far harsher in their portrayal of motherhood, depicting it as a kind of malady. In the first edition of Our Bodies Ourselves (1970) the Boston Women’s Health Collective called pregnancy a “life crisis with tremendous growth possibilities.” Post-partem, they wrote, “the physical changes . . . are enormous. Although they are considered ‘natural’ they closely resemble the pathological.” Germaine Greer’s 1970 blockbuster The Female Eunuch diagnosed the family as a sick organism, with Mother at its “dead heart.”

The most famous, and vilified, of the second-wave texts is Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970). The book evinced outright revulsion toward biological pregnancy and childbirth. “Pregnancy is barbaric . . . the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species,” she pronounced. “Moreover, childbirth hurts and it isn’t good for you.” She quoted a friend who’d been through it: having a baby was “like shitting a pumpkin.”

For Firestone the mother-child tie was a chain-gang shackle: “The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.” Maternal fury is inevitable, she claimed, but this fury can be a source of revolutionary zeal. She explained: “The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hatred is directed outward, and ‘motherlove’ is born.”

How could this bondage be broken? End Nature! In vitro fertilization, “test tube babies,” and “even parthenogenesis—virgin birth—could be developed very soon,” Firestone predicted. Yes, reprotech, like warcraft, could be deployed to enforce patriarchal power. But the feminist revolution would seize the weapons and turn them on the oppressor. Compared with Friedan’s reformist white paper, The Dialectic of Sex is a cyborg’s “Bread and Roses,” singing in the death of every kind of labor. “The double curse that man should till the soil by the sweat of his brow and that woman should bear in pain and travail,” proclaimed Firestone, “would be lifted through technology to make humane living for the first time a possibility.”

Yet even as Firestone and other feminists were deconstructing the ideology of biological destiny, others still were repurposing it to build a utopian “gynocracy.” In 1974 Weather Underground fugitive Jane Alpert disseminated “Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory.” In it she declared that “the capacity to bear and nurture children” is not just the root of women’s oppression. It is “the basis of [their] powers,” whether or not they reproduce. The same mother-child bond that Firestone would smash to free human potential Alpert glorified as the promise of a humane future. “The paradigm for all social relationships is the relationship of a healthy and secure mother to her child,” she wrote. In the manifesto that would galvanize pronatalist “cultural” feminism, Alpert exhorted “Womankind” to “worship” the “Mother.”

The feminist idealization of matriarchy was compatible with the patriarchal Christian “family values” that swept Ronald Reagan to power in 1980. Together they had the muscle to keep the demon down in its hole; the “postfeminist” retraction soon began. No one seemed readier to repent than Friedan. In 1981 her book The Second Stage decried the “feminist mystique” that rejected family and motherhood. In the commencement speech she gave at her alma mater that year, she urged Smith College graduates to be nicer to men.

There is now no shortage of books about motherhood. In the Paris Review in 2018, Lauren Elkin praised a new “crop” for “their unerring seriousness, their ambition, the way they demand that the experience of motherhood in all its viscera be taken seriously as literature.” Can any of these be classified as demon texts? After I’d ordered a few, Amazon kindly offered me a screenful of recent motherhood-agnostic texts. Some guide readers on deciding whether to have kids; others guide them not to (for example, No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children (2009), by Corinne Maier; and Jen Kirkman’s I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales from a Happy Life Without Kids (2013)). The subtitle of Amy Blackstone’s Childfree by Choice (2019) trumpets a “movement redefining family and creating a new age of independence.”

A movement? A movement implies collective action; not having kids is neither collective nor active. There is, however, a community, much of which lives on social media. The “Childfree” sub-Reddit has 1.4 million members. The “I Regret Having Children” Facebook page has over 44,000, almost entirely women; other women have gathered at the markedly unladylike “Lady No-Kids.” The mommy blogs have roiled with rebellion since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns began. Under a video of Boston mothers screaming profanities in a field, blogger “Scary Mommy” comments that the event looks funny, but its meaning is not: “We’re not tired, we’re done. We have nothing left to give.”

If one can attempt to generalize about the scores of posts, it seems the regretful moms are looking for solace, while the “child-free” are spoiling for a fight. On Facebook, “Dual Income No Kids/Single Income No Kids” (“DINK/SINK,” boasting 13,800 members) features endless photos and cartoons of musts-to-avoid (baby puke, household chaos), as well as shiny rewards-for-avoiding (poolside cocktails, diamond ring). Pugnaciousness may be the predominant tone of social media, but these people seem to be daring outsiders to find the childless distasteful.

If there is one justification for childlessness that may be popularly accepted, it is art. Art, like childbirth, is productive; the childless artist or writer cannot be accused of sloth. At the same time, artists—or I’ll speak for myself, writers—are geniuses at getting nothing done, which is not a good skill for parenting. This is the subtext of the essays in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (2015), try as both the contributors and editor Meghan Daum do to come up with something else. Not incidental, of course, is the fact that childcare is still mostly women’s job; of the sixteen writers in the collection, twelve are women. Sigrid Nunez catalogues the great ones—Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf—who did not have children. Colette neglected her unwanted daughter. Doris Lessing left two kids in Africa to return to London to write. Nunez quotes Alice Munro, who’d “bat” her two-year-old “away with one hand and type with the other.” Like Leda, Munro is rueful: the child understood herself to be “the adversary to what was most important to me.”

Some in the collection, including Michelle Huneven, had traumatic childhoods and don’t trust themselves to mother well. Laura Kipnis doesn’t cotton to mothers, “a strange and unenviable breed: harried, hampered, resentful.” Several take pains to establish themselves as the cool aunt or preempt charges of child-hating. “There’s no question that I would have loved my child with a kind of love I’d never know otherwise,” announces Daum. Tell that to the 44,000 members of “I Regret Having My Children.”

A few take it upon themselves to consider the larger social implications of their decision. Lionel Shriver frets about the Global North’s indolent birth rate while “elsewhere”—she names Niger, Yemen, and China—they are reproducing like fruit flies. In short, Baby Boomers (presumably white ones) are shirking their eugenic duty. Shriver interviews Gabriella, who comes from “generations of academics, historians, diplomats—thinkers and doers”—her “genetic inheritance,” Gabriella calls it, without which she believes “the world will be a poorer place.” Another interviewee, Nora, has similar misgivings about the waste of her superior genes. But like Gabriella, she can’t be bothered: “Devoting my whole life to promulgating my ethnicity is a big ask,” she says. Ick.

Only the men in the collection joke freely. After all, this is not really their department. Geoff Dyer skips briskly from the deference paid the seven-year-old pashas in his posh neighborhood to a cheerful existential nihilism. “Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life ‘meaning’ is the one to which I am most hostile—apart from all the others. The assumption that life needs a meaning or purpose!” he exclaims. Tim Kreider describes parenthood as “noisy and toy-strewn, pee-stained and shrieky.”

Among the demon novels I read, the majority also feature artists or writers struggling to produce anything besides breast milk. At the beginning of her barely fictional autofiction I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (2021), Claire Vaye Watkins has a sane and gainfully employed husband, a few-months-old baby, and a bang-up case of postpartum blues. Unable to “feel any feelings beyond those set to music by the Walt Disney Company,” she’s stopped writing or even caring about writing. A child of high desert hipneck poverty and daughter of the guy who procured young girls for Charles Manson, Claire has reason to be disinclined toward family life. When a friend of a friend urges escape—“Don’t fetishize marriage and babies. Don’t succumb to the axial tilt of monogamy. . . Travel! . . . Even shitty, shitty St. Patrick’s Day in Vegas is better than the best day at home with an infant”—Claire cannot argue. She quits hubby and baby, retraces her parents’ wanderings, consumes heroic amounts of intoxicants, and sows a truckload of wild oats. Occasionally she’s tickled by wistfulness for what she left behind, and she is charmed by her daughter when they eventually meet again. But she doesn’t return to the cocoon.

The Shame (2020), the brief, artful first novel by Makenna Goodman, also begins with a mother’s flight. The main character, Alma, drives from her homestead in Vermont to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the middle of the night. In Vermont, while her husband teaches at a nearby college, Alma tends sheep, cans vegetables, patches pants, repairs the woodstove—and mothers. She mothers actively, conscientiously—though not excellently, in her own estimation, and with waning verve. “‘Cherish it,’ a woman told me at the market, smiling at the kids. I wanted to punch her in the fucking face.”

Alma is also an unpublished writer. She begins a story whose narrator is herself, only better. Then she discovers the character’s model on a mothering site. “Celeste” is a single mom and ceramicist leading a hilariously Instagrammable life. Celeste travels to Bali, plays the harmonium, “ate raw clams with cranberry horseradish relish at the MOMA.” “Her handbag was a cube of Oaxacan palm leaves.” The story fades away, but Alma continues to follow Celeste obsessively online. Finally, she takes off to Williamsburg to find her. When she does, Alma witnesses her idol shoving a croissant into the face of her hysterical toddler.

The Shame is about ambition, envy, consumption, and the difficult, exhilarating search for a writerly voice, among other things. But, like the other demon novels, it is mainly about the ways that motherhood can plunder—or cleave—the self. “Motherhood had cracked me in half. My self as a mother and my self as not were two different people, distinct,” writes Watkins. “Someone else had written [her books], elves-and-shoemaker style.” Alma laments, “I was being stretched to my limit when it came to mothering. I tried to access a feeling of selfhood from small bouts of writing, daydreaming, and painting.” The work goes nowhere; the chores are “daunting,” the children “parasitic. . . I had no idea who I was anymore, or what I liked to do.” Only when the fantasized self is revealed as false—the celestial is brought to earth—can Alma become whole, artist and mother.

Two other books literalize the metaphor of the split self. In The Need (2019), Helen Phillips’s highly praised novel, Molly, a paleobotanist with young children Viv and Ben, is pursued by Moll, the embodied ghost of her negative alter-life. Moll longs for the children she lost to a suicide bomber—the children Molly has and is going bats caring for. In the end Molly incorporates Moll—good mother and bad, “one shadow.” In the haunting of the lucky mother by the grieving could-have-been mother, one might see a pale allusion to Toni Morrison’s Sethe, among the greatest tragic mothers in literature, who is haunted by the ghost of the beloved child she kills to save from the atrocities of slavery.

Nightbitch, of the eponymous 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder, is a conceptual artist trying not to be consumed by motherhood. Her son “was her only project. She had done the ultimate job of creation, and now she had nothing left,” she tells herself. “To keep him alive—that was the only artistic gesture she could muster.” But the restless, ruthlessly desiring artist refuses to be displaced by the compulsorily giving mother. Ferocity transforms woman into dog: Nightbitch. Self-integration begins when Nightbitch trains her boy to be a puppy. Having never gone to sleep without endless snacks and stories, he beds down happily in a dog crate. And when, unable to contain her canine instincts, Nightbitch kills the family cat, the child is giddy, and suggests they eat it.

A striking aspect of this body of work is its whiteness. The contributors to Selfish are well established, well enough off, and almost all white. The white parents in the novels are heterosexual, married, and middle class. They live in private homes. Except for Molly, who depends on Aunt Norma for succor and babysitting, the families are nuclear: the wives responsible for the kids, the husbands offstage, pursuing careers. These moms do not solve their problems by organizing community daycares or marching for universal basic income. At best, they demand that the fathers chip in.

Duke University Black feminist scholar Jennifer C. Nash mentions this whiteness in a 2018 review essay called “The Political Life of Black Motherhood.” The field of maternal studies, launched by the 1976 publication of Adrienne Rich’s seminal Of Woman Born, was “fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists,” Nash writes. She cites hooks, Dorothy Roberts, author of the massively influential Killing the Black Body (1997), sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, literary critic Hortense Spillers, and essayist-poet Audre Lorde. Yet maternal memoirs, which also proliferated after Rich’s book, are overwhelmingly white. And not only white, they also tend toward the demonic (a term Nash doesn’t use). The genre, she says, “roots itself in mapping white maternal ambivalence, in treating motherhood as a space that takes—perhaps even steals—from women.”

Like hooks, Collins links these women’s problems to whiteness. In Black Feminist Thought (1990), Collins argues that white assumptions about motherhood—the nuclear, private family household, the mother as sole caregiver economically dependent on a man—have historically been alien to African American women. With roots in African tribal cultures and the wrenched-apart families of slavery, as well as the exigencies of ongoing poverty, a collective approach to raising children is common in African American communities. A bloodmother cares for her children within a web of aunts and grannies, neighbors, othermothers, or “fictive kin” who take in children orphaned by the sale or death of their parents in slavery or whose parents cannot keep them due to destitution, illness, or incarceration.

Collins stresses that “in woman-centered kin units . . . the centrality of mothers is not predicated on male powerlessness” or absence. Yet this was the charge made by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”—a charge that lives on in welfare and child-protective practices.

Overly powerful Black mothers, not white supremacist policies, produced a “tangle of pathology” resulting in violence and social disintegration, Moynihan claimed. “In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.”

Snitow called the Moynihan Report one of the real anti-mother demon texts of the 1960s. I’d nominate it a contender for all time. But Moynihan was neither the first nor the last to characterize Black motherhood as pathological. After his report came the mythical “welfare queen” and the depraved (also mythical) “crack mother.” Meanwhile, in these same decades, an image of the Black mother was emerging on the other side of the mask. In media as diverse as TV sitcoms and Black Power leaflets, she was a warrior-mother, both victim of the trauma of African-American life under white supremacy, and also its iconic resister.

Nash explores another “now-dominant,” more flattering though equally flattening, picture of Black motherhood. Here it is “a site of spiritual and psychic renewal” and a revolutionary, transgressive practice, “always upending prevailing heterosexist, patriarchal, antiblack, and misogynistic norms.” In The Atlantic, Leah Wright Rigueur opens a piece with a scene of her laughing uproariously at the birth of her third child—a Madonna of Black Joy. “Celebratory joy felt particularly appropriate for the occasion given the reality of Black mothers’ experiences in America,” she writes. Even white cultural feminists of the 1970s plucked from Blackness to draw the blueprints of their matriarchal utopias. They looked, for instance, to the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler, in whose futures the populations are brown and the mothers, while fierce and ornery (and sometimes male), are world-shapers.

Is the demon text white because Black and brown women have more serious worries than the binkie buried in the back seat of the SUV? Are they preoccupied by problems of survival, such as disproportionate rates of maternal and infant mortality, environmental racism, and surveillance by “child-protective” services? Are maternal resentment, rage, and indifference White People Problems? Like the men in the Selfish anthology, at least one Dominican-American male novelist skewers this notion. The mother of the protagonist in a Junot Díaz story wonders why a young neighborhood woman has no kids. “Maybe she just doesn’t like children,” he suggests. The mother replies: “Nobody likes children. . . . That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.”

Nash agrees that maternal ambivalence is not the exclusive province of white people. She asks why Black feminist scholars “steadfastly refuse to document the violence of motherhood apart from the threat of state violence.” She is not interested in supplanting one dominant image with another but rather, wishes for complexity. “Is there space for maternal unhappiness in the black feminist theoretical maternal archive, space for accounts of motherhood that find mothering profoundly unradical, perhaps even tedious, exhausting, or upsetting?” Where are the childless-by-choice, the careerist, the just-going-about-her-business Black mom? Portraying the Black mother as the apotheotic revolutionary not only eclipses a vast range of everyday experience, says Nash, it also “shores up a singular notion of radical black female subjectivity: motherhood.”

An outlier in this landscape is Alice Walker, a writer-mother who has wrestled publicly with her dual identity. But just as Snitow looked back on the demon texts of the 1960s and ’70s and found them less demonic than all that, Walker’s “One Child of One’s Own,” published in Ms. in 1979, is remembered as a treatise on maternal ambivalence, whereas it is much less ambivalent about motherhood than it is enraged about what Cherie Moraga later summed up regarding social justice movements of the 1970s: “All the women were white, all the Blacks were men.” Toward that one child, Rebecca, Walker is tender; she speaks of the pains of motherhood, such as worrying about the child’s illness and the racism she will face, but she appreciates how those pains opened her to worlds she would not otherwise have known. The piece ends with a poem listing the obstacles various women writers faced—Woolf her madness, Austen her lovelessness—and “You [Alice] have Rebecca—who is/ much more delightful/ and less distracting / than any of the calamities/ above.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of Alice Walker’s chief demonizers is Rebecca Walker. In an interview with NPR, the daughter described the Ms. piece as “extremely ambivalent about motherhood.” Alice, Rebecca recalled, “talked about how you should really only have one child, because if you had more than one child you would be enslaved to your children, and you wouldn’t be able to be creative, and you wouldn’t be able to be free, and you would lose your independence and your peace of mind.” Nor had she forgotten that Mom called her a calamity. Rebecca has gotten her revenge; quite publicly she renounced Alice. Still, the poetic symmetry does not escape her. The NPR interview marked the release of Rebecca’s own memoir Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence.

We can improve motherhood: we can make it less onerous and more egalitarian, stop criminalizing “bad” mothers, and quit pressuring people who do not want kids into having them. But these are incremental reforms. They will not solve the real problems of motherhood, which, as the demon texts plainly show, simply adapt to the times. Like capitalism, motherhood will always find ways to screw mothers.

The only solution is to abolish mothers.

That, in essence, is Shulamith Firestone’s vision in The Dialectic of Sex. It is also Sophie Lewis’s in Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019). Like Firestone, Lewis is uninterested in reform. She is a utopian. She wants to break not just the inexorable tie between mothers and children but the links between mothers and gestation, gestation and family, family and capitalism, and capitalism and human life. “Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively,” Lewis writes. “Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the ‘family.’”

In the meantime, Lewis argues, those who perform gestational labor—commercial surrogates—must have workers’ rights and autonomy. The book’s through line is a journalistic investigation of an Indian surrogacy facility called the Akanksha Fertility Clinic and of its owner and manager, Dr. Nayana Patel. Earning wealth and social cachet off the low-paid, highly controlled workers’ backs, Patel fashions herself a feminist and rescuer of the downtrodden poor. But Full Surrogacy Now is not an exposé, and the surrogates’ own testimonies complicate any villain-victim narrative. Rather, Lewis uses commercial gestation as a lens through which to interrogate the gendered, economic, and sentimental presumptions about “natural” baby production and family-making.

Whether unpaid or commercial—a labor of love, obligation, or livelihood—gestation is work, Lewis insists. Calling it work does not “dignify” surrogacy, however, or imply a demand for wages for parenting. Rather, it positions gestation as a site of resistance to the capitalist commodification of everything: “What if we reimagined pregnancy, and not just its prescribed aftermath, as work under capitalism—that is, as something to be struggled in and against toward a utopian horizon free of work and free of value?”

Periodically, the press announces that the artificial womb is just around the corner—within two generations, a scientist recently told the BBC. In that documentary, as in all the others, the brows on the talking heads furrow over ethical issues and democratic input. Then they unfurrow, as they celebrate the coming marvels for preemies and joys for the uterus-deprived—in this piece, a handsome gay couple (no ecstatic biotech shareholders are pictured).

Firestone saw the baby machine as the engine of revolution, redefining “our relationship to production and reproduction” and leading to the end of class and the family. Lewis notes that we don’t even need the incubator. “Since the perfection of IVF techniques enabled a body to gestate entirely foreign material,” she writes, “living humans have become the sexless ‘technology’ component of the euphemism Assisted Reproductive Technology.’” This is not a reason to ban the practice, the high-moral goal of some feminists and human rights activists, says Lewis; surrogacy, like abortion, will continue whether it is legal or not. “When everybody is announcing calamity and dystopia, it is very important to notice that, with surrogacy as with so much else, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” she writes. “But equally, and far more excitingly, there is this: the more things stay the same with surrogacy, the more people force them to change.” What will be forced to change ultimately includes not just gestation, but everything: parenthood, childhood, care, community.

Might Lewis’s full surrogacy and mutual human remaking offer a way out for the mothers of the demon novels? In the penultimate section of The Need, Molly has reluctantly capitulated to Moll’s entreaties to spend time with the children. Soon, she comes to depend on this mothering surrogate—because, really, what mother doesn’t need at least one? The women set up an alternating schedule: one hides in the husband’s basement studio while the other tends to the kids. But Molly’s guilt and anxiety compel her to lurk, then to appear, during Moll’s shifts.

One evening Molly and the children become ill and fall into a fevered sleep together. When she emerges from the bedroom, she finds them recovered and bathed, at the kitchen table with Moll. “Hi, other Mommy,” says Viv casually when she spots her “real” mother. Ben barely notices her. Later, Molly and Moll will press together into one, an enlightened, renewed individual. Could they have continued “manufacturing one another noncompetitively?” A mother has awakened from the sleep of reason, and her world is transformed. Yet there are no monsters here. Just a woman and a couple of kids, eating snacks in their pajamas.

From: https://bostonreview.net/articles/hating-motherhood/ Tagged: wpmustprint Saved: May 2022

On Heteropessimism

✾ thenewinquiry.com✾ Wednesday 9 October 2019✾ Asa Seresin✾ 16 minute read✾

“Heterosexuality always embarrasses me,” Maggie Nelson admits in The Argonauts, a book once so rabidly popular among women and queers that my first copy was swiped from my bag at a dyke bar in 2016. Nelson’s confession has always struck me as diagnostic of our current moment, in which indictments of heterosexuality have become something of a meme. Yet when I asked her about it during a Skype call held by a sexuality-studies workshop for graduate students, she backtracked. Denying that she is embarrassed by heterosexuality in general, Nelson claimed that she is only humiliated by her own heterosexuality, by moments in her life when she has entertained—or suffered from—a romantic attraction to cis men.

At the time this caveat struck me as both unnecessarily defensive and disingenuous. Of all people, Nelson knows her queer theory, and thus knows that her own heterosexual experience only comes into focus via the cultural delineation of heterosexuality from other (less embarrassing?) forms of intimacy and attachment. It doesn’t make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution—if you are embarrassed by one, you are necessarily embarrassed by the other. Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem.

What I now see is that Nelson’s caveat is typical of heteropessimism, a mode of feeling with a long history, and which is particularly palpable in the present. Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.

Social media is a playground of performative disidentification, and heteropessimism thrives there. One recent surge of online heteropessimism was triggered by the Straight Pride event in Boston (an event that, like so much of the right-leaning internet, is simultaneously less substantial and far more sinister than most people seem to believe). At the same time as the City of Boston granted organizers a permit for the event to take place, they denied them the right to fly a newly unveiled Straight Pride flag, which—as social-media users jumped over themselves to point out—tellingly resembled a black-and-white-striped prison uniform.

“Heterosexuality is a prison!” a chorus declared, vocalizing one of heteropessimism’s central maxims. Many of those who seized the opportunity to mock Straight Pride and its appropriately drab flag were, unsurprisingly, queer, yet a sizable number of straight people could also be found in the fray. A quick Twitter search of the phrase “heterosexuality is a prison” reveals that it is attached just as often to complaints made from within heterosexual experience as to queers thanking their lucky stars they were born gay.

Confronted by Straight Pride, many are keen to emphasize that they are not that kind of heterosexual, that they are, in fact, ashamed of being straight, and that, not to be dramatic, they see heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will. (The prevalence of the prison metaphor could be taken as a reassuring indication of abolitionism going mainstream or a worrying reminder of how easily incarceration is still trivialized in the popular imagination.) Their disavowals are akin to white people making jokes about “stuff white people like,” a connection that makes sense given the sinister intimacy between Straight Pride and white-supremacist organizing. Yet while trying to redeem oneself from whiteness or heterosexuality through performative distancing mechanisms might seem progressive, the reality is usually little more than an abdication of responsibility. If heteropessimism’s purpose is personal absolution, it cannot also be justice.

Performatively detaching oneself from heterosexuality is particularly appealing for women, and the reason why is encapsulated by one of heteropessimism’s memetic antecedents: the overly attached girlfriend. This early meme is less a portrayal of actual behavior than a goofy male nightmare, the suffocatingly overcommitted partner against whom freewheeling men like to define themselves. Interestingly, the meme originally emerged from a video parodying Justin Bieber’s 2012 hit “Boyfriend,” which begins with the now famous romantic threat “If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go.” As is fairly common in straight culture, a negative trait like obsessive jealousy—which in reality is one of the most commonly cited triggers of male-on-female domestic violence—is repackaged and sold as a female trait. If the OAG was a manifestation of men’s heteropessimism, women reacted by declaring themselves absolutely and flamboyantly unattached—to men and to heterosexuality in general. A proliferation of memes parading this lack of attachment emerged in the OAG’s wake, quickly becoming a foundational mode of women’s heteropessimist expression.

In this sense, heteropessimism is, to borrow Lee Edelman’s phrase, an “anesthetic feeling”: “a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.” Heteropessimism’s anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits—overattachment and “the overintensity of feeling”—for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed. That much heteropessimist sentiment is delivered in joke form coheres with Henri Bergson’s idea that comedy delivers “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Unlike traditional comedy, however, heteropessimism is anticathartic. Its structure is anticipatory, designed to preemptively anesthetize the heart against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain. During the media storm surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing, for example, the comedian Solomon Georgio tweeted (to the tune of over 23,000 retweets and 142,000 likes): “Today is a reminder that if homosexuality was a choice, there would be 2, maybe 3, straight women left after today.” This sentence, which circles back to the same word on which it began, betrays the confusion between universality and specificity embedded in heteropessimism. Kavanagh is a “reminder” of a preexisting fact—that no woman would choose to be straight—yet this fact is somehow also produced by “today,” by the particular awfulness of the present.

Like most online subcultures, heteropessimism occupies a contradictory relationship to the market. Quite often framed as an anti-capitalist position, heteropessimism could be read as a refusal of the “good life” of marital consumption and property ownership that capitalism once mandated. Yet this good life, which was always withheld from marginalized populations, is now untenable for almost everyone. If the couple was the primary consumer unit of the past, today this has collapsed, or more accurately been replaced by a new dyad, the individual consumer and her phone. It is hardly news that the goal of the big hookup apps is to keep people single. Tinder has made this surprisingly explicit in its first ever brand campaign, which features an exuberant, seemingly carefree blonde woman accompanied by the words “Single does what single wants.” Stay single, stay wanting, and let the data of your desire accumulate like so many layers of gold.

Heteropessimism has helped stimulate this individualizing turn, not just by draining the hetero couple form of its appeal but because dissatisfaction with heterosexuality, despite being sold as universal, always seems to operate on the level of the individual. Collectively changing the conditions of straight culture is not the purview of heteropessimism. In this sense, heteropessimism actually reinforces the privatizing function of heterosexuality, even as it is mass distributed through culture as a viral meme. Under a heteropessimistic rubric, women might not view themselves as competing with one another within the cutthroat dating “market,” but in metabolizing the problem of heterosexuality as a personal issue the possibility of solidarity remains foreclosed.

This is an acute problem. Social movements such as #MeToo or the South African protest against intimate-partner violence #MenAreTrash demonstrate the frightening urgency with which heterosexual culture needs to be revolutionized. Heteropessimism might seem like a starting point of that revolution, but in reality its anesthetizing force has had the ironic effect of stalling some of the momentum of these movements. If “heterosexuality” becomes shorthand for misogyny, the proper object of critique falls from view. To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better. This is, of course, similar to the charge often leveled against Afro-pessimism, a school of thought that takes antiblackness to be the transhistorical structuring force of the world. Both Afro- and heteropessimism are reactions to perceived immutability, but beyond this their resonance is mostly morphological. The pessimism in heteropessimism is more literal, more basic (in both senses of the word) than it is in Afropessimism. Partly for this reason, heteropessimism is far more obviously prohibitive of social change.

Unlike Afropessimists, heteropessimists bear responsibility for exactly what they identify as irredeemable, and this responsibility cannot evaporate via disavowal, however much they might like it to. A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality’s malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women—especially white women—have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power. Like most lesbians, I have found myself on the receiving end of approximately 100,000 drunk straight women bemoaning their orientation and insisting that it would be “so much easier” to be gay. Sure, it probably would be! That “men are trash” is not something I am personally invested in disputing. Yet in announcing her wish to be gay, the speaker carelessly glosses over the fact that she has chosen to stay attached to heterosexuality—to remain among the (slightly more than 2 or 3) women who are, despite everything, still straight.

Women are not the only heteropessimists. From the indignant fury of the incel to the married man complaining about his “old ball and chain,” men clearly subscribe to heteropessimism even if, like all feelings, they are not exactly encouraged to express it. To be clear, men’s heteropessimist claims tend to be neither ethically nor logically equivalent to those made by women. Instead, they are a kind of funhouse distortion of feminist complaint. Nowhere is this perversion better illustrated than on Facebook, where the efforts of men’s-rights activists have led administrators to classify “men are trash” as hate speech and suspend the accounts of those who use the phrase. (Users may post “women are trash” with impunity.)

Heteropessimism has become a framework through which men process both demands for gender equality and the quotidian experience of romantic harm as evidence of a global female conspiracy. One of the most prominent male heteropessimist memes asserts that the #MeToo climate has made dating too dangerous—for men. The most zealous male heteropessimists—so committed that they are mocked by other male-supremacist groups for actually choosing to act on their heteropessimism—unite under the delightful banner of Men Going Their Own Way. MGTOW maintain that women are sly, parasitic, and essentially evil, that heterosexuality is wholly beneficial to women and severely dangerous for men, and that the only solution is for men to abstain from marriage, reproduction, and (according to some) dating, sex, and even masturbation.

The result is a strange parody of feminism. In place of heterosexual relations, MGTOW are encouraged to form homosocial self-care communities that will both shield and heal them from romantic trauma, ensuring a kind of prolonged anesthesia of the heart. The movement’s heavy reliance on the Internet makes it difficult to know how substantial it is in reality. Its members are prolific meme makers, and online forums are their consciousness-raising site of choice. Yet even if MGTOW became a prominent force in reality, in choosing to self-segregate, this group actually render themselves the least dangerous of male heteropessimists. Far more disturbing are those who’ve come to believe that contemporary culture cheats them out of their “right” to possess women—and choose to act on this belief.
In a talk at the 2019 Duke Feminist Theory Workshop, Lauren Berlant identified heteropessimism as a product of contemporary tectonic shifts in social power: “As we are living now, when privilege unravels it goes out kicking and screaming, and people lose confidence in how to be together, uncertain about how to read each other, and incompetent about even their own desire . . . as the incels, braincels, and many new sex-negative feminists exemplify.” Thus far, this is the only explicit acknowledgment I’ve found of the link between these feminist and anti-feminist traditions of heterosexual negativity.

Such a theoretical lacuna is unsurprising. Heterosexuality has long been a neglected object of study, elbowed out of sexuality studies right after the field emerged by the sexier and cooler project of queer theory. Queer theorists look smugly at heterosexuality over their shoulders as the thing that they have—thank God—left behind. In doing so, they remain outdatedly attached to a moment in which heterosexuality was widely understood to be an idealized form of life. In Jane Ward’s otherwise razor-sharp Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, the sociologist chooses to define straight people not by the sex acts they pursue but by the fact that “they enjoy heterosexual culture. Simply put, being sexually ‘normal’ suits them. It feels good; it feels like home.” This flattening account of straight identity, which fails to accommodate even the possibility of heteropessimism, is a far cry from our current reality.

Compared to the heady possibilities of the queer world to come, heterosexuality appears unbearably drab and predictable (the “same old story” as Skepta puts it in a recent heteropessimist anthem). Indeed, in the moment just before feminist theorization of heterosexuality all but totally fizzled out, a pre–Gender Trouble Judith Butler wrote that “precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself.”

Spinning on its wheels, endlessly repeating, going nowhere—heteropessimists and queer theorists alike are convinced that this is heterosexuality’s permanent fate. I think they’re wrong, that there’s evidence heterosexual culture is changing. But even if it weren’t, we would have to believe it could, because tens of thousands of women are currently dying of it every year, murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, or exes. (That almost all mass shooters have histories of domestic violence makes it obvious that heterosexuality also poses a fatal threat to anyone, of any gender, who happens to be in a movie theater, at school, in the office, at a mall.) Yes, universal queerness and the abolition of gender may be the horizon toward which we are eventually moving—but what happens in the meantime?

Particularly for women, radically transforming heterosexuality might begin with honest accounts of which elements of heterosexuality are actually appealing—the house is clearly on fire, but is there anything worth saving? Such accounts are totally foreclosed by heteropessimism, and must therefore be drawn from conversations and narratives that—even if only momentarily—transcend a heteropessimist register.

One such conversation can be found in the writer Harron Walker’s podcast why do i like men. In episode one, guest Larissa Pham echoes the ridiculers of Straight Pride: “Heterosexuality is a prison . . . heterosexuality is awful.” Pham posits heterosexuality as a form of wayward, masochistic desire; she tells Walker that she likes men “’cause you don’t know what’s good for you . . . and you’re drawn to that which destroys you.” Later, Pham reverts to the familiar implication that no woman would choose heterosexuality: “I don’t think you can choose attraction.”

Yet over the course of the conversation Pham does cite reasons why she finds men desirable, such as “big arms,” “penis,” and “the way men smell . . . most men.” In subsequent episodes, other guests offer their own ideas about men’s appeal. Theda Hammel suggests that women are drawn to men because intimate proximity to a man is affirming: “The reason that a woman likes men—or a trans woman maybe in particular likes men—is not necessarily because men are that likeable . . . but just that they bring out qualities that you like in yourself, by virtue of being different from you.” For all their obviousness, these observations are quite rarely voiced. Hearing them spoken so plainly exposes how heteropessimism has worked to silence articulations of women’s desire.

why do i like men is a half joke—you can hear the smirk in Walker’s voice as she delivers the question at the beginning of each episode—but it is also a sincere inquiry. In asking and reasking the podcast’s eponymous question, Walker pushes through heteropessimist anesthesia and reawakens her own vulnerability. In this light, heterosexuality is not a terminal diagnosis but becomes a possible site of experiment and change.

