→ May 13, 2019
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Good Omens.

I’m a definite fan of Neil Gaiman’s work, having loved American Gods and also enjoyed Anansi Boys and The Graveyard Book, but have yet to get into any of Terry Pratchett’s output, including his famous and very popular Discworld series. With amazon about to release its adaptation of their joint novel Good Omens on May 31st, I picked up the novel a few weeks ago to prepare myself for the impending apocalypse. For a book written by two authors, it’s remarkably fluid and consistent, and, as you might expect given their reputations, it’s quite funny.

As the marketing campaign for the series has probably told you, the end of the world is nigh and someone has misplaced the Antichrist – more specifically, the forces of good and evil have discovered that they’ve lost track of the infant spawn of Satan, who was switched at birth with another baby thirteen years previously in a swap that went awry without anyone noticing. The ads sell the book a bit short, at least, as there’s much more going on than that particular mix-up; the book focuses far more on the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who turn this book into an unlikely buddy comedy as they try to get the eschaton back on track even as events spiral beyond their control and, in Crowley’s case, various other agents of the devil come after him for possibly screwing up the apocalypse.

The Antichrist, meanwhile, grows up as Adam in an unsuspecting family, and gathers a few friends around him in a little gang of mischief-makers called “Them” by the adults in their community, a group of four mirrored later in the book by the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (although Pestilence has been replaced, a gag I won’t ruin here). The novel’s subtitle refers to an old book of prophecies by a witch named Agnes Nutter, the only truly accurate such book ever published, which of course means it has been summarily ignored throughout history – but one of her descendants arrives in the novel with an annotated copy and index cards referring to specific prophecies with attempted interpretations. There’s a modern-day witchfinder general (not this one), and his helper, Nelson Pulsifer, no relation to Bill, and the witchfinder’s dingbat landlord, a self-proclaimed medium (and, naturally, a fake). The narrative bounces around these different threads as they all converge, for whatever reason, on Tadfield, which is to be the epicenter of the eschaton.

Despite the quasi-religious underpinnings of the book, its best aspect by far is the interplay between Aziraphale and Crowley, who sit on opposite sides of the dualistic divide but appear to be longtime friends who, in this case at least, share a common interest in moving the plot along while encountering many obstacles, mostly of the physical variety. The book is substantially funnier when they’re on its pages, and, while never boring without them, it definitely lags a bit when neither of them is involved in the action. Their banter is snappier, and Gaiman and Pratchett clearly had more fun writing these characters and twisting their personae so that they appear to be acting on the ‘wrong’ sides of the good/evil dichotomy. There are various running gags around these two characters, notably around Crowley’s car, that work extremely well and, like any good running joke, get funnier the more they appear.

For a light farce like Good Omens, sticking the landing is helpful but not quite mandatory; the point is to enjoy the ride, and if the resolution is satisfying, so much the better. Gaiman and Pratchett do stick the landing, however, especially since we know from the start of the book the world isn’t actually going to end – I mean, mild spoiler, I guess, but it’s obviously not that sort of book – and they have to write themselves out of that predicament. It’s a well-crafted ending that doesn’t feel cheap or contrived; I didn’t predict it but after seeing the resolution I could see in hindsight how the authors had set it up. Given how well Good Omens delivers its laughs – and I laughed a lot – a solid ending feels like a bit of a bonus. Now I can’t wait for the TV series to arrive.

Next up: I bailed on James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late after about 80 pages and around 200 uses of the c-word, so I’ve moved on to Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore.

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→ May 3, 2019
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Bad Blood.

Theranos was one of the hottest tech startups of the last fifteen years, at least in terms of the breathless coverage afforded to the company’s putative blood-testing technology and young founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. As you know by now, the entire thing was a giant fraud: the technology never worked, the company ducked or lied to regulators, and Holmes in particular lied to the press and investors who plowed a few hundred million dollars into the company before it collapsed. That implosion came about thanks to a few whistleblowers from inside the firm and the diligent reporting of Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou, who tells the entire history of the scam in his book Bad Blood. The book is thorough, gripping, and infuriating: how did one inexperienced college dropout manage to con so many ostensibly intelligent people into believing her bullshit?

Theranos’s claim was that they could run over a hundred tests on just a single drop of blood drawn by a fingerstick by using a relatively minuscule device, first one called the Edison and later one called the miniLab, that could live in a doctor’s office, a pharmacy clinic, or even a patient’s home. This included routine tests like those for blood cholesterol levels as well as more complex tests that would ordinarily require a lot more blood, which would have to be drawn from a vein. None of this ever worked, and Theranos hid the fraud by taking blood samples back to its headquarters and running the samples on larger machines made by Siemens, all the while making increasingly grandiose claims about its technology, forging nine-figure partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, and continuing to solicit investments at valuations that eventually crossed $5 billion, making Holmes a paper billionaire.

The media coverage of Theranos in general and Holmes in particular was willfully credulous, none more so than the Fortune cover story “This CEO’s Out for Blood,” a fawning profile that bought all of Holmes’ lies wholesale with what appears to be no attempt to independently validate any of her claims. (The writer, Roger Parloff, eventually admitted he’d been duped.) Holmes appears to have had a strategy for executing this con by co-opting the reputations of powerful, older men: she managed to pack her board with major political figures, including George Schultz and Gen. James Mattis, who all tended to be old white men with zero scientific or technical background, but whose presence carried a lot of weight with the media. She also hired attorney David Boies, eventually giving him shares in the company and a board seat, to stage scorched-earth attacks on anyone who dared criticize the company, which included intimidating former employees who might reveal that Theranos’ technology didn’t work. She even landed a spot as an Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship for the Obama Administration, only stepping down months after the fraud was revealed.