For a long time, heterosexuality’s normalization allowed it to endlessly repeat, immune from any substantial change. Today, heteropessimism might actually obscure the extent to which heterosexuality is changing—even as it is also causing it. Without an immutable object of critique, the logic of heteropessimism falls apart. Perversely, this has created a renewed investment in the consistency of heterosexuality, a reinscription of heterosexuality’s tired features, even as this investment takes the disguised form of negative feeling. In this light, heteropessimism reveals something about the way we can remain secretly attached to the continuity of the very things we (sincerely) decry as toxic, boring, broken. Faced with the possibility of disappointment, anesthesia can feel like a balm.

From: https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/ Tagged: wpmustprint Saved: April 2022

Modern Architecture and Complaints about the Weather, or, ‘Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier, It is still raining in our garage….’

✾ journal.media-culture.org.au✾ Friday 28 August 2009✾ Nicole Sully✾ 25 minute read✾

Authors

School of Architecture, University of Queensland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.172

Keywords:

History and Theory of Architecture, Modern Architecture, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Womens Studies, Climate Responsive Design - History, Architecture - Psychological Aspects

Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics—a reading reinforced in cultural representations of Modern Architects, such as Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead (a character widely believed to be based on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright). The perception of the Modern Architect as an artistic hero or genius has also influenced the reception of their work. Despite their indisputable place within the architectural canon, many important works of Modern Architecture were contested on pragmatic grounds, such as cost, brief and particularly concerning issues of suitability and effectiveness in relation to climate and weather. A number of famed cases resulted in legal action between clients and architects, and in many more examples historians have critically framed these accounts to highlight alternate issues and agendas.

“Complaints about the weather,” in relation to architecture, inevitably raise issues regarding a work’s “success,” particularly in view of the tensions between artistry and functionality inherent in the discipline of architecture. While in more recent decades these ideas have been framed around ideas of sustainability—particularly in relation to contemporary buildings—more traditionally they have been engaged through discussions of an architect’s ethical responsibility to deliver a habitable building that meets the client’s needs. This paper suggests these complaints often raise a broader range of issues and are used to highlight tensions inherent in the discipline. In the history of Modern Architecture, these complaints are often framed through gender studies, ethics and, more recently, artistic asceticism. Accounts of complaints and disputes are often invoked in the social construction (or deconstruction) of artistic genius—whether in a positive or negative light. Through its discussion of a number of famed examples, this paper will discuss the framing of climate in relation to the figure of the Modern Architect and the reception of the architectural “masterpiece.”

Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier …

In June 1930 Mme Savoye, the patron of the famed Villa Savoye on the outskirts of Paris, wrote to her architect, Le Corbusier, stating: “it is still raining in our garage” (Sbriglio 144)—a persistent theme in their correspondence. This letter followed another sent in March after discovering leaks in the garage and several bedrooms following a visit during inclement weather. While sent prior to the building’s completion, she also noted that rainfall on the bathroom skylight “makes a terrible noise […] which prevents us from sleeping in bad weather” (Sbriglio 142).

Claiming to have warned Le Corbusier about the concern, the contractor refused to accept responsibility, prompting some rather fiery correspondence between the two. This problem, compounded by issues with the heating system, resulted in the house feeling, as Sbriglio notes, “cold and damp” and subject to “substantial heat loss due to the large glazing”—a cause for particular concern given the health problems of the clients’ only child, Roger Savoye, that saw him spend time in a French Sanatorium (Sbriglio 145). While the cause of Roger’s illness is not clear, at least one writer (albeit with a noticeable lack of footnotes or supporting evidence) has linked this directly to the villa (de Botton 65).

Mme Savoye’s complaints about dampness, humidity, condensation and leaking in her home persisted in subsequent years, prompting Benton to summarise in 1987, “every autumn […] there were cries of distress from the Savoye family with the first rains” (Villas 204). These also extended to discussion of the heating system, which while proving insufficient was also causing flooding (Benton, "Villa" 93). In 1935 Savoye again wrote to Le Corbusier, wearily stating:

It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight. The gardener’s walls are also wet through. (Sbriglio 146–7)

Savoye’s understandable vexation with waterproofing problems in her home continued to escalate. With a mixture of gratitude and frustration, a letter sent two years later stated: “After innumerable demands you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 in uninhabitable…. Please render it inhabitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action” (Sbriglio 147).

Paradoxically, Le Corbusier was interested in the potential of architecture and urban planning to facilitate health and well-being, as well as the effects that climate may play in this. Early twentieth century medical thought advocated heliotherary (therapeutic exposure to sunlight) for a diverse range of medical conditions, ranging from rickets to tuberculosis. Similarly the health benefits of climate, such as the dryness of mountain air, had been recognised for much longer, and had led to burgeoning industries associated with health, travel and climate. The dangers of damp environments had also long been medically recognised. Le Corbusier’s awareness of the health benefits of sunshine led to the inclusion of a solarium in the villa that afforded both framed and unframed views of the surrounding countryside, such as those that were advocated in the seventeenth century as an antidote to melancholy (Burton 65–66).

Both Benton and Sbriglio present Mme Savoye’s complaints as part of their comprehensive histories of an important and influential work of Modern Architecture. Each reproduce excerpts from archival letters that are not widely translated or accessible, and Benton’s 1984 essay is the source other authors generally cite in discussing these matters. In contrast, for example, Murphy’s 2002 account of the villa’s conversion from “house” to “historical monument” cites the same letters (via Benton) as part of a broader argument that highlights the “undomestic” or “unhomely” nature of the work by cataloguing such accounts of the client’s experience of discomfort while residing in the space—thus revisiting a number of common criticisms of Modern Architecture.

Le Corbusier’s reputation for designing buildings that responded poorly to climate is often referenced in popular accounts of his work. For example, a 1935 article published in Time states:

Though the great expanses of glass that he favors may occasionally turn his rooms into hothouses, his flat roofs may leak and his plans may be wasteful of space, it was Architect Le Corbusier who in 1923 put the entire philosophy of modern architecture into a single sentence: “A house is a machine to live in.”

Reference to these issues are usually made rather minimally in academic accounts of his work, and few would agree with this article’s assertion that Le Corbusier’s influence as a phrasemaker would rival the impact of his architecture. In contrast, such issues, in relation to other architects, are often invoked more rhetorically as part of a variety of historical agendas, particularly in constructing feminist histories of architecture. While Corbusier and his work have often been the source of intellectual contention from feminist scholars—for example in regard to authorial disputes and fractious relationships with the likes of Eileen Gray or Charlotte Perriand—discussion of the functional failures in the Villa Savoye are rarely addressed from this perspective. Rather, feminist scholars have focussed their attention on a number of other projects, most notably the case of the Farnsworth House, another canonical work of Modernism.

Dear Herr Mies van der Rohe …

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, completed in 1951 in Plano Illinois, was commissioned as a country weekend residence by an unmarried female doctor, a brief credited with freeing the architect from many of the usual pragmatic requirements of a permanent city residence. In response Mies designed a rectilinear steel and glass pavilion, which hovered (to avoid the flood levels) above the landscape, sheltered by maple trees, in close proximity to the Fox River. The refined architectural detail, elegant formal properties, and poetic relationship with the surrounding landscape—whether in its autumnal splendour or covered in a thick blanket of snow—captivated architects seeing it become, like the Villa Savoye, one of the most revered architectural works of the twentieth century.

Prior to construction a model was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, upon completion the building became a pilgrimage site for architects and admirers. The exhibition of the design later fuelled debate about whether Dr Farnsworth constituted a patron or a client (Friedman 134); a distinction generating very different expectations for the responsibilities of the architect, particularly regarding the production of a habitable home that met the client’s brief versus producing a design of architectural merit.

The house was intended as a frame for viewing and contemplating nature, thus seeing nature and climate aligned with the transcendental qualities of the design. Following a visit during construction, Farnsworth described the building’s relationship to the elements, writing: “the two horizontal planes of the unfinished building, floating over the meadows, were unearthly beautiful under a sun which glowed like a wild rose” (5). Similarly, in 1951, Arthur Drexler described the building as “a quantity of air caught between a floor and a roof” (Vandenberg 6). Seven years later the architect himself asserted that nature “gained a more profound significance” when viewed from within the house (Friedman 139).

While the transparency of the house was “forgiven” by its isolated location and the lack of visibility from neighbouring properties, the issues a glass and steel box might pose for the thermal comfort of its occupant are not difficult to imagine. Following the house’s completion, Farnsworth fitted windows with insect screens and blinds (although Mies intended for curtains to be installed) that clumsily undermined the refined and minimalistic architectural details.

Controversy surrounding the house was, in part, the result of its bold new architectural language. However, it was also due to the architect-client relationship, which turned acrimonious in a very public manner. A dispute between Mies and Farnsworth regarding unpaid fees was fought both in the courtroom and the media, becoming a forum for broader debate as various journals (for example, House Beautiful), publicly took sides.

The professional female client versus the male architect and the framing of their dispute by historians and the media has seen this project become a seminal case-study in feminist architectural histories, such as Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House of 1998. Beyond the conflict and speculation about the individuals involved, at the core of these discussions were the inadequacies of the project in relation to comfort and climate. For example, Farnsworth describes in her journal finding the house awash with several inches of water, leading to a court session being convened on the rooftop in order to properly ascertain the defects (14).

Written retrospectively, after their relationship soured, Farnsworth’s journal delights in recounting any errors or misjudgements made by Mies during construction. For example, she described testing the fireplace to find “the house was sealed so hermetically that the attempt of a flame to go up the chimney caused an interior negative pressure” (2). Further, her growing disenchantment was reflected in bleak descriptions aligning the building with the weather. Describing her first night camping in her home, she wrote: “the expanses of the glass walls and the sills were covered with ice. The silent meadows outside white with old and hardened snow reflected the bleak [light] bulb within, as if the glass house itself were an unshaded bulb of uncalculated watts lighting the winter plains” (9).

In an April 1953 article in House Beautiful, Elizabeth Gordon publicly sided with Farnsworth as part of a broader campaign against the International Style. She condemned the home, and its ‘type’ as “unlivable”, writing: “You burn up in the summer and freeze in the winter, because nothing must interfere with the ‘pure’ form of their rectangles” (250). Gordon included the lack of “overhanging roofs to shade you from the sun” among a catalogue of “human qualities” she believed architects sacrificed for the expression of composition—a list that also included possessions, children, pets and adequate kitchen facilities (250). In 1998 excerpts from this article were reproduced by Friedman, in her seminal work of feminist architectural history, and were central in her discussion of the way that debates surrounding this house were framed through notions of gender.

Responding to this conflict, and its media coverage, in 1960 Peter Blake wrote:

All great houses by great architects tend to be somewhat impractical; many of Corbu’s and Wright’s house clients find that they are living in too expensive and too inefficient buildings. Yet many of these clients would never exchange their houses for the most workable piece of mediocrity. (88)

Far from complaining about the weather, the writings of its second owner, Peter Palumbo, poetically meditate the building’s relationship to the seasons and the elements. In his foreword to a 2003 monograph, he wrote:

life inside the house is very much a balance with nature, and an extension of nature. A change in the season or an alteration of the landscape creates a marked change in the mood inside the house. With an electric storm of Wagnerian proportions illuminating the night sky and shaking the foundations of the house to their very core, it is possible to remain quite dry! When, with the melting snows of spring, the Fox River becomes a roaring torrent that bursts its banks, the house assumes a character of a house-boat, the water level sometimes rising perilously close to the front door. On such occasions, the approach to the house is by canoe, which is tied to the steps of the upper terrace. (Vandenberg 5)

Palumbo purchased the house from Farnsworth and commissioned Mies’s grandson to restore it to its original condition, removing the blinds and insect screens, and installing an air-conditioning system. The critical positioning of Palumbo has been quite different from that of Farnsworth. His restoration and writings on the project have in some ways seen him positioned as the “real” architectural patron. Furthermore, his willingness to tolerate some discomfort in his inhabitation has seen him in some ways prefigure the type of resident that will be next be discussed in reference to recent owners of Wright properties.

Dear Mr Wright …

Accounts of weatherproofing problems in buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright have become the basis of mythology in the architectural discipline. For example, in 1936 Herbert Johnson and J. Vernon Steinle visited Wright’s Richard Lloyd Jones house in Oklahoma. As Jonathan Lipman wrote, “Steinle’s most prominent recollection of the house was that there were scores of tubs and canning jars in the house catching water leaking through the roof” (45). While Lipman notes the irony that both the house and office Wright designed for Johnson would suffer the same problem, it is the anecdotal accounts of the former that have perhaps attracted the most interest. An oft-recounted story tells of Johnson telephoning Wright, during a dinner party, with regard to water dripping from the ceiling into his guest-of-honour’s soup; the complaint was reportedly rebuffed unsympathetically by Wright who suggested the lady should move her chair (Farr 272).

Wright himself addressed his reputation for designing buildings that leaked in his Autobiography. In reference to La Miniatura in Pasadena, of 1923, he contextualised difficulties with the local climate, which he suggested was prone to causing leaks, writing: “The sun bakes the roof for eleven months, two weeks and five days, shrinking it to a shrivel. Then giving the roof no warning whatever to get back to normal if it could, the clouds burst. Unsuspecting roof surfaces are deluged by a three inch downpour.” He continued, stating:

I knew all this. And I know there are more leaking roofs in Southern California than in all the rest of the world put together. I knew that the citizens come to look upon water thus in a singularly ungrateful mood. I knew that water is all that enables them to have their being there, but let any of it through on them from above, unexpectedly, in their houses and they go mad. It is a kind of phobia. I knew all this and I have taken seriously precautions in the details of this little house to avoid such scenes as a result of negligible roofs. This is the truth. (250)

Wright was quick to attribute blame—directed squarely at the builder. Never one for quiet diplomacy, he complained that the “builder had lied to [him] about the flashing under and within the coping walls” (250) and he was ignorant of the incident because the client had not informed him of the leak. He suggested the client’s silence was undoubtedly due to her “not wishing to hurt [his] feelings”. Although given earlier statements it might be speculated that she did not wish to be accused of pandering to a phobia of leaks. Wright was dismissive of the client’s inconvenience, suggesting she would be able to continue as normal until the next rains the following year and claiming he “fixed the house” once he “found out about it” (250). Implicit in this justification was the idea that it was not unreasonable to expect the client to bear a few days of “discomfort” each year in tolerance of the local climate. In true Wright style, discussions of these problems in his autobiography were self-constructive concessions.

While Wright refused to take responsibility for climate-related issues in La Minatura, he was more forthcoming in appreciating the triumphs of his Imperial Hotel in Japan—one of the only buildings in the vicinity to survive the 1923 earthquake. In a chapter of his autobiography titled “Building against Doomsday (Why the Great Earthquake did not destroy the Imperial Hotel),” Wright reproduced a telegram sent by Okura Impeho stating: “Hotel stands undamaged as monument of your genius hundreds of homeless provided perfectly maintained service. Congratulations” (222).

Far from unconcerned by nature or climate, Wright’s works celebrated and often went to great effort to accommodate the poetic qualities of these. In reference to his own home, Taliesin, Wright wrote:

I wanted a home where icicles by invitation might beautify the eaves. So there were no gutters. And when the snow piled deep on the roofs […] icicles came to hang staccato from the eaves. Prismatic crystal pendants sometimes six feet long, glittered between the landscape and the eyes inside. Taliesin in winter was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes. (173)

This description was, in part, included as a demonstration of his “superior” understanding and appreciation of nature and its poetic possibilities; an understanding not always mirrored by his clients. Discussing the Lloyd Lewis House in Libertyville, Illinois of 1939, Wright described his endeavours to keep the house comfortable (and avoid flooding) in Spring, Autumn and Summer months which, he conceded, left the house more vulnerable to winter conditions. Utilising an underfloor heating system, which he argued created a more healthful natural climate rather than an “artificial condition,” he conceded this may feel inadequate upon first entering the space (495). Following the client’s complaints that this system and the fireplace were insufficient, particularly in comparison with the temperature levels he was accustomed to in his workplace (at The Daily News), Wright playfully wrote:

I thought of various ways of keeping the writer warm, I thought of wiring him to an electric pad inside his vest, allowing lots of lead wire so he could get around. But he waved the idea aside with contempt. […] Then I suggested we appeal to Secretary Knox to turn down the heat at the daily news […] so he could become acclimated. (497)

Due to the client’s disinclination to bear this discomfort or use any such alternate schemes, Wright reluctantly refit the house with double-glazing (at the clients expense).

In such cases, discussion of leaks or thermal discomfort were not always negative, but were cited rhetorically implying that perfunctory building techniques were not yet advanced enough to meet the architect’s expectations, or that their creative abilities were suppressed by conservative or difficult clients. Thus discussions of building failures have often been invoked in the social construction of the “architect-genius.” Interestingly accounts of the permeability of Wright’s buildings are more often included in biographical rather that architectural writings.

In recent years, these accounts of weatherproofing problems have transformed from accusing letters or statements implying failure to a “badge of honour” among occupants who endure discomfort for the sake of art. This changing perspective is usually more pronounced in second generation owners, like Peter Palumbo (who has also owned Corbusier and Wright designed homes), who are either more aware of the potential problems in owning such a house or are more tolerant given an understanding of the historical worth of these projects.

This is nowhere more evident than in a profile published in the real estate section of the New York Times. Rather than concealing these issues to preserve the resale value of the property, weatherproofing problems are presented as an endearing quirk. The new owners of Wright’s Prefab No. 1 of 1959, on Staten Island declared they initially did not have enough pots to place under the fifty separate leaks in their home, but in December 2005 proudly boasted they were ‘down to only one leak’ (Bernstein, "Living"). Similarly, in 2003 the resident of a Long Island Wright-designed property, optimistically claimed that while his children often complained their bedrooms were uncomfortably cold, this encouraged the family to spend more time in the warmer communal spaces (Bernstein, "In a House"). This client, more than simply optimistic, (perhaps unwittingly) implies an awareness of the importance of “the hearth” in Wright’s architecture.

In such cases complaints about the weather are re-framed. The leaking roof is no longer representative of gender or power relationships between the client and the uncompromising artistic genius. Rather, it actually empowers the inhabitant who rises above their circumstances for the sake of art, invoking a kind of artistic asceticism.

While “enlightened” clients of famed architects may be willing to suffer the effects of climate in the interiors of their homes, their neighbours are less tolerant as suggested in a more recent example. Complaints about the alteration of the micro-climate surrounding Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles prompted the sandblasting of part of the exterior cladding to reduce glare. In 2004, USA Today reported that reflections from the stainless steel cladding were responsible for raising the temperature in neighbouring buildings by more than 9° Celsius, forcing neighbours to close their blinds and operate their air-conditioners. There were also fears that the glare might inadvertently cause traffic problems. Further, one report found that average ground temperatures adjacent to the building peaked at approximately 58° Celsius (Schiler and Valmont). Unlike the Modernist examples, this more recent project has not yet been framed in aid of a critical agenda, and has seemingly been reported simply for being “newsworthy.”

Benign Conversation

Discussion of the suitability of Modern Architecture in relation to climate has proven a perennial topic of conversation, invoked in the course of recurring debates and criticisms. The fascination with accounts of climate-related problems—particularly in discussing the work of the great Modernist Architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright—is in part due to a certain Schadenfreude in debunking the esteem and authority of a canonical figure. This is particularly the case with one, such as Wright, who was characterised by significant self-confidence and an acerbic wit often applied at the expense of others. Yet these accounts have been invoked as much in the construction of the figure of the architect as a creative genius as they have been in the deconstruction of this figure—as well as the historical construction of the client and the historians involved.

In view of the growing awareness of the threats and realities of climate change, complaints about the weather are destined to adopt a new significance and be invoked in support of a different range of agendas. While it may be somewhat anachronistic to interpret the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe in terms of current discussions about sustainability in architecture, these topics are often broached when restoring, renovating or adapting the designs of such architects for new or contemporary usage. In contrast, the climatic problems caused by Gehry’s concert hall are destined to be framed according to a different set of values—such as the relationship of his work to the time, or perhaps in relation to contemporary technology. While discussion of the weather is, in the conversational arts, credited as benign topic, this is rarely the case in architectural history.

References

Benton, Tim. The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920–1930. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

———. “Villa Savoye and the Architects’ Practice (1984).” Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays. Ed. H. Allen Brooks. New York: Garland, 1987. 83–105.

Bernstein, Fred A. “In a House That Wright Built.” New York Times 21 Sept. 2003. 3 Aug. 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/nyregion/in-a-house-that-wright-built.html >.

———. “Living with Frank Lloyd Wright.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2005. 30 July 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18habi.html >.

Blake, Peter. Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Structure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1960).

Campbell, Margaret. “What Tuberculosis Did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture.” Medical History 49 (2005): 463–488.

“Corbusierismus”. Art. Time 4 Nov. 1935. 18 Aug. 2009 < http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755279,00.html >.

De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin, 2006.

Farnsworth, Edith. ‘Chapter 13’, Memoirs. Unpublished journals in three notebooks, Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, unpaginated (17pp). 29 Jan. 2009 < http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/pdf/edith_journal.pdf >.

Farr, Finis. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961.

Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.

Gordon, Elizabeth. “The Threat to the Next America.” House Beautiful 95.4 (1953): 126–30, 250–51. Excerpts reproduced in Friedman. Women and the Making of the Modern House. 140–141.

Hardarson, Ævar. “All Good Architecture Leaks—Witticism or Word of Wisdom?” Proceedings of the CIB Joint Symposium 13–16 June 2005, Helsinki < http://www.metamorfose.ntnu.no/Artikler/Hardarson_all_good_architecture_leaks.pdf >.

Huck, Peter. “Gehry’s Hall Feels Heat.” The Age 1 March 2004. 22 Aug. 2009 < http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02 /27/1077676955090.html >.

Lipman, Jonathan. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings. Introduction by Kenneth Frampton. London: Architectural Press, 1984.

Murphy, Kevin D. “The Villa Savoye and the Modernist Historic Monument.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61.1 (2002): 68–89.

“New L.A. Concert Hall Raises Temperatures of Neighbours.” USA Today 24 Feb. 2004. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004–02-24-concert-hall_x.htm >.

Owens, Mitchell. “A Wright House, Not a Shrine.” New York Times 25 July 1996. 30 July 2009 <� http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/25/garden/currents-a-wright-house-not-a-shrine.html >.

Sbriglio, Jacques. Le Corbusier: La Villa Savoye, The Villa Savoye. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier; Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999.

Schiler, Marc, and Elizabeth Valmont. “Microclimatic Impact: Glare around the Walt Disney Concert Hall.” 2005. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.sbse.org/awards/docs/2005/1187.pdf >.

Vandenberg, Maritz. Farnsworth House. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Foreword by Lord Peter Palumbo. London: Phaidon Press, 2003.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

From: https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/172 Tagged: wpmustprint Saved: April 2022

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

✾ vanityfair.com✾ Monday 8 November 2010✾ Mark Bowden✾ 41 minute read✾

After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.By November 8, 2010To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

Miami-Dade detectives learned that she had been living for months at the Airport Regency Hotel, eight miles from where she was found. It is one of those crisply efficient overnight spots in the orbit of major airports that cater to travelers needing a bed between legs of long flights. She was employed by a cruise-ship line and had severely cut her finger on the job, so she was being put up at the hotel by her employers while she healed. The assault had begun, she said, in her room, on the fourth floor. She described her attackers as two or three white men who spoke with accents that she heard as “Hispanic,” but she wasn’t certain. She remembered one of the men pushing a pillow into her face, and being forced to drink something strong, alcoholic. She had fragments of memories like bits of a bad dream—of being held up or carried, of being thrown over a man’s shoulder as he moved down a flight of stairs, of being roughly violated in the backseat of a car, of pleading for her life. Powerful, cruel moments, but there was nothing solid, nothing that made a decent lead. When her lawyer soon after filed a lawsuit against the hotel, alleging negligence, going after potentially deep corporate pockets, the detectives thought something was fishy. This was not your typical rape victim. What if she was part of some sophisticated con?

The police detectives did what they could at the hotel, combing the woman’s room for evidence, interviewing hotel employees, obtaining images from all of the surveillance cameras for the morning of the crime, going over the guest lists. The hotel had 174 rooms, and so many people came and went that it would have taken months working full-time to run checks on every one of them, something beyond the resources of a police department in a high-crime area like Miami-Dade. The sex-crimes unit set aside the file with no clear leads, only more questions. After several weeks, “we were dried up,” recalled Allen Foote, the detective handling the case.

So the action was all headed toward civil court. The hotel engaged a law firm to defend itself from the woman’s lawsuit, and the firm eventually hired a private detective named Ken Brennan to figure out what had happened.

Foote was not pleased. It was usually a pain in the ass to have a private detective snooping around one of his cases. Brennan was right out of central casting—middle-aged, deeply tanned, with gray hair. He was a weight lifter and favored open-necked shirts that showed off both the definition of his upper pecs and the bright, solid-gold chain around his neck. The look said: mature, virile, laid-back, and making it. He had been divorced, and his former wife was now deceased; his children were grown. He had little in the way of daily family responsibilities. Brennan had been a cop on Long Island, where he was from, and had worked eight years as a D.E.A. agent. He had left the agency in the mid-90s to work as a commodities broker and to set up as a private detective. The brokering was not to his taste, but the investigating was. He was a warm, talkative guy, with a thick Long Island accent, who sized people up quickly and with a healthy strain of New York brass. If he liked you, he let you know it right away, and you were his friend for life, and if he didn’t … well, you would find that out right away, too. Nothing shocked him; in fact, most of the salacious run-of-the-mill work that pays private detectives’ bills—domestic jobs and petty insurance scams—bored him. Brennan turned those offers away. The ones he took were mostly from businesses and law firms, who hired him to nail down the facts in civil-court cases like this one.

He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what happened. I’m not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is.” Brennan liked it when the information he uncovered helped his clients, but that wasn’t a priority. Winning lawsuits wasn’t the goal. What excited him was the mystery.

The job in this case was straightforward. Find out who raped and beat this young woman and dumped her in the weeds. Had the attack even happened at the hotel, or had she slipped out and met her assailant or assailants someplace else? Was she just a simple victim, or was she being used by some kind of Eastern European syndicate? Was she a prostitute? Was she somehow implicated? There were many questions and few answers.

Vanishing Act

‘I used to be a cop and a federal agent,” Brennan told Detective Foote, introducing himself at the Miami-Dade police sex-crimes-unit offices. Foote had long strawberry-blond hair, which he combed straight back, and a bushy blond mustache. He was about the same age as Brennan, who read him right away as a fellow member of the fraternity, somebody he could reason with on familiar terms.

“Look, you and I both know there’s no fucking way you can investigate this case,” Brennan said. “I can see this through to the end. I won’t step on your dick. I won’t do a thing without telling you about it. If I figure out who did it, you get the arrest. I won’t do anything to fuck it up for you.”

Foote saw logic in this and did something he ordinarily wouldn’t do. He shared what he had in his file: crime-scene photos, surveillance footage from the hotel security cameras, the victim’s confused statement. Foote had interviewed a couple of hotel staff members, but they hadn’t seen a thing. He’d gone about as far as he could with it. He thought, Good luck.

The insurance adjuster had fared no better than Foote. As Brennan reviewed the adjuster’s detailed summary of the case in early November of 2005, eight months after the victim had been found, it was easy to see why. The woman’s memory was all over the map. First she said she had been attacked by one man, then three, then two. At one point she said their accent might have been not Hispanic but “Romanian.” There was no evidence to implicate anyone.

The hotel had a significant security system. The property was fenced, and the back gates were locked and monitored. There were only a few points of entry and exit. During the night, the back door was locked and could be opened only remotely. There were two security guards on duty at all times. Each exit was equipped with a surveillance camera. There was one over the front entrance and one over the back, one in the lobby, one at the lobby elevator, and others out by the pool and parking lot. All of the hotel guests had digital key cards that left a computer record every time they unlocked the door to their rooms. It was possible to track the comings and goings of every person who checked in.

Brennan started where all good detectives start. What did he know for sure? He knew the victim had gone up to her fourth-floor room at the Airport Regency at 3:41 A.M., that she had used her key card to enter her room at about the same time, and that she had been found at dawn in the weeds eight miles west. Somewhere in that roughly three-hour window, she had left the hotel. But there was no evidence of this on any of the cameras. So, how?

The victim was colorfully present on the video record, with her bright-red puffy jacket and shoulder-length blond curls. She had been in and out all night. After months of living in the hotel, she was clearly restless. She made frequent trips down to the lobby just to chat with hotel workers and guests, or to step outside for a smoke, and the cameras caught her every trip. She had gone out to dinner with a friend and returned around midnight, but she wasn’t done yet. She is seen exiting the elevator at about three in the morning, and the camera over the front entrance catches her walking away. She told investigators that she had walked to a nearby gas station to buy a phone card because she wanted to call her mother back in Ukraine, where people were just waking up. Minutes after her departure, the camera catches her return. The lobby camera records her re-entering the hotel and crossing the lobby. Moments later she is seen entering the elevator for her final trip upstairs. A large black man gets onto the elevator right behind her, and the recording shows them exchanging a few words. The police report showed her entering her room 20 minutes later, which had led to much speculation about where she was during that time. The victim had no memory of going anywhere but directly to her room. Brennan checked the clock on the camera at the elevator and found that it ran more than 20 minutes behind the computer clock, which recorded the key swipes, solving that small mystery. After she entered the lobby elevator, she was not seen again by any of the cameras.

The surveillance cameras were in perfect working order. They were not on continually; they were activated by motion detectors. Miami-Dade detectives had tried to beat the motion detectors by moving very slowly, or finding angles of approach that would not be seen, but they had failed. No matter how slowly they moved, no matter what approach they tried, the cameras clicked on faithfully and caught them.

One possibility was that she had left through her fourth-floor window. Someone would have had to drop her out the window or somehow lower her, presumably unconscious, into the bushes below, and then exit the hotel and walk around to retrieve her. But the woman showed no signs of injury from such a drop, or from ropes, and the bushes behind the hotel had not been trampled. The police had examined them carefully, looking for any sign of disturbance. It was also possible, with more than one assailant, that she had been lowered into the grasp of someone who had avoided disturbing the bushes, but Brennan saw that such explanations began to severely stretch credulity. Sex crimes are not committed by determined teams of attackers who come with padded ropes to lower victims from fourth-floor windows.

No, Brennan concluded. Unless this crime had been pulled off by a team of magicians, the victim had to have come down in the elevator to the lobby and left through the front door. The answer was not obvious, but it had to be somewhere in the video record from those cameras. “Needless to say, the big mystery here is how this woman got out of the hotel,” read the summary of the case prepared by the insurance adjuster. It was a mystery he had not been able to crack.

Brennan penciled one word on the memo: “Disguise?”

He began studying the video record with great care, until he could account for every coming and going. Whenever a person or a group arrived, the camera over the front door recorded it. Seconds later, the entries were captured by the lobby cameras, and then, soon after, by the elevator cameras. Room-key records showed the arrivals entering their rooms. Likewise, those departing were recorded in the opposite sequence: elevator, lobby, front door. The parking-lot cameras recorded cars coming and going. One by one, Brennan eliminated scores of potential suspects. If someone had left the hotel before the victim re-entered her room, and did not return, he could not have attacked her. Such people were eliminated. Those who entered and were not seen to leave were also eliminated, and likewise anyone exiting the hotel without a bag, or carrying only a small bag. Brennan eliminated no one without a clear reason, not even women or families. He watched carefully for any sign of someone behaving nervously, or erratically.

This painstaking process ultimately left him with only one suspect: the man seen entering the elevator behind the victim at 3:41 A.M. He was a very large black man with glasses, who looked to be at least six four and upwards of 300 pounds. He and the woman are seen casually talking as they enter the elevator. The same man emerges from the elevator into the lobby less than two hours later, at 5:28 A.M., pulling a suitcase with wheels. The camera over the front door records him rolling the suitcase out toward the parking lot at a casual stroll. He returns less than an hour later, shortly before dawn, without the bag. He gets back on the elevator and heads upstairs.

Why would a man haul his luggage out of an airport hotel early in the morning, when he was not checking out, and then return to his room within the hour without it? That question, coupled with Brennan’s careful process of elimination, led him to the conclusion that the victim had been taken out of the hotel inside the big man’s suitcase.

But it seemed too small. It looked to be about the size that air travelers can fit into overhead compartments. But the man himself was so big, perhaps the size of the bag was an illusion. Brennan studied the video as the man exited the elevator and also as he left the hotel, then measured the doorways of both. When he matched visible reference points in the video—the number of tiles to each side of the bag as it was wheeled out the front door, and the height of a bar that ran around the inside of the elevator—he was able to get a close approximation of the suitcase’s actual size. He obtained one that fit those measurements, which was larger than the bag on the video had appeared to be, and invited a flexible young woman whose proportions matched the victim’s to curl up inside it. She fit.

He scrutinized the video still more closely, watching it again and again. The man steps off the elevator rolling the bag behind him. As he does, the wheels catch momentarily in the space between the elevator floor and the ground floor, just for a split second. It was hardly noticeable if you weren’t looking for it. The man has to give the bag a tug to get it unstuck.

And that clinched it. That tiny tug. The bag had to have been heavy to get stuck. Brennan was now convinced. This is the guy. No matter what the victim had said—that she had been attacked by two or maybe three men, that they were “white,” that they spoke with accents that sounded Hispanic or perhaps Romanian—Brennan was convinced her attacker had to be this man.

The detective was struck by something else. His suspect was entirely collected. Cool and calm, entering the elevator with the woman, exiting with the suitcase, pulling it behind him out to the parking lot, then strolling back less than an hour later. Brennan had been a cop. He had seen ordinary men caught up in the aftermath of a violent crime. They were beside themselves. Shaking. Panicky. If a man rapes and beats a woman to the point where he thinks she’s dead, and then hauls the body out to dump it in the weeds, does he come strolling back into the same hotel as if nothing happened? An ordinary attacker would have been two states away by noon.

What this man’s demeanor suggested to Brennan was chilling.

He’s good at this. He’s done this before.

The “Mercury” Man

Brennan called a meeting at the hotel on November 17, 2005. The owners were there, the insurance adjusters, and the lawyers—in other words, the people who had hired him. They met in a boardroom. On a laptop screen, Brennan pulled up the image of the large man pulling his suitcase off the elevator.

He said, “This is the guy that did it. That girl is inside that suitcase.”

There was some snickering.

“How do you come up with that?” he was asked. Brennan described his process of elimination, how he had narrowed and narrowed the search, until it led him to this man.

They weren’t buying it.

“Didn’t the victim say that she was attacked by two white guys?” one of them asked.

“I’m telling you,” said Brennan. “This is the guy. Let me run with it a little bit. If you’re willing to give me the resources, I’ll track this guy down.”

He told them that it was a complete win-win. The hotel’s liability in the civil suit would go way down if he could show that the woman had not been attacked by a hotel employee. “What could be better?” he said. “Think how good you’ll look if we actually catch the guy responsible. You’d be solving a horrible crime!”

They seemed distinctly unmoved.

“Look at how cool this guy is,” he told them, replaying the video. “He just raped and beat a woman to death, or thinks he has, and it’s not like he’s all nervous and jittery. He’s cool as a clam! Tell me the kind of person who could do such a thing and be this nonchalant. This ain’t the only time he’s done this.”

A discussion ensued. There were some in the room who wanted to find the rapist, but the decision was primarily a business calculation. It was about weighing the detective’s fee against a chance to limit their exposure. Brennan didn’t care what their reasons were; he just wanted to keep going. Old instincts had been aroused. He had never even met the victim, but with her attacker in his sights, he wanted him badly. Here was a guy who was walking around almost a year later, certain he had gotten away with his crime. Brennan wanted what all detectives want: the gotcha! He wanted to see the look on the guy’s face.

It was close, but in the end the hotel suits decided to let him keep working. Having overcome their skepticism so narrowly, Brennan was even more determined to prove he was right.

The hotel’s records were useless. There were too many rooms and there was too much turnover to scrutinize every guest. Even if the hotel staff remembered a 300-pound black man with glasses, which they did not, there was no way to tell whether he was a registered hotel guest or a visitor, or if he was sharing someone else’s room. Even in cases where they photocopied a guest’s driver’s license, which they did not do faithfully, the image came up so muddy that there was no way to make out the face.

So he went back to the video. Now that he knew whom he was looking for, Brennan scrutinized every appearance of his suspect, at the elevator, in the lobby, at the hotel restaurant, at the front door. In one of the video snippets at the elevator, the suspect is seen walking with a fit black man wearing a white T-shirt with the word “Mercury” on the front, which meant nothing to Brennan. His first thoughts were the car company, or the planet, or the element. There was nothing there he could work with. The manner of both men on the snippet suggested that they knew each other. They walked past the elevator and turned to their right, in the direction of the restaurant. So Brennan hunted up video from the restaurant surveillance camera, and, sure enough, it captured the two entering. As Brennan reviewed more video, he saw the big black man with the other man quite frequently, so he suspected that the two had been in town together. The man in the T-shirt had an ID tag on a string around his neck, but it was too small to read on the screen. Brennan called NASA to see if they had a way to enhance the picture. He described the camera and was told that it couldn’t be done.

Again, back to the video. In the restaurant footage, the man in the T-shirt is momentarily seen from behind, revealing another word, on the back of the T-shirt. The best view comes in a split second as he sidesteps someone leaving, giving the camera a better angle. Brennan could see the letter V at the beginning of the word, and O at the end. He could make out a vague pattern of script in the middle, but could not be sure of the exact letters. It was like looking at an eye chart when you need stronger glasses; you take a guess. It looked to him as if the word was “Verado.” It meant nothing to him, but that was his hunch. So he Googled it and found that “Verado” was the name of a new outboard engine manufactured by Mercury Marine, the boat-engine manufacturer.

There had been a big boat show in Miami in February, when the incident happened. Perhaps the man in the white T-shirt had been working at the show for Mercury Marine, and if he had, maybe his big friend had, too.

Mercury Marine is a subsidiary of the Brunswick Corporation, which also manufactures billiards and bowling equipment and other recreational products. Brennan called its head of security, Alan Sperling, and explained what he was trying to do. His first thought was that the company might have put its boat-show employees up at the Airport Regency. If it had, he might be able to identify and locate the man in the picture through the company. Sperling checked, and, no, Mercury’s employees had stayed at a different hotel. Brennan racked his brain. Had any of the crews who set up the company’s booth stayed at the Regency? Again, the answer was no.

“Well, who got those shirts?,” Brennan asked.

Sperling checked and called back two weeks later. He said the only place the shirts had been given away was at the boat show’s food court. The company in charge of food for the show was called Centerplate, which handles concessions for large sporting events and conventions. It was a big company with employees spread across the nation. Brennan called the head of human resources for Centerplate, who told him that the company had put up some of its people at the Regency, but that it had hired more than 200 for the boat show, from all over.

“Somebody has to remember a big black guy, 300 pounds at least—in glasses,” said the detective.

A week later, the man from Centerplate called back. Some of their workers did remember a big black man with glasses, but no one knew his name. Someone did seem to recall, he said, that the company had initially hired the man to work at Zephyr Field, home of the New Orleans Zephyrs, the minor-league baseball team in Metairie, a sprawling suburb. This was a solid lead, but there was a bad thing about it: Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city just months earlier, and the residents of Metairie had been evacuated. It was a community scattered to the winds.

Good News, Bad News

Brennan was stubborn. He was now months into this effort to identify and find the man responsible for raping and beating a woman he had never met. There was no way that what he was being paid for the job was worth the hours he was putting in. Nobody else cared as much as he did. What the hotel’s insurers really wanted, Brennan knew, was for him to tell them that the victim was a hooker, and that she had been beaten by one of her johns, which would go a long way toward freeing them from any liability. But this wasn’t true, and he had told them at the outset that the truth was all they would get from him. Detective Foote was openly skeptical. He had given Brennan all the information he had. He had more pressing cases with real leads and real prospects.

But Brennan had a picture in his head. He could see this big man with glasses coolly going about his business day to day—smug, chatting up the girls, no doubt looking for his next victim, comfortable, certain that his crimes left no trail.

Katrina was the bad thing about the New Orleans lead, but there was also a good thing. Brennan had a buddy on the police force there, a Captain Ernest Demma. Some years earlier, on a vacation to the French Quarter with his kids, Brennan had risked his hide helping Demma subdue a prisoner who had violently turned on him.

“The guy had broken away from me,” Demma recalled, “and out of nowhere comes this guy in a black jacket flying down the sidewalk, who runs him down, tackles him, and held the guy until my men could subdue him. He was fantastic.” It was the kind of gesture a cop never forgets. Demma dubbed Brennan “Batman.” New Orleans may have been down for the count, but when Batman called, Demma was up for anything.

The captain sent one of his sergeants out to Zephyr Field, where the club was working overtime to get its storm-ravaged facility ready to open the 2006 season. Demma called Brennan back: “The good news is: I know who this guy is.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“His name is Mike Jones, there’s probably only a million of them, and he doesn’t work there anymore, and nobody knows where he went.”

Still, a name! Brennan thanked Demma and went back to the Regency database, and, sure enough, he found that there had indeed been a guest named Mike Jones staying at the hotel when the attack occurred. He had checked in on February 14, seven days before the rape and assault, and he had checked out on the 22^nd, one day after he was seen rolling his suitcase to the car. The full name on his Visa card was Michael Lee Jones. The card had been canceled, and the address was for a Virginia residence Jones had vacated years earlier. He had left no forwarding address. Brennan lacked authority to subpoena further information from the credit-card company, and the evidence he had was still too slight to get Miami-Dade police involved. The phone number Jones had left with registration was a number for Centerplate.

But the trail was warm again. Brennan knew that Jones no longer worked for Centerplate, and the people there didn’t know where he was, but the detective thought he knew certain things about his prey. Judging by the nonchalance he showed hauling a young woman’s body out of the hotel stuffed in a suitcase, Brennan suspected that this was a practiced routine. The Centerplate job had kept him moving from city to city, all expenses paid, a perfect setup for a serial rapist with a method that was tried and true. If Jones was his man, then he wouldn’t give up an arrangement like that. If he wasn’t employed by Centerplate anymore, where would somebody with his work experience go next? Who was facilitating his predation now? Brennan got some names from Centerplate and went online and compiled a list of the food-service company’s 20 to 25 top competitors.

He started working his way down the list, calling the human-resources department for each of the competing firms, and one by one he struck out. As it happened, one company on the list, Ovations, had its headquarters in the Tampa area, and Brennan was planning a trip up in that direction anyway, so he decided to drop in. As any investigator will tell you, an interview in person is always better than an interview on the phone. Brennan stopped by and, as he can do, talked his way into the office of the company’s C.O.O. He explained his manhunt and asked if Ovations employed a 300-plus-pound black man with glasses named Michael Lee Jones.

The executive didn’t even check a database. He told Brennan, who was not a law-enforcement official, that if he wanted that information he would have to return with a subpoena. All the other companies had checked a database and just told him no. He knew he had finally asked in the right place.

“Why would you want someone working for you who is a rapist?” he asked. He was told there were privacy issues involved.

“Get a subpoena,” the executive suggested.

So Brennan got a fax number for Ovations and called Detective Foote at Miami-Dade; before long a subpoena spat from the machine. It turned out that Ovations had an employee named Michael Lee Jones who fit the description. He was working in Frederick, Maryland.

The Interrogation

Michael Lee Jones was standing behind a barbecue counter at Harry Grove Stadium, home of the minor-league Frederick Keys, when Detective Foote and one of his partners showed up. It was an early-spring evening in the Appalachian foothills, and Foote the Floridian was so cold his teeth were chattering beneath his mustache.

When Brennan had called him with the information about Jones, Foote was impressed by the private detective’s tenacity, but still skeptical. This whole effort more or less defined the term “long shot,” but the name and location of a potential suspect was without question the first real lead since the case had landed on his desk. It had to be checked out. The department had a requirement that detectives traveling out of town to confront suspected criminals go as a team, so Foote waited until another detective had to make such a trip to the suburbs of Washington. He got the detective to agree to take him along as partner. Together they made the hour-and-a-half drive to Frederick to visit Jones in person.

Foote had called Jones earlier that day to see if he would be available. The detective kept it vague. He just said he was investigating an incident in Miami that had happened during the boat show, and confirmed that Jones had been working there. On the phone, Jones was polite and forthcoming. He said he’d been in Miami at that time and that he would be available to meet with Foote, and gave him directions to the ballpark.

Jones was a massive man. Tall, wide, and powerful, with long arms and big hands and a great round belly. His size was intimidating, but his manner was exceedingly soft-spoken and gentle, even passive. He wore clear-rimmed glasses and spoke in a friendly way. Jones was in charge of the operation at the food counter and appeared to be respected and well liked by his busy employees. He was wearing an apron. He steered Foote and the other detective away from the booth to a picnic area just outside the stadium.

As Foote recalled it later, he asked Jones about meeting women in Miami, and Jones said he had “hooked up” once. The detective asked him to describe her. “I only have sex with white women,” Jones said.

Foote asked if he had had sex with anyone at the Airport Regency, and Jones said no. He said that the woman he had had sex with in Miami had been working at the boat show, and that they had hooked up elsewhere.

“Any blonde women?,” Foote asked.

“No.”

“Foreign accent?”

Jones said the woman he had sex with in Miami had been German.

Foote was not making Jones as a suspect. The big man acted convincingly, like someone with nothing to hide. The detective was freezing in the evening air. Foote preferred coming right to the point; he was not given to artful interrogation. Besides, he felt more and more as if the trip had been a waste of time. So he just asked what he wanted to know.

“Look, I’ve got a girl who was raped that week. Did you have anything to do with it?”

“No, of course not!” said Jones, appropriately shocked by the question. “No way.”

“You didn’t beat the shit out of this girl and leave her for dead in a field down there?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Are you willing to give me a DNA specimen?,” Foote asked.

Jones promptly said he would, further convincing the detective that this was not the guy. Do the guilty volunteer conclusive evidence? Foote produced the DNA kit, had Jones sign the consent form, and ran a cotton swab inside Jones’s mouth.

He called Brennan when he got back.

“I’m telling you, Ken, this ain’t the guy,” he said.

“No, man, he’s definitely the fucking guy,” said Brennan, who flew up to Frederick himself, traveling with his son, and spent time over a three-day period talking to Jones, who continued to deny everything.

Months after he returned, the DNA results came back. Brennan got a call from Foote.

“You ain’t gonna believe this,” said Foote.

“What?”

“You were right.”

Jones’s DNA was a match.

Brennan flew up to Frederick in October to meet Foote, who arrested the big man. It had been 11 months since he took the case. Foote formally charged Jones with a variety of felonies that encompassed the acts of raping, kidnapping, and beating a young woman severely. The accused sat forlornly in a chair that looked tiny under his bulk, in an austere Frederick Police Department interrogation room, great rolls of fat falling on his lap under an enormous Baltimore Ravens T-shirt. He repeatedly denied everything in a surprisingly soft voice peculiar for such a big man, gesturing broadly with both hands, protesting but never growing angry, and insisting that he would never, ever, under any circumstances do such a thing to a woman. He said that he “never had any problems” paying women for sex, and that he “did not get a kick” out of hurting women. He did admit, once the DNA test irrevocably linked him to the victim, that he had had sex with her, but insisted that she was a “hooker,” that he had paid her a hundred dollars, and that when he left her she was in fine shape, although very drunk. They showed him pictures of her battered face, taken the day she was found.

“I did not hurt that girl,” Jones said, pushing the photos away, his voice rising to a whine. “I’m not violent.… I never hit a fucking woman in my whole fucking life! I’m not going to hurt her.”

Brennan asked him why a man would roll his suitcase out to the parking lot and stash it in his car at five in the morning, two days before he checked out of the hotel.

“I couldn’t remember if we were leaving that day or the next day. I wasn’t sure.… For some reason, I thought, Fuck it, it’s time to go.”

Brennan was able to trip Jones up with only one small thing. Jones said that his suitcase had only his clothes, shoes, and a video game in it, but when the detective noted the extra tug Jones had needed to get it off the elevator, Jones suddenly remembered that he had had a number of large books in it as well. He said he was an avid reader.

When Brennan asked him to name some of the books he had read, Jones could not. He could not name a single title.

But Jones was unfailingly compliant, and his manner worked for him. Even with the DNA, the case against him was weak. He had ample reason for not having volunteered initially that he had paid a woman for sex—he had a prior arrest for soliciting a prostitute—so that wouldn’t count against him, and if he had had sex with the victim, as he said, it would account for the DNA. The fact that Jones had willingly provided the sample spoke in his favor. In court, it would come down to his word against the young woman’s, and she was a terrible witness. She had picked Jones out of a photo lineup, but given how foggy her memory of the night was, and the fact that she had seen Jones before, unlike the other faces she was shown, it was hardly convincing evidence of his guilt. Her initial accounts of the crime were so much at odds with Brennan’s findings that even Foote found himself wondering who was telling the truth.

[#image: /photos/54cbfd145e7a91c5282340dd]|||Watch exclusive behind-the-crime-scenes video from the case.|||

Miami prosecutors ended up settling with Jones, who, after being returned to Miami, pleaded guilty to sexual assault in return for having all of the more severe charges against him dropped. He was sentenced to two years in prison, an outcome that Brennan would have found very disappointing if that had been the end of the story. It was not.

Three More Hits

Brennan never doubted that Jones was a rapist, and given what he had observed, first on the surveillance video and then after meeting him in person, he was convinced that sexual assault was Jones’s pastime.

“This ain’t a one-fucking-time deal,” Brennan told Foote. “I’m telling you, this is this guy’s thing. He’s got a job that sends him all over the country. Watch him on that video. He’s slick. Nonchalant. He’s too cool, too calm. You’ll see it when you put his DNA into the system.”

The “system” is the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The F.B.I.-administered database now has well over eight million DNA offender profiles. Local, state, and federal law-enforcement officials routinely enter DNA samples recovered from convicts and from the scenes and victims of unsolved crimes, and over the years the system has electronically matched more than 100,000 of them, often reaching across surprising distances in place and time. It means that when a DNA sample exists a case can never be classified as entirely “cold.”

Michael Lee Jones had left a trail. The Miami-Dade police entered Jones’s DNA into CODIS in late 2006, and several months later, which is how long it takes the F.B.I. to double-check matches the system finds electronically, three new hits came up.

Detective Terry Thrumston, of the Colorado Springs Police Department sex-crimes unit, had a rape-and-assault case that had been bugging her for more than a year. The victim was a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who had been picked up early in the morning on December 1, 2005, by a stranger—a very large black man with glasses, who had offered her a ride and then talked his way into her apartment and raped her, holding his hand tightly over her mouth. Thrumston had no leads, and the case had sat for two years until DNA collected from the victim matched that of Michael Lee Jones.

There were two victims in New Orleans. One of them, also a blonde, had been partying in the French Quarter a little too hard, by her own admission, and very early on the morning of May 5, 2003, she had gone looking for a cab back to her hotel when a very large black man with glasses pulled his car over to the curb and offered her a ride. As she later testified, he drove her to a weedy lot and raped her. He pressed his large hand powerfully over her face as he attacked her, and she testified that she bit his palm so hard that she had bits of his skin in her teeth afterward. When he was finished, he drove off, leaving her on the lot. She reported the rape to the New Orleans police, who filed her account and took DNA samples from the rapist’s semen. The case had sat until CODIS matched the specimen with Michael Lee Jones. The other New Orleans victim told a similar tale, but failed to pick Jones’s face out of a photo lineup.

Jones, it turns out, had been in both Colorado Springs and New Orleans on the dates in question. So in 2008, as his Florida sentence drew to a close, he was flown to Colorado Springs to stand trial. It was a novel prosecution, because the Colorado woman had died in the interim, of causes unrelated to the crime. As a result, Deputy District Attorney Brien Cecil had no victim to put on the stand. Instead he fashioned a case out of two of the other rapes, calling as witnesses the Miami victim and one of the New Orleans victims, both of whom supplemented the DNA evidence by pointing out Jones as their attacker in the courtroom. Cecil argued that their cases showed a “common plan, scheme, or design” that was as much Jones’s signature as his trail of semen.

The New Orleans victim proved to be a very effective witness. Her memory was clear and her statements emphatic, the outrage still evident six years later, along with her chagrin at the poor judgment she had displayed that night. The Miami victim, on the other hand, was every bit as bad on the stand as the Miami prosecutors had feared. One of Jones’s lawyers made much of the different stories she had told police. Her struggles with English further confused matters.

Jones pleaded not guilty to all charges in the Colorado case. He argued through his lawyers (he did not testify) that the sex had been consensual, and that the woman claiming rape had been a prostitute. But where jurors in Colorado might have been able to accept two prostitutes in different states at different times unaccountably filing rape charges after turning a trick, and in both cases immediately describing their attacker as a huge black man with glasses, they clearly choked on a third. There was no evidence that any of the victims were prostitutes. And then, of course, there was the DNA.

Michael Lee Jones is serving what amounts to a life sentence at the Fremont Correctional Facility, in Colorado. He received a term of 24 years to life for one count of sexual assault with force, and 12 years to life for the second count, of felonious sexual contact. He is 38 years old and will not be eligible for his first parole hearing until 2032. The state estimates his term will last until he dies.

His Miami victim won a $300,000 settlement from the hotel and the hotel’s security company.

Ken Brennan is back doing his private-detective work in Miami. He is enormously proud of the efforts that have locked Jones away. “The cases they got him on, they’re just the tip of the iceberg,” he predicted. “Once other jurisdictions start checking their DNA files on cases when this guy was at large, I guarantee you they will find more.”

So far his hunches have been pretty good.

From: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/12/vanishing-blonde-201012 Saved: January 2021

What It Felt Like When “Cat Person” Went Viral

✾ newyorker.com✾ Thursday 10 January 2019✾ Kristen Roupenian✾ 12 minute read✾

For a few hours after “Cat Person” went viral, I got to live the dream and the nightmare of knowing exactly what people thought when they read what I’d written. Illustration Hanna Barczyk

In the fall of 2017, I was finishing up lunch at a Noodles & Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when I saw that I’d missed a call from a 212 area code. I thought, I bet my story just got into The New Yorker. This was an unusual assumption for me to make, given that, at that point, I’d had a single story accepted in a print literary magazine; the rest of my published work was available only in online genre venues, like Body Parts Magazine and Weird Fiction Review. The story I’d submitted to The New Yorker had already been rejected, politely, by every other publication I’d sent it to, but, a few weeks earlier, my agent had received an e-mail from Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker’s fiction editor, which read, in its entirety:

Hi Jenni,

I just want to apologize for holding onto this one for so long. It’s an intriguing piece and I have it circulating here now, so should be able to get back to you in the next week or two.

Sorry to keep you waiting,

Deborah

If you are not in the habit of submitting short stories to literary magazines, this might not seem like such a big deal to you, but, when I learned that the fiction editor of The New Yorker knew my name, I was so thrilled that I forwarded the e-mail to my mother.

Against all odds, my prediction was correct. On my voice mail was a message from my agent—at that point, we’d had so few reasons to talk to each other that I hadn’t yet entered her number into my phone. All I remember from the rest of that afternoon was sitting under an oak tree in a University of Michigan quad, trying to wrap my brain around what had happened and what it would mean and thinking, This is it. This is the happiest I will ever be.

On Monday, December 4^th, my story “Cat Person” came out in the magazine and online. I posted the link on my Facebook page, at which point nearly everyone I’d ever met either liked it or sent me a message saying “CONGRATULATIONS,” and I responded “THANK YOU!!!” Then a bunch of my friends took me out for drinks at a local cocktail bar and, after that, it was pretty much over.

Except that it wasn’t. Three days later, I was sitting in a coffee shop with my girlfriend, Callie, trying to write, when she looked up from her computer and said, “There’s something going on with your story.” Callie is also a writer, and she used to work in publishing, so she was much more connected to the literary Internet than I was. She seemed slightly unnerved. “It’s just Twitter,” I said, with the smug dismissiveness of a thirtysomething late millennial who had tweeted a grand total of twelve times in her life. Callie tried to explain what was happening; I failed to understand. Then I went home, fired up Twitter, and saw that I had a bunch of notifications from strangers. I was reading through them when my mom called about something unrelated. I tried to explain to her what was happening, and then she went online herself and, at some point, she said, “Oh, my God, Kristen, someone Barack Obama follows just retweeted your story.” Then she burst into tears.

In brief, “Cat Person” is a story about two characters—Margot, a twenty-year-old college student, and Robert, a man in his mid-thirties—who go on a single bad date. The story is told in the close third person, and much of it is spent describing Margot’s thought process as she realizes that she does not want to have sex with Robert but then decides, for a variety of reasons, to go through with it anyway. When the story appeared online, young women began sharing it among themselves; they said it captured something that they had also experienced: the sense that there is a point at which it is “too late” to say no to a sexual encounter. They also talked, more broadly, about the phenomenon of unwanted sex that came about not through the use of physical force but because of a poisoned cocktail of emotions and cultural expectations—embarrassment, pride, self-consciousness, and fear. What had started as a conversation among women was then taken up and folded into a much larger debate that played out, for the most part, between men and women, its flames fanned by the Internet controversy machine. Was what happened between Robert and Margot an issue of consent, or no? Was Robert a villain for not picking up on Margot’s discomfort, or was Margot at fault for not telling Robert what she was feeling? The lines hardened, think pieces proliferated, and disagreements were amplified to the point of absurdity, until the story threatened to become the blue-dress/white-dress moment of the #MeToo era. Men read “Cat Person” this way! Women read “Cat Person” that way! Why can’t we all just get along?

I may have oversimplified this version of events. There are a lot of essays and articles out there that summarize the response to the story much more objectively than I ever could. When I started writing this, my goal was to do something different, to tell the story from the epicenter, to answer a question that I still get asked fairly often: “What was it like to have your story go viral?” But that is turning out to be surprisingly hard.

The truth is that my memory of that period is largely fragmentary, displaced in time and space. I remember that that weekend was very, very cold; my dog had a U.T.I., so I had to keep going outdoors even as the rain froze into snow. I remember logging out of Twitter and then sneaking back onto it from my phone. I remember my friends, on a group chat, sending me a screenshot of someone on Twitter saying, “I cannot IMAGINE her group texts rn”—the social-media snake eating its own tail. I remember Callie hugging me as I cried. I remember the e-mails coming and coming—first, fan letters from people who’d discovered my story and liked it, then anti-fan letters, from people who’d discovered my story and didn’t. I received many in-depth descriptions, from men, of sexual encounters they’d had, because they thought I’d “just like to know.” I got e-mails from people I hadn’t talked to in years who wondered if I’d noticed that my story had gone viral. And, as the days went on, I got e-mails requesting interviews from outlets all over the globe: the U.S., Canada, England, Australia. Everyone wanted me to come on the air and talk about my story. Emphasis on my.

Because that was another thing about the story’s second life as an Internet Sensation: its status as fiction had largely got lost. In a way, I still feel that this is something to be proud of: the story’s realism, and Margot’s perspective in particular, were things I had worked very hard to perfect. I’d wanted people to be able to see themselves in the story, to identify with it in such a way that its narrative scaffolding would disappear. But, perhaps inevitably, as the story was shared again and again, moving it further and further from its original context, people began conflating me, the author, with the main character. Sometimes this was blunt (“What, The New Yorker is just publishing diary entries now?”) and other times it was subtler: the assumption was that I’d be happy to go on the radio and explain why young women in 2018 were still struggling to achieve satisfying sex lives—in other words, the assumption was that my own position and history would be identical to Margot’s. I was thirty-six years old and a few months into my first serious relationship with a woman, and now everyone wanted me to explain why twenty-year-old girls were having bad sex with men. I felt intensely protective of Margot, and of the readers who identified with her, and, at the same time, I felt like an impostor. I felt as though if I were truthful about who I was, I would let everyone down.

So what was it like to have a story go viral? For a few hours, before I came to my senses and shut down my computer, I got to live the dream and the nightmare of knowing exactly what people thought when they read what I’d written, as well as what they thought about me. A torrent of unvarnished, unpolished opinion was delivered directly to my eyes and my brain. That thousands—and, eventually, millions—of readers had liked the story, identified with it, been affected by it, exhorted others to read it, didn’t make this any easier to take. The story was not autobiographical, but it was, nonetheless, personal—everything I write is personal—and here were all these strangers dissecting it, dismissing it, judging it, fighting about it, joking about it, and moving on.

I want people to read my stories—of course I do. That’s why I write them. But knowing, in that immediate and unmediated way, what people thought about my writing felt . . . the word I keep reaching for, even though it seems melodramatic, is annihilating. To be faced with all those people thinking and talking about me was like standing alone, at the center of a stadium, while thousands of people screamed at me at the top of their lungs. Not for me, at me. I guess some people might find this exhilarating. I did not.

For people with low-level social anxiety, a common piece of conventional wisdom is that you should stop worrying so much about what other people think, because no one is actually thinking about you. In fact, this isn’t true, even if you haven’t had a story go viral. Almost everyone we encounter thinks about us. Bad hair, they think, as they pass us on the street. Annoying voice. Nice legs. Gummy smile. Stained shirt. She looks like my third-grade teacher. Why is she taking so long to order her coffee? I hate her stupid face. The problem is not that other people think about us but that their thoughts are so flattening, so reductive in comparison to our own complicated view of ourselves. Here I am, having this irreducible and mysterious set of human experiences, and all you think when you encounter me is, Her hair is weird. Many horror stories revolve around this theme: if we could eavesdrop on all the quick, dismissive thoughts that other people were having about us, we would go insane. We are simply not meant to see ourselves as others see us.

Here’s the catch: when you read a story I’ve written, you’re not thinking about me—you’re thinking as me. I’ve wormed my way inside your head (hi!) and briefly taken over your mind. You’re forced to reckon with my full complexity—or, at least, whatever fraction of that complexity I’ve managed to get down on the page. When the story is over—or if you put it down midway—you’re free to think whatever you want. You can think, Dumb, or Boring, or Great, or, She looks like a bitch in her author photo, or, What the fuck did I just read? But I don’t need to be there to absorb your reaction. In fact, I shouldn’t be. My role in the process is over. The interpretation, the criticism, the analysis telling you that you’re right or that you’re wrong or that you’re an asshole—that’s someone else’s job. I can’t, and won’t, take part.

After “Cat Person” went viral, I sold my first book, a story collection. It’s coming out this month. I’m hoping that the number of monsters and murderers in its pages will put at least some of the autobiographical questions to rest. But, more than that, I want people to read it. I hope they like it. And, at the same time, I don’t want to know what they think about it. I’m sure that sometime, late at night, I’ll go on Twitter and search for my name and try to figure out what people are saying—or not saying—about me and my book. I’ll do this because I’m human, and I’m curious, and I’m anxious, and because it’s possible to want things that are bad for us—but I’ll also do my best to resist. Another piece of conventional wisdom is that what other people think about us is none of our business. And, as it turns out, with that I agree.

From: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-it-felt-like-when-cat-person-went-viral Saved: March 2021

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

✾ nytimes.com✾ Tuesday 18 December 2018✾ Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, and Michael LaForgia✾ 22 minute read✾

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, at a Senate hearing in April. Internal Facebook records describe data-sharing deals that benefited more than 150 companies.Credit...Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users—control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

Facebook has been reeling from a series of privacy scandals, set off by revelations in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly used Facebook data to build tools that aided President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Acknowledging that it had breached users’ trust, Facebook insisted that it had instituted stricter privacy protections long ago. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, assured lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

[Facebook’s strategy in times of crisis: delay, deny and deflect.]

But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections. They also raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission.

In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies—most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations. Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.

[Here are five takeaways from The Times’s investigation.]

In an interview, Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy, said none of the partnerships violated users’ privacy or the F.T.C. agreement. Contracts required the companies to abide by Facebook policies, he added.

Still, Facebook executives have acknowledged missteps over the past year. “We know we’ve got work to do to regain people’s trust,” Mr. Satterfield said. “Protecting people’s information requires stronger teams, better technology and clearer policies, and that’s where we’ve been focused for most of 2018.” He said that the partnerships were “one area of focus” and that Facebook was in the process of winding many of them down.

Facebook has found no evidence of abuse by its partners, a spokeswoman said. Some of the largest partners, including Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo, said they had used the data appropriately, but declined to discuss the sharing deals in detail. Facebook did say that it had mismanaged some of its partnerships, allowing certain companies’ access to continue long after they had shut down the features that required the data.

With most of the partnerships, Mr. Satterfield said, the F.T.C. agreement did not require the social network to secure users’ consent before sharing data because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself—service providers that allowed users to interact with their Facebook friends. The partners were prohibited from using the personal information for other purposes, he said. “Facebook’s partners don’t get to ignore people’s privacy settings.”

[Facebook disclosed to Congress that it failed to police how device makers handled its users’ data.]

Data privacy experts disputed Facebook’s assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements, expressing skepticism that businesses as varied as device makers, retailers and search companies would be viewed alike by the agency. “The only common theme is that they are partnerships that would benefit the company in terms of development or growth into an area that they otherwise could not get access to,” said Ashkan Soltani, former chief technologist at the F.T.C.

Mr. Soltani and three former employees of the F.T.C.’s consumer protection division, which brought the case that led to the consent decree, said in interviews that its data-sharing deals had probably violated the agreement.

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

Details of the agreements are emerging at a pivotal moment for the world’s largest social network. Facebook has been hammered with questions about its data sharing from lawmakers and regulators in the United States and Europe. The F.T.C. this spring opened a new inquiry into Facebook’s compliance with the consent order, while the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are also investigating the company.

Facebook’s stock price has fallen, and a group of shareholders has called for Mr. Zuckerberg to step aside as chairman. Shareholders also have filed a lawsuit alleging that executives failed to impose effective privacy safeguards. Angry users started a #DeleteFacebook movement.

This month, a British parliamentary committee investigating internet disinformation released internal Facebook emails, seized from the plaintiff in another lawsuit against Facebook. The messages disclosed some partnerships and depicted a company preoccupied with growth, whose leaders sought to undermine competitors and briefly considered selling access to user data.

Richard Allan, a Facebook vice president, testifying before Parliament last month next to Mr. Zuckerberg’s vacant seat. The company is under fire from both American and European lawmakers.Credit...Agence France-Presse—Getty Images

As Facebook has battled one crisis after another, the company’s critics, including some former advisers and employees, have singled out the data-sharing as cause for concern.

“I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user,” said Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook. “No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”

An Engine for Growth

Personal data is the oil of the 21^st century, a resource worth billions to those who can most effectively extract and refine it. American companies alone are expected to spend close to $20 billion by the end of 2018 to acquire and process consumer data, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Few companies have better data than Facebook and its rival, Google, whose popular products give them an intimate view into the daily lives of billions of people—and allow them to dominate the digital advertising market.

Facebook has never sold its user data, fearful of user backlash and wary of handing would-be competitors a way to duplicate its most prized asset. Instead, internal documents show, it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.

Facebook began forming data partnerships when it was still a relatively young company. Mr. Zuckerberg was determined to weave Facebook’s services into other sites and platforms, believing it would stave off obsolescence and insulate Facebook from competition. Every corporate partner that integrated Facebook data into its online products helped drive the platform’s expansion, bringing in new users, spurring them to spend more time on Facebook and driving up advertising revenue. At the same time, Facebook got critical data back from its partners.

The partnerships were so important that decisions about forming them were vetted at high levels, sometimes by Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, Facebook officials said. While many of the partnerships were announced publicly, the details of the sharing arrangements typically were confidential.

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s second-in-command, at a Senate hearing in September. The data-sharing deals were vetted at senior levels, sometimes by her and Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook officials said.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images

By 2013, Facebook had entered into more such partnerships than its midlevel employees could easily track, according to interviews with two former employees. (Like the more than 30 other former employees interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements or still maintained relationships with top Facebook officials.)

So they built a tool that did the technical work of turning special access on and off and also kept records on what are known internally as “capabilities”—the special privileges enabling companies to obtain data, in some cases without asking permission.