Carreyrou didn’t buy it, and he didn’t back down, all of which shows in his WSJ articles that dismantled the company’s house of lies and again shows in Bad Blood, which is meticulous in reconstructing the genesis and perpetuation of the fraud, with information gleaned from over 150 interviews with employees and others close to Theranos. He particularly benefited from information from Tyler Schultz, George Schultz’s grandson and a Theranos employee for about a year, who realized that Theranos’ technology didn’t work and that they weren’t properly verifying their results (but were still making the same claims of accuracy to the public), and who reported the company to regulators despite intense pressure and outright threats from Theranos, its lawyers, and his own family. (Schultz, who will turn 99 later this year, was a true believer in Theranos and in Holmes until well after the fraud was made public.) Bad Blood is full of details of internal interactions from Theranos that depict Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani as vindictive, paranoid bullies who didn’t care that the technology didn’t work, or simply refused to accept that it didn’t, and thought they could steamroll anyone who tried to get in their way – and for about a decade, it worked.

The overwhelming sense Bad Blood gave me is that so very many of the people involved in the scam belong in jail. Holmes and Balwani, who was also her boyfriend when she hired him, come across as sociopaths who relentlessly bullied employees and the media; both are still facing criminal charges, while Holmes settled SEC fraud charges while Balwani is fighting them. They had many allies in their scheme, from Boies (whose behavior seems unethical, at least) to the various marketing and PR flacks inside and outside Theranos who helped perpetuate the con. Does Chiat Day, the major advertising agency Theranos hired to build its image, bear any responsibility for helping disseminate untruths about the company? What about Theranos’ marketing employees or in-house attorneys, the former repeating the lies Holmes and Balwani told them, the latter using dubious tactics to intimidate former employees into signing agreements against their own interests? If Holmes and Balwani actually serve jail time – I’m skeptical, but there’s still a nonzero chance of that – it may deter some future mountebanks, but the biggest lesson of Bad Blood seems to be how many people happily went along with the scheme because they thought Theranos was going to make them rich, and because there was little direct cost to them. Patients could have died from errant medical directions that came from Theranos’ inaccurate test results, yet just about every person involved in promulgating the swindle walked away with nothing worse than a bad name on their resumes.

Carreyrou raises the most salient point that investors and reporters missed during Theranos’ days as a high-flying simurgh: the venture capital firms backing Theranos focused on high tech, but not on biotech or medical devices. The VCs with expertise in medical investments were absent. Carreyrou argues that that should have set off alarm bells for other investors or for reporters racing to laud the company or its female founder/CEO, who benefited from the media’s desire to find a rare woman among Silicon Valley leaders, from her photogenic looks, and from her overt attempts to channel Steve Jobs (which come off as delusionally creepy in the book). Con artists will never lack for marks, but when the people who would ordinarily be most interested in backing a venture head in the other direction, it should serve as at least a prompt to ask more probing questions before putting the CEO on your magazine’s cover.

Next up: I’m preparing for the upcoming amazon series by reading Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens.

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→ April 4, 2019
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Between You and Me.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor at the New Yorker for several decades, and, based on her book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is what I had always imagined copy editors to be before I became a professional writer. If you’ve seen the last season of The Wire, you know the archetype I’m describing: The human dictionary, someone not just familiar with the finer points of grammar and syntax but who revels in those distinctions, and thus becomes both indispensable to harried writers who might not find the right word or who err in their usage as well as the sworn enemy of the same writers who, like me, would prefer to believe that their copy was perfect when it was filed.

Norris does a lot of that, it seems, and some of those language quirks serve as the starting points here for individual chapters that meander through questions of usage or linguistic evolution but also through fun or interesting stories from her forty years at one of the most revered English-language publications. The New Yorker has published works, fiction and non-fiction, from some of this country’s most esteemed writers, and Norris was able to edit and work with many of them, with her working relationship with Philip Roth earning significant mention in the book (a weird coincidence, since I just read a fictionalized version of a romantic relationship with him in Asymmetry). The publication is also well-known for maintaining standards on language, grammar, and orthography that, depending on your perspective, are either a noble attempt to fight the erosion of linguistic excellence or pretentious prescriptivism that leads people to say grammar is just something white people like. (I admit to sympathizing with the former sentiment more than the latter, but even the New Yorker loses me by putting a diaeresis in coöperation.) George Saunders has praised her editing, as has longtime editor in chief David Remnick.

The best parts of Confessions of a Comma Queen, for me at least, are the anecdotes about battles, internal and internecine, over editing decisions. I often answer people on social media or in chats by saying that “words have meanings,” a bromide that I think gets at a deeper truth: any modern language has a panoply of ways to describe just about anything, and in most cases these different words or phrases will differ slightly in denotation or connotation, so that in most cases there will be one or two optimal choices. Yet the subjectivity of language and its limitations in expressing the variety of human thought also mean that rational, intelligent people may even disagree over which words are the right ones. Norris details some of those battles and even more trivial ones, devoting much of one chapter to the hyphen, another to the semicolon (perhaps my favorite punctuation mark, but one she derides), and of course quite a bit to the comma, although I think she ultimately comes down on the wrong side of the debate over the serial, Oxford, or Harvard comma.