The Times reviewed more than 270 pages of reports generated by the system—records that reflect just a portion of Facebook’s wide-ranging deals. Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.”

The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.

Facebook, in turn, used contact lists from the partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei—which has been flagged as a security threat by American intelligence officials—to gain deeper insight into people’s relationships and suggest more connections, the records show.

Some of the access deals described in the documents were limited to sharing non-identifying information with research firms or enabling game makers to accommodate huge numbers of players. These raised no privacy concerns. But agreements with about a dozen companies did. Some enabled partners to see users’ contact information through their friends—even after the social network, responding to complaints, said in 2014 that it was stripping all applications of that power.

As of 2017, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon and others could obtain users’ email addresses through their friends.

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

One of Facebook’s device partners was Huawei, a Chinese company flagged as a security threat by United States intelligence.Credit...Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images

Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread—privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show. Facebook acknowledged that it did not consider any of those three companies to be service providers. Spokespeople for Spotify and Netflix said those companies were unaware of the broad powers Facebook had granted them. A spokesman for Netflix said Wednesday that it had used the access only to enable customers to recommend TV shows and movies to their friends.

“Beyond these recommendations, we never accessed anyone’s personal messages and would never do that,” he said.

A Royal Bank of Canada spokesman disputed that the bank had had any such access. (Aspects of some sharing partnerships, including those with the Royal Bank of Canada and Bing, were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.)

Spotify, which could view messages of more than 70 million users a month, still offers the option to share music through Facebook Messenger. But Netflix and the Canadian bank no longer needed access to messages because they had deactivated features that incorporated it.

These were not the only companies that had special access longer than they needed it. Yahoo, The Times and others could still get Facebook users’ personal information in 2017.

Yahoo could view real-time feeds of friends’ posts for a feature that the company had ended in 2012. A Yahoo spokesman declined to discuss the partnership in detail but said the company did not use the information for advertising. The Times—one of nine media companies named in the documents—had access to users’ friend lists for an article-sharing application it had discontinued in 2011. A spokeswoman for the news organization said it was not obtaining any data.

Facebook’s internal records also revealed more about the extent of sharing deals with over 60 makers of smartphones, tablets and other devices, agreements first reported by The Times in June.

Facebook empowered Apple to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were asking for data. Apple devices also had access to the contact numbers and calendar entries of people who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing, the records show.

Apple officials said they were not aware that Facebook had granted its devices any special access. They added that any shared data remained on the devices and was not available to anyone other than the users.

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Facebook enabled Apple devices to conceal that they were asking for data, making it impossible for users to disable sharing.Credit...Alisa Yuldybaeva/EPA, via Shutterstock

Facebook officials said the company had disclosed its sharing deals in its privacy policy since 2010. But the language in the policy about its service providers does not specify what data Facebook shares, and with which companies. Mr. Satterfield, Facebook’s privacy director, also said its partners were subject to “rigorous controls.”

Yet Facebook has an imperfect track record of policing what outside companies do with its user data. In the Cambridge Analytica case, a Cambridge University psychology professor created an application in 2014 to harvest the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users for the consulting firm.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit privacy research group, said that Facebook would have little power over what happens to users’ information after sharing it broadly. “It travels,” Ms. Dixon said. “It could be customized. It could be fed into an algorithm and decisions could be made about you based on that data.”

400 Million Exposed

Unlike Europe, where social media companies have had to adapt to stricter regulation, the United States has no general consumer privacy law, leaving tech companies free to monetize most kinds of personal information as long as they don’t mislead their users. The F.T.C., which regulates trade, can bring enforcement actions against companies that deceive their customers.

Besides Facebook, the F.T.C. has consent agreements with Google and Twitter stemming from alleged privacy violations.

Facebook’s agreement with regulators is a result of the company’s early experiments with data sharing. In late 2009, it changed the privacy settings of the 400 million people then using the service, making some of their information accessible to all of the internet. Then it shared that information, including users’ locations and religious and political leanings, with Microsoft and other partners.

Facebook called this “instant personalization” and promoted it as a step toward a better internet, where other companies would use the information to customize what people saw on sites like Bing. But the feature drew complaints from privacy advocates and many Facebook users that the social network had shared the information without permission.

The F.T.C. investigated and in 2011 cited the privacy changes as a deceptive practice. Caught off guard, Facebook officials stopped mentioning instant personalization in public and entered into the consent agreement.

Under the decree, the social network introduced a “comprehensive privacy program” charged with reviewing new products and features. It was initially overseen by two chief privacy officers, their lofty title an apparent sign of Facebook’s commitment. The company also hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to assess its privacy practices every two years.

But the privacy program faced some internal resistance from the start, according to four former Facebook employees with direct knowledge of the company’s efforts. Some engineers and executives, they said, considered the privacy reviews an impediment to quick innovation and growth. And the core team responsible for coordinating the reviews—numbering about a dozen people by 2016—was moved around within Facebook’s sprawling organization, sending mixed signals about how seriously the company took it, the ex-employees said.

Critically, many of Facebook’s special sharing partnerships were not subject to extensive privacy program reviews, two of the former employees said. Executives believed that because the partnerships were governed by business contracts requiring them to follow Facebook data policies, they did not require the same level of scrutiny. The privacy team had limited ability to review or suggest changes to some of those data-sharing agreements, which had been negotiated by more senior officials at the company.

Facebook officials said that members of the privacy team had been consulted on the sharing agreements, but that the level of review “depended on the specific partnership and the time it was created.”

In 2014, Facebook ended instant personalization and walled off access to friends’ information. But in a previously unreported agreement, the social network’s engineers continued allowing Bing; Pandora, the music streaming service; and Rotten Tomatoes, the movie and television review site, access to much of the data they had gotten for the discontinued feature. Bing had access to the information through last year, the records show, and the two other companies did as of late summer, according to tests by The Times.

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Facebook continued the access for Pandora, the music-streaming service, and other companies even after an F.T.C. agreement led to an official change in policy.Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Facebook officials said the data sharing did not violate users’ privacy because it allowed access only to public data—though that included data that the social network had made public in 2009. They added that the social network made a mistake in allowing the access to continue for the three companies, but declined to elaborate. Spokeswomen for Pandora and Rotten Tomatoes said the businesses were not aware of any special access.

Facebook also declined to discuss the other capabilities Bing was given, including the ability to see all users’ friends.

Microsoft officials said that Bing was using the data to build profiles of Facebook users on Microsoft servers. They declined to provide details, other than to say the information was used in “feature development” and not for advertising. Microsoft has since deleted the data, the officials said.

Compliance Questions

For some advocates, the torrent of user data flowing out of Facebook has called into question not only Facebook’s compliance with the F.T.C. agreement, but also the agency’s approach to privacy regulation.

“There has been an endless barrage of how Facebook has ignored users’ privacy settings, and we truly believed that in 2011 we had solved this problem,” said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an online privacy group that filed one of the first complaints about Facebook with federal regulators. “We brought Facebook under the regulatory authority of the F.T.C. after a tremendous amount of work. The F.T.C. has failed to act.”

According to Facebook, most of its data partnerships fall under an exemption to the F.T.C. agreement. The company argues that the partner companies are service providers—companies that use the data only “for and at the direction of” Facebook and function as an extension of the social network.

But Mr. Vladeck and other former F.T.C. officials said that Facebook was interpreting the exemption too broadly. They said the provision was intended to allow Facebook to perform the same everyday functions as other companies, such as sending and receiving information over the internet or processing credit card transactions, without violating the consent decree.

When The Times reported last summer on the partnerships with device makers, Facebook used the term “integration partners” to describe BlackBerry, Huawei and other manufacturers that pulled Facebook data to provide social-media-style features on smartphones. All such integration partners, Facebook asserted, were covered by the service provider exemption.

Since then, as the social network has disclosed its data sharing deals with other kinds of businesses—including internet companies such as Yahoo—Facebook has labeled them integration partners, too.

Facebook even recategorized one company, the Russian search giant Yandex, as an integration partner.

Facebook records show Yandex had access in 2017 to Facebook’s unique user IDs even after the social network stopped sharing them with other applications, citing privacy risks. A spokeswoman for Yandex, which was accused last year by Ukraine’s security service of funneling its user data to the Kremlin, said the company was unaware of the access and did not know why Facebook had allowed it to continue. She added that the Ukrainian allegations “have no merit.”

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

The Russian company Yandex, which has been accused of funneling information to the Kremlin, had access to Facebook data as recently as last year.Credit...Mikhail Metzel/TASS, via Getty Images

In October, Facebook said Yandex was not an integration partner. But in early December, as The Times was preparing to publish this article, Facebook told congressional lawmakers that it was.

An F.T.C. spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the commission agreed with Facebook’s interpretation of the service provider exception, which is likely to figure in the F.T.C.’s ongoing Facebook investigation. She also declined to say whether the commission had ever received a complete list of partners that Facebook considered service providers.

But federal regulators had reason to know about the partnerships—and to question whether Facebook was adequately safeguarding users’ privacy. According to a letter that Facebook sent this fall to Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, PricewaterhouseCoopers reviewed at least some of Facebook’s data partnerships.

The first assessment, sent to the F.T.C. in 2013, found only “limited” evidence that Facebook had monitored those partners’ use of data. The finding was redacted from a public copy of the assessment, which gave Facebook’s privacy program a passing grade over all.

Mr. Wyden and other critics have questioned whether the assessments—in which the F.T.C. essentially outsources much of its day-to-day oversight to companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers—are effective. As with other businesses under consent agreements with the F.T.C., Facebook pays for and largely dictated the scope of its assessments, which are limited mostly to documenting that Facebook has conducted the internal privacy reviews it claims it had.

How closely Facebook monitored its data partners is uncertain. Most of Facebook’s partners declined to discuss what kind of reviews or audits Facebook subjected them to. Two former Facebook partners, whose deals with the social network dated to 2010, said they could find no evidence that Facebook had ever audited them. One was BlackBerry. The other was Yandex.

No image provided by Pocket, sorry 😿

Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy, said the sharing deals did not violate privacy rules because the partners functioned as extensions of the social network.Credit...Isopix/REX/Shutterstock

Facebook officials said that while the social network audited partners only rarely, it managed them closely.

“These were high-touch relationships,” Mr. Satterfield said.

© 2022 The New York Times Company.

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From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html Saved: December 2018

The End of Open-Plan Everything

✾ theatlantic.com✾ Monday 27 July 2020✾ Amanda Mull✾ 14 minute read✾

Last fall, True Manufacturing completed a project long in the making. The company, which specializes in commercial refrigeration systems, had decided to abandon the neutral cubicles that had encased customer-service workers at its Missouri headquarters, opting instead for a redesign that featured the clustered, partitionless seating now ubiquitous in modern offices. A few months later, as the coronavirus forced Americans to learn the details of social distancing and respiratory droplets, the company got to work on another initiative, this one executed with considerably more haste: redividing its workers into cubicles with clear plexiglass partitions.

“Oh my gosh, talk about taking 10 steps back,” Steven Proctor, True Manufacturing’s director of sales and marketing, told me. “We just did the big open-office concept; we put everybody in desk shares that were right on top of each other.” The company’s office and the problems it suddenly presented might have been brand new, but the concerns of Proctor and his co-workers were far from unique. This spring, millions of Americans trying to limit their interactions with colleagues or working from home alongside roommates or family members were forced to look around and wonder where all the walls had gone. On a hunch, True didn’t stop at just its own partitions—the company ordered more plexiglass, settled on some standard sizes, and contacted the local chamber of commerce to offer itself up for custom jobs, sure that lots of other businesses would find themselves in the same bind. Orders began coming in almost immediately.

Over the past few decades, the formerly subdivided interior spaces of work and home got a lot more open. Private offices gave way to cost-effective cubicles, and once California tech companies became the influential employers of a new generation, their open plans were the beginning of the end of private workspaces—even the humble cubicle. At home, a cavalcade of HGTV house flippers and luxury renovators instructed viewers to tear down those walls in pursuit of an open-concept living space. Open plans were so tantalizing to some people that they spawned their own celebrities: Chip and Joanna Gaines, a pair of evangelical Texas parents, became huge stars, complete with their own product lines, shops, and restaurants, by demolishing seemingly every interior wall in Waco.

But this spring, walls both partial and permanent got the advocate they needed: the pandemic.

In the past few months, the lives that unfolded in the airy, impersonal spaces of the Before Times have changed. Collaboration and togetherness have become disease vectors, to say nothing of open floor plans’ less deadly problems, such as the impossibility of two Zoom calls happening without a wall between them. Once sold as chic and modern, the wholesale abandonment of defined spaces feels at times even more ill-considered than it did when the biggest issue was listening to your co-workers yak on the phone. As early as March, designers, manufacturers, and architects started building plans and products for what they guessed might be a precipitous change in daily life. They were right. Personal space is finally back in style, but re-creating it after two decades of its destruction is hardly a straightforward task. We have to decide what we want from walls in the first place. The threat of illness and extended home quarantine took floor plans out of the realm of philosophy and reminded all involved of the necessary functional reason humans have been building walls for millennia: to keep other people away from them.

The march toward open-plan everything came in fits and starts. In the early 1900s, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie” style helped give open plans a visual vernacular, and as the century progressed, walls began to fall away as domestic help became less affordable. If middle-class mothers couldn’t sequester the cook in the kitchen while they tended to the kids, then the hidden kitchen would no longer do. “Then, as now, [open plans] promised to tear down obstruction and facilitate connection,” my colleague Ian Bogost wrote in a 2018 history of the style. “The mother, relegated to the kitchen, needed to have a view of where the children were playing in the yard. This key principle would evolve to justify open plans more generally, but with a mother’s view of the safe confines of the indoors more in mind.” HGTV, which features lots of wall removal because demolition makes for great TV, isn’t selling just a theory of design—it’s selling the persistent myth that if women buy the right things, they really can have it all.

The office’s embrace of fully open plans was faster. Many offices were first partially opened for mid-century secretarial pools, but the design’s wide adoption for office workers of all kinds began in the early 2000s, with the ascendance of Silicon Valley tech companies such as Google and Apple and their futuristic, super-casual workplaces. They influence the American workplace today in much the same way that companies such as General Motors and General Electric did in the previous century.

Randy Howder, a co-managing director of the San Francisco office for the design and architecture firm Gensler, thinks that open plans can be very effective when they’re well designed by architects who understand a particular workplace’s culture and needs, though he admits that’s not the only reason they’ve proliferated. “The angel on my left shoulder says they’re popular because there was a lot of belief in the fact that an open office engendered greater collaboration and more lateral awareness of what other colleagues are doing,” he said. “The devil on my right shoulder says it was sometimes cheaper and more cost-effective and faster to build” an open-plan office, which resulted in squished-together desks and no privacy in workplaces where people need quiet and focus. And that belief that open offices would foster teamwork? The opposite now appears to be true.

So America found itself with few barriers to prevent “connection”—or to catch sneezes—at the beginning of 2020. By then, the limitations of open plans had already become clear both at work and at home: The noisiness of high-ceilinged, hardwood-floored, densely populated offices had helped spur the rapid adoption of Apple AirPods. Dishwashers now come with decibel ratings to ensure that the occupants of America’s “great rooms” can hear The Masked Singer over dinner cleanup. In its 2019 workplace survey, Gensler found that 65 percent of respondents wanted at least semiprivate workspaces; another quarter wanted on-demand access to private spaces. At home, the American Institute of Architects’ annual survey of residential architects found double-digit declines in interest in open layouts compared with the previous year in both 2019 and 2020.

Despite this changing tide of opinion, the return of walls had not been widely predicted. Walls, or even new office partitions or desk dividers, are expensive and bulky. Workspaces that had been built to function without them can’t be easily expanded to accommodate them, and people who had spent thousands of dollars and months of their life knocking down too many parts of their house in the past decade might be loath to spend even more time and money to have individual rooms once again.

Still, in one way or another, walls have started to creep back into the places whence they had been banished. You might have already seen some of True Manufacturing’s work without realizing it—the company has filled orders for plexiglass dividers for the food-service and hospitality clients it serves through its refrigeration business, but also for banks, school systems, police departments, care homes, and the NBC Sports broadcast of a recent Mecum automotive auction, for which True customized the clear partitions with the network’s logo. Partitions and dividers have been in such demand nationwide that supplies of the materials most often used to make them, like plexiglass, have begun to run low.

For companies that make products for spaces that have suddenly fallen into disuse—restaurants, hotels, offices—pivoting to partitions has also helped them continue to cut paychecks to engineers, designers, manufacturers, and salespeople. Stylex, an office-furniture company based in New Jersey, began planning for the return of walls on a hunch in late March. “I started to think, somewhat out of desperation, what could we do that people are actually going to need toward the end of this year and into next year?” Bruce Golden, Stylex’s co-CEO, told me. “They probably have enough chairs. They probably have enough desks.”

To answer that question, his company came up with a product called Quick Screens—tall, simple, fabric-covered partitions on casters. When the line launches next month, orders will ship in 10 days as opposed to Stylex’s typical six to eight weeks, the fastest the company has ever turned around a product. Golden said that although the new partitions have generated some interest, the coronavirus has disrupted more than just office setups. The commercial-furniture industry is still trying to adjust its sales techniques to the new normal. “Usually, the salespeople go out and they make calls—present the products, talk about the products person to person,” Golden told me. “The designers and the dealers do go onto our website, but making them aware of the products is not that easy. But the word will get out there.”

At Gensler, Howder is already planning for his clients’ return to work. “We see some interesting movement toward things that are neither an office nor an open environment,” he told me, emphasizing that the cube farm of the ’90s is not coming back. Instead, Howder is predicting the rise of what his firm calls the “officle.” It’s not exactly a private office, not exactly an open work area, not exactly a small conference room—but maybe it’s all those things. The image can be hard to conjure; it’s a small, partially open space where, at least theoretically, you don’t have to listen to your desk neighbors talk about their spouse for a couple of hours while you try to hit a deadline. These spaces would also help separate workers if they return to the office while the threat of coronavirus infection remains. Before more permanent changes can be made, Howder said, that means reorganizing open-plan common areas, sometimes with partitions such as those made by Stylex, which is one of Gensler’s suppliers. In the long term, that means—yes—walls.

In homes, things work more slowly. The budgets are personal instead of corporate. Offices can be altered with ease while employees clack away on laptops at their kitchen tables, but no one wants to live in a construction site and a pandemic simultaneously. Still, some residential architects have started to see signs of life. Jane Frederick, the president of the American Institute of Architects, says that although business is slower than normal at her Beaufort, South Carolina, residential-design firm, the phone has started to ring again. “We’re getting quite a few calls because I think people are pent up in their houses, and they’re going crazy,” Frederick told me. “But they’re very nervous to pull the trigger.” She wasn’t shocked to hear that people wanted to renovate after staring at their own walls for months on end. “If you moved into an existing space, you just made your life work around whatever rooms were there,” Frederick said. “You might have been using the dining room as an office, but it doesn’t really work now, because if someone is in the kitchen grinding coffee, you can hear it on your Zoom call.” Even amid a worsening pandemic in the state, the small firm has booked a handful of new projects.

Frederick told me that, at least in her practice, interest in open plans was never quite as extreme as the transformations frequently depicted on HGTV, a channel she said she doesn’t watch, because of the unrealistic expectations it engenders in novice renovators. But the past few years have seen a definite uptick in desire for more defined rooms—just not at the front of the house. “You used to have one room that was sort of your mudroom, laundry room, and pantry, and now those typically are three different rooms” in the home’s rear, Frederick told me. In new homes and high-end renovations, unsightly chores have gotten their own dedicated spaces, away from the presentation area of the open kitchen. Frederick expects demand for these kinds of spaces to continue to rise during and immediately after the pandemic, as people prize a separation between the “dirty” and “clean” areas of a home. The same search for separation (but without the cleanliness concern) has happened with the living room—more of Frederick’s clients have started to request spaces for yoga, reading, or meditation elsewhere in their home, seeking seclusion for activities that might have previously been done in the now-open area.

Although these choices are the province of the wealthy, the preferences of people with lots of choices often end up reflected in the homes of Americans with more modest means down the line. “Open kitchens” and their immense, marble-topped islands get shrunk down to budget sizes and remade in cheap materials, tucked into the corners of rental apartments and finished with a subway-tile backsplash. People without a dedicated mudroom buy shoe racks and wall hooks to dress up the area near their door as a “room” unto itself. It isn’t a wall, but during a pandemic, walls have started to seem pretty luxurious. To have walls, you need space.

Where space isn’t available, or when time is of the essence, both manufacturers that I spoke with expect the partition business to attract new customers and competitors for at least the next six months to a year, if not longer. And as the country has already learned this year with faulty masks and fake hand sanitizer, pandemic panic-buying can attract some unsavory operators and pose unforeseen risks to a desperate public—even cutting into a sheet of plexiglass and bolting it to a desk or counter isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. “That acrylic gets in your skin and cuts you, and I think you’d rather get cut with glass,” said Steve Alexander, True Manufacturing’s parts-marketing manager. Walls, in all their variations, aren’t created equally: Hastily purchased panels that haven’t been properly finished at the edges, that aren’t thick enough to stand rigidly, or whose bases are too narrow for their height could cause more problems than they solve, especially in sensitive environments such as hospitals or classrooms. “You can’t have these things fall on third or fourth graders if they go back to school,” Alexander noted. “That would be a big problem.”

From: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/walls-pandemic-open-plan/614590/ Tagged: office, open plan Saved: July 2020

Polyamory is Rational(ist)

✾ putanumonit.com✾ Wednesday 16 October 2019✾ 24 minute read✾

“The Rationalist community isn’t just a sex cult,” quoth Diana Fleischman in a new book about Rationalists, “they do other great things too!” When I read that I asked my friends if there are any cultish sex parties I’m not being invited to; they all assured me that they’re not having secret sect sex in my absence (except for Diana, who kept mum).

So, I assume that this trope mostly comes down to the high percentage of Rationalists who are polyamorous. I found out about this correlation soon after discovering Rationality (having already been in an open relationship), but I never paused to question it. When a journalist recently called to interview me about polyamory and rationality, it got me thinking: what actually explains the correspondence?

It is estimated that about 5% of Americans are CNM (consensually non-monogamous) although that number varies widely based on the survey sample and the exact definition of non-monogamy used. In contrast, 17% of Americans in the 2014 LessWrong survey said that they prefer polyamory. Perhaps more than 5% of non-Rationalist Americans would prefer open relationships if they could get them, but it’s unlikely that 17% do. Moreover, the survey indicates that polyamory increases with Rationality engagement both online and off: 19% of those who have posted on LessWrong prefer polyamory vs. 12% of those who haven’t, same for those who have and haven’t read at least half of The Sequences, and 26% of those who’ve attended a Rationalist meetup prefer polyamory vs. 11% of meetup virgins.

It’s not obvious there should be a correlation between a relationship style that originated in the hippie counterculture and a meta-philosophy that originated in questions of decision theory, cognitive biases, and artificial intelligence. There could be a founder effect: LessWrong creator Eliezer is open about being open. But he’s not that open: the word “polyamory” isn’t mentioned even once in The Sequences, while “polysyllabismic” occurs twice. If this entire community is a plot by Eliezer to get laid, he’s really throwing people off the scent with all the AI work.

The scolds tell us that “Polyamory is for rich, pretty people” but while Rationalists are good looking, they’re not richer than the average American. A bunch of nerds in a Berkeley group house are not the upper-class decadent playboys the author imagines.

I brainstormed six plausible theories to explain the connection between polyamory and Rationality, as alternatives to the hypothesis that Rationalists are simply indoctrinating their friends into non-monogamy. In a rare burst of scientific endeavor, I posted a survey to interrogate all seven hypotheses, and a couple of other variables as well. The survey has gathered 633 responses as of this writing thanks to my diligent readers and my friends who retweeted it. You can view the survey to see the original phrasing of the questions and contribute your data. You can also download the raw data yourself, come up with your own stories, and critique mine.

I’m not particularly attached to any of these theories, this is purely driven by curiosity, not advocacy. Most of these are beliefs and attitudes that should correlate separately with both Rationality and polyamory, at least in my personal experience. It is very hard to tease out causality from these relationships: each attitude can be a result of engaging with Rationality and polyamory, a preexisting cause that leads people to them, or a result of one and a cause of the other. Establishing a causal direction is beyond the power of a point-in-time survey, so whenever I mention causality below keep in mind that I’m just speculating.

Survey Analysis

The survey consists of multiple-choice questions, the majority of which encode a linear scale (even if the scale was not explicit). For example, the answers to the two questions regarding engagement with online Rationality and the Rationality community are treated as 4 point scales, and the two scores are added to create a 7-point scale for “combined engagement”.

Linear scales are easy to work with and most of my analysis is in the form of linear regressions and correlations. While this introduces some inaccuracies (e.g., the implicit assumption that the distance between 1–2 on the scale is the same as 2–3 and 3–4) some errors are unavoidable no matter how these things are measured and encoded. I erred on the side of making the answer options explicit so respondents wouldn’t have to guess what “3 out of 7 on the polyamory scale” means. I also erred on the side of making the survey short and accessible—this is all exploratory. I also preregistered the core of my analysis plan with 3 scientists and the aforementioned journalist, to help keep it free from bias.

The main variables I measured, which will be explained in detail below, are:

Engagement with Rationality, via two 4-point scales.
Preference for polyamory, with a single 4-point scale.
Questioning and overcoming intuition, two 4-point scales.
Agreement with evolutionary psychology, a 5-point scale.
Acceptance of weirdness, a 4-point scale.
Ethics, a question with 6 discrete categories 3 of which are used to encode a “Rationalist Ethics” scale.
Religiosity, a 4-point scale.
Utopianism, a poorly written question collapsed to a 3-point scale.
Attitude towards progressive politics, a 5-point scale.

Below is the correlation matrix of all the main variables, with the color representing the strength and direction of the correlation. We will dive into each in turn.

Respondents

Of the 633 respondents, 78% are straight men. I don’t break out any of the main analyses by gender and orientation, so keep in mind that if these confounders have a strong impact on the measured variables this impact may not be accounted for.

I posted the poll on Putanumonit, LessWrong, my own Twitter, and my Facebook. It was also retweeted and shared, most noticeably by former Putanumonit interviewees Aella and Geoffrey Miller—these all fall under “elsewhere”.

Respondents who came to the survey from different sources differ quite a bit in their engagement with Rationality and polyamory, although not so much on the other variables. The two charts below also show the relative number of respondents from each source.

And now, to the stories.

Story 1 – Overcoming Intuitions

A core tenet of Rationality is that what feels true is not necessarily what is true. What feels true may simply be what is pleasant, politically expedient, or what fits your biases and preconceptions. The willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong is a prerequisite for learning Rationality, and Rationality further cultivates that skill.

A key to polyamory is realizing that what feels bad is not necessarily a sign that something is bad. Seeing your partner kiss another lover can trigger feelings of jealousy and insecurity. But in the context of polyamory, it’s actually a positive sign: that they trust you and feel comfortable around you, and that they encourage you to express your love for other people too.

Failure to overcome your intuitions can happen in two places: failing to question them in the first place, and failing to believe that you can overcome your immediate reaction and in time dissolve the intuition itself. Many Rationality skeptics (including Daniel Kahnemann himself!) see biased thinking as inevitable and impossible to improve. Many polyamory skeptics don’t believe that jealousy and possessiveness can be overcome. To progress in Rationality or polyamorous relationships, you need the opposite attitude.

After fiddling with ggplot2 for several hours, the chart above is the most comprehensive way I came up with to illustrate the relationship between questioning intuition and both Rationality and polyamory. It may not be clear at first glance what’s going on, so let me explain what these charts represent.

There are 7 different levels of engagement with Rationality forming the X-axis, from left (unfamiliar) to right (engaged Rationalist). I used labels instead of the numbers 2–8 to clarify the meaning.
There are 4 relationship type preferences forming the Y-axis, from fully monogamous at the bottom to polyamorous on top.
The two axes form 7×4 = 28 combinations. The area of each square represents the number of respondents in that combination. For example, there were 44 people who scored ⁶⁄₈ on Rationality engagement (Rat-adjacent) and are monogamous, represented by the 5^th square from the left (since that scale goes 2–8) on the bottom row.
The color of each square represents mistrusting and overcoming one’s intuition, from bright red (trusting) to dark blue (overcoming).

Overall, there wasn’t much variance on the “overcoming intuition” scale, with most individuals (and all 28 group averages) falling in the 5–7 range of the 2–8 scale. Whatever variance there is strongly correlated with polyamory (p < 10^-4) and not correlated at all with Rationality. On the chart, you see the squares getting darker as we move up but not as we move left or right.

The latter result is very surprising to me. The ability to notice, dissect, and when necessary overcome my intuitions and gut reactions is an invaluable skill for me, and I credit a lot of that to my engagement with Rationality. Skeptics of Rationalist self-improvement like Scott Alexander say that to the extent that is ability is real, it is innate and not enhanced by engaging with Rationality. The two survey questions get at attitude more than skill, but it’s still evidence in favor of the skeptics.

Story 2 – Believing in Evolutionary Psychology

This is related to the first story, but I could imagine it has a standalone effect. Dissecting our emotions and intuitions requires understanding where they come from, and that understanding starts with our evolution. On the Rationality side, evolutionary psychology explains many of our cognitive biases, especially around social behavior and signaling.

Evolutionary psychology also offers insight into the emotion at the heart of relationship choices: jealousy. Men tend to be sexually jealous and control their partner’s sexual access, as a result of the immense cost in reproductive fitness borne by raising another man’s child by your mate. Women experience more jealousy around emotional investment and solicit signs of commitment from their partners, having been dependent on a man to provide them and their children with the resources necessary for survival.

Grasping the full implications of this did a lot to dispel jealousy’s hold on me. The first thing I noticed is that our ancestor’s reproductive fitness concerns are not very relevant in the 21^st century. Contraception and genetic testing make raising another man’s children a very remote possibility, and a pregnant or nursing woman is unlikely to starve these days just because a man is not there to provide for her. More importantly, there’s no particular reason for me to follow my evolved drives; if I adopted a child I would love and raise them even though it does little to propagate my genes.

Well, it appears that I’m alone on this one. Accepting evolutionary psychology does not correlate with Rationality and correlates negatively with polyamory.

The correlation is not very strong because there wasn’t a lot of variance in people’s attitudes about evolutionary psychology. 91% of the sample were at least Neutral on a 5-point scale of accepting that it does a good job explaining human behavior and emotions. Among monogamous people 69% agreed or strongly agreed, vs. 56% of poly folk.

I considered that evolutionary psychology is not popular in politically progressive circles because it rejects the blank slate doctrine, and progressive politics are correlated with polyamory. While both these things are confirmed in my data, progressive politics don’t fully explain away the negative relationship between evolutionary psychology and monogamy.

What does explain it? Since I predicted the opposite, I do not want to speculate.

As for Rationality, it correlates with neither evolutionary psychology, nor progressive politics, nor the two together (they could have offsetting correlations with Rationality, but seem to simply have none). This further frustrates my hypothesis, but it at least dispels the notion that Rationalists are a reactionary sex cult, a canard that is promoted on one particular subreddit.

Story 3 – Social Reality and Weirdness

In a story that I shared on Twitter, I told my coworker that when I’m in a rush and need a measured dose of caffeine I just chew on a handful of roasted espresso beans. The taste is not actually bad—if you like chocolate covered beans, you may not totally need the chocolate. I suggested to my coworker that she try it at least once, just to know what it tastes and feels like.

She adamantly refused, citing “that’s not how it’s consumed” and “it’s weird, people don’t do that” as her main objections. I countered that these are facts about people, rather than facts about coffee beans. While you can infer some things about beans from observing people, the beans are right there in the office kitchen to be experienced directly. My coworker seemed unable to grasp the distinction, treating the social unacceptability of eating coffee beans as akin to physical impossibility.

I call this phenomenon social reality. Those who feel its pull strongly allow for small quirks but mostly follow the socially acceptable course—monogamy. Those who ignore social reality stand the risk of becoming Soylent-drinking, AI-safety-donating, cryonic-enlisted Rationalists.

At least, that was my hypothesis. Instead of asking directly “how weird are you?” I opted for a question giving strange eating habits (coffee beans, cold steak, raw oil) as a concrete example to gauge people’s reactions.

As with the intuition question, weirdness correlates strongly with polyamory (p ≈ 10^-1) and not at all with Rationality engagement. Again, this is shocking to me. It could well be that the question wasn’t getting at the willingness to be a weirdo-among-weirdos that I associate with Rationalists, but if it measured nothing at all it wouldn’t correlate with polyamory either. Joke’s on us—Rationalists were the normies all along.

This wasn’t in my original analysis, but I checked the connection between weirdness and overcoming intuition. The two are significantly correlated but are not measuring the same thing. For example, when regressing polyamory on rationality engagement, weirdness, and overcoming intuition together, all three show up with positive and significant coefficients.

Story 4 – Religion

While the Old Testament had mostly positive things to say about kiloamorous King Solomon, modern religions tend to criticize adultery for both sexes. As for Rationality, I personally think that LessWrong has become too hostile to religious folk and I’m a Bayesian atheist. The absence of religious people in both polyamory and Rationality will cause them to correlate.

Only 10% of my respondents were religious, but that was enough to demonstrate a negative relationship to both polyamory and Rationality.

The survey also included a single polyamorous, Rationalist, virtue-ethicist, religious woman. If that’s you, please get in touch! I would love to hear some more about your lifestyle and worldview.

Story 5 – Ethics

Most people don’t need an explicit system to make moral choices, they follow their intuitions and the norms of their social circle. This applies to relationship choices as well—asking your partner not to kiss other people is usually not the output of a moral deliberation but just the popular norm.

Polyamory doesn’t fit well within the normal moral-intuitionist framework. As Geoffrey Miller noted, the natural justification for polyamory is from consequentialist ethics: the pleasure Geoffrey’s partner and her lover gain from spending time together outweighs the discomfort it brings him. Consequentialism doesn’t have a lot of room for claims of special moral rank due to “being her real boyfriend”, the well-being of all people is treated the same regardless of their relationship status.

The polyamory guide More Than Two also argues that expanding one’s moral circle and adhering to a stricter moral system is required for flourishing polyamorous relationships. Polyamory requires treating as moral equals not only currently existing lovers but also potential ones: an existing couple shouldn’t make rules (for example, veto power) that will unreasonably constrain or harm new people who may one day enter into a relationship with one of them. The book’s mantra “the people in a relationship are more important than the relationship” likewise carries a strong flavor of consequentialism.

Rationalists are also very likely to follow a consequentialist ethical system, and not just those who overlap with Effective Altruism. There are myriad reasons for this and exploring all of them would take a project at least the scope of this one. For now, I’ll simply claim that it is known. If the data contradicts me on this one I should really give up on saying anything at all about Rationalists.

Whew. Consequentialism has a remarkably strong correlation with Rationality. On the non-Rationalist end of the scale, consequentialists are a small minority while 50% follow their intuitions rather than an explicit system. On the Rationalist end, consequentialists are a large majority.

When regressed on multiple variables, consequentialism also shows a significant positive relationship with overcoming intuition (since it requires overriding one’s moral intuitions) and a significant negative relationship with religiosity (since religious people are likely to follow a religious system of ethics instead). When these variables are included consequentialism no longer has a significant relationship with polyamory (although it still does with Rationality).

Story 6 – Utopianism

Have you ever experienced a moment of bliss? On the rapids of inspiration maybe, your mind tracing the shapes of truth and beauty? Or in the pulsing ecstasy of love? Or in a glorious triumph achieved with true friends? Or in a conversation on a vine-overhung terrace one star-appointed night? Or perhaps a melody smuggled itself into your heart, charming it and setting it alight with kaleidoscopic emotions? Or when you prayed, and felt heard? […]

Yet a little later, scarcely an hour gone by, and the ever-falling soot of ordinary life is already covering the whole thing. The silver and gold of exuberance lose their shine, and the marble becomes dirty. […]

I summoning the memory of your best moment—why? In the hope of kindling in you a desire to share my happiness.

And yet, what you had in your best moment is but a beckoning scintilla at most. Not close to what I have. No closer than the word “sun” written in yellow ink is to the actual sun. For I’m beyond words and imagination. […]

The challenge before you: to become fully what you now are only in hope and potential.

This excerpt is from Nick Bostrom’s poetic Letter From Utopia, an imagined missive to today’s humans from our possible future selves who are wiser, happier, better in every way that we want to be better. I am not much given to religious sentiment, but Letter From Utopia comes closest to kindling that sentiment in me.

I use Utopia as a benchmark for orienting myself towards the person I want to be. With a clear enough picture of Utopia in my head, I can interrogate it along many dimensions. Are the people of Utopia nationalist or universalist? Secular or religious? Do they feel joy or anger when their lovers find new lovers? Some of these are hard to answer, but I can’t imagine that in the glorious future people regulate who their lovers may and may not spend time with. It just doesn’t fit.

Polyamory is new, it’s weird, and it’s certainly forward-looking. Insomuch as people have the instinct to explore and experiment with new ways of being, to take risks in the hope of reaching new plateaus of happiness, that instinct will push them towards polyamory.

As for Rationality, it was conceived on transhumanist messaging boards and still retains that sentiment. Our home is not a static point but a vector—Less Wrong every day. The project of Rationality is born of the belief that humans can become wiser, polyamory is the belief that we can become happier and more loving.

The question I came up with to assess positive and negative attitudes about humanity’s future potential garnered a lot of complaints, all of them justified. It was confusing, poorly worded, and unintuitive. And yet, even with the measurement noise that resulted from the badly written question, “utopianism” correlates significantly with both Rationality engagement and polyamory. In the glorious future, everyone is a polyamorous nerd (and almost certainly bisexual).

Bisexual?

While not the main aim of the survey, I was curious to confirm my anecdotal impression that bisexuality correlates with polyamory. It surely does. Bisexuals were exactly twice as likely in my sample to be polyamorous as heterosexuals: 56% vs. 28% for women and 39% vs. 20% for men. Somewhat surprisingly, only 2 of the 15 homosexual men in the survey were polyamorous, although I don’t know if we can draw conclusions for this small sample by itself.

Summary

How did my hypotheses do when faced with 633 actual human beings? Some were confirmed, some are still in question, and some went up in flames.

The six stories were based purely on my own experience: I’m a consequentialist non-religious transhumanist weirdo. Learning about evolutionary psychology blew my mind, and so did realizing that my emotions are subject to introspection and modification. I’m still not bisexual, but, you know, growth mindset. I arrived at polyamory and Rationality independently; what the survey shows is that there any many different paths to the same destination.

Polyamory did show significant correlations with all six variables thrown into a single regression, except that evolutionary psychology had the opposite effect from what I predicted. When Rationality engagement is added to the regression it screens out some of the effect of religiosity on polyamory and most of the effect of consequentialism.

My hypotheses did a worse job explaining Rationality than they did polyamory. Only religiosity, consequentialism (massively so), and utopianism had a positive relationship with Rationality. When polyamory is included in the regression, overcoming intuition becomes significantly correlated in the opposite direction from what I predicted.

Bottom line: only religiosity and utopianism (despite the poorly written question) significantly correlate with both Rationality and polyamory when everything is thrown in the regression. Consequentialism is purely a proxy for Rationality, and accepting evolutionary psychology is a proxy for monogamy. Not accepting your intuitions and yes accepting weirdness are not correlated positively with Rationality engagement, which goes against my intuitions and is extremely weird to me.

More importantly, even when all the above variables are included Rationality and polyamory show a very strong correlation. Rationality engagement alone accounts for 9% of the variance in polyamory, and the six additional variables only contribute another 5% of variance explained between them. Whatever makes Rationalists poly or vice versa, we have not explained it yet.

San Francisco Bay

Since I published the survey, I happened to talk to two women who said that everyone they know in the San Francisco Bay Area is polyamorous. One of them moved to New York in part because she couldn’t find a monogamous boyfriend in SF, the other is polyamorous and still lives there.

Rationalists also happen to concentrate in Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area, albeit for initial reasons that had nothing to do with polyamory. My survey didn’t ask whether people live in the Bay or not, and neither did any of the LessWrong surveys to my knowledge. I quickly ran an even-less-scientific Twitter poll with the following results:

I can’t match this poll to the original survey’s respondents, but the overall percentage of polyamorous respondents matches almost perfectly: 22% vs. 24% in the original survey. Living in the Bay is correlated with polyamory but not overwhelmingly so: 31% of Bay Area respondents are poly vs. 20% of respondents who live elsewhere. While this is quite a strong effect, geography also doesn’t suffice to fully explain the poly-Rat relationship.

Well, is Rationality a polyamorous cult then?

I included one question in the survey to measure the direct impact of Rationality engagement on polyamory, asking nonmonogamous people who or what opened them up to open relationships. I “independently invented” polyamory, and so did my wife and most of my poly friends. I know very few people who were convinced to try polyamory by their acquaintances, even fewer who were converted by something they read. Still, I decided to ask how people became polyamorous: whether they came up with it themselves or if they picked it up from friends (Rationalist or otherwise) or something they read (Rationalist or otherwise).

Holy poly. This chart blew my mind when it first rendered. I rechecked the data three times to make sure they’re correct. They are.

The percent of people who self-invent polyamory is roughly constant for all levels of Rationality engagement, and the percent of those who pick it up from non-Rationalist sources goes up only slightly. But three out of four highly-engaged Rationalist in my survey are polyamorous, and fully half of those had absorbed polyamory from other Rationalists—those are the expanding green bars/

My survey certainly oversampled polyamorous people, but I still have to conclude that engaging with Rationalists and Rationalist writing will at least double your chance of becoming polyamorous.

There’s no point fighting it anymore, and no reason to. Rationality is great and it will make your life better. Polyamory is great and it will make your life better. That may not be true for everyone, but I suspect that it’s true for a lot of you who are 4,000 words deep into a research post on a polyamorous Rationalist’s blog.

Go read Alicorn’s polyhacking story on LessWrong, and show up to a meetup in your nicest outfit. Or, you can stay right here. I’ll be your poly Rationalist media, with interviews and book reviews and dating tips. I’ll be your poly Rationalist friend, check out this page if you want to hang out in real life or ask me out on a date.

Give in. Join us. And remember—we’re not just a sex cult, we do other great things too!

From: https://putanumonit.com/2019/10/16/polyamory-is-rational/ Saved: November 2020

Smart Cities: Buggy and Brittle

✾ placesjournal.org✾ Full Bio✾ 39 minute read✾

Robert De Niro as renegade smart-city hacker Harry Tuttle in Brazil 1985

Calafia Café in Palo Alto is one of the smartest eateries in the world. With Google’s former executive chef Charlie Ayers at the helm, the food here isn’t just for sustenance. This is California—eating is also a path to self-improvement. Each dish is carefully crafted with ingredients that not only keep you slim, but make you smarter and more energized too. A half-dozen venture capitalists pick at their dandelion salads. A sleepy suburb at night, by day Palo Alto becomes the beating heart of Silicon Valley, the monied epicenter of the greatest gathering of scientific and engineering talent in the history of human civilization. To the west, across the street, lies Stanford University. The Googleplex sprawls a few miles to the east. In the surrounding region, some half-million engineers live and work. A tech tycoon or two wouldn’t be out of place here. Steve Jobs was a regular.

Excusing myself to the men’s room, however, I discover that Calafia Café has a major technology problem. Despite the pedigree of its clientele, the smart toilet doesn’t work. As I stare hopefully at the stainless steel throne, a red light peering out from the small black plastic box that contains the bowl’s “brains” blinks at me fruitlessly. Just above, a sign directs an escape path. “If sensor does not work,” it reads, “use manual flush button.” And so I bail out, sidestepping fifty years of progress in computer science and industrial engineering in the blink of an eye.

Back at my table, I try to reverse-engineer the model of human-waste production encoded in the toilet’s CPU. I imagine a lab somewhere in Japan. Technicians in white lab coats wield stopwatches as they methodically clock an army of immodest volunteers seated upon row after row of smart johns. The complexity of the problem becomes clear. Is it supposed to flush as soon as you stand up? Or when you turn around? Or pause for a fixed amount of time? But how long? Can it tell if you need another flush? It’s not quite as challenging an engineering task as putting a man on the moon, or calculating driving directions to the airport. Somehow, though, that stuff works every time.

My bewilderment quickly yields to a growing sense of dread. How is it that even in the heart of Silicon Valley it’s completely acceptable for smart technology to be buggy, erratic, or totally dysfunctional? Someone probably just cured cancer in the biotechnology lab across the street and is here celebrating over lunch. Yet that same genius will press the manual flush button just as I did, and never think twice about how consistently this new world of smart technology is letting us down. We are weaving these technologies into our homes, our communities, even our very bodies—but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all.

I know I should stop worrying, and learn to love the smart john. But what if it’s a harbinger of bigger problems? What if the seeds of smart cities’ own destruction are already built into their DNA? I’ve argued that smart cities are a solution to the challenges of 21^st-century urbanization, that despite potential pitfalls, the benefits outweigh the risks, especially if we are aggressive about confronting the unintended consequences of our choices. But in reality we’ve only scratched the surface.

What if the smart cities of the future are buggy and brittle? What are we getting ourselves into?

Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Len Rubenstein

Buggy

A few weeks later, I found myself wandering around the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with nary a thought about uncooperative toilets in mind. Strolling west from Kenmore Square, a few minutes later I came across the new home of the Broad Institute, a monolith of glass and steel that houses a billion-dollar center for research in genomic medicine. The street wall was tricked out with an enormous array of displays showing in real time the endless sequences of DNA base pairs being mapped by the machinery upstairs.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. The Blue Screen of Death, as the alert displayed by Microsoft Windows following an operating-system crash is colloquially known. Forlorn, I looked through the glass at the lone panel. Instead of the stream of genetic discoveries, a meaningless string of hexadecimals stared back, indicating precisely where, deep in the core of some CPU, a lone miscomputation had occurred. Just where I had hoped to find historic fusion of human and machine intelligence, I’d found yet another bug.

The term “bug,” derived from the old Welsh bwg (pronounced “boog”), has long been used as slang for insects. But appropriation of the term to describe technical failings dates to the dawn of the telecommunications age. The first telegraphs invented in the 1840s used two wires, one to send and one to receive. In the 1870s, duplex telegraphs were developed, permitting messages to be sent simultaneously in both directions over a single wire. But sometimes stray signals would come down the line, which were said to be “bugs” or “buggy.” ¹ Thomas Edison himself used the expression in an 1878 letter to Puskás Tivadar, the Hungarian inventor who came up with the idea of a telephone exchange that allowed individual lines to be connected into a network for the first time. ² According to an early history of Edison’s own quadruplex, an improved telegraph that could send two signals in each direction, by 1890 the word had become common industry parlance. ³

The first documented computer bug, however, was an actual insect. In September 1947, Navy researchers working with professors at Harvard University were running the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator through its paces when it suddenly began to miscalculate. Tearing open the primitive electromechanical computer, they found a moth trapped between one of its relays. On a website maintained by Navy historians, you can still see a photograph of the page from the lab notebook where someone carefully taped the moth down, methodically adding an annotation: “First actual case of bug being found.” ⁴ As legend has it, that person was Grace Hopper, a programmer who would go on to become an important leader in computer science. (Hopper’s biographer, however, disputes this was the first time “bug” was used to describe a malfunction in the early development of computers, arguing “it was clear the term was already in use.”) ⁵

First computer bug, a dead moth, 1947. Courtesy of U.S. Navy

Since that day, bugs have become endemic in our digital world, the result of the enormous complexity and ruthless pace of modern engineering. But how will we experience bugs in the smart city? They could be as isolated as that faulty toilet or a crashed public screen. In 2007 a Washington Metro rail car caught fire after a power surge went unnoticed by buggy software designed to detect it. ⁶ Temporarily downgrading back to the older, more reliable code took just 20 minutes per car while engineers methodically began testing and debugging.

The troubles of automation in transit systems are a precursor to the kinds of problems we’re likely to see as we buy into smart cities. As disconcerting as today’s failures are, however, they are actually a benchmark for reliability. Current smart systems are painstakingly designed and extensively tested. They have multiple layers of fail-safes. With the urgency of urban problems increasing and the resources and will to deal with them in doubt, in the future many smart technologies will be thrown together under tight schedules and even tighter budgets. They will struggle to match this gold standard of reliability, with only a few short-lived, sporadic glitches each year.

“Blue Screen of Death” Windows crash screen, New York City. Photo by thirdrail

The sheer size of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structures humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportunities for bugs and unanticipated interactions. As Kenneth Duda, a high-performance networking expert told the New York Times, “the great enemy is complexity, measured in lines of code, or interactions.” ⁹ Ellen Ullman, a writer and former software developer, argues, “it is impossible to fully test any computer system. To think otherwise is to misunderstand what constitutes such a system. It is not a single body of code created entirely by one company. Rather, it is a collection of ‘modules’ plugged into one another. … The resulting system is a tangle of black boxes wired together that communicate through dimly explained ‘interfaces.’ A programmer on one side of an interface can only hope that the programmer on the other side has gotten it right.” ¹⁰

In his landmark 1984 study of technological disasters, Normal Accidents, sociologist Charles Perrow argued that in highly complex systems with many tightly linked elements, accidents are inevitable. What’s worse is that traditional approaches to reducing risk, such as warnings and alerts (or the installation of the backup recovery system in the BART incident), may actually introduce more complexity into systems and thereby increase risks. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, for instance, was caused by an irreversible chain of events triggered during tests of a new reactor safety system. Perrow’s conclusion: “Most high-risk systems have some special characteristics, beyond their toxic or explosive or genetic dangers, that make accidents in them inevitable, even ‘normal.’” ¹¹

Malfunctioning crosswalk light, New York City. Photo by Paul Hollenback

Normal accidents will be ever-present in smart cities. Just as the rapid pace of urbanization has revealed shoddy construction practices, most notably in China’s notorious “tofu buildings,” hastily put together smart cities will have technological flaws created by designers’ and builders’ shortcuts. These hasty hacks threaten to make earlier design shortcuts like the Y2K bug seem small in comparison. Stemming from a trick commonly used to save memory in the early days of computing, by recording dates using only the last two digits of the year, Y2K was the biggest bug in history, prompting a worldwide effort to rewrite millions of lines of code in the late 1990s. Over the decades, there were plenty of opportunities to undo Y2K, but thousands of organizations chose to postpone the fix, which ended up costing over $300 billion worldwide when they finally got around to it. ¹² Bugs in the smart city will be more insidious, living inside lots of critical, interconnected systems. Sometimes there may be no way to anticipate the interdependencies. Who could have foreseen the massive traffic jam caused on U.S. Interstate 80 when a bug in the system used to manage juror pools by Placer County, California, erroneously summoned twelve hundred people to report for duty on the same day in 2012? ¹³

The pervasiveness of bugs in smart cities is disconcerting. We don’t yet have a clear grasp of where the biggest risks lie, when and how they will cause systems to fail, or what the chain-reaction consequences will be. Who is responsible when a smart city crashes? And how will citizens help debug the city? Today, we routinely send anonymous bug reports to software companies when our desktop crashes. Is this a model that’s portable to the world of embedded and ubiquitous computing?

Software glitch in BART ticket terminal, San Francisco. Photo by zakattak

Counterintuitively, buggy smart cities might strengthen and increase pressure for democracy. Wade Roush, who studied the way citizens respond to large-scale technological disasters like blackouts and nuclear accidents, concluded that “control breakdowns in large technological systems have educated and radicalized many lay citizens, enabling them to challenge both existing technological plans and the expertise and authority of the people who carry them out.” This public reaction to disasters of our own making, he argues, has spurred the development of “a new cultural undercurrent of ‘technological citizenship’ characterized by greater knowledge of, and skepticism toward, the complex systems that permeate modern societies.” ¹⁴ If the first generation of smart cities does truly prove fatally flawed, from their ashes may grow the seeds of more resilient, democratic designs.

In a smart city filled with bugs, will our new heroes be the adventurous few who can dive into the ductwork and flush them out? Leaving the Broad Institute’s Blue Screen of Death behind, I headed back in the rain to my hotel, reminded of Brazil, the 1985 film by Monty Python troupe member Terry Gilliam, which foretold an autocratic smart city gone haywire. Arriving at my room, I opened my laptop and started up a Netflix stream of the film. As the scene opens, the protagonist, Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce, squats sweating by an open refrigerator. Suddenly the phone rings, and Harry Tuttle, played by Robert De Niro, enters. “Are you from Central Services?” asks Lowry, referring to the uncaring bureaucracy that runs the city’s infrastructure. “They’re a little overworked these days,” Tuttle replies. “Luckily I intercepted your call.” Tuttle is a guerrilla repairman, a smart-city hacker valiantly trying to keep residents’ basic utilities up and running. “This whole system of yours could be on fire, and I couldn’t even turn on a kitchen tap without filling out a twenty-seven-B-stroke-six.”

Let’s hope that’s just a story. Some days, it doesn’t feel so far-fetched.

Jonathan Pryce and Robert De Niro in Brazil.

Brittle

Creation myths rely on faith as much as fact. The Internet’s is no different. Today, netizens everywhere believe that the Internet began as a military effort to design a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.

The fable begins in the early 1960s with the publication of “On Distributed Communications” by Paul Baran, a researcher at the RAND think tank. At the time, Baran had been tasked with developing a scheme for an indestructible telecommunications network for the U.S. Air Force. Cold War planners feared that the hub-and-spoke structure of the telephone system was vulnerable to a preemptive Soviet first strike. Without a working communications network, the United States would not be able to coordinate a counterattack, and the strategic balance of “mutually assured destruction” between the superpowers would be upset. What Baran proposed, according to Harvard University science historian Peter Galison, “was a plan to remove, completely, critical nodes from the telephone system.” ¹⁵ In “On Distributed Communications” and a series of pamphlets that followed, he demonstrated mathematically how a less centralized latticework of network hubs, interconnected by redundant links, could sustain heavy damage without becoming split into isolated sections. ¹⁶ The idea was picked up by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a group set up to fast-track R&D after the embarrassment of the Soviet space program’s Sputnik launch in 1957. ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, was rolled out in the early 1970s.

So legend has it.

The real story is more prosaic. There were indeed real concerns about the survivability of military communications networks. But RAND was just one of several research groups that were broadly rethinking communications networks at the time—parallel efforts on distributed communications were being led by Lawrence Roberts at MIT and Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury at the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory. Each of the three efforts remained unaware of each other until a 1967 conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where Roberts met Scantlebury, who by then had learned of Baran’s earlier work. ¹⁷ And ARPANET wasn’t a military command network for America’s nuclear arsenal, or any arsenal for that matter. It wasn’t even classified. It was a research network. As Robert Taylor, who oversaw the ARPANET project for the Pentagon, explained in 2004 in a widely forwarded e-mail, “The creation of the ARPA net was not motivated by considerations of war. The ARPA net was created to enable folks with common interests to connect to one another through interactive computing even when widely separated by geography.” ¹⁸

ARPANET map, 1977. Adapted from F. Heart, et al., ARPANET Completion Report, 1978

We also like to think that the Internet is still widely distributed as Baran envisioned, when in fact it’s perhaps the most centralized communications network ever built. In the beginning, ARPANET did indeed hew closely to that distributed ideal. A 1977 map of the growing network shows at least four redundant transcontinental routes, run over phone lines leased from AT&T, linking up the major computing clusters in Boston, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles. Metropolitan loops created redundancy within those regions as well. ¹⁹ If the link to your neighbor went down, you could still reach them by sending packets around in the other direction. This approach is still commonly used today.

By 1987, the Pentagon was ready to pull the plug on what it had always considered an experiment. But the research community was hooked, so plans were made to hand over control to the National Science Foundation, which merged the civilian portion of the ARPANET with its own research network, NSFNET, launched a year earlier. In July 1988, NSFNET turned on a new national backbone network that dropped the redundant and distributed grid of ARPANET in favor of a more efficient and economical hub-and-spoke arrangement. ²⁰ Much like the air-transportation network today, consortia of universities pooled their resources to deploy their own regional feeder networks (often with significant NSF funding), which linked up into the backbone at several hubs scattered strategically around the country.

Just seven years later, in April 1995, the National Science Foundation handed over management of the backbone to the private sector. The move would lead to even greater centralization, by designating just four major interconnection points through which bits would flow across the country. Located outside San Francisco, Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago, these hubs were the center not just of America’s Internet, but the world’s. At the time, an e-mail from Europe to Asia would almost certainly transit through Virginia and California. Since then, things have centralized even more. One of those hubs, in Ashburn, Virginia, is home to what is arguably the world’s largest concentration of data centers, some forty buildings boasting the collective footprint of 22 Walmart Supercenters. ²¹ Elsewhere, Internet infrastructure has coalesced around preexisting hubs of commerce. Today, you could knock out a handful of buildings in Manhattan where the world’s big network providers connect to each other—60 Hudson Street, 111 Eighth Avenue, 25 Broadway—and cut off a good chunk of transatlantic Internet capacity. (Fiber isn’t the first technology to link 25 Broadway to Europe. The elegant 1921 edifice served as headquarters and main ticket office for the great ocean-crossing steamships of the Cunard Line until the 1960s.)

Wikimedia servers at Equinix data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Via Wikimedia

Despite the existence of many chokepoints, the Internet’s nuke-proof design creation myth has only been strengthened by the fact that the few times it has actually been bombed, it has proven surprisingly resilient. During the spring 1999 aerial bombardment of Serbia by NATO, which explicitly targeted telecommunications facilities along with the power grid, many of the country’s Internet Protocol networks were able to stay connected to the outside world. ²² And the Internet survived 9/11 largely unscathed. Some 3 million telephone lines were knocked out in lower Manhattan alone—a grid the size of Switzerland’s—from damage to a single phone-company building near the World Trade Center. Broadcast radio and TV stations were crippled by the destruction of the north tower, whose rooftop bristled with antennas of every size, shape, and purpose. Panic-dialing across the nation brought the phone system to a standstill. ²³ But the Internet hardly blinked.

But while the Internet manages to maintain its messy integrity, the infrastructure of smart cities is far more brittle. As we layer ever more fragile networks and single points of failure on top of the Internet’s still-resilient core, major disruptions in service are likely to be common. And with an increasing array of critical economic, social, and government services running over these channels, the risks are compounded.

The greatest cause for concern is our growing dependence on untethered networks, which puts us at the mercy of a fragile last wireless hop between our devices and the tower. Cellular networks have none of the resilience of the Internet. They are the fainting ladies of the network world—when the heat is on, they’re the first to go down and make the biggest fuss as they do so.

Cellular networks fail in all kinds of ugly ways during crises; damage to towers (15 were destroyed around the World Trade Center on 9/11 alone), destruction of the “backhaul” fiber-optic line that links the tower into the grid (many more), and power loss (most towers have just four hours of battery backup). In 2012, flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy cut backhaul to over 2000 cell sites in eight counties in and around New York City and its upstate suburbs (not including New Jersey and Connecticut), and power to nearly 1500 others. ²⁴Hurricane Katrina downed over a thousand cell towers in Louisiana and Mississippi in August 2005, severely hindering relief efforts because the public phone network was the only common radio system among many responding government agencies. In the areas of Japan north of Tokyo annihilated by the 2011 tsunami, the widespread destruction of mobile-phone towers literally rolled the clock back on history, forcing people to resort to radios, newspapers, and even human messengers to communicate. “When cellphones went down, there was paralysis and panic,” the head of emergency communications in the city of Miyako told the New York Times. ²⁵

Disaster relief crews in Sukuiso, Japan, after 2011 earthquake. Photo by U.S. Navy

The biggest threat to cellular networks in cities, however, is population density. Because wireless carriers try to maximize the profit-making potential of their expensive spectrum licenses, they typically only build out enough infrastructure to connect a fraction of their customers in a given place at the same time. “Oversubscribing,” as this carefully calibrated scheme is known in the business, works fine under normal conditions, when even the heaviest users rarely chat for more than a few hours a day. But during a disaster, when everyone starts to panic, call volumes surge and the capacity is quickly exhausted. On the morning of September 11, for instance, fewer than 1 in 20 mobile calls were connected in New York City. ²⁶ A decade later, little has changed. During a scary but not very destructive earthquake on the U.S. East Coast in the summer of 2011, cell networks were again overwhelmed. Yet media reports barely noted it. Cellular outages during crises have become so commonplace in modern urban life that we no longer question why they happen or how the problem can be fixed.

Disruptions in public cloud-computing infrastructure highlight the vulnerabilities of dependence on network apps. Amazon Web Services, the 800-pound gorilla of public clouds that powers thousands of popular websites, experienced a major disruption in April 2011, lasting three days. According to a detailed report on the incident posted to the company’s website, the outage appears to have been a normal accident, to use Perrow’s term. A botched configuration change in the data center’s internal network, which had been intended to upgrade its capacity, shunted the entire facility’s traffic onto a lower-capacity backup network. Under the severe stress, “a previously unencountered bug” reared its head, preventing operators from restoring the system without risk of data loss. ²⁷ Later, in July 2012, a massive electrical storm cut power to the company’s Ashburn data center, shutting down two of the most popular Internet services—Netflix and Instagram. ²⁸ “Amazon Cloud Hit By Real Cloud,” quipped a PC World headline. ²⁹

The cloud is far less reliable than most of us realize, and its fallibility may be starting to take a real economic toll. Google, which prides itself on high-quality data-center engineering, suffered a half-dozen outages in 2008 lasting up to 30 hours. ³⁰ Amazon promises its cloud customers 99.5 percent annual uptime, while Google pledges 99.9 percent for its premium apps service. That sounds impressive until you realize that even after years of increasing outages, even in the most blackout-prone region (the Northeast), the much-maligned American electric power industry averages 99.96 percent uptime. ³¹ Yet even that tiny gap between reality and perfection carries a huge cost. According to Massoud Amin of the University of Minnesota, power outages and power quality disturbances cost the U.S. economy between $80 billion and $188 billion a year. ³² A back-of-the-envelope calculation published by International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency tagged the economic cost of cloud outages between 2007 and mid-2012 at just $70 million (not including the July 2012 Amazon outage). ³³ But as more and more of the vital functions of smart cities migrate to a handful of big, vulnerable data centers, this number is sure to swell in coming years.

Cloud-computing outages could turn smart cities into zombies. Biometric authentication, for instance, which senses our unique physical characteristics to identify individuals, will increasingly determine our rights and privileges as we move through the city—granting physical access to buildings and rooms, personalizing environments, and enabling digital services and content. But biometric authentication is a complex task that will demand access to remote data and computation. The keyless entry system at your office might send a scan of your retina to a remote data center to match against your personnel record before admitting you. Continuous authentication, a technique that uses always-on biometrics—your appearance, gestures, or typing style—will constantly verify your identity, potentially eliminating the need for passwords. ³⁴ Such systems will rely heavily on cloud computing, and will break down when it does. It’s one thing for your e-mail to go down for a few hours, but it’s another thing when everyone in your neighborhood gets locked out of their homes.

Global Positioning System satellite network. Courtesy of NOAA

Another “cloud” literally floating in the sky above us, the Global Positioning System satellite network, is perhaps the greatest single point of failure for smart cities. Without it, many of the things on the Internet will struggle to ascertain where they are. America’s rivals have long worried about their dependence on the network of 24 satellites owned by the U.S. Defense Department. But now even America’s closest allies worry that GPS might be cut off not by military fiat but by neglect. With a much-needed modernization program for the decades-old system way behind schedule, in 2009 the Government Accountability Office lambasted the Air Force for delays and cost overruns that threatened to interrupt service. ³⁵ And the stakes of a GPS outage are rising fast, as navigational intelligence permeates the industrial and consumer economy. In 2011 the United Kingdom’s Royal Academy of Engineering concluded that “a surprising number of different systems already have GPS as a shared dependency, so a failure of the GPS signal could cause the simultaneous failure of many services that are probably expected to be independent of each other.” ³⁶ For instance, GPS is extensively used for tracking suspected criminals and land surveying. Disruptions in GPS service would require rapidly reintroducing older methods and technologies for these tasks. While alternatives such as Russia’s GLONASS already exist, and the European Union’s Galileo and China’s Compass systems will provide more alternatives in the future, the GPS seems likely to spawn its own nasty collection of normal accidents. “No one has a complete picture,” concluded Martyn Thomas, the lead investigator on the UK study, “of the many ways in which we have become dependent on weak signals 12,000 miles above us.” ³⁷

Centralization of smart-city infrastructure is risky, but decentralization doesn’t always increase resilience. Uncoordinated management can create its own brittle structures, such as the Internet’s “bufferbloat” problem. Buffering, which serves as a kind of transmission gearbox to sync fast-flowing and congested parts of the Internet, is a key tool to smoothing out surges of data and reducing errors. But in 2010 Jim Gettys, a veteran Internet engineer, noticed that manufacturers of network devices had taken advantage of rapidly falling memory prices to beef up buffers far beyond what the Internet’s original congestion-management scheme was designed for. “Manufacturers have reflexively acted to prevent any and all packet loss and, by doing so, have inadvertently defeated a critical TCP congestion-detection mechanism,” concluded the editors of ACM Queue, a leading computer networking journal, referring to the Internet’s traffic cop, the Transmission Control Protocol. The result of bufferbloat was increasing congestion and sporadic slowdowns. ³⁸ What’s most frightening about bufferbloat is that it was hiding in plain view. Gettys concluded: “the issues that create delay are not new, but their collective impact has not been widely understood … buffering problems have been accumulating for more than a decade.” ³⁹

What a laundry list of accidental ways smart cities might be brittle by design or oversight! But what if someone deliberately tried to bring one to its knees? The threat of cyber-sabotage on civil infrastructure is only just beginning to capture policymakers’ attention. Stuxnet, the virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear weapons plant at Natanz in 2010, was just the beginning. Widely believed to the product of a joint Israeli-American operation, Stuxnet was a clever piece of malicious software, or malware, that infected computers involved with monitoring and controlling industrial machinery and infrastructure, known by the acronym SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition). At Natanz some 6000 centrifuges were being used to enrich uranium to bomb-grade purity. Security experts believe Stuxnet, carried in on a USB thumb drive, infected and took over the SCADA systems controlling the plant’s equipment. Working stealthily to knock the centrifuges off balance even as it reported to operators that all was normal, Stuxnet is believed to have put over a thousand machines out of commission, significantly slowing the refinement process, and the Iranian weapons program. ⁴⁰

The wide spread of Stuxnet was shocking. Unlike the laser-guided, bunker-busting smart bombs that would have been used in a conventional strike on the Natanz plant, Stuxnet attacked with all the precision of carpet bombing. By the time Ralph Langner, a German computer-security expert who specialized in SCADA systems, finally deduced the purpose of the unknown virus, it had been found on similar machinery not only in Iran but as far away as Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and even the United States. By August 2010, over 90,000 Stuxnet infections were reported in 115 countries. ⁴¹

Siemens SIMATIC control panel for a SCADA system like those targeted by the Stuxnet virus.