There’s a wonderful chapter on profanity that is appropriately filled with f-bombs, as well as a strangely fascinating chapter that is mostly dedicated to Norris’ quest for more #1 pencils, which I only knew existed by imputation, since I was always required to use #2 pencils for standardized tests and had seen #3 pencils (useless) but to this day have never laid eyes on a #1 pencil. The story of the pencils has no inherent drama but Norris manages to turn it into a comic escapade, complete with a delightful back-and-forth with the CEO of the pencil company whose pencils she ultimately obtains. There’s a discussion of the singular they, and other (failed) gender-neutral pronouns, that has become even more salient today than it was when Norris wrote about it, and of course the title’s phrase looms large in another discussion of how people misuse pronouns by saying things like “between you and I” or “me and Joey Bagodonuts both went 0-for today.”

I only had one real quibble with Between You and Me and it might not matter if you read the printed version. I listened to the audiobook, and Norris’ attempts to read Noah Webster’s writings, which used ?, a character known as the medial s that looks like an f but actually isn’t one, comes off like she’s mocking someone with a speech impediment; treating that character as an f is funny once, as a joke, but Norris carries it too far while ignoring the fact that it’s not an f at all. That gag slightly sours another wonderful chapter that explains how much of even contemporary English usage derives from decisions Webster made unilaterally on what was “proper” English, as well as other changes he advocated that never caught on. It’s a great read for the stickler in your life, or any writer/editor who might enjoy reading about the editing life and culture of one of America’s great and most distinctive magazines.

Next up: John Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea.

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→ March 19, 2019
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My Uncle Napoleon.

My Uncle Napoleon, written by Iraj Pezeshkzad, is an Iranian novel written in the 1970s and later banned by the theocrats who took power in the 1979 revolution, likely for indecency, as the book is really a comic romp set during World War II in Iran. Based loosely on some of the author’s own experiences in childhood, the book follows the narrator as he falls in love with his cousin Layli and watches his father, his Uncle Napoleon, and another uncle squabble over trial things and plot against each other, often with unexpected consequences, as they all live in attached houses owned by the titular blowhard.

He’s usually called Dear Uncle in the book itself, however, and he is its Ignatius J. Reilly, a bombastic, self-important tyrant, trying to rule his house but finding himself thwarted by his brothers and often other members of the household. He’s assisted by his butler, Mash Qasem, who prefaces nearly every statement with “Why should I lie … to the grave it’s ah, ah … !” The two have concocted an elaborate fantasy of fighting for independence against Britain and in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, and Dear Uncle is convinced that the English are still out to get him, something the narrator’s father frequently uses to his advantage. The narrator’s mischievous, philandering uncle Asadollah Mirza often helps in various schemes or tries to prevent them from getting out of hand, all the while speaking of sex in code, referring to it as “going to San Francisco” (and later referring to other sex acts as other cities). Dustali Khan shows up thinking his wife is trying to cut off his “noble member,” and maybe he deserves it, although she is quick to fly off the handle and scream bloody murder. Other eccentric relatives and neighbors wander in and out of the story, which doesn’t have a real narrative arc to it other than the loose background story of the narrator’s pursuit of Layli, who is promised to another cousin, the feckless wimp Puri.

Although some of the humor in the book is rooted in Persian culture, most of it feels very universal – this could just as easily be a comedy of manners set on some English lord’s estate, a Downtown Abbey with more yelling and backstabbing and at least talk of sex, although characters in this book talk about San Francisco a lot more often than they actually go there. It’s a different picture of Iran than anything we’ve had in the media since the Islamic Revolution brought the Ayatollahs to power; the news gives us Iranian leaders screaming death to the U.S. and to Israel, cooking up anti-Semitic conspiracies, and funding terror groups around the region, while Iranian film has given us pictures of a society in a sort of arrested development, a country that could be an economic and cultural powerhouse if it were a liberal democracy. These characters feel universal, even with names that are less familiar to western minds – I didn’t realize that the Khan in Dustali Khan was an honorific, not a surname – and some historical allusions that sent me to Wikipedia.

Like A Confederacy of Dunces, My Uncle Napoleon is also very funny. There’s a slapstick element of physical comedy throughout the book, with characters waving knives and guns around, falling over each other, and, once, kicking another right in the noble member, hard enough that any plans to go to San Francisco must be put off for some time. There’s some very clever wordplay throughout the dialogue, especially when Asadollah is involved. (The narrator is the obvious stand-in for Pezeshkzad, but I did wonder if Asadollah was his own adult self arriving in the novel to comment on the goings-on.) On top of the lower-brow humor is a thick coating of farce, mocking the Iranian habit of blaming the English for various problems in the wake of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, while also taking aim at all dictators through the orotund title character, whose sound and fury generally signifies nothing, yet whose lack of rank or history of valor don’t stop him from proclaiming himself a great hero and trying to keep all of the relatives staying in his compound under his thumb. He’s constantly trying to exile various people around him, or have them arrested, or to have this one pose confess to a murder that didn’t happen just to save the family’s honor and avoid a public embarrassment. Near the beginning of the novel, there’s a family gathering when someone passes wind loudly enough to interrupt Dear Uncle, which leads to an enormous family row that the narrator’s father enjoys far too much. It’s absurd, and funny, and also a symbol of the kind of family quarrels we’ve all had or seen start from nothing and blow up into more than they ever should have become.

Whether the story goes anywhere is probably beside the point, since the journey itself is entertaining, but if you’re looking for a neatly tied bow around the book’s conclusion, you won’t really get it. The story ends abruptly, and there’s a brief epilogue, but we don’t get a traditional big finish. It didn’t matter to me at all – I don’t really remember what Ignatius J. Reilly did at the end of his book either, and that never stopped me from recommending it, as I would this one.

Next up: I’m a few books behind now but just finished Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room and Karin Boye’s Kallocain.

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→ March 6, 2019
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Leaving Neverland.

Leaving Neverland, the new, four-hour documentary airing exclusively on HBO, is a difficult watch. Two men who say that Michael Jackson sexually molested them repeatedly over a period of many years repeat those claims on camera in unsparing detail, which in and of itself would be a painful and infuriating scene to see and hear, but that’s only a small part of what makes this film both powerful and very uncomfortable. It’s far more than a new indictment of Jackson, whose status as a serial sexual abuser is beyond doubt (and beyond remedy) at this point, but serves more as a portrait of the spiraling, exponential damage wrought on their victims and their families years after the abuse has stopped.

Wade Robson and James Safechuck both say in Leaving Neverland that Jackson began abusing them when they were very young – Robson from age 7, Safechuck around the same age – and that it continued for many years, accompanied by all of the behavior we now associate with serial abusers: grooming, co-opting, and above all threatening. Robson says many times that Jackson convinced him that they would both go to jail if they were caught. Both Robson’s and Safechuck’s mothers appear in the documentary as well, as both were there when Jackson met the boys and fell under the singer’s spell, becoming unwitting accomplices to the abuse, agreeing to let their sons spend many nights sleeping at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and accepting their sons’ answers at the time that no abuse was taking place.

While the documentary tells the history of the abuse and the public accusations of Jackson while the singer was still alive, including the 1993 accusation by Jordy Chandler, settled out of court for $23 million, and the 2003-04 accusations by Gavin Arvizo, which led to a criminal trial and an acquittal on all charges, it’s far more about the victims here than the pedophile at its center. (That said, there are some shocking moments from historical footage, including one of Jackson’s lawyers standing before the media in 2003, threatening to ruin the lives of anyone who might come forward to accuse Jackson of further crimes.) Robson was born in Brisbane, and won a dance contest that allowed him to meet Jackson, who thoroughly bamboozled Robson’s mother to the point that she left Australia and her husband, taking Wade and his sister Chantal to California in the belief that Jackson would help develop her son’s career as a dancer. Safechuck, who was the boy in the dressing room in that famous Pepsi commercial with Jackson (if you’re old enough, you almost certainly remember it), is an only child, but Jackson’s ‘interest’ in him led his mother to similarly turn their lives upside down to try to further James’ career, driving a wedge between her and his father that persists today. (His father doesn’t appear in the film.)

There’s too much commentary out there already about the mothers’ culpability in allowing the abuse to begin and continue, as well as a comment from one of the jurors in the 2003 trial that Gavin’s parents were idiots for letting the boy sleep with Jackson, but Leaving Neverland documents how well-meaning, loving parents can be hoodwinked by a sociopathic, determined pedophile who has the means to assuage any doubts or, unfortunately, buy them away. He showered the families with gifts, flew them places first-class, gave the boys unforgettable experiences on stage, while also presenting himself to the families as a lonely, misunderstood adult whose childhood was stolen from him by the pressures of global stardom. The way that the victims and their families describe the early stages of Jackson’s grooming of the boys, you can see how someone in the moment might have felt sorry for the singer, whose childhood was obviously difficult and who said he was beaten by his father, but it also becomes clear that Jackson used his past as a wedge he could drive between his victims and their parents – and that he did so with the help of enabling assistants who probably should have long ago been called to account for their actions.

Part one of the documentary delivers a lot of prologue, explaining how the two boys met Jackson and ended up victims, but part two is where the point of the story lies, as we hear, in their own words and those of family members, about the permanent damage wreaked upon them all by Jackson’s abuse. Both men speak of mental health issues, never saying PTSD but clearly suffering from it, and are still coping with their effects, while their relationships with family members are all fractured, some likely beyond any repair. Both mothers are themselves wracked with guilt that will never fade, because the damage cannot be undone, to their sons and to their families, and to other victims who might have been spared had anyone picked up on the signs of abuse and put a stop to Jackson’s ‘sleepovers’ sooner.

Both men describe the molestation in specific terms, which is a potential trigger for some viewers and worth bearing in mind before you watch Leaving Neverland. I was not personally triggered by that, but the part of the documentary – and the online response – I’ve found profoundly unsettling is the support for the abusive pedophile at the heart of the story. We see scenes of supporters outside the courthouse with signs proclaiming Jackson’s innocence (really, how could you know?), including some dingbat releasing white doves when the not guilty charges come through. We see videos of people attacking Robson online from when he went public with his abuse story, contradicting testimony he’d given in the 2003 trial that Jackson had never molested him. And if you’ve been on Twitter at all the last few nights and clicked on the #LeavingNeverland hashtag or searched for names involved in the documentary, you’ve seen all manner of support for the singer, saying he was innocent and attacking the victims and their families. You have to be deeply deluded to think that all four of the accusers we know about have lied about everything, even though these two men tell stories that are highly specific and show a pattern of behavior, to still think Jackson is the real victim here.