Stuxnet was the first documented attack on SCADA systems, but it is not likely to be the last. A year later, in an interview with CNET, Langer bristled at the media’s focus on attributing the attack to a specific nation. “Could this also be a threat against other installations, U.S. critical infrastructure?” he asked. “Unfortunately, the answer is yes because it can be copied easily. That’s more important than the question of who did it.” He warned of Stuxnet copycat attacks, and criticized governments and companies for their widespread complacence. “Most people think this was to attack a uranium enrichment plant and if I don’t operate that I’m not at risk,” he said. “This is completely wrong. The attack is executed on Siemens controllers and they are general-purpose products. So you will find the same products in a power plant, even in elevators.” ⁴²

Skeptics argue that the threat of Stuxnet is overblown. Stuxnet’s payload was highly targeted. It was programmed to only attack the Natanz centrifuges, and do so in a very specific way. Most importantly, it expended a highly valuable arsenal of “zero-day” attacks, undocumented vulnerabilities that can only be exploited once, after which a simple update will be issued by the software’s supplier. In its report on the virus, security software firm Symantec wrote, “Incredibly, Stuxnet exploits four zero-day vulnerabilities, which is unprecedented.” ⁴³

Stuxnet’s unique attributes aside, most embedded systems aren’t located in bunkers, and they are increasingly vulnerable to much simpler attacks on their human operators. Little more than a year after Stuxnet was uncovered, a lone hacker known only as “pr0f” attacked the water utility of South Houston, a small town of 17,000 people just outside Texas’s most populous city. Enraged by the U.S. government’s downplaying of a similar incident reported in Springfield, Illinois, pr0f homed in on the utility’s Siemens SIMATIC software, a web-based dashboard for remote access to the waterworks’ SCADA systems. While the Springfield attack turned out to be a false alarm—federal officials eventually reported finding “no evidence of a cyber intrusion”—pr0f was already on the move, and the hacker didn’t even need to write any code. ⁴⁴ It turned out that the plant’s operators had chosen a shockingly weak three-letter password. While pr0f’s attack on South Houston could have easily been prevented, SIMATIC is widely used and full of more fundamental vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. That summer Dillon Beresford, a security researcher at (oddly coincidentally) Houston-based network security outfit NSS Labs, had demonstrated several flaws in SIMATIC and ways to exploit them. Siemens managed to dodge the collateral damage of Stuxnet, but the holes in SIMATIC are indicative of far more serious risks it must address.

Another troubling development is the growing number of “forever day” vulnerabilities being discovered in older control systems. Unlike zero-day exploits, for which vendors and security firms can quickly deploy countermeasures and patches, forever-day exploits target holes in legacy embedded systems that manufacturers no longer support—and therefore will never be patched. The problem affects industrial-control equipment sold in the past by both Siemens and GE, as well as a host of smaller firms. ⁴⁵ It has drawn increased interest from the Cyber Emergency Response Team, the government agency that coordinates American cyber-security efforts.

One obvious solution for securing smart-city infrastructure is to stop connecting it to the Internet. But “air-gapping,” as this technique is known, is only a stopgap measure at best. Stuxnet, much like Agent.btz, the virus that infected the Defense Department’s global computer network in 2008, were likely both walked into secure facilities on USB sticks. ⁴⁶ Insecure wireless networks are everywhere, even emanating from inside our own bodies. Researchers at the security firm McAfee have successfully hijacked insulin pumps, ordering the test devices to release a lethal dose of insulin, and a group of computer scientists at the University of Washington and University of Massachusetts have disabled heart-defibrillator implants using wireless signals. ⁴⁷

Screenshot posted by the hacker who penetrated a South Houston, Texas, water utility control system in 2011.

These vulnerabilities are calling the entire open design of the Internet into question. No one in those early days of ARPANET ever imagined the degree to which we would embed digital networks in the support systems of our society, the carelessness with which we would do so, and the threat that malevolent forces would present. Assuring that the building blocks of smart cities are reliable will require new standards and probably new regulation. Colin Harrison, IBM’s smarter-cities master engineer, argues that in the future, “if you want to connect a computer system to a piece of critical national infrastructure it’s going to have to be certified in various ways.” ⁴⁸ We’ll also have take stronger measures to harden smart cities against direct assault. South Korea has already seen attacks on its civil infrastructure by North Korean cyber-warriors. One strike is believed to have shut down air traffic control in the country for over an hour. ⁴⁹

Nothing short of a crisis will force us to confront the risk of smart cities’ brittle infrastructure. The first mayor who has to deal with the breakdown of a city-scale smart system will be in new territory, but who will take the blame? The city? The military? Homeland security? The technology firms that built it? Consider the accountability challenge Stuxnet poses—we’d likely never have known about it were it not for its own bug. Carried out of Natanz by some unsuspecting Iranian engineer, the worm failed to detect that it had escaped into the open, and instead of deactivating its own reproductive mechanisms, like a real virus it proliferated across the globe. ⁵⁰

A New Civics

If the history of city building in the last century tells us anything, it is that the unintended consequences of new technologies often dwarf their intended design. Motorization promised to save city dwellers from the piles of horse manure that clogged 19^th-century streets and deliver us from a shroud of factory smoke back to nature. Instead, it scarred the countryside with sprawl and rendered us sedentary and obese. If we don’t think critically now about the technology we put in place for the next century of cities, we can only look forward to all the unpleasant surprises they hold in store for us.

Smart cities are almost guaranteed to be chock full of bugs, from smart toilets and faucets that won’t operate to public screens sporting Microsoft’s ominous Blue Screen of Death. But even when their code is clean, the innards of smart cities will be so complex that so-called normal accidents will be inevitable. The only questions will be when smart cities fail, and how much damage they cause when they crash. Layered atop the fragile power grid, already prone to overload during crises and open to sabotage, the communications networks that patch the smart city together are as brittle an infrastructure as we’ve ever had.

But that’s only if we continue doing business as usual. We can stack the deck and improve the odds, but we need to completely rethink our approach to the opportunities and challenges of building smart cities. We need to question the confidence of tech-industry giants, and organize the local innovation that’s blossoming at the grassroots into a truly global movement. We need to push our civic leaders to think more about long-term survival and less about short-term gain, more about cooperation than competition. Most importantly, we need to take the wheel back from the engineers, and let people and communities decide where we should steer.

Smartcitizens exhibition at CentroCentro, Madrid, 2013. Photo by SmartCitizensCC

People often ask me, “What is a smart city?” It’s a hard question to answer. “Smart” is a problematic word that has come to mean a million things. Soon, it may take its place alongside the handful of international cognates—vaguely evocative terms like “sustainability” and “globalization”—that no one bothers to translate because there’s no consensus about what they actually mean. When people talk about smart cities, they often cast a wide net that pulls in every new public-service innovation from bike sharing to pop-up parks. The broad view is important, since cities must be viewed holistically. Simply installing some new technology, no matter how elegant or powerful, cannot solve a city’s problems in isolation. But there really is something going on here—information technology is clearly going to be a big part of the solution. It deserves treatment on its own. I take a more focused view and define smart cities as places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems.

I think the more important and interesting question is, “what do you want a smart city to be?” We need to focus on how we shape the technology we employ in future cities. There are many different visions of what the opportunity is. Ask an IBM engineer and he will tell you about the potential for efficiency and optimization. Ask an app developer and she will paint a vision of novel social interactions and experiences in public places. Ask a mayor and it’s all about participation and democracy. In truth, smart cities should strive for all of these things.

There are trade-offs between these competing goals for smart cities. The urgent challenge is weaving together solutions that integrate these aims and mitigate conflicts. Smart cities need to be efficient but also preserve opportunities for spontaneity, serendipity, and sociability. If we program all of the randomness out, we’ll have turned them from rich, living organisms into dull mechanical automatons. They need to be secure, but not at the risk of becoming surveillance chambers. They need to be open and participatory, but provide enough support structure for those who lack the resources to self-organize. More than anything else, they need to be inclusive. In her most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the acclaimed urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” ⁵¹ Yet over fifty years later, as we set out to create the smart cities of the 21^st century, we seem to have again forgotten this hard-learned truth.

Centre for Smart Infrastructure, University of Cambridge. Photo by Engineering at Cambridge

But there is hope that a new civic order will arise in smart cities, and pull every last one of us into the effort to make them better places. Cities used to be full of strangers and chance encounters. Today we can mine the social graph in an instant by simply taking a photo. Algorithms churn in the cloud, telling the little things in our pocket where we should eat and whom we should date. It’s a jarring transformation. But even as old norms fade into the past, we’re learning new ways to thrive on mass connectedness. A sharing economy has mushroomed overnight, as people swap everything from spare bedrooms to cars, in a synergistic exploitation of new technology and more earth-friendly consumption. Online social networks are leaking back into the thriving urban habitats where they were born in countless promising ways.

For the last 15 years, I’ve watched the struggle over how to build smart cities evolve from the trenches. I’ve studied and critiqued these efforts, designed parts of them myself, and cheered others along. I’ve written forecasts for big companies as they sized up the market, worked with start-ups and civic hackers toiling away at the grass roots, and advised politicians and policy wonks trying to push reluctant governments into a new era. I understand and share much of their agendas.

But I’ve also seen my share of gaps, shortfalls, and misguided assumptions in the visions and initiatives that have been carried forth under the banner of smart cities. And so I’m going to play the roles of myth buster, whistle-blower, and skeptic in one. The technology industry is asking us to rebuild the world around its vision of efficient, safe, convenient living. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince us to pay for it. But we’ve seen this movie before. As essayist Walter Lippmann wrote of the 1939 World’s Fair, “General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing, it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise.” ⁵¹ Today the computer guys are singing the same song.

I believe there is a better way to build smart cities than to simply call in the engineers. We need to lift up the civic leaders who would show us a different way. We need to empower ourselves to build future cities organically, from the bottom up, and do it in time to save ourselves from climate change. If that seems an insurmountable goal, don’t forget that at the end of the day the smartest city in the world is the one you live in. If that’s not worth fighting for, I don’t know what is.

From: https://placesjournal.org/article/smart-cities/ Saved: March 2019

Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell

✾ wired.com✾ Thursday 13 December 2018✾ Charles Duhigg✾ 52 minute read✾

The young Tesla engineer was excited. Ecstatic, in fact. It was a Saturday in October 2017, and he was working at the Gigafactory, Tesla’s enormous battery manufacturing plant in Nevada. Over the previous year, he had been living out of a suitcase, putting in 13-hour days, seven days a week. This was his first real job. And now a colleague had tracked him down to say that Elon Musk—Elon Musk!—needed his personal help.

The previous year, Musk had made an audacious announcement: His company, which was known—fetishized, actually—for its luxurious electric vehicles, would soon begin manufacturing a new sedan that it planned to sell for just $35,000, putting it within reach of the middle class. The Model 3, Tesla hoped, would transform the auto industry by proving that a mass-produced, emissions-free vehicle was not only feasible but profitable. If successful, the vehicle would help end humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, slow climate change, and show that ingenuity and ambition could accomplish nearly anything. Within a year of that announcement, however, work on the car was behind schedule. There were problems in battery manufacturing, parts construction, and development of assembly lines. Tesla’s goal was to build 5,000 vehicles a week; recently the company had been producing roughly three cars a day. Many inside the Gigafactory—not to mention at the Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto and the assembly factory in Fremont, California—had been working hard for months, trying to get things on track.

Musk was spending the weekend in the Gigafactory, attempting to discover why machines weren’t functioning, why parts kept misaligning, why the software was crashing. Musk had demanded that his factories be automated as much as possible. But among the consequences of this extreme robotization were delays and malfunctions. Tesla had spent more than $1 billion building the Gigafactory, and almost nothing was going as planned.

At about 10 o’clock on Saturday evening, an angry Musk was examining one of the production line’s mechanized modules, trying to figure out what was wrong, when the young, excited engineer was brought over to assist him.

“Hey, buddy, this doesn’t work!” Musk shouted at the engineer, according to someone who heard the conversation. “Did you do this?”

The engineer was taken aback. He had never met Musk before. Musk didn’t even know the engineer’s name. The young man wasn’t certain what, exactly, Musk was asking him, or why he sounded so angry.

“You mean, program the robot?” the engineer said. “Or design that tool?”

“Did you fucking do this?” Musk asked him.

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to?” the engineer replied apologetically.

“You’re a fucking idiot!” Musk shouted back. “Get the fuck out and don’t come back!”

The young engineer climbed over a low safety barrier and walked away. He was bewildered by what had just happened. The entire conversation had lasted less than a minute. A few moments later, his manager came over to say that he had been fired on Musk’s orders, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The engineer was shocked. He’d been working so hard. He was set to get a review from his manager the next week, and had been hearing only positive things. Instead, two days later, he signed his separation papers.

On a Wednesday morning a few weeks later, Musk returned to the Gigafactory on his private plane. Tesla had started firing hundreds of other employees for performance reasons—more than 700 would eventually be let go. Musk was scheduled to talk to the plant’s workers, to inspire them to push through what Musk had forecast would be a “manufacturing hell.” The Gigafactory needed widespread fixes; there was no way the plant would produce 5,000 batteries a week anytime soon.

When he arrived, Musk began marching through the factory. He walked along the assembly line, red-faced and urgent, interrogating workers he encountered, telling them that at Tesla excellence was a passing grade, and they were failing; that they weren’t smart enough to be working on these problems; that they were endangering the company, according to someone who observed him.

Employees knew about such rampages. Sometimes Musk would terminate people; other times he would simply intimidate them. One manager had a name for these outbursts—Elon’s rage firings—and had forbidden subordinates from walking too close to Musk’s desk at the Gigafactory out of concern that a chance encounter, an unexpected question answered incorrectly, might endanger a career.

After Musk had patrolled the factory floor for a while, executives pulled him into a conference room. “I think we can fix this,” one of his top lieutenants, Jon McNeill, told him, according to someone who heard the conversation. McNeill tried to calm Musk down, and repeated a proverb he had once heard: No man comes up with a good idea when being chased by a tiger. At that moment, Musk was the tiger. (A spokesperson for McNeill said he did not want to participate in this story.)

Musk, though, had other concerns. “What’s that smell?” he asked. Everyone went silent. They knew Musk was so sensitive to odors that job candidates were told not to wear cologne or perfume when they met him. They had seen him become upset over small issues like this, had observed him attack executives for their incompetence and inabilities. One person explained that there were vats of liquid silicon nearby. When heated, it sometimes smelled like burning plastic.

These vapors were going to kill people, Musk said. They were going to kill him.

The group got back to solving the Gigafactory’s problems. Eventually it was time for Musk to give his speech. He left the room and walked onto a makeshift stage. The Model 3 was always going to be difficult, he told workers. But it was turning out to be even harder than anyone anticipated. He thanked employees for their work—and then warned them that more was coming. Tesla had to have high standards to succeed. It was not a 9 to 5 company. People were already working hard; now Musk was implying they needed to do more. He was at turns complimentary, awkward, and intense. The Model 3 was a bet-the-company decision, he said. Everybody needed to work hard and smarter.

Then Musk walked off the stage. The remaining executives decamped to a conference room to continue working through a list of the Gigafactory’s problems. Musk, according to one participant, was gone—on to the next task.

Eight months later, Tesla would announce that it had managed to hit its target and produce 5,000 Model 3s in one week. Three months after that, it would report profits of $312 million, well beyond Wall Street’s expectations. Musk seemed, once again, to have snatched victory from the maw of catastrophe, proving his critics wrong through ambition and sheer force of will. But the path to that triumph would be more turbulent than almost anyone anticipated. Over the past year, Musk has fascinated, delighted, and horrified his fans and detractors alike by attacking strangers on Twitter, berating analysts on earnings calls, calling a man he had never met a pedophile, and, most consequentially, tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share with “funding secured,” when in fact there was no such funding secured. That tweet would cause the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue Musk for securities fraud and, in a settlement, to compel him to pay $20 million and abandon his company’s chairmanship. None of that, however, has chastened Musk, who tweeted in October that the tweet that cost him $20 million was “worth it.” The tiger was on the loose.

If it has been strange to watch Musk’s wild ride via news reports and social media, it’s been even weirder inside the company. Over the past six months I’ve communicated with dozens of current and former Tesla employees, from nearly every division. They describe a thrilling and tumultuous workplace, where talented engineers and designers have done some of their proudest work but where, as one former executive put it, “everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon.” Almost all these employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements or fears of being sued or fired by Musk. (Even those with positive things to say asked for anonymity.) Most wanted the best for Tesla and said the recent profit report made them hopeful that the company is finally climbing onto firmer ground.

But experience gives them pause. A large number of high-ranking executives have left in the past two years, and Tesla has stumbled over basic tasks like delivering its cars. Working at the firm has been an agony and ecstasy, some say—sometimes toggling between both extremes in a single day.

Tesla, which was given extensive summaries of the reporting in this article, including what took place during Musk’s Gigafactory visits and the engineer’s dismissal, said through a spokesperson that some aspects were “overly dramatized,” “abbreviated,” and “ultimately misleading anecdotes that completely lack essential context.” The company added that “Elon cares very deeply about the people who work at his companies. That is why, although it is painful, he sometimes takes the difficult step of firing people who are underperforming and putting the success of the entire company” at risk. Tesla also noted that Musk was worried about the comfort and safety of workers when he complained about the vapors in the Gigafactory.

Tesla declined to make Musk, any board members, or any executives except the company’s general counsel available for on-the-record interviews. WIRED did hear from an outside law firm representing Tesla and Musk, which objected to the reporting and how questions were being asked, and suggested that WIRED might be sued.

On the day in 2017 that Musk gave his speech at the Gigafactory, he was both despot and savior. There were grand pronouncements, searing interrogations, and a laserlike focus on doing what no one had accomplished before. His speech deflated some and inspired others. “That was a pretty typical Wednesday, actually,” one senior executive told me. “That’s what it was like until I quit.”

Elon Musk didn’t start Tesla. But he did, in the most important ways, create it. When Musk invested $6.3 million in Tesla in 2004 and became the firm’s chairman, he found a pulpit worthy of his ambitions. Soon he would become chief executive and turn Tesla as much into a cause as a company. “The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar electric economy,” Musk wrote in a 2006 document he called “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan.” “We will not stop until every car on the road is electric,” he said at one point. It was a lesson in his approach to life. “Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” he once told WIRED about his other company, SpaceX. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”

Silicon Valley was built on such audaciousness. Musk’s story, in particular, has been embraced as proof that believing in the impossible can sometimes make it real. He was born in South Africa in 1971 and moved to Canada as soon as he completed high school. He didn’t have much of a plan—he had only $2,000 when he arrived—but after working odd jobs and enrolling in a local college he eventually made it to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied economics and physics. After graduating, he founded a company with his brother and a friend and worked constantly, sometimes sleeping under his desk and showering at a local YMCA. They eventually sold their company, earning Musk $22 million. That funded his next startup, which became PayPal, a venture eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was fantastically rich at the age of 31. Such good fortune wasn’t all that unusual in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. “I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and, uh, turn it into my personal fiefdom,” he told reporters in 1999 as they observed him taking delivery of a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car. “But I’m much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.” (Musk later crashed the car.)

These new companies of Musk’s imagination would not make ephemeral, digital chaff but, rather, reshape the physical world through struts, thrusters, rocket engines, and steel. Musk started SpaceX; bought Solar City, an alternative energy company; and created the Boring Company to dig a network of high-speed transportation tunnels. But it was Tesla that first demonstrated his world-changing ambitions.

As a leader, Musk managed by example—by working hard, demanding perfection, thinking in unconventional ways, and insisting the inconceivable could be accomplished if it was simply reduced to logical steps. “He’s someone who empowers you to be better than you think you can be,” said Todd Maron, who was Tesla’s general counsel for five years until the company said earlier this month that he would be leaving. “He has extraordinarily high standards, and so he pushes you to be your absolute best.” Similar sentiments were expressed by other executives and managers. “He is the smartest person I have ever met,” said a former executive at Solar City. “I can’t tell you how many times I prepared a report for him and he asked a question that made us realize we were looking at the problem completely wrong.”

Many Tesla executives have stories about how Musk reset their concept of the possible, but the classic tale is about retractable door handles. In the mid-2000s, the company was designing the luxury Model S when Musk insisted the car needed handles that would lie flush against its body. They would glide out, as if by magic, just as the owner reached the vehicle, by responding to a signal from an electronic key. “It was unanimous among the executive staff that the complex door handle idea was crazy,” said a former executive. It required incredibly complicated engineering, and it solved a problem that no one else thought was actually a problem. But no matter how forcefully executives objected, Musk wouldn’t yield. Even once the car was released, the handles sometimes proved troublesome. When Consumer Reports wanted to review a Model S in 2015, it had to postpone the analysis because “the fancy retractable door handles refused to let us in.”

But Musk was right. Those door handles quickly became a signature feature. A flush handle is now standard on every new Tesla. “It creates this almost emotional connection with the car, this sense that you’re part of the future,” the former executive said. “And that’s Elon’s genius. He knows what people want before they know.” This is the familiar pattern: Musk demands something impossible. Colleagues push back. Musk insists. And then innovation occurs at a speed hardly anyone thought possible. When Consumer Reports reviewed the Model S, it said the sedan “performed better in our tests than any other car ever has.” More important, Tesla helped prod the rest of the auto industry to begin developing electric cars of their own. Today, General Motors, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, and Nissan are among the many automakers offering electric vehicles.

As CEO, Musk was often an emotional leader, colleagues say, sometimes tearing up in front of employees when overcome by frustrations or the importance of the firm’s mission. He could also be socially awkward, prickly when others failed to show deference, defensive when corrected. To some he seemed to have a robotic lack of empathy and odd interpersonal mannerisms. “People used to tell me to hunch down lower in my seat during meetings,” one former high-ranking executive told me. “Elon reacted better to people when he was sitting higher than them.”

In Silicon Valley, people are allowed to be strange. In fact, they are often celebrated for it. At Tesla, Musk’s oddness was accepted. He was, after all, the leader, the biggest stockholder, the visionary. But sometimes his impatience would turn into tirades. “We called it ‘the idiot bit,’ ” a senior engineering executive told me. “If you said something wrong or made one mistake or rubbed him the wrong way, he would decide you’re an idiot and there was nothing that could change his mind.” Musk would openly deride employees in meetings, according to numerous sources, insulting their competence, bullying those who had failed to perform, demoting people on the spot. Musk could afford to fire, because a long list of qualified people wanted to work at Tesla. “It’s one of the few companies that is genuinely changing the world,” a former executive said. “And everyone was so smart.”

If Tesla executives weren’t exactly giddy, they were at least proud. Tesla sold 50,000 Model S cars in 2015, even as the price started at $76,000. That same year, Tesla introduced the Model X, an SUV with upward-folding falcon-wing doors. The company’s revenues soared to $7 billion the next year, and its workforce expanded to nearly 18,000. As Tesla’s cars grew in popularity, so did Musk’s fame. He played himself in episodes of The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory and began appearing on red carpets. Millions of people started following him on Twitter, where he would post photos of spacecraft built by his rocket company, spark dialogs with strangers, and produce the occasional technologist’s koan. “The rumor that I’m building a spaceship to get back to my home planet Mars is totally untrue,” he tweeted in 2015.

“He went from nerd famous to Hollywood famous,” said a former longtime executive. “It changes you when you suddenly become a celebrity.” Musk bought five different mansions in one Bel Air neighborhood, at a total cost of $72 million. One was a ranch-style house with 16,251 square feet and a screening room for videogames. As Musk’s public profile grew, his life became more complicated. After he was divorced from his first wife, with whom he has five children, in 2008, he started dating celebrities (including actress Talulah Riley, whom he married and divorced twice). Some company executives say they began reading celebrity tabloids. If the magazines reported turmoil in Musk’s love life, they knew to wait to deliver bad news. And executives followed his tweets and retweets closely. “We called it management by Twitter,” a former Solar City employee said. “Some customer would tweet some random complaint, and then we would be ordered to drop everything and spend a week on some problem affecting one loudmouth in Pasadena, rather than all the work we’re supposed to do to support the thousands of customers who didn’t tweet that day.”

Still, Musk’s storms were relatively easy to navigate. “He was surrounded by people he knew and trusted, who had been there for a while, who knew how to push back on him,” said a former executive who spoke to Musk regularly over much of the past decade. “He listened to us when we said he needed to dial it down. But then the Model 3 happened and everyone started leaving, and then everything started falling apart.”

On the morning of March 31, 2016, Musk left one of his Los Angeles homes and drove to a Tesla store in nearby Century City. It was the first day that customers could make reservations for the Model 3. If Musk’s plans worked, the midpriced vehicle would sell by the millions and revolutionize transportation. Manufacturing wasn’t scheduled to start for at least another year, but buyers who were willing to put down $1,000 could reserve a car.

For weeks, some Tesla executives had wagered among themselves how many people would preorder a Model 3. Some optimists guessed more than 50,000, which would be close to an industry record. When Musk arrived in Century City, though, he saw something amazing. Nearly 2,000 people were standing in a line that wrapped around the building and into the parking lot. Musk began walking in the crowd, slapping hands while his bodyguard occasionally yelled “no selfies, just high-fives.” Musk phoned other executives. Tesla stores elsewhere were similarly mobbed. By the end of the day, Tesla had accepted 180,000 reservations. By the end of the week, 325,000 people had ordered a Model 3. Tesla’s stock price began to soar. The company had sold fewer than 150,000 cars in its entire history, but within a little over a year it was worth more than General Motors, a company that sold more than 150,000 cars, on average, every week.

Soon after reservations opened, Doug Field, Tesla’s senior vice president of engineering, called a meeting of his staff. “You are now working at a different company,” he told them. Tesla had to go from a small manufacturer to a mass producer. “Everything has changed,” Field said. Field was a critical cog in making sure that change occurred smoothly. Musk had increasingly come to rely on Field and Jon McNeill, Tesla’s president of sales, marketing, delivery, and service, to oversee the company’s rapidly growing workforce. Both Field and McNeill were seasoned managers, respected in Silicon Valley and by Tesla’s staff. They and others had been recruited for their expertise and because running a company with tens of thousands of employees—from hourly workers to PhD scientists—required more than just genius and willpower.

Field was known to be methodical and disciplined. He had received degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had helped build automobiles at Ford Motor Company. He came to Tesla in 2013 after working at Apple. Leaving Apple “was the hardest career decision I’ve made,” Field said in a 2015 interview. “But it came down to the mission. It felt like a convergence of everything I had done in my career.” (A spokesperson for Field declined to discuss his time at Tesla.)

McNeill, a former Bain consultant who had started four companies, joined Tesla in 2015. He was known as a generous mentor who had built a reputation for creating happy workplaces. “The awards that bring me the most satisfaction are the Best Places to Work awards,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “Do these awards help us get business? I do not know.” But they attracted talent.

Tesla didn’t have a chief operating officer, so over time Field and McNeill became de facto daily managers, recruiting or overseeing dozens of vice presidents and other executives. By the time Tesla started taking reservations for the Model 3, that staff had already spent many months planning how it would build the car. The strategy was to start vehicle assembly at the Fremont plant in October 2017, according to a former engineering executive. Initially the factory would start small, giving employees time to smooth out assembly-line kinks and refine work processes. Then Tesla would start ramping up to 5,000 cars a week, the benchmark Musk had said the company needed to achieve.

In the summer of 2016, however—soon after customers began reserving Model 3s—Musk called a meeting that changed everything, according to multiple people who attended or were briefed on the gathering. The company had to move faster, Musk told his senior executives. He wanted to start production in July 2017, almost four months ahead of plan. Musk was excited by a particular notion: He had recently had a dream, people in the room recall him saying, in which he had seen the factory of the future, a fully automated manufacturing plant where robots built everything at high speed and parts moved along conveyor belts that delivered each piece, just in time, to exactly the right place. He said he had been working on such ideas for a while. “This thing will be an unstoppable alien dreadnought,” he told his colleagues, causing some of them to pull out their phones and Google the phrase. (It returned disturbing images of sci-fi armored spaceships that looked like copulating squids.)

To make the dreadnought a reality, Musk said, departments would need to redesign their manufacturing plans. The familiar pattern kicked in: Executives told Musk what he was proposing was unrealistic. Tesla was already building the most advanced factory in auto manufacturing, and there would be plenty of time to make incremental improvements and add automation once everything was running smoothly. Overhauling all the lines would cost so much time and money that it might be impossible to meet his expectations.

Musk has said that nearly anything is possible unless it violates the laws of physics. We’re going to build the machine that builds the machine, he told the room. But they had to move fast. A fully automated factory, he said, was an investment in Tesla’s future that would help the company compete in the coming decades. Over the next few weeks, executives kept arguing with Musk. A steady stream of engineers began giving notice. And a troubling trend emerged, according to former executives: If someone raised concerns or objections, Musk would sometimes pull the person’s manager aside and order that the offender be reassigned, or potentially terminated, or no longer invited to meetings. Some executives began excluding skeptics out of self-preservation. “If you were the kind of person who was likely to push back, you got disinvited, because VPs didn’t want anyone pissing off Elon,” one former executive who reported to Musk told me. “People were scared that someone would question something.”

Musk himself would later estimate that Tesla was burning through up to $100 million a week as thousands of employees tried to build Musk’s dreadnought. The threat of firing became a drumbeat. One former employee recalled hearing about a colleague who was eating breakfast at his desk when he was called away. His banana went brown and the milk in the cereal bowl formed a film before his officemates realized he’d been fired and cleaned up the mess. Musk “would say ‘I’ve got to fire someone today,’ and I’d say, ‘No you don’t,’ and he’d say, ‘No, no, I just do. I’ve got to fire somebody,’ ” one former high-ranking executive told me. (A Tesla spokesperson disputed this but added that Musk makes “difficult but necessary decisions.”) At one meeting Musk, agitated, broke a phone. During another, he noticed that an executive was missing and called him. The man’s wife had recently given birth, and he explained that he was taking time off as she recuperated. Musk was angry. At a minimum, you should be on phone calls, Musk told the man. Having a kid doesn’t prevent you from being on the phone. (A Tesla spokesperson said that while Musk “was once upset that a particular executive did not dial into an important conference call several days after his child was born,” the company would not penalize an employee for taking paternity leave.)

“Everyone came to work each day wondering if that was going to be their last day,” another former executive told me. A previous employee remembered Musk saying that Tesla’s goal was to save the world. “He would get really emotional,” this person told me—and that’s why he sometimes seemed callous, “because what’s one person’s feelings compared to the fate of billions? Elon cares a lot about humanity, but he doesn’t really care about individual people all that much.” (A Tesla spokesperson said Musk “very much cares about individual people.”)

By the summer of 2017, more than a year had passed since Tesla had started taking reservations for the Model 3, but the company was still nowhere near ready to make the car in volume. Engineers were still trying to figure out how to get robots to recognize and reliably grasp different colored wires, how to get parts where they were needed via a maze of conveyor belts. The company was far behind schedule, and some customers were starting to ask for their deposits back. On July 28, the firm hosted a huge press conference and celebration called the Model 3 Handover Party at the Fremont factory. Events like this were important, because Tesla does not spend money on advertising. Instead, it relies on glowing press coverage and ecstatic reviews to help sell cars.

At the party, Musk was scheduled to give the first 30 Model 3 customers—most of them employees—their automobiles. Because the assembly line was not fully functioning, those vehicles had been painstakingly built. Nevertheless, Musk, with a showman’s zeal, had tweeted earlier that month that Tesla would be making 20,000 cars a month by year’s end.

Once the event started, though, executives became worried. Musk, sitting in a room with his colleagues waiting for the press conference to start, seemed unresponsive, almost dead to the world. He had been dating the actress Amber Heard, but recently they had broken up. Now there was a vacant look on Musk’s face.

Executives squatted next to their boss and delivered pep talks. They told Musk he ought to enjoy this moment, when his dream of changing the world was finally becoming real. Musk stared ahead, silent. Eventually he walked into the room where journalists were waiting. His comments started off oddly dark. “We’re going to go through six months of manufacturing hell,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty great, but it’s going to be quite a challenge to build this car.” He began listing all the things that might go wrong. “Floods, fires, tornadoes, ships sink, if anything interrupts one of our supply chains, that will interrupt the production ramp.” Musk answered a few questions. “Sorry for being a little dry,” he said. “Got a lot on my mind right now.” To some, he appeared irritated to be there.

By that evening, Musk seemed more at ease when he unveiled 30 cars before an audience of hundreds. But the relief was short-lived, according to colleagues. The event marked the start of “a downward spiral,” said a former high-ranking executive who was with Musk that day. “He was always a mad genius, but he was about 95 percent genius and 5 percent mad.” That summer, possibly due to the breakup with Heard and the stress from the Model 3, the “ratio started to shift, and by the fall it was totally inverted.”

Over the next few months, what had once been a tense situation inside Tesla became, as Musk had prophesied, hellish. He did little to mask his angst. One Sunday morning a few days after the Model 3 event, as Musk was scrolling through Twitter on his iPhone, he saw a question posed by a game developer: “Following @elonmusk on Instagram shows an amazing life. I wonder if the ups and down he had make for a more enjoyable life?”

Musk began typing. “The reality is great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress. Don’t think people want to hear about the last two,” he replied. As others chimed in, one asked if Musk thought he suffered from bipolar depression. “Yeah,” Musk tweeted back. “Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.”

At work, Musk sometimes seemed almost giddy, occasionally interrupting meetings to insist that his colleagues watch clips of Monty Python episodes on his computer, according to several people. A particular favorite was a skit of aristocrats debating the virtues of words like antelope versus sausage. He would play it more than once, laughing uproariously each time, as his colleagues waited to return to the issues at hand.

More concerning to executives were Musk’s low periods, particularly in the wake of his split from Amber Heard. In the weeks after the first Model 3 handovers, Musk occasionally didn’t show up for meetings, or they would be canceled at the last minute, former employees say. Colleagues say they would call him on his cell phone in the morning, to make sure he had started the day. Musk gave bizarre interviews: He described being in “severe emotional pain” to a writer from Rolling Stone and then asked for dating advice. “I will never be happy without having someone,” he said. “Going to sleep alone kills me.”

In the months after the handover party, Musk seemed angrier than before, according to multiple people. “It started to feel like every day you expected to be fired,” said one executive who says he had three supervisors in three days. “There was this constant feeling of dread.”

Some managers feared that by taking on more prominent roles they increased their risk of termination or public humiliation. One former executive described Musk shaming her in front of colleagues. “He was shouting that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was an idiot, that he’s never worked with someone so incompetent,” she told me. In a company with so many male employees, “as a woman it was particularly humiliating,” she said.