Director Dan Reed largely stays out of the way of the story here – aside from some drone shots of LA that don’t add much except some running time – but there is also a clear subtext to Leaving Neverland about the allure of celebrity, and how Jackson used it to seduce the families of both boys, and then to seduce the boys themselves. Both mothers, interviewed very extensively on camera, speak of Jackson’s interest in their sons’ careers and in their families as immensely flattering, and the combination of power and money led them to choose to upend their personal lives and helped blind them to what, in hindsight, should have been blindingly obvious.

Robson’s sister and Safechuck both say that they’re not asking people to forget Jackson’s artistry, but to remember the whole person – that this incredibly talented human was also a pedophile and sexual predator. I don’t see how we can continue to separate the art from the artist in this case, not now that I’ve seen the movie. You can’t simply “cancel” a musician of his importance and influence; we can stop playing Jackson’s music, and certainly Capital One should stop playing its commercial with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” now, but Jackson has directly and indirectly influenced multiple generations of pop musicians since “I Want You Back” was their first hit in 1969. There is no erasure here, only a time for an overdue reckoning with his legacy as a talented person who did unspeakable things and ruined many lives. Leaving Neverland won’t convince people who don’t want to hear it, but it is a devastating portrait of grooming, sexual abuse, and the cascading ramifications that come years after it ends.

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→ February 22, 2019
→ By

Innovation and Its Enemies.

The late Calestous Juma died shortly after the publication of his last book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, which may be why the book is still so little-known despite its obvious relevance to our fast-changing, tech-driven economy. Juma was a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School with a longtime focus on international development, especially the application of new technology to developing countries and to boosting sustainable development. While the prose is a bit on the academic side, Juma uses very well-known technologies and even other inventions that you might not think of as ‘technologies’ but that still drove massive cultural and economic changes that led to substantial societal, religious, or political opposition.

Juma’s main thesis is that there will always be forces that oppose any new technology or invention that offers the potential for change, and he tries to categorize the reasons for and the types of opposition that any innovation might face. Some of the case studies he covers are ones you’d expect, like the printing press, refrigeration, and genetically modified crops, but he also covers less-expected ones like margarine and coffee. Margarine was invented in the mid-1800s and faced a torrent of opposition from dairy farmers, leading to the development of dairy associations that lobbied Congress and state legislatures for absurd laws that restrained or prohibited trade in butter alternatives, from requiring labeling designed to scare consumers to requiring the stuff to be dyed pink to make it less appetizing. To this day there are still regulations that overtly favor dairy butter that date from decades ago, although the discovery that the trans fats in traditional margarine are deleterious to heart health has made such laws anachronisms.

Coffee might be the most fascinating story in the book because it appeared and spread like a new technology, even though we don’t think of it as one. Coffee originated in east Africa, notably Ethiopia, and spread across the Red Sea to Yemen, from which it began to permeate Arab societies and faced its first wave of opposition from Muslim authorities who feared its stimulant effects (with some imams ruling it haram) and from secular authorities who feared the culture of coffeehouse would give rise to organized political groups. The same two forces applied when the drink spread to Europe, where it also faced a new group campaigning against its spread: producers of beer and wine, who feared the drink would replace theirs – in part because all three were safer than drinking well water at the time – and employed every trick they could find, including getting “doctors” (such as there were in the pre-science era) to claim that coffee was harmful to one’s health. While there are still some religious proscriptions on coffee, the drink’s spread was eventually helped by its own popularity and by the split among many authorities on its beneficence and value, with monarchs and even the Pope coming out in favor of the drink.

The two chapters that look at the ongoing controversy, most or all of it fabricated, over transgenic crops is probably the most directly relevant to our current political discourse, as genetically modified organisms are probably required if we’re going to feed the planet. Juma shows how GMOs suffered because regulatory authorities were consistently behind the technology and had to react to changes after they happened, and then often did so without sufficient guidance from technology experts. No example is more appalling than that of a genetically modified salmon called the AquAdvantage salmon that grows to maturity in about half the time required for wild salmon, and that thus has the potential to reduce overfishing while providing a reliable protein source that also has less impact on the environment than protein from mammals or poultry. The U.S. government was totally unprepared for the arrival of a genetically modified animal designed for human consumption, which also gave opponents, from Alaskan legislators (including Don Young, who openly promised to kill the company behind AquAdvantage) to fearmongering anti-GM advocates (look at the “Concerns” section on the Wikipedia entry for the fish), time to maneuver around it, blocking it through legislation and excessive regulatory obstacles.

Where Innovation and Its Enemies could have used more help was in how Juma organizes his conclusions. There are common themes across all of his examples, from the natural human fear (especially those of adults over age 30) of change to concerns over job loss to questions about environmental impact, but the choice to organize the book’s narrative around specific case studies means that the conclusions are dispersed throughout the book, and he doesn’t write enough to bring them together. A book like this one could be extremely valuable for policymakers looking to create an environment that encourages innovation and facilitates adoption of new technologies while providing sufficient regulatory structure to protect the public interest and foster trust. It has all of the information such a reader would need, but it’s scattered enough that a stronger concluding chapter would have gone a long way.

Next up: Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula.

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→ February 11, 2019
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Morels app.