Todd Maron, Tesla’s general counsel, said in defense of Musk that “there’s a lot of people outside Tesla who will sort of sugarcoat what they actually think of your performance, or of an issue, because they don’t really want to have the hard conversation.” Musk, however, “is someone who, I think, puts a lot of effort into forcing himself to be fully honest, and when he genuinely thinks someone has failed at something, he will let you know that he thinks you have failed at that and that the company requires that you do better so that we can achieve our mission and succeed.” (A month after I spoke to Maron, Tesla made the announcement that he would be leaving in January, one in a string of recent executive departures, which includes the company’s chief information officer, chief people officer, chief accounting officer, and vice presidents of manufacturing, worldwide finance, and engineering.)

Whether it was because of Musk’s management style or in spite of it, progress continued. “And that was the weird part,” a high-ranking engineering executive said, “because we were doing amazing work. I don’t want it to seem like the whole experience was negative, because when people were shielded from Elon, Tesla was amazing. We did incredible things.”

By the fall of 2017, parts of the Model 3 assembly line were starting to function smoothly. Production was beginning to pick up. Advances sometimes felt Pyrrhic, though, given Musk’s tendency to announce ambitious milestones. (Shareholders have sued the company over such announcements, and the Department of Justice has opened a probe into whether Tesla misled the public about Model 3 projections and production. Tesla, in a statement, said it was cooperating with the Department of Justice and that “Tesla’s philosophy has always been to set truthful targets.”)

Then, one evening in late October of that year, as things were still going badly inside the Gigafactory, Musk climbed onto the facility’s roof and posted a video on Instagram of himself and a few others roasting marshmallows, drinking whiskey, and singing a Johnny Cash song. “That did not go over well,” said a former high-ranking engineering executive. “All these people are working super hard, and he’s drinking and having a campfire.” Soon afterward, the company revealed that it had lost $671 million in the previous quarter and had built only 222 Model 3s; it had lost $1.5 billion in the first nine months of the year. During a November conference call with Wall Street analysts, as his colleagues listened apprehensively, Musk declared: “I have to tell you, I was really depressed about three or four weeks ago.” But he had become optimistic. “Now I can see sort of a clear path to sunshine,” he said. He had been working nonstop, sleeping in the factory, personally diagnosing robot calibration problems. “We are on it,” he added. “We’ve got it covered.”

Some of Musk’s colleagues cringed at these statements. Among the biggest obstacles, they believed, was Musk himself. There was disarray at Tesla because Musk kept insisting on automation, because so many people were leaving, because subordinates were terrified that challenging Musk could cost them their jobs.

Some executives felt something more was needed. At least two senior executives approached some of Tesla’s board members and said they were worried about Musk, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. Everyone wanted Musk to succeed but he needed help, one executive told them. (Board members Antonio Gracias, Ira Ehrenpreis, and Robyn Denholm, in a statement, said that it “is not true” that they were asked to speak to Musk about his behavior. The board members declined to be interviewed and declined to answer questions about whether they had or sought out conversations about Musk’s behavior.)

One person who tried to share concerns with Musk himself was his personal assistant. She approached him one day in private, according to people who later heard about the conversation. Executives are struggling, she told Musk. (In an email, she objected to any suggestion of tension with Musk and declined interview requests.)

Colleagues say the assistant was a gentle, calming presence in Musk’s life. It was her job to give him feedback, even if it was sometimes hard to hear. She was beloved by other executives, who often asked her to help them gauge Musk’s moods.

A few months later, she left the company.

By early February 2018, top executives were leaving. McNeill told Musk he was quitting, and would go on to become the chief operating officer at Lyft. This was a huge loss—with the possibility of inflaming anxieties among employees and stockholders—and so there were discussions about how to handle disclosing the departure. But after the news leaked, Musk announced the exit as almost an afterthought during a conference call with Wall Street analysts. “Actually, one thing we forgot to mention is Jon McNeill, who is heading up our sales and service group, is departing the company.” Musk said. “Going forward, I will be having the sales and service report directly to me.”

A few months later, Doug Field indicated he wanted to take a leave of absence, which one person described to The Wall Street Journal as a “six-week sabbatical.” Field never returned to Tesla; instead he took a job back at Apple. All told, more than 36 Tesla vice presidents or higher-ranking staffers had left the company in the previous two years. Some of them weren’t replaced. Soon, according to various sources, there were 19 people directly reporting to Musk and another 11 executives who did not have superiors. (Tesla disputes those numbers.) Musk had enormous oversight responsibilities, particularly as he was running other companies at the same time. “It felt like the adults were leaving the building,” one senior finance person told me. “There was really no one left who could push back on Elon anymore.”

By then, even Musk had conceded that the company’s fully automated factory vision, the “alien dreadnought,” wasn’t working. Workers ripped out conveyor belts inside the Fremont plant. Employees began carrying car parts to their workstations by hand or forklift and stacking boxes in messy piles. In April, Musk halted production for an entire week to make repairs. On some level, Musk seemed to recognize that he was undermining Tesla. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk tweeted. “To be precise, my mistake.” He once told a colleague: “We just have to stop punching ourselves in the head.”

But the punches kept coming. Musk’s Twitter habits accelerated—and sometimes veered out of control. On average, he had tweeted 94 times a month in 2016 and 2017. But after Field and McNeill left, he seemed to get sucked into a social media vortex. He sent 421 messages in May 2018, 414 in June, and 310 in July. The content of the messages was as unrestrained as the frequency. He posted bits of poems, derided journalists, and taunted short-sellers who were betting that Tesla’s stock price would fall. “You’re an idiot,” he tweeted in 2017 at a transit expert who criticized him. “Sorry,” he clarified. “Meant to say ‘sanctimonious idiot.’ ” He also sent insults via other means. “You’re a horrible human being,” he emailed a former employee who had spoken out about Tesla, according to The Washington Post. He sent a BuzzFeed reporter an email calling him a “fucking asshole.”

In May, Musk announced the company’s latest earnings in a conference call. He made no effort at civility and no one held him back. When a Wall Street analyst asked Tesla’s chief financial officer about capital expenditures, Musk responded: “Boring. Bonehead questions are not cool. Next?” With the next question, he erupted again. “These questions are so dry. They’re killing me!” and called upon a YouTube video blogger with an enormous enthusiasm for Tesla to ask questions for the next 20 minutes. (The company’s stock price dropped more than 5 percent after the call.)

Come summer, news coverage of Tesla was lurching from disaster to disaster. “For a long time, Elon would say or do something kind of wacky, and I would get up in front of my team and explain, this is why you shouldn’t worry about it,” said one executive who had been with Tesla for some years. “But eventually it got to where I couldn’t apologize anymore.”

Rumors of Musk’s behavior made their way to potential hires. One story that numerous people recounted involved a candidate for a retail development position. When he came to his interview with Musk, he wore blue shoes. Musk turned to a colleague and said he didn’t like the candidate’s shoes. The colleague explained the candidate’s qualifications. But Musk was unmoved; he rejected the candidate. (In a statement, a Tesla spokesperson said that Musk rejected the candidate because his experience wasn’t right for Tesla, and “the fact that Elon also mentioned in passing that he didn’t like the candidate’s shoes had nothing at all to do with why he wasn’t hired.”)

The story, however, came to be seen as an example of Musk’s impulsiveness. “After hearing about that, you stop recommending to friends they should apply,” a former executive told me. “You don’t want to put friends through that.”

In June, at Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting, Musk seemed sometimes near tears. “This is like—I tell you—the most excruciating, hellish several months that I have maybe ever had,” he said. It would eventually come out in Tesla’s financial filings that almost 20 percent of customers who had put down a deposit for the Model 3 had asked for refunds.

Musk soon announced Tesla had built a tent in the parking lot of the Fremont factory, where a new assembly line had been constructed. Musk spent his 47^th birthday inside the factory, working nonstop. “All night—no friends, nothing,” he later told The New York Times.

“The Model 3 production ramp was excruciatingly difficult for everyone at Tesla,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. “In order for Tesla to succeed, we must have extremely high standards and work harder and smarter than everyone else. Sometimes, when we feel it’s important to the success of our mission, that means people are let go. Those decisions are never easy and they are not made lightly, but hard decisions need to be made if we are to succeed. The alternative is the death of sustainable transportation, which is something we simply cannot accept.”

On July 1—more than two years after opening reservations for the Model 3—Musk finally sent the jubilant email many employees had been waiting for. “I think we just became a real car company,” he wrote. Tesla had manufactured 5,031 Model 3 vehicles during a seven-day period. They had hit their goal, six months late, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and dozens of executive departures. “What an incredible job by an amazing team,” Musk wrote. “Couldn’t be more proud to work with you.”

Employees inside the company also thought it was amazing, though some cite different reasons.

“For me, the fact that we were able to build at scale, amid all that craziness, that’s the real accomplishment,” one former engineering executive told me. “Just think about it: We designed a car that is so simple and elegant you can build it in a tent. You can build it when your CEO is melting down. You can build it when everyone is quitting or getting fired. That’s a real accomplishment. That’s amazing.”

It was amazing. But, as everyone knows, after that moment things got, in some ways, even stranger. When a Thai boys’ soccer team was trapped in a flooded cave in June, Musk offered to build a submarine to rescue them. But after his assistance was partially rebuffed, he tweeted an accusation that one of the rescuers was a pedophile. (There is no evidence this claim is true, and the rescuer has filed a defamation lawsuit, which is still pending.) Then news broke that, with debts of more than $900 million coming due in March, Tesla had asked suppliers to give back money the company had already paid them. In August, Musk sent the now infamous tweet: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Tesla’s stock soared. It quickly became apparent, though, that Musk had neither nailed down the money to take Tesla private nor had he done the basic groundwork for such an announcement, such as determining what regulatory approvals were necessary, according to a complaint against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk and Tesla eventually settled the SEC charges for $20 million apiece, and Musk was forced to relinquish his chairmanship of the board. He remains chief executive. (In November, Tesla named board member Robyn Denholm as chair.)

There were other dramas as well. As part of its settlement with the SEC, Tesla is supposed to set up controls and procedures for Musk’s communications. A week later, he sarcastically tweeted that the agency had been renamed the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.” In response to a question on Twitter about cosplay, he posted pictures of manga women with captions like “im actually catgirl here’s selfie” and solicitations to buy bitcoin. Twitter shut down his account, assuming it had been hacked, until Musk confirmed the posts were his.

Then, in September, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Musk smoked marijuana. The video of the moment went viral, and while some people mocked Musk for appearing not to inhale, others raised more serious questions. The show was recorded in California, where recreational cannabis use is legal, but Musk is chief executive of SpaceX—a government contractor that works on national security projects. Musk has received security clearance, according to the Department of Defense, and “individuals with federal security clearances have to abide by federal laws, period. You are not allowed to smoke marijuana, regardless of state law,” said Department of Defense spokesperson Audricia Harris. A few weeks before the Rogan podcast, The New York Times reported that “some board members are also aware that Mr. Musk has on occasion used recreational drugs, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Tesla, in a statement to WIRED, wrote that the “employees and executives who work with Elon day in and day out, and who know him best, can and do attest to the fact that they have never observed Elon to be under the influence of anything that could affect his judgment at work.” The company continued: “SpaceX conducts random drug testing, administered by an independent laboratory, on its employees in a sensitive position—including Elon. Such testing never has shown even trace quantities of drugs in Elon’s system.” In November, NASA announced it would be conducting a “cultural assessment study” of SpaceX and Boeing to ensure the companies were meeting NASA’s requirements of “adherence to a drug-free environment.” The Washington Post reported that officials had indicated “the review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk.”

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Musk’s public behavior lurched from feisty to angry to almost pitiably distraught. As the weather grew colder, however, Musk seemed to emerge from his gloom. Musk gave interviews to Kara Swisher’s Recode Decode podcast, Axios on HBO, and 60 Minutes. He has talked about a range of subjects: how he’s been misunderstood and mistreated by journalists, his hope of merging the human brain with machines so we can download our consciousness, his enthusiasm for competition in the electric car business. He also declared to 60 Minutes that he has “no idea how to smoke pot” and said, “I do not respect the SEC.” In the Axios interview he said, not for the first time, that the experience of ramping up the Model 3 was among the most difficult of his life. “Seven days a week, sleeping at the factory,” he said. “No one should put this many hours into work.” Musk looked tired and uncomfortable as he said the company had come within weeks of death, and described how the experience “hurts my brain and my heart.” He didn’t mention in that interview what his demands had meant to those who worked for him—to the people who had been fired, those who had been screamed at, or those who’d worked long weekends at the Gigafactory.

Musk’s odd behavior isn’t unique or even extreme in the annals of inventors. Howard Hughes lived like a hermit in hotels, watching movies in the nude and refusing to cut his fingernails. Nikola Tesla, who pioneered alternating current electricity delivery—and who is honored in the name of Musk’s company—died destitute, convinced he had invented a motor that could run on “cosmic rays” and obsessed with caring for sick pigeons. (He is reputed to have said of one, “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me.”)

There’s a sense of tragedy in such stories because these men seemed, at one point, to rise above the masses and suggest that genius is possible. Silicon Valley in particular reveres these kind of heroes—and the more willful and ornery they are, the better. Technologists are often called upon to do things that seem impossible, and so they celebrate when doubters are proven wrong—when the dismissal of an idea becomes evidence of its visionary reach. The idea of the odd genius is afforded a special status within technology. People lionize inventors who listen to their intuition and ignore naysayers, who hold themselves and everyone else to a standard of perfection, regardless of what it costs those around them. Steve Jobs is gone; now we have Elon Musk.

Throughout the turmoil, workers at Tesla have continued building Model 3s, getting better and faster each day. They still don’t sell the car for $35,000—the least expensive version costs at least $10,000 more—but someday, who knows? The large quarterly profit the company announced in October provided the firm with a moment of relief. Some former executives say what concerns them now is whether other car companies—the big ones with well-honed manufacturing systems, steady executives, and functioning bureaucracies—will start making electric cars that are just as good as Tesla’s, erasing the company’s head start and cachet.

After Musk abandoned his brash proposal to take Tesla private, some on Wall Street argued that the company would benefit from a leadership change. “We are hopeful that … the past 17 days will lead the board down the path to bringing on a more operational CEO, or at a minimum a COO,” Cowen and Company analysts wrote after Musk tweeted and then dropped his suggestion about going private. “Now, more than ever, a solid number 2—someone with strong operational background that can help Tesla move from ideas to execution—is crucial,” RBC Capital Markets wrote to clients. Some have proposed that Musk might become Tesla’s chief design officer—a wizard and motivational force.

Others, though, are skeptical. “A strong executive isn’t going to come in with him hovering over their shoulder,” a former senior executive told me. It is unlikely Musk will give up power, former colleagues say. In January 2018, shareholders agreed to compensate Musk as much as $55 billion over the next 10 years, but only if Musk continues to lead the company and hits 12 milestones, including a market capitalization of $650 billion, roughly 10 times what it’s worth today. (Musk, who is worth more than $20 billion and already owns a great deal of Tesla stock, won’t be paid anything at all if Tesla doesn’t grow to the targets.) “He’s got 55 billion reasons to never let anybody run that company,” one executive said.

A Tesla spokesperson said that Musk has proven himself. “The fact that under Elon’s leadership we have successfully ramped Model 3 production and just had our most successful quarter in the company’s history suggests he was not an obstacle to Tesla’s success.”

Eric Larkin, who helped oversee factory software until he was fired in April, still feels a strong emotional and financial attachment to Tesla. He’d worked there for three years and was proud to be part of something that could reduce carbon in the atmosphere and “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” as the company’s mission statement puts it. “Tesla is the only company positioned to make this world a better place, to really improve the world right now,” Larkin told me. “And Tesla is Elon. How can you be bitter about humanity’s best hope?”

Many I spoke to agreed that Tesla and Musk, for the time being, are inseparable. Which is why they are so bewildered by his behavior and so disappointed that his strengths are accompanied by such curious faults. A few years ago, two Tesla workers were having drinks at a hotel bar across from the Fremont factory when Musk walked in. He was alone except for a bodyguard. They asked Musk if he would like to join their table. Musk sat, and after a few uncomfortable moments started talking about the TV shows he liked, cartoons like South Park and Family Guy. Everyone ordered expensive Scotch and began recounting their favorite episodes from The Simpsons. It was fun. They laughed a lot. It didn’t feel normal, exactly. But it also didn’t feel scary or bad, as it so often did inside the factory. They could have been anyone, just ordinary friends catching up. Then, after a few hours, Musk paid the bill and walked away, back into his chaotic, frenzied, tigerlike life.

Source photos: Art Streiber/August Image (Musk); Steve Wilson/Getty Images (tiger) Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News/Getty Images (Musk); Tom Brakefield/Getty Images (Tiger) Jason Henry/The New York Times/Redux (Gigafactory) Mark Brake/Getty Images (Musk); Justin Kaneps/The New York Times/Redux (Car)

Charles Duhigg (@cduhigg) was part of a team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, writing about Apple for The New York Times. He is the author of best sellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better.

Correction appended (12–13-2018, 1:00 pm EST): Elon Musk’s “horrible human being” email was first reported by The Washington Post, not Business Insider.

Correction appended (12–14-2018, 2:05 pm EST): Updated to clarify which automakers offer electric vehicles.

This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

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Paging Dr. Robot

✾ newyorker.com✾ Monday 23 September 2019✾ D. T. Max✾ 35 minute read✾

Surgical robots have thin rods instead of bulky hands, and the rods never tremble. Illustration Elena Xausa

When Pier Giulianotti was a medical student, he hated the sight of blood. In the mid-seventies, he travelled from his native Italy to Spain, on a fellowship, and watched a lung resection. “I nearly fainted,” he recalled recently. “I had to sit down in the corner.” The next day, he attended a plastic-surgery procedure. “Something more gentle,” he told himself. “This will be for me!” The patient had a burn scar on her face. First, the surgeons removed the damaged skin. “You’ve seen the movie ‘Terminator’?” Giulianotti said. “I was trembling on my legs, but I was trying to resist.” After the surgeons prepared a graft by slicing healthy skin from the woman’s thigh—“Swoosh swoosh swoosh, like cutting a piece of salami!”—he went woozy. Again he was led to the chair of shame. Giulianotti considered quitting medicine, but he loved helping patients. He got over his squeamishness and decided to specialize in surgery, but kept wondering if the practice could be refined. “I am Tuscan—anatomy is painting,” he said to himself. “Surely there is a more artistic way to interact with the human body.”

He finished his medical studies and did surgical residencies at the University of Pisa and the University of Milan, which are among Italy’s best medical faculties. In the mid-eighties, he became an expert in laparoscopic surgery, in which a doctor inserts a camera inside a small incision and then uses the video to guide surgical tools that have been inserted into the body through other incisions. Minimally invasive surgery speeds recovery and reduces the length of hospital stays. But he found that laparoscopic equipment was disorienting to use—among other problems, depending on the position of the probe inside the body, the image that the surgeon sees can be backward.

In 1999, Giulianotti remembers, he attended a conference in Germany, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, where the company demonstrated a prototype of a robotic arm for use in performing surgery. The response was tepid—the surgeons present said that they just wanted better laparoscopic tools. Johnson & Johnson shelved the project, but Giulianotti was galvanized by the concept. “Ninety per cent of the surgeons said bullshit,” he said. “But I knew.”

On a recent morning in Chicago, Giulianotti, who looks a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger with white hair, put on a sterile gown and cap, covered his craggy face with a surgeon’s mask, and entered an operating room. Giulianotti is now a professor of surgery at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he runs a program in robotic-assisted surgery. At the age of sixty-six, he has now performed roughly three thousand procedures with the aid of a robot, and has helped train nearly two thousand surgeons in the art. Farid Gharagozloo, a professor at the University of Central Florida and a surgeon at the Global Robotics Institute, said of Giulianotti, “He single-handedly started the area of general surgery in robotics, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. No matter what the field, there’s a certain panache and sort of genetic makeup that makes people the leaders—makes them do things that no one else wants—and Pier has that.” Gharagozloo said that, when he watched videos of Giulianotti’s surgeries, he was left “in awe.” Giulianotti was the first surgeon to perform more than a dozen robotic procedures, ranging from kidney transplants to lung resections. In the operating room, he relies on one robot: a multi-armed, one-and-a half-million-dollar device named the da Vinci.

The patient, a woman in her twenties, lay etherized upon a table. She had a genetic endocrine condition that causes an enlarged thyroid, and recurring tumors on the pancreas and on the adrenal glands. After Giulianotti arrived in the operating room, the physician assistant and the chief resident made four tiny incisions, marked with red dots, on her stomach, and inserted narrow tubes, called cannulas, into the holes.

Giulianotti greeted the support team and took me over to a monitor, to look at a preoperative black-and-white scan of the patient’s innards. He pointed to a large tumor on the tail of the woman’s pancreas, a couple of centimetres from her spleen. It would be “very, very challenging,” he warned, to remove the tumor without damaging the spleen. The abdomen is as densely packed as an overstuffed suitcase. The spleen nearly touches the curvature of the stomach and a section of the colon. To operate successfully within such density, surgeons must have a pinpoint sense of their tools’ locations. Giulianotti’s clinical fellow, Michail Papamichail, who was observing the operation, explained, “If you miss the plane, one mistake leads to another, and soon you have to convert.” Converting is switching to conventional surgery. Giulianotti told me that he had once made a conversion after one of the da Vinci’s arms stopped moving. But he had never missed the plane.

Robotic surgery has several advantages. First is the ability to cut and suture in deeper, tighter quarters. Robots have thin rods instead of bulky hands, and—in contrast to conventional or laparoscopic surgery—the rods never tremble. The da Vinci has four arms: one holds a camera and the other three grasp instruments. Surgeons sit at a console and use joysticks and foot pedals to control which two of the three rods they are manipulating at any given moment. A user as skillful as Giulianotti creates the illusion of having three operative hands; surgeons who regularly use the da Vinci often report experiencing a heightened sense of control. Robotic instruments are more flexible than a human wrist and can rotate three hundred and sixty degrees. Laparoscopic tools, by comparison, have a limited range of motion and can be awkward to use: when the tip of a laparoscopic tool is deep inside a patient’s body, it can be hard to exert leverage precisely, and the tiniest movement of the surgeon’s hand can lead to a major mistake. Finally, whereas most laparoscopic probes show a two-dimensional image, the da Vinci’s robotic camera gives a full three-dimensional picture of the body—the surgeon looks at the footage through a stereoscopic viewer that is attached to the console.

Papamichail told me that, were I to see the procedure unfold solely by watching the console screen, it would look like “such an easy operation to perform.” He added, “But it is not. Otherwise, many people would do it. Pier makes it look easy because he moves so smoothly, accurately, and quickly.” Papamichail also said, “What really impresses me is his perception of the inside anatomy and how delicately he is moving the robotic instruments. For each operation, he strictly follows his preoperative plan. For whatever action he does during an operation, there is always a reason behind it.”

Despite the enthusiasm of such practitioners as Giulianotti, many members of the American surgical establishment remain skeptical of robotic surgery—in part because it is expensive (having a robot perform your kidney transplant can add several thousand dollars to your hospital bill) and in part because doctors often prefer to stick with methods they have already mastered. Some physicians view robotic surgery as a pretty technology in need of a problem. Marty Makary, a doctor who performs both laparoscopic and robotic surgery, and is also a health-policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, told me, “Because the robot has been so heavily marketed, it has become a ‘one hammer’ approach. I know of instances where there’s no real benefit, but surgeons insist on using it, in order to attract patients.” Since robotic surgery first came on the scene, twenty years ago, more than eighteen thousand studies of its efficacy have been conducted, and with many procedures, such as a pancreatectomy, the method is considered superior; with other procedures, it remains unclear whether a robotic approach produces meaningfully better outcomes than laparoscopic surgery.

Giulianotti, who performed robotic surgery on a cadaver in 1999, has never looked back. He recalled to me the first times he used a da Vinci for operations on living patients. (They were all gallbladder surgeries, because for an accomplished surgeon the procedure is difficult to mess up.) He described the experience in sensual terms: “I felt the small robotic hands of the robot were a prolongation of my own. If you are used to having flat vision, and you pass into 3-D, you feel you are immersed inside the human body. It was a fantastic journey—the interior of the anatomy, the shadow of little vessels and nerves. I immediately fell in love.” He told me about a bravura operation that he performed, in 2008, on an Italian woman who had a huge tumor on her liver. The patient was a Jehovah’s Witness, and therefore couldn’t be given blood. Giulianotti recalled telling himself, “Any mistake, and the patient will die on the operating table.” Because his da Vinci-assisted incisions were so precise, he said, he was able to remove the tumor with only three hundred cubic centimetres of blood loss—about half a pint. “That was a big turning point for me,” he recalled. “I thought this technique could be expanded—a lot.” (He has since operated on dozens of other Jehovah’s Witnesses.)

For the patient currently on the table, he felt that the advantages of robotic surgery were particularly clear. Given her condition, this was unlikely to be her last visit to an operating room, and he wanted her body to emerge as intact as possible. Typically, the operation would call for removing the patient’s spleen, but she was a young woman, and it was better to keep it. “The spleen has immunitary functions,” Giulianotti explained.

At 7:35 A.M., the circulating nurse gave the “time out”—the reading of the patient’s name and age, and the reason for the surgery. Then she turned on the carbon dioxide and the patient’s stomach expanded obscenely; the suitcase became a closet. Giulianotti approached the operating table. Rows of gleaming scalpels, forceps, and sponges were arrayed on a tray—an arrangement familiar to anyone who watches medical dramas. But, at the moment when a typical surgeon would extend his hand for a scalpel, Giulianotti went into a corner, where there was a gray console that reminded me of a hulking computer from the nineties. He slid off his hospital shoes—green Crocs—and placed his stockinged feet on the pedals and his hands on the joysticks. He sank his face deep into the stereoscopic viewer. A nurse rolled a cart with four praying-mantis-like arms toward the patient’s exposed belly and connected them to the cannulas. The machine whirred as it gently adjusted its height, calculating a position that would allow its arms to move optimally inside the woman’s abdomen. Giulianotti asked for forceps, a hook, and a grasper, and the nurses attached them to the robot’s appendages. At seven-thirty-seven, the da Vinci inserted the instruments into the woman’s body, and they instantly appeared on the monitor. It was time to begin cutting.

In the nineteen-nineties, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military organization that first developed the Internet, attempted to design a robotic-surgery device. The goal was for a doctor to sit securely behind enemy lines and remotely repair soldiers’ wounds on the battlefield. The project, which was based at the Stanford Research Institute International, was abandoned: the bandwidth available at the time was insufficient to operate a sensitive instrument halfway across the world without a devastating time lag. Some innovations pioneered at Stanford did work well, though, such as a method that offered better visualization of wounds. In 1995, a California surgeon named Fred Moll licensed the technology, with two colleagues, for tens of millions of dollars, and launched a startup, Intuitive Surgical.

Moll knew that laparoscopy, for all its benefits, could exhaust and frustrate surgeons, who often had to spend several hours manipulating their tools through tiny holes. But, if scalpels and forceps were attached to a remote-controlled robot, surgeons could easily go as deep as they wanted, at any angle. Moll and his colleagues built a device and called it the da Vinci. (Leonardo, the protean genius, had made drawings of a humanlike robot.)

Initially, sales were slow. Hospitals were wary of the high costs of the device, and many surgeons found it alienating. David Cassak, the editor of the journal MedTech Strategist, explained to me, “These are guys who like to be up to their elbows in gore.” He added that, when the da Vinci was new, “many really didn’t want to entertain the idea there was some machine out there that could replace them.” Moll began promoting the da Vinci for heart-bypass surgery, a gruelling operation for which no minimally invasive procedure was generally available—the patient’s ribs had to be cracked open. This turned out to be a strategic mistake. According to the company, one problem the researchers faced was that a patient undergoing a bypass can’t survive for very long on a mechanical heart pump: surgeons must race the clock. The procedure was too stressful for use as an introduction to the da Vinci.

One day in 2000, a German urologist named Jochen Binder decided to use a da Vinci to remove a prostate gland. He was impressed with the freedom of movement and the 3-D view offered by the da Vinci, and felt that robotic appendages, with their accuracy and strength, were especially well suited to the narrow space where the gland is tucked away. In laparoscopic prostate surgery, suturing was almost impossible—it was, as a medical executive explained to me, “like two chopsticks trying to tie a knot.” The da Vinci completed the sutures with ease. Quickly, a majority of urologists adopted the robotic approach. Intuitive Surgical executives now like to joke, “We aimed for the heart and hit the prostate.” (Around this time, Moll left the company.)

The company, like any West Coast startup, was consumed with making its platform ubiquitous: if it could get enough of its machines into hospitals, it would be hard for anyone to get them out. The sales force worked to create excitement not just among surgeons but also among potential patients, tapping into the futuristic appeal of robots. Da Vinci simulators were set up in malls. In radio ads, hospitals that owned da Vincis boasted about having the latest technology, using talking points that Intuitive Surgical had provided for them.

Many surgeons clearly preferred using the da Vinci for certain procedures, but were they sending patients home sooner and in better shape? The Food and Drug Administration hadn’t forced Intuitive Surgical to offer proof. The agency divides medical-device applications into various categories. The manufacturer of a product that employs new technology is required to demonstrate that it works and is safe. In other cases, companies need only show that their devices are substantially similar to products already in the marketplace. The F.D.A. judged the da Vinci to be a variant of laparoscopic surgery, and cleared it for sale.

Intuitive Surgical, in its early push for profit, developed a reputation for some sloppy practices. The training that surgeons were offered on the da Vinci often lasted only a day. In 2013, the F.D.A. sent the company a warning letter, accusing it of failing to keep the agency informed about updates to the da Vinci’s operating instructions, on matters such as the proper cleaning of instruments. Two years later, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists declared that “the rapid adoption of robotic technology for gynecologic surgery is not supported by high-quality patient outcomes, safety, or cost data.” At about the same time, shareholders began filing lawsuits alleging that, among other things, Intuitive Surgical had made false statements about the da Vinci’s capabilities. Two of the cases were eventually settled, for fifty-five million dollars. Other lawsuits were filed by patients who said they had been harmed during surgery involving a da Vinci. A urologist, who caused a tear in the rectal wall of an obese patient while performing robotic prostate surgery, claimed that the company hadn’t warned him that the operation was not suited to seriously overweight patients. (Intuitive denied this, but settled the case.) Documents filed in that lawsuit revealed that sales representatives at Intuitive Surgical had pressured doctors to increase the number of procedures they performed with the da Vinci, so that the company’s numbers would be more impressive.

In 2014, Intuitive Surgical paid for an ad that featured a photograph of Giulianotti and other white-coated employees at the University of Illinois medical center. “We believe in da Vinci Surgery because our patients benefit,” the copy said. A blogger criticized the school for endorsing a commercial product, and noted that one person in the picture was neither a doctor nor a nurse but an administrator. The company had not compensated the medical team for the endorsement, but over the years it has given two hundred thousand dollars to help fund annual conventions for the Clinical Robotic Surgery Association, of which Giulianotti is a founding member. Giulianotti pointed out that the money was not paid to him personally, and he does not regret the ad, explaining that its purpose was to advertise for patients. “I am totally independent,” he said.

Makary, of Johns Hopkins, told me that in recent years Intuitive Surgical has “cleaned up its act,” and, among other reforms, now provides more extensive training to doctors. But its mistakes have contributed to the surgical community’s skepticism about robotic surgery. Phil Phillips, a former deputy director at the F.D.A., who played a major role in clearing the robot for use, told me, “I think the da Vinci was probably a lightning rod because its manufacturer cast it as a revolutionary device.” Giulianotti told me that most general surgeons still oppose robotic procedures. “Ask any of the presidents of the American College of Surgeons,” he said. “They’re basically all against it.” (A spokesman for the group said that it has no official position on robotic surgery.)

Even though Intuitive Surgical is controversial in the medical community, it has had the robotics field to itself, and has an excellent business plan. Currently, there are nearly five thousand da Vincis around the world. Servicing one of the robots can cost up to two hundred thousand dollars a year. From the end of the month in which Intuitive Surgical first went public, in 2000, to the end of last month, the company’s stock price increased more than eight thousand per cent—almost twenty-six per cent, on average, per year. During the same period, the Nasdaq went up less than five per cent a year. Some analysts call Intuitive Surgical the “Apple of the med-tech sector.”

Once the da Vinci had inserted its 3-D camera inside the patient with a tumor on her pancreas, everyone turned their eyes to a flat-panel screen. Monitors had been installed around the operating room, as in a sports bar. The da Vinci’s three arms were loaded and ready to go: one held a grasper, the second held a hook, and the third held forceps. Giulianotti moved the grasper to lift the stomach wall and hold it immobile. He then used the forceps to push tissue out of the way as he hooked a ligament and severed it. If you were watching the patient—nobody was—you saw the arms of the robot steadily moving in and out through the tiny incisions in the woman’s body. On the screen, things looked more frenetic. The robotic arms seemed to prod and grab at the tissue like a pack of predatory animals, giving the disquieting impression that they were feasting on a carcass.

Medical residents watched from the perimeter. As a playlist of Bach partitas played in the background, Giulianotti kept up a running commentary, which was transmitted via a sound system. He pointed out anatomical landmarks—the liver, the transverse colon—and described how he was using each instrument.

The pleasure that he took in his work was evident. “Through the navigation with the robot, you will see beautiful images,” Giulianotti had promised me. “You are moving around like you are dancing, avoiding major blood vessels and organs.” Now, after making a deft cut, he told his audience, “Michelangelo said the art is already inside the marble block.” As Giulianotti made his way toward the pancreas, he occasionally paused to exult in how little blood had been lost: “Only fifty or sixty millilitres!” He added, “That’s less than a glass of wine.”

He asked a nurse to replace the forceps with a tool called a vessel sealer, a device that emits electromagnetic waves in order to cut off blood flow, usually within seconds. It also contains a blade, for cutting blood vessels. Once the sealer had been attached, he went back to work. He came to the tail of the pancreas, where it joins the spleen, and cut the colon away from the left kidney. The 3-D camera revealed that smoke was curling inside the patient’s closed abdomen.

“I don’t need a club or a spear, now that I’ve mastered sarcasm.” Cartoon Mick Stevens

At last, the tumor—yellow-red and bulging—was at the center of the console screen. Giulianotti did not like the look of it. It seemed “hypervascularized,” and he suspected that it was cancerous. To test this theory, an anesthesiologist injected a green dye that moved through the patient’s bloodstream. Giulianotti switched the camera probe to infrared mode and, using the foot pedals, activated a laser on the da Vinci. The tumor pulsed green. This meant that it was sucking up blood, which suggested that it might indeed be malignant.

Giulianotti stood up and announced that “this operation has become a cancer operation.” According to standard surgical protocol, the woman’s spleen would have to come out, after all, because of the risk of leaving cancerous lymph nodes behind. “Let’s complete the job,” he said. He went back to the console, and the robot began methodically cutting the blood vessels that bonded the stomach to the spleen.

Throughout the operation, the da Vinci displayed morsels of digital intelligence. Whenever Giulianotti wanted to cut something, the robot first measured the tissue’s impedance—or resistance to an electrical current—and, thus, the extent to which blood had been stanched. If the da Vinci judged that it was O.K. to proceed, it gave an encouraging beep. The robot had a stapler, but it would not use it if the tissue that it was supposed to tack down was too thick. (It reminded me of a remark that Moll, Intuitive Surgical’s co-founder, had made to the Times, in 2008. He said that a key function of robots in an operating room was to constrain bad surgeons: “Robots are good at going where they are supposed to, remembering where they are and stopping when required.”)

At eight-forty-five, the tumor paled, its blood supply having been cut off. Giulianotti cut loose a section of the pancreas near the tumor and then separated the spleen, and its suspect lymph nodes, from the stomach wall. If there had been no evidence of cancer, Giulianotti could have chopped up the tumor and brought it out through the existing tiny holes in the patient’s belly. But this was impossible where there was a risk of malignant cells spreading, so a nurse sent a specimen bag through the cannula. Giulianotti used his robotic grasper to put the loose organ and the tumor inside the bag.

The elegance that Giulianotti so prized had evaporated. He got up from his seat and went over to the operating table. The chief resident made a three-inch incision in the patient’s abdomen. Giulianotti put a laparoscopic camera through one of the cannulas and, while watching the screen, used forceps to push the bag toward the incision. He then squeezed the contents until they fit through the slit.

At 9:42 A.M., he pulled out the bag with the severed spleen and the tumor. The specimen emerged through the incision with a plop. Giulianotti looked up like a boy with mixed feelings about having caught a fish. “We lost more blood from this stupid maneuver than from the entire robotic operation,” he groused. But there was compensation. “We finished before the Bach partitas did,” he noted.

Afterward, Giulianotti and I went to a small room outside the O.R., where various physicians were typing into terminals. He said, “Some people—even my colleagues—when speaking about the robot they are saying, ‘Oh, it’s a better tool.’ No. It’s not a better tool! It’s a complete”—he searched for the end of the thought—“philosophical concept. We are for the first time in the history of humanity using a world that doesn’t exist—virtuality—to be able to change reality.”

Later that day, we went across the street, where the university is building a new robotic-surgery center. (The most generous private donor is a satisfied former patient of Giulianotti’s.) The new lab, which is set to open next year, will be underground, and when Giulianotti first saw the bunkerlike space he found it too gloomy. So he lifted the audacious concept behind I. M. Pei’s addition to the Louvre, and added skylights, in the shape of glass pyramids, to various courtyards. Giulianotti told me that he had originally come to Chicago for a one-year sabbatical but had grown to like the city. “It is one of only three American cities acceptable to Europeans,” he declared.

To get to the new lab, Giulianotti took me beneath the university’s neuropsychiatric institute, whizzing past an “Authorized Personnel Only” sign. He has the mind-set, common to many surgeons, that he can do pretty much whatever he wants. At one point, when a publicist from the hospital told him that she was obligated to be at his side whenever I was present, he refused, informing her that he didn’t live in the Soviet Union.

Arriving at the new lab space, most of which was still under construction, Giulianotti showed me where seminar rooms and training facilities would go. He was particularly eager to try out an operation on patients who suffered from gastric reflux; if the technique worked as well as he hoped, the patients might emerge fully cured—and could stop taking medication like Prilosec. He swore me to secrecy on the new procedure, saying, “If they knew that I’m working on this project they could kill me, because I’m touching a business of billions around the world.”

We walked over to another empty space. This was where he planned to build a remote “cockpit” for surgeries in which the patient was not in the same room. It was the original DARPA project, reborn. “I think with 5G coming we can do it,” Giulianotti said. He will have to work quickly: a Boston-area company called Vicarious Surgical, which is partly funded by Bill Gates, is also working on a robot that a surgeon will be able to operate from a remote distance.

Even though competitors like Vicarious Surgical are beginning to emerge, Intuitive Surgical retains an overwhelming market share, and, with five billion dollars in cash reserves, it can afford to invest heavily in R. & D. An important next step for the company will be upgrading the da Vinci. With its cautionary beeps, the robot is more than a tool, but it is hardly as autonomous as, say, a self-driving car. It marshals no personal data about the patient or the population that has the same conditions; it does not make assessments by weighing genetic information or by aggregating data from similar procedures. During an operation, a da Vinci offers a surgeon only rudimentary guidance. If its software were a chess program, all it would do is keep you from accidentally sacrificing your queen on the next move.

Giulianotti told me that a more advanced robot could have assessed the tumor he saw that morning better in situ than he could: “I’m pretty sure that the computer would be able to recognize—based on the pattern of blood flow and the tissue itself, and based on billions of people—what is the best decision: ‘You can save the spleen,’ or ‘It’s better to remove the spleen.’ ” Later, I learned that the patient’s tumor was not actually malignant; she could have kept her spleen.

A company called Digital Surgery is trying to smarten robots by feeding visual data sets of surgical procedures into artificial-intelligence algorithms. The company already markets an app that trains doctors through simulated surgery, and it is essentially applying the same technique to training robots. The company’s founder, a surgeon named Jean Nehme, told me, “We’re not anywhere near playing grand-master chess. But the computers are at the level of a medical-school student. Our algorithms recognize and understand where a surgeon is in a procedure.”

Fred Moll, the Intuitive Surgical co-founder, is eager to see robotic medical devices incorporate artificial intelligence, but he argues that there are some decisions a computer simply can’t make. He asked me to imagine a surgeon removing a tumor from a patient’s brain. Too much cutting could lead to a loss of function, such as aphasia; too little cutting could leave the patient open to a possibly fatal outcome. The patient, meanwhile, is awake on the operating table, providing the surgeon with second-by-second feedback. “You’re trying to make a judgment about how much should I take, and there’s patient interaction,” Moll said. “When do you stop? There’s a component that’s going to be hard to displace onto a robot.”

Intuitive Surgical tends to point to the F.D.A. as the reason that complex artificial intelligence hasn’t yet made it into the operating room. Last year, Myriam Curet, the company’s chief medical officer, spoke to the Robot Report, a Web site, and said, “I actually think the technology to create an autonomous robot will actually be easy to solve. . . . The problem will be the regulatory environment.” Consumer fears will also have to be overcome. Gary Guthart, the C.E.O. of Intuitive Surgical, reminded me that human pilots still take off and land commercial planes, even though they don’t have to do so. He said, “Flight-wise, I think most folks, while they accept that there’s a fair amount of automation, they want the pilot in there. They want Sully Sullenberger.”He was careful not to promise too much autonomy for the da Vinci too soon.“When the computer makes a recommendation, it better be right,” he said. For the moment, Intuitive Surgical seems focussed more on making humans as good as robots than on the reverse. Intuitive’s main automation goal, Curet explained, is to dampen the variability of a human surgeon’s performance—“ ‘My child was throwing up, so therefore I’m tired today, and therefore my hands are not as steady as they were yesterday.’ ”

Some of Intuitive’s key patents related to the da Vinci have expired or will do so soon, and later this month the company will get a glimpse of its first significant competitor: a surgical robot made by Medtronic, the medical-products behemoth. Its device is tentatively being called the Einstein. (Giulianotti noted, mockingly, “Da Vinci was a genius, and they need another genius, so—Einstein!”) According to an industry executive who has seen photographs of the device, it doesn’t seem very different from the da Vinci. “There are only so many ways to build a robot,” the executive told me. The Einstein poses a threat mainly because Medtronic can use its market power to sell the device along with other products. The University of Illinois, despite its long-standing relationship with Intuitive Surgical, recently signed a million-dollar deal to test Medtronic robots in the new underground lab.

Another threat comes from Johnson & Johnson, which now has a robotics division headed by none other than Fred Moll. This time, Moll says, his goal isn’t to produce a huge robot for an operating room; instead, he plans to manufacture a more portable multipurpose device that can be deployed throughout a hospital, assisting on everything from colonoscopies to heart surgeries.

Scott Huennekens, who until recently ran a joint venture between Google and Johnson & Johnson, spoke to me about how the practice of surgery might be transformed in the next few decades. Once robotic devices become commonplace and reliable, surgery will no longer have to take place at a hospital, which means that far more people will have access to it—especially those in remote or impoverished areas. There will be dozens of kinds of surgical robots, and many will tackle specific jobs, from suturing in the abdomen to setting a broken leg. The over-all surgical plan will be generated by a computer, crunching data from the patients’ tests and previous similar surgeries. An A.I. algorithm will recommend a treatment regimen. Humans will oversee but not perform the actual operating. The only person who will be nostalgic for today’s clumsy methods is the kind of surgeon who is driven by the visceral thrill of immersing his hands in flesh. A data-driven, robotic surgical protocol will not only be more democratic, Huennekens promised; it will “result in better outcomes, faster recoveries, and lower costs.”

I got a sense of how far we are from this vision when I watched Giulianotti remove a woman’s gallbladder, a few hours after he’d finished the operation on the pancreas. He had lunched, reluctantly, on some woeful pizza in the medical center’s student cafeteria. During the meal, he gave me some culinary advice: “Never eat at a so-called Italian restaurant where there is Caesar salad on the menu. What is this, Caesar salad?” Then he went up to the designated operating room, and waited impatiently for his turn at bat—some urologists were taking forever to complete a robotic prostatectomy.

By two-forty-five, he was back in scrubs. For this patient, he was using Intuitive Surgical’s newest model robot, the da Vinci S.P. (The initials stand for “Single Portal.”) The robot has a solitary appendage: a metal tube that contains within it four little arms ready to spring out, like the tools in a Swiss Army knife. The operating team attaches to the arms all the necessary devices, from hooks to forceps. The patient ends up with only one visible incision. Earlier this year, the University of Illinois at Chicago sent out a press release boasting that it owned the only S.P. in the city.

The university’s internal review board had approved the gallbladder procedure, even though the F.D.A. has not yet officially cleared it for the S.P. According to Giulianotti’s estimate, only about fifty such operations have been performed. When I walked into the operating room, the patient was inert; incisions had been made around her belly button, and a flap of skin rested on her stomach like a tube of toothpaste that had been flipped open.

Giulianotti went over to his corner. The operation was not demanding—he had done it about five hundred times with the old, four-portal da Vinci. The probe, which resembled a metal straw, slid smoothly past the liver; once it was inside the abdomen, four tiny, jointed arms emerged from the tube. One held the camera; a second, deploying a grasper, pulled back the neck of the gallbladder; the remaining two moved to clip and cut an artery that connects to the organ. Because the da Vinci S.P.’s purpose is to function in even narrower surgical fields than the standard model, it has special icons on the console that help the user keep track of where the three tools and the probe are at all times. If robotic surgery is dancing, the icons help keep you from stepping on your partner’s toes.

Giulianotti quickly ran into trouble. In order to create a device that could fit through one small incision, Intuitive Surgical had designed more delicate tools. Giulianotti’s grasper lost its grip on the gallbladder, and the organ flopped back down, blocking the camera’s view. Giulianotti froze. I could sense his frustration both in his taut shoulders and on the screen. As I watched the grasper repeatedly fail to hit its target, I understood how much of an interloper the surgical tools were in the slippery confines of the body, and how much harm they could do if the surgeon got even slightly discombobulated. The patient’s liver hovered, like a piñata, just millimetres away.

Eventually, Giulianotti retracted all the tools, so that he could see the larger area more clearly. The grasper successfully latched on to the gallbladder’s neck, and the rest of the operation went smoothly. Once the gallbladder was free, Giulianotti used the grasper to bring it near the surface; the assistant surgeon then used forceps to pull it out of the patient’s belly button.

“It was difficult,” Giulianotti told me, outside the operating room. “We are still working on the procedure, what we can do better.” He assured me, with a touch of wounded pride, that “with the multi-probe it would have been a piece of cake.” A staffer on the hospital’s internal review board asked him if there had been “any issues.” Giulianotti curtly reported that the beginning of the procedure had been a struggle. But, after he’d walked down the hall and thrown his used scrubs into a compactor, his enthusiasm resurfaced. Because the incision had been made in the belly button, he noted, “the patient will have no visible scar at all!” If a laparoscopic operation had been done with only one incision, he told me, it would have been much more risky. “And by the way,” he said, “she’s going home in two hours.” ♦

From: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/paging-dr-robot Saved: September 2019

How a Vermont social network became a model for online communities

✾ theverge.com✾ Thursday 24 January 2019✾ Andrew Liptak✾ 24 minute read✾

On August 29^th, 2011, Tropical Storm Irene passed over Vermont, the first such storm to hit the state since 1938. Almost every river and stream in the state flooded. When the water receded, four people were dead and numerous towns faced a massive cleanup, with nearly $700 million dollars worth of damage across the state.

One of the affected towns was my hometown, Moretown. Nestled on the edge of the Green Mountains, it’s the classic definition of small town: no stoplight, a combined general store and gas station, a tiny library, and a single elementary school, all serving a population of just under 2,000. When Irene passed overhead, the floodwaters topped the banks of the Mad River, and flooded more than 60 private homes and public offices, including the post office, fire department, elementary school, and town offices. Moretown isn’t a place with significant emergency-response resources, but the residents did have their neighbors—and a new online message board called Front Porch Forum.

In the aftermath of Irene, the residents of Moretown used this online community to coordinate meals for those left without a home, request assistance with the cleanup, or offer help with preserving family pictures. The town government had never set up an official online presence, so it began using the forum, too, posting official updates and keeping everyone apprised of developments in the cleanup.

The front door of Moretown’s Town Hall, where town officials posted updates printed from Front Porch Forum in the aftermath of Irene.

Front Porch Forum had come to Moretown just months before, but the site had spread throughout much of the state, town by town, since it was founded in 2000 in Burlington. The site looks like a relic from another era; its website is clean and minimal, without the pictures, reaction buttons or comment fields that most social platforms have implemented today. Users register using their real name and address, and gain access to the forum for their town or neighborhood. This network of 185 forums covers each town in Vermont, as well as a handful in neighboring New York and New Hampshire. While most towns possess their own forum, the more populated areas of the state, such as the cities of Burlington and Montpelier, are split up into more manageable districts. During normal times, people might use it to alert their neighbors about everything from runaway Roombas to notices about garage sales or public meetings. But in a pinch, it proved essential when it came to coordinating disaster relief.

Moretown’s Elementary School, where library Meg Allison worked.

Meg Allison, the librarian for Moretown’s elementary school, recalls how quickly the town mobilized in the aftermath of Irene. Over the course of the summer of 2011, people “were slowly gathering momentum and using [Front Porch Forum],” she explained, and “suddenly, it became the go-to place for sharing flood and FEMA information.” The town board even began to print out the day’s digest of postings, pinning them to the front door of the town hall. “It became the way the town communicated,” Allison recalled. Town residents pitched in to help those who lost their homes: they cooked meals and offered help. Allison, whose own home was out of danger from the floodwaters, offered up her own expertise, helping her less fortunate neighbors preserve water-damaged family pictures.

Allison says that her tiny town was prepared for the disaster in part because its residents had been using the forum for months, and in that time, it had helped to build and reinforce their relationships with their neighbors. As a result, when the storm hit, Moretown had a new tool at its disposal: those pre-existing relationships that had been strengthened by the multitude of tiny interactions facilitated through the forum. Towns that lacked the forum certainly had resources and their shares of neighborly connections that helped them, but the forum helped provide a durable piece of infrastructure to encourage these relationships in the preceding months.

Front Porch Forum is similar to a Listserv: networks that were commonplace on the internet by 2000 but waned as modern social networks arose, their roles absorbed by sleeker, multibillion-dollar platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Yet despite the competition from those larger sites, Front Porch Forum has not only persisted, it’s thrived in Vermont. Since its founding in 2000, it boasts nearly 160,000 members, or just under a quarter of the population of the state.

Bringing people together, and forming communities—this is, of course, the stuff of Facebook mission statements, and a mantra that’s been so often repeated in a year of scandals and outcries over the prevalence of toxic behavior and the glacially slow pace when it comes to addressing it. The broad social media industry has been forced to contend with the desire to allow for a great latitude of freedom for its users and the inventiveness of bad actors that seek to manipulate social media for their own ends. While sites like Twitter and Facebook have found that they need to introduce new features, fact-checkers, and tighten up their rules around bad behavior, they have a long way to go to regain user trust. It’s in this environment that Front Porch Forum has been operating, doing all of the things that its bigger rivals say that they want to do: bring people together and provide a safe environment online.

Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis at their home in the Five Sisters neighborhood in Burlington.

Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife Valerie got the idea for Front Porch Forum in 2000, shortly after they moved to Burlington from Washington, DC in 1998. Michael had just left a job at a business-to-business startup and was looking for a new project.

It was a challenging time for the family. Their son, Benjamin, developed cerebral palsy shortly after he was adopted, and as newcomers to Burlington, they struggled to meet their neighbors. “Almost all families go through periods of great need,” Michael told The Verge, “and historically, neighbors were a key part of peoples’ support networks. Valerie and I realized that Ben’s severe cerebral palsy would require more than we could provide on our own.” While their neighborhood was active and outgoing, the family had trouble breaking in. “Enter Front Porch Forum,” Michael says.

Michael came up with the framework for a Listserv he called the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum, and printed up a stack of fliers, which he distributed throughout his Burlington neighborhood, inviting his neighbors to join. Hosted through a third-party provider and armed with an Excel spreadsheet, he designed it as a space for neighbors to share information and updates about the area. Online communities were beginning to change, with Listservs and online forums giving way to the ancestors of today’s social networks. Sites like Six Degrees, Classmates.com, or PlanetAll allowed users to create individual profiles and connect with other people they might know—or didn’t know—online. While Wood-Lewis’ Burlington forum didn’t allow for individual profiles, it did tap into a similar desire: contact with one’s community and neighbors.

A home in the Five Sisters neighborhood in Burlington.

Michael explained that the Five Sisters neighborhood was home to “lots of community organizer types,” and, as a result, his list was instantly popular, with hundreds of people signing up within a few months. It was a remarkable response, Michael says, because it came at a time “when it wasn’t even guaranteed that people even had internet in their homes.” Over the next six years, he operated it on the side, and people used the list to do everything from solicit recommendations for local plumbers or carpenters, let their neighbors know about that wandering skunk, or opine on local issues.

By 2006, Wood-Lewis left his job as an executive director of an environmental nonprofit and began to think seriously about how to turn his side project into a viable business that he could scale beyond the Burlington area. He and his wife pulled some of their savings together to hire engineer Rob Maurizi to design and relaunch the site, turning an e-mail-based list into a platform of its own. This new online network now covered all of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. “If what’s happening in the Five Sisters can happen in the rest of Burlington or Chittenden County,” Wood-Lewis recalled, “there’s got to be a business in there somewhere, and a social impact.”

A homemade sign on Michael Wood-Lewis’ desk.

For years, Wood-Lewis manually compiled each day’s submitted posts into a digest that he would then send out to the list each evening. When Maurizi left the state, Wood-Lewis had to scrape together money for an update every couple of months. “We really couldn’t add features,” he says. “It forced me to innovate along different lines, instead of developing new features or tweaking color schemes.” To generate revenue, he began cold-calling local businesses to advertise on the site. That allowed him to hire a neighbor to help moderate the site and develop the procedures needed for handling the growing population.

The relaunched site maintains many of the same functions as the original Listserv. Users can now post messages directly to the site, which their neighbors can read by logging onto their forum or receiving the day’s postings in their inbox in a daily email digest. Users have the option of replying directly to those messages, either by displaying their feedback in the next day’s digest or contacting the poster directly via e-mail. They also have the option to make their listing viewable in neighboring towns—useful if you’re casting a wide net for recommendations or if you have a missing pet.

Each forum also displays a list of participating public officials—everyone from mayors to state representatives to librarians to justices of the peace—and users can navigate through the archive of postings or a community calendar. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, the forum doesn’t provide members with individual profile pages or allow members to select who their friends are. Just as you can’t choose which neighbors surround you, you’re surrounded by your neighbors online.

Screenshot of a recent issue from my home forum.

An entire generation of social networks grew since the forum launched: MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, and Twitter. Built on the ashes of the first generation of social networks, these platforms offered people entirely new ways to communicate with one another. Despite those competing sites, Wood-Lewis’ project was a hit locally. “People were telling me stories daily about how impactful it was,” Wood-Lewis recalled.

Following the website launch in 2006, word of the network spread, and the Wood-Lewises put their own money down to once again expand the system to cover the entirety of Chittenden County. The demand for the site didn’t stop there, but Wood-Lewis explains that their personal finances constrained the site’s growth. Shortly after expanding to Chittenden County, the town of Starksboro (located to the south in Addison County) and Grand Isle County (containing the towns of Alburgh, Grand Isle, Isle La Motte, North Hero, and South Hero) approached the Wood-Lewises to join, and they came up with a workaround: the towns would pay to sign up. “Then after that, communities just approached us.”

He began to throw out a one-time fee as a startup cost for each town, based on the complexity of the desired forum and the state of their software. Residents raised the money themselves, went to businesses or their local chamber of commerce for funds, or applied for grants to pay the few thousand dollars that the company required.

An art piece about building communities hangs outside of the office of Robert Millar, Front Porch Forum’s Business Manager.

Lynn Espey, Front Porch Forum’s Marketing Manager.

Front Porch Forum’s offices in Burlington, Vermont.

Critically, the site’s growth was organic, growing as demand allowed. As the site began to expand across the state, it slowly grew its team of community moderators, who proactively skim over each post to make sure it adheres to the site’s code of conduct. While major social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have teams who review reported posts, they do so in a reactive manner—users have to flag something that’s out of character. While Front Porch Forum has developed tools to automate some of the review processes, it’s kept its human moderators in the loop, working to make sure that what’s being posted to the site isn’t detrimental to the community.

Along the way, the company experienced two major boosts. The first came in 2011 with eVermont, an initiative from the Vermont Council on Rural Development, which had won a federal grant to expand internet access to rural parts of the state, and Front Porch Forum was part of the package offered to towns that applied.

But the biggest boost came in the aftermath of Irene (as well as another major flooding event earlier that summer around Lake Champlain), which spurred Front Porch Forum to go statewide. After the storms, the Vermont Council on Rural Development earned a second major federal grant to increase the resiliency of at-risk towns. Once again, Front Porch Forum was part of the package, allowing it to expand to the rest of the state. As of summer 2018, Wood-Lewis notes, 160,000 of Vermont’s 260,000 households are part of the network, and of those households, 50 percent of users post to the forum, while 79 percent take “offline actions” due to their membership on their local forum.

“Our goal is to make Vermont resilient in the face of other coming issues,” Wood-Lewis says. Irene was a stark reminder that a changing climate will have an outsized impact on a tiny, less prosperous state. While resiliency took the form of better culverts and ditches to manage water from major storms, Front Porch Forum was pitched as a way to make those communities more resilient by shoring up the bonds between neighbors.

The Mad River in Moretown, Vermont, which topped its banks and flooded the town during Irene.

Interactions on Front Porch Forum can range from serious, to utilitarian, to downright goofy. Earlier this year, I found a builder to construct a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my house through the site. One recent Burlington post asked for the whereabouts of a household Roomba, which had been tasked with cleaning a porch, only to escape down the street. (It was later recovered). In the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections, my local forum lit up with neighbors discussing their local candidates, talking about everything from their stances on a proposed carbon tax to school spending.

Front Porch Forum isn’t designed as a virtual replacement for one’s real-world neighborhood—it’s meant to facilitate those everyday, in-person connections that form the basis of a community. Wood-Lewis says the site changes people’s perceptions of where they live, because the connections it facilitates impart a sense that it’s “a real place of real people,” and these interactions give its users a sense of ownership of their community.

Julia Andrews at the United Church of Westford, where the food bank is located that she helped start through Front Porch Forum.

Items available at the Westford Church food bank.

That’s played out in countless ways over the years. Westford resident Julia Andrews told The Verge about one notable interaction that she had on the forum shortly after it arrived in her town in 2006. Around Thanksgiving, she said that a fellow Westford resident posted about her experiences helping her impoverished brother track down a turkey for their family meal. “Initially, she had a couple of responses,” Julia said, noting that the original posting really upset her, and prompted her to reach out. “What happened was that she and I met at a coffee shop.”

The two had never met before, but after their meeting, they decided to set up a food bank. Six months of planning and work later, they opened up their food shelf in the United Church of Westford, a modest collection of shelves that still helps the community over a decade later. Andrews says that they use the forum to put out the call for donations and to advertise the food bank’s hours and policies. The forum, Andrews says, is “word of mouth on steroids,” and said that “people just come out of the woodwork” to help stock the shelf.

Others have found the forum to be an ideal platform for contributing to the community in other ways. Since retiring as a teacher in Barre, Vermont in 1998, Nancy Wolfe explained that she saw a distinct lack of hometown pride in her central Vermont city, a blue-collar town that’s earned a reputation for crime and drugs in recent years. Several years ago, she began a home-brewed research project into the city’s storied history in an attempt to inject some civic pride into her neighbors. Attempts to hold a series of talks never yielded a good turnout, but she found that the city’s forum provided an ideal venue for her efforts. She broke her work into small, manageable chunks, and began posting it—a paragraph at a time, a couple of times a week, sharing the town’s history of granite mining and sculpting.

Politicians and city and town officials find the site useful as well. Front Porch Forum sells an access package to politicians, allowing them to observe the towns or counties that they represent. Burlington Ward 6 City Councilor Karen Paul uses the forum as a way to keep her constituents apprised of her work in city government. “When I go door to door during campaign season, there’s no question: a lot of people will say to me that they read my posts on Front Porch Forum,” she told The Verge. That sentiment was echoed by Washington County State Senator Ann Cummings, who said that it was a good way to learn about issues that “were bubbling up in the community,” and noted that it was another tool that she could use to stay engaged with her constituents.

Since Front Porch Forum’s founding, other sites have popped up to occupy a similar space in the industry, such as Nextdoor. Founded in 2011, Nextdoor allows individuals to map out a neighborhood and post recommendations, events, lost and found reports, and other items of interest. But the tenor is notably different. Loud, back-and-forth comment threads are frequently featured on platforms like Best of Nextdoor, but the interactions on Front Porch Forum are typically a bit more low-key. While you still get poorly worded responses or snarky back-and-forth discussions on the forum that would be worthy of Best of Nextdoor, the discussion feels less like gossip, and more service-y. This appears to be by design; where the major social media sites prize the number of interactions through features like post comments or reactions, discussions on the forum move at a slower pace.

Front Porch Forum structures its conversations differently than the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor, slowing the pace down to prompt users to think a bit more about what they’re saying before their community. There’s no news feed with rapid-fire updates to check every couple of minutes. You can fire off an angry reply to a neighbor over something they wrote—but it will show up a day later on the site. Wood-Lewis said that they’ve had more than one user write to the site directly, asking to retract a comment written in haste. It’s harder to get in a flame war when each exchange takes 24 hours to respond to, at least on the platform itself.

This isn’t to say that Front Porch Forum is free from heated discussions. While it’s easy to find bad Nextdoor posts, Front Porch Forum has its share of passive-aggressive and irritating users, arguing for days over issues relevant only to a small group of people. For example, the destruction of a home in Winooski earlier this year unleashed a flood of now-homeless rats into nearby properties. When someone asked about how to remove the rats, neighbors engaged in a fierce debate over the ethics of trapping and killing animals. In another recent posting, someone reported that their car was smeared with dog poop after complaining about unleashed dogs. And as this year’s midterm elections approached, the site saw an influx of political advocacy. But on the whole, the platform’s approach to discussions helps maintain a largely civil discourse.

But a bigger reason for the civil tone likely comes down to the fact that the users are all part of the same real-world community. And unlike Facebook or Twitter, where someone without a stake in a conversation or issue can drop in to interrupt and derail discussions, Front Porch Forum’s requirement that someone list their address helps to protect against outsiders from sabotaging local conversations or spreading misinformation.

Furthermore, that team of moderators helps ensure that the site’s guidelines are being followed. The company employs six such community moderators across the state. Wood-Lewis explains these employees skim the postings (he says that they don’t edit them) to make sure that they adhere to the site’s Terms of Use, which prohibits racist or illegal conduct or personal attacks against one another. And while the site has the usual prohibitions against content that is unlawful, abusive, or pornographic, it also has some additional clauses: users can’t use the forum “in a way counter to its community-building mission.”

“People tend to have thick skins around topics,” Wood-Lewis explained, “but not around people.” It’s okay to call out a bad idea, but it’s not okay to call the person an idiot for doing so. Wood-Lewis says that the community manager team performs a vital role for the site, and that they go through a “months-long in-house training that covers all aspects” of the work that they perform, and that when a problematic post does come up, it’ll be reviewed by multiple OCM members. When a post is flagged, it’s reviewed, and the author is contacted. Most authors, Wood-Lewis says, aren’t mad that their post was stopped: “Often, we are greeted with expressions of relief,” happy that a post written in the moment was pulled back before it caused problems. In most extreme examples, the moderators will just close an individual’s account.

“We generally have a subjective test—no personal attacks,” says Wood-Lewis. “Critiquing the decisions of a public official, we don’t deem that a personal attack.” He estimates that 99 percent of all of the site’s posts make it past the moderators, and that “the vast majority of postings are not controversial in any way.”

Michael Wood-Lewis outside his home in Burlington, Vermont.

Some users have complained about Front Porch Forum’s approach to community moderation. In 2013, one user posted a comment about not wanting to use poison to deter wildlife in their yard, unless they’re planning on killing “some useless right-wing radio talk show host,” which raised several complaints from users, and resulted in one of them being kicked off the site.

But in other places around the state, the community-oriented structure of the forum helps set the tone for its real-world counterpart. Monkton resident John Mejia recounted to The Verge an instance when they posted to their local forum following the theft of several Black Lives Matter signs from their front yard. They “got an overwhelming amount of support directly to me initially,” Mejia says. “I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more response to the forum in general.” What did end up on the forum was “a couple of posts that were just racist, I would say, in terms of bringing up all these well, lies, about the Black Lives Matter movement, but in general about race and racism in the US.”

Mejia’s response was to address those statements head-on, issuing corrections with facts, which earned another round of responses from neighbors who “were horrified at what the other person had written.” Mejia urged them to take their horror public on the forum. “Although I appreciated the personal support that I was getting, it was important for the community to see that those anti-black world views that were expressed are not common in our area.” Mejia noted that moderators from Front Porch Forum contacted them as this played out, saying that they were monitoring the exchange, in case the discussion devolved.

Now that the site covers all of Vermont, the company has begun to take tentative steps beyond the state’s borders. The site included one tiny New Hampshire community as a result of a federal grant, and the company has recently expanded to a handful of towns in New York’s Washington County—Argyle, Cambridge, White Creek, and Jackson—with the hope that they’ll continue into others as time and word of mouth progresses. But Wood-Lewis says he doesn’t want to take over the world: scaling up too quickly would mean outstripping their workforce. He explains that now that they’ve gotten a handle on the site’s growth, they’re looking to begin tackling the long list of updates that they’ve always wanted to hit, and they recently hired their first in-house software engineer to work on it. “We’re settling up some deferred maintenance and software debt,” he says.

Wood-Lewis described his company’s revenue as having three components: ad sales to local businesses—the largest source of revenue for the site—which purchase unobtrusive blocks in the digests a few times a year; custom subscriptions for politicians or local governmental officials to access the forums of their constituents or jurisdictions, either to notify them of updates or to reach constituents in multi-town districts; and a yearly NPR-style pledge drive (that raised $150,000 this year), which is only a small percentage of their budget. “All three of those products, interestingly enough,” he says “came about because people knocked on our doors.” The site’s users wanted to advertise, gain access to multiple forums, or simply give the site money because they found it to be really useful.

While a social focus remains at the forefront of the company and its direction, it’s still a for-profit enterprise. The company’s slow growth came due to restraints from available resources and funding, but that conservative handling has prompted a far more thoughtful approach to how it serves its members. Where bigger sites have parceled out shares of the company to multiple individuals, Front Porch Forum remains solely in the hands of Wood-Lewis and his wife. That arrangement allows them to exert a level of control over the look, feel, and direction of the company and its social mission.

One of the front porches of the Five Sisters neighborhood in Burlington, Vermont.

For now, Wood-Lewis is more interested in adding features (the company says that it is working on a mobile app) and focusing on local communities than in driving growth.

And if a major company like Nextdoor or Facebook came to Vermont with an acquisition offer? “I would listen,” he says, “and it would be an interesting conversation, but I don’t think it would happen.”

From: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-forum-vermont-social-network-listserv-local-online-community Saved: January 2019

Colophon

Walden Pond is laid out using Paged.js, CSS and a lot of custom JavaScript and Python. It is rendered and converted to PDF by PDFShift. The fonts are Noto Serif JP for the body text, and Raleway Dots, Raleway and Cinzel Decorative for headings.

It is made in Marrickville, New South Wales, Australia, by Ben Doherty. Then printed by Lulu, somewhere near you.

The aurora borealis, taken by me, just outside Reykjavík, Iceland in October 2015

Dieren. Mei-15 (original title on object), Boom op dijk (original title. Translated: Tree on dike), 1915, Willem Bastiaan Tholen, http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.218056