Morels was the first game I reviewed for Paste, over four years ago, and crossed my radar because it was a brand-new, purely two-player game with some positive early press. It’s a great, quick-to-learn set-collection game that was only the second title I’d come across to use the now-popular rolling market mechanic, where you can take the first card or few cards in the display for free, while taking cards further from the start of the queue costs you something. There’s also a push-your-luck element to choosing which sets to collect and which to discard for twigs, the game’s currency, as well as trying to deduce what your opponent might be collecting and deciding whether it’s worth using a turn to grab something they need. It’s been on every iteration of my all-time board game rankings and my top two-player games rankings since I first reviewed it.

Late last year, an app version of Morels appeared for iOS and Android devices, using the original artwork and featuring strong AI opponents – at least, I think they’re pretty strong, since I can’t beat the hard level more than about half the time – for a very strong app experience. If you’ve been looking for a new two-player game and want to try Morels before buying the physical game, or just want a new game app that plays well as a solo vs AI experience, I strongly recommend this.

Morels is a game of mushroom collection, which means a few of my closest friends are already predisposed to hate this game. The deck includes cards of nine different mushroom types, each with a different point value and value in twigs. You can ‘cook’ any set of at least three mushrooms of one type to gain the points shown on those cards by turning in the mushroom cards with a skillet card; if you turn in four, you can boost the value by 3 with a butter card, and if you turn in five, you can boost the value by 5 with a cider card. Basket cards increase your hand limit. You can turn in two cards of any mushroom type to gain twigs, which you then use to grab cards from the market that are beyond the first two (free) spots. The market moves one space to the right on every turn, and if the rightmost card wasn’t taken, it falls into a pile just off the market that can hold up to four cards, which you can also take for free; if that pile reaches four and no one has taken the stack, they’re all discarded for the remainder of the game.

Morels app screenshot

There are two special card types in the deck. Destroying Angel cards are deadly, of course, and if you take one your hand limit is cut in half for several turns. Night cards show the same mushroom types as the regular (day) cards, with the exception of the most valuable cards, the morels, and Night cards are worth two cards of the displayed type – so you can turn in one Night card for twigs, or you can cook one Night card and one Day card of the same mushroom type for points. The catch is that Night cards show up face down, so you take one without knowing which mushroom type you’re getting (there’s one Night card for each non-morel mushroom). Game play continues until the deck is exhausted.

Decisions in the game are quick, but they’re not always simple; you’re working against the constraints of your hand limit, the finite supply of skillet cards, and the hard end to the game – you don’t get a last shot to cook once the deck is finished. I learned more strategy from playing against the AI than from playing against anyone in person, since the AI player nearly always does what it can to grab Night cards, even if it means using all of its twigs, and will generally try to stop me from collecting enough high-value mushrooms – particularly morels and chanterelles – to cook. The hard AI also seems to have good deck awareness, knowing what’s left and also managing end game well enough that I found I had to change how I played to keep up.

I’ve played the app dozens of times with just occasional glitches, and no complaints about game play or the AI. I wish it kept track of total wins/losses against each AI level, but that’s a minor quibble. The graphics are bright and clear, and you don’t really need to be able to read the mushroom titles to play it as a result. Everything you need to know to play the game well is on the main screen, and the challenge is more one of keeping track of things in your head (or I guess on paper, if you want) rather than one of the app making this information harder to find. At $4.99 for iOS or Android it’s an easy recommendation for me.

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→ February 10, 2019
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Eighth Grade.

Comedian Bo Burnham made his screenwriting debut with 2018’s Eighth Grade, a cute coming-of-age story with newbie Elsie Fisher in the lead role of Kayla. It will compete with itself between making you laugh and making you want to crawl out of your own skin, because I’m guessing just about everyone who sees this will relate to something that happens to Kayla as we follow her through the last few weeks of eighth grade and see her navigate social anxieties and prepare for high school. The film is free now on amazon prime.

Kayla is a shy, awkward teenager – watch how Fisher walks, as if she’s trying to make herself smaller – who posts ‘advice’ vlogs that, as we see, no one watches, but also worries that she’s giving advice she doesn’t even take herself. Nothing extraordinary happens to her for most of the film; she gets invited to a pool party, wins the dubious honor of being named quietest in her class, spends a lot of time on Instagram and Snapchat (as we’re told, nobody uses Facebook any more), has a crush, hears about sex, and eventually has a day where she shadows a perky, outgoing high school senior named Olivia (Emily Robinson, who has fantastic hair). We get a school-shooting drill, impossibly uncool teachers and school administrators – really, a principal tries to dab, and I’ve never been so embarrassed to be over the age of 20 – and, eventually, one bad thing happens that triggers the big scene you might have caught in the trailer where Kayla and her dad (Josh Hamilton) have an emotional conversation around a fire pit.

Eighth Grade is by far at its best when Kayla is on the screen and at the center of whatever’s happening. She gives a description of anxiety, without naming it as such, that’s about as good a depiction of the physical aspects of the disorder that I have heard anywhere in fiction. Fisher’s bright eyes and blond hair would seem to make her a standout, but she plays Kayla as so unsure and vulnerable that she ends up seeming younger than her classmates and that much more sympathetic. And Eighth Grade should be viewed through her lens from start to finish; even the worst thing that happens to her works better because she’s always at the focus of the narrative and the camera. There’s a joke around a banana that is such picture-perfect physical comedy that I can only assume Fisher actually hates the fruit in real life – or else she deserved a Best Actress nod for that scene alone.

Where Burnham lost me and cost himself some momentum is when he went for cheap laughs, like making the adults not just uncool but sort of assertively uncool, like the dabbing principal or the teacher in the sex education video who says “it’s gonna be lit!” To a teenager, parents and adults are just generally not cool, but Burnham goes twice as far as he needs to go so he can hammer that point home. A few of the gags hit, but more miss or just seem out of place because they take the focus away from Kayla’s journey – and her story is the heart of the film in every sense of the term.

Other than Fisher’s performance, the biggest reason Eighth Grade works, even with its inconsistencies, is that Burnham has managed to hit so many universal emotions and experiences with just a handful of anecdotes over the course of about 90 minutes. While there’s nothing here that specifically happened to me as a kid, the sensations and emotions were entirely familiar – none more so than that sense that you’re the one person in the room everyone is looking at, the one person everyone else has identified as the oddball. A few of the anecdotes are rooted in modernity; all the kids are constantly on their phones, talking to each other through DMs, snaps, and instagram comments. You can generalize almost everything in this film that Kayla experiences to match something you remember feeling as a kid. And I got to feel this film on two levels, since I’m also the father of a girl just a year younger than Kayla is, so eighth grade for us is just around the corner. (I’ve already forbidden her from using Snapchat though.) So while the script is inconsistent and has some gags that don’t land, the story is so authentic to the experience of growing up as a suburban teenager that the film eventually works and resonates without resorting to cheap manipulation or big twists.

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→ January 28, 2019
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FYRE.

My prospects ranking package began its rollout this morning for ESPN+ subscribers with the list of 15 guys who just missed the top 100.

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By now there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen FYRE, the Netflix documentary on the ill-fated music festival to be held in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017 that turned out to be a giant con run by its founder Billy McFarland and musician Ja Rule. (There is a competing Hulu documentary on the festival that I have not seen.) Netflix chose to release this briefly in theaters, which will qualify it for awards consideration in the next cycle, and for sheer entertainment value it’s among the top documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I love a good con in fiction, but this con happened in real life, and the most amazing theme of FYRE is how so many people working on the festival saw the con happening in real time and did nothing to stop it. Fyre itself was originally an app that would allow people to book celebrities for events, streamlining a process that was opaque even to people with the money to do this but not the access. At some point, McFarland – and we’ll get to him in a moment – had the idea to create a music festival to promote the app, and then plowed ahead with the concept, despite lacking any experience in running festivals, and then hired a bunch of people he knew to try to run the event, half of whom didn’t know what they were doing and half knew what they were doing but couldn’t execute given the constraints of time, money, and location. Many of these folks appear on camera and voice their concerns that it was never going to work, but as far as I can tell, none of them actually quit the organization – one was fired for raising these issues – or did much beyond say that they thought the plans were in trouble.

McFarland appears here only in footage from the planning meetings, because it turns out they pretty much filmed everything as they were trying to make this festival happen, but isn’t interviewed directly; he does answer questions in the Hulu documentary, the producers of which paid him to do so. What FYRE does give us, however, is a sense of just what a grifter McFarland really is: he’d previously come up with Magnises, a members-only club with a credit card-like passport that would give members access to exclusive events, an actual club to visit in Manhattan, and discounts on hard-to-get tickets to concerts and shows. While it delivered on some of its promises, eventually the company started overpromising and underdelivering, or just not delivering at all, leading to a surge in complaints and cancellations just as McFarland was bragging about massive membership growth – and also turning his attention to Fyre.

His ability to get Magnises off the ground and even build some kind of customer base set up the Fyre fiasco in two ways: It became clear that he was very good at getting publicity, and he started a pattern of trying to separate wealthy or high-income millennials from their money. The Fyre Festival wasn’t just poorly run, but poorly funded, and the company took money from would-be concert goers for things that didn’t exist, like housing on or near the beach, and eventually came up with the idea of wristbands that attendees would use to pay for “extra” events like jetskiing but that was just a scam to get working capital so the concert wouldn’t go under before it started.

Of course, the most entertaining parts of Fyre come down to the depths of the scam, and how McFarland appears to be so privileged that he can’t understand the word ‘no.’ I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film, but the Evian water story has quickly become a meme, with good reason. People did get to what was supposed to be the concert site, only to find it wasn’t ready for anybody, with just some hurricane tents propped up on the beach and inadequate supplies or housing for the people who did show up, with the concert cancelled just hours before the event was supposed to begin, and no plans to get all these people back home after they were flown to the site on a chartered plane. McFarland appears to have tried to just keep a half-step ahead of the people while stealing their money, and I think the most shocking part (other than the Evian bit) is that he is eventually arrested over this scam, gets out on bail, and immediately sets out to begin another grift, this one even more blatant than the previous ones.

Nobody feels sorry for the well-heeled Fyre Festival customers who were willing to fly to the Bahamas for what was essentially billed as a luxury version of Coachella and kept handing over cash without doing much to see if the people taking their money were reliable. I can’t say I felt a lot of sympathy for them either, but that schadenfreude was not a major part of FYRE‘s message to me. I can’t get over how many people worked on this project, knew it was a dumpster fire on a flatbed rail car that was slowly going off the tracks into a ravine, and stuck around – even when they weren’t getting paid. One person, never identified, did leak details to a site that called Fyre Festival a scam and probably contributed to its downfall (or at least to the rise of skeptical media coverage of it), but everyone we see here except for the one who was fired kept working here until the event was cancelled. (The guy who was fired – the one real voice of reason here – is the same guy who brags that he learned to fly by playing Flight Simulator.)

This event never gets off the ground were it not for a clever social media campaign that made heavy use of ‘influencers,’ notably those on Instagram, who were promised compensation if they would simply talk about the festival and post its image of a blank orange square. (I don’t know why either.) The documentary skirts the subject too much for my liking, because ultimately, influencer culture is itself a fraud. Yes, if you have a large social media following, you can direct people to buy certain products and services, just by nature of the volume of eyeballs on your content. That absolves the influencer of any responsibility for what they appear to recommend, which was later codified by the FTC into guidelines requiring influencers to disclose “material connections” to brands they recommend, and to do so in a way that will be clear to most users. I have a large Twitter following and modest audiences on Facebook and Instagram (the latter of which I’m using more, mostly just for fun or silly posts), and so I am offered a lot of stuff in the hopes that I’ll recommend it – sometimes things just show up at the house. I have a simple policy: I won’t recommend anything I don’t like or use myself. I have told publishers not to send items. I declined a gift card to a restaurant chain (no, not Olive Garden) because there was a quid pro quo attached to it. Granted, I am not an “influencer” using it as my primary source of income – but maybe that’s not the most ethical way to make a living, either.

As for the Hulu version, I’ll probably watch it because I have a couple of close friends who’ve urged me to do so, even just so we can discuss it, although the consensus seems to be that FYRE is better. And it is wonderfully bonkers at so many points. Ja Rule has a quote near the end that is a jawdropper. The Evian story and McFarland’s third scam, while out on bail, are both are-you-fucking-serious moments. The Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Fyres?) scenes on the beach and later at the airport are both enough to make you screw up your faces in disbelief, although those beach scenes made me a little uncomfortable as these well-off young adults complained over conditions that probably a billion people in the world experience as their normal. It’s shocking in so many ways, none more so than the grifter Billy himself, who must be some sort of sociopath for the ease with which he lies to people and to cameras while gleefully helping himself to others’ cash.

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→ January 24, 2019
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Cold War.

Pawel Pawlikowski won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015 for his movie Ida, and returned this year with the critically acclaimed Cold War, distributed by amazon studios, which just earned three Oscar nominations this week for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and, in one of the biggest surprises of the nominations, Best Director. The taut 85-minute, black-and-white drama sets a doomed romance against the backdrop of the Cold War itself, with its two main characters moving back and forth across the Iron Curtain as the political climate tears them apart and their animal magnetism pulls them back together.

Based heavily on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents, who were musicians in Poland after World War II and split up multiple times before Pawe? was born, Cold War stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, who first meet when Wiktor helps put together a music ensemble to play and honor traditional Polish folk music under the Communist government. Zula has singing talent but lies about her background and experience to con her way into the group, and Wiktor feels an immediate attraction to her that she recognizes and exploits to secure her place at the makeshift academy. This eventually explodes into a passionate affair that leads Wiktor to plan for their defection while their company tours Berlin, only to have Zula choose to stay behind at the last moment, setting in motion a series of meetings and partings over the next fifteen years between Paris, Yugoslavia, and Warsaw, with Zula becoming a jazz singer, Wiktor ending up a political prisoner, and the two absorbing increasing costs to leave each other and come together again.

The pain of parting may be nothing to the joy of meeting again, but Zula and Wiktor are unable to maintain that joy for very long, and begin to tear each other apart – especially Wiktor, who seems to often treat Zula like a prize to be won, or an object to be possessed, as opposed to an independent woman with her own agency. Kulig and Kot have absurd on-screen chemistry that allows Pawlikowski to show virtually nothing while making the desperate passion between the two characters palpable: There’s one love scene where the camera and the actors pause, and we only see Zula’s face, and in the span of under ten seconds the viewer can feel the intensity of this relationship while still understanding that it can never end well.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white appears to have resonated with Academy voters, as both this and Roma landed cinematography nods; Pawlikowski said that color didn’t work when they tried it, as he wanted to replicate the gray bleakness of Poland in the aftermath of the war and the communist takeover. It gives the Polish scenes that depressing air, although it works against the portions of the movie in the nightclubs and salons and ateliers of Paris, where the sense of life is muted … or perhaps that was Pawlikowski’s point, that Zula and Wiktor, as products of the war and the communist regime, can’t fully appreciate or embrace the artistic and personal freedom of the west after their experiences?

Kulig smolders as Zula, moving deftly from ingenue to partner to free spirit to an independent woman who can be petulant and indignant as Wiktor begins to treat her worse the more they’re together. Kot, looking like a slightly older, more rakish Michael Fassbender, drifts more abruptly from dark remove to desperation, as Wiktor’s ability to take Zula for granted once she’s there is completely mystifying, while his single-minded focus on finding her when they’re apart is palpable and easier to understand.

Cold War is short – it’s less than half the length of fellow nominee Never Look Away, which clocks in at 188 minutes – and it zips along once Zula enters the picture, sometimes a little too quickly for some of the tension between the two characters to develop naturally. The film’s ending is problematic, although the last line and shot are both beautiful, in a way I can’t discuss without a huge spoiler; I’ll just say I don’t think it’s adequately set up by the 80 minutes that come before. That puts it behind my big 3 of foreign films from 2018 (Burning, Roma, Shoplifters), but the first 95% of this movie is so good and such a gripping depiction of the familiar story of star-crossed lovers that it’s still a success and worth seeking out.

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