Moonshots and Masterpieces
The Sunday Night Reader for 4/24/22
We’re too old for clove cigarettes and too busy to form a salon. But the middle-aged creative community in CU is out there mutual admiration society-ing each other on social media frequently. And it’s pretty great. Thanks for the confidence boost, folks. I love it — and the art, podcasts, video games, newsletters, and vibes we’re sending each other’s way.
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose
I’m a big fan of the catharsis that can be found in a bittersweet novel, movie, or song. So this interview of Susan Cain by Pilar Guzman caught my eye. “Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moonshots, masterpieces and love stories,” Cain says. “The sadness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion, an agent of connection and love.”
From their conversation: “When I gave my TED Talk on bittersweetness in the summer of 2019, it was fascinating how much the very act of talking about sorrow, longing and bittersweetness was seen as being a statement of depression, as opposed to a cleareyed view of what life is.
The fact that all humans have to go through that together is one of our deepest sources of communion and one of our deepest sources of art and beauty. [W]hat you’re doing when you’re feeling compassionate is actually experiencing this sorrow of others.
When we think of human nature, we often either cynically or despairingly go to the idea of survival of the fittest, but [psychologist Dacher Keltner] says we should also really be talking about survival of the kindest, because as humans, the only way that we survive is by being able to respond to the cries of our infants. What has radiated outward from there is that we’re not only responding to our own infants’ cries, we react to the cries of other people’s infants and then we react to other human beings in distress in general.” Read more.
Making a Buck, Not a Killing
Prices are going up because the costs of raw materials and labor are going up. But they’re also going up because shareholders and CEOs are making a killing.
The Los Angeles Times points out that corporations, in many cases, can come out ahead even without price increases in an age of inflation. They just have to be willing to make a healthy profit rather than a murderous one.
The object lesson? AriZona iced tea, of all things. From the LA Times article:
“How does AriZona [keep selling a can for under a dollar] while everything else goes up? The price of aluminum has doubled in the last 18 months. The price of high fructose corn syrup has tripled since 2000. Gas prices are pumping up delivery costs. One 1992 dollar, adjusted for inflation, is worth two 2022 dollars. But the 99-cent Big AZ Can, as the company calls it, persists.
The short answer: the company is making less money. The big cans are still profitable, but for the moment, they’re much less so than a few years ago.
Don Vultaggio, the 70-year-old, 6-foot-8 founder and chairman of the company, is choosing to take a haircut in order to keep the price flat and cans moving.”
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, offers a counterpoint by tracking the economics of bras and recent price increases. Lace and elastic costs are both up 40 percent since 2019. Underwire and hook costs are up 20 to 25 percent. Dying fabric is energy intensive, and costs have quadrupled.
The bra game illustrates the same dynamic, though.
Victoria’s Secret uses the article to poor-mouth the fact that they saw an additional $110 million in supply chain costs in the last quarter of 2021. But they conspicuously leave out some details that they shared on a recent earnings call. Namely, that’s $110 million on $2.175 billion in net sales in a year when the company cleared just under $650 million dollars and found the money for a $250 million stock buy-back (with another $250 million dollar buy-back in process this year).
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Spiking the Press
The death of truth in the political and social spheres requires the death of the news, which is precisely what the authoritarian right wants. Alex Pareene — of Gawker before it was killed by a Peter Thiel-backed Hulk Hogan (still double-take-inducing these years later) — puts a fine point on it:
“These people on this ascendant right don't just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don't just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don't just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly. They don’t want that and don’t like it and are endeavoring to end it as a common practice…
This new right fundamentally doesn’t want ‘newsgathering’ to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing…
It’s not even that the right needs people to lose ‘trust’ in traditional news organizations to win elections or start wars. That already happened and they won. It’s more like they need people to just randomly trust whatever bullshit feels right, to get them to fall for scams and believe propaganda. In the grandest dreams of the pathetic people doing most of the unpaid work, the end game is the eradication of ‘deviance’ from public life. And that is a real threat that the people opposing this should take more seriously…The mission is mainly to prevent, stigmatize, and delegitimize the discovery and confirmation and dissemination of information about how a few people got their money, where they keep it, and what they do with it — like spending it on subsidizing bigotry about trans people and getting gay teachers fired.” Read more.
Mercy by José Antonio Rodríguez
…It wasn’t [the stars] who forfeited God
For a watch that didn’t work anyway.
It wasn’t them who sometimes denied
Us the living mirror we named love.
And still you look to them
For stories, for riddles, for answers
That they never possessed.
I’m not saying I’m better than you,
Far from it, if you find me here
Erecting the same elements
With these meager tools,
Wanting even now to give them life,
That they may look upon me with mercy…
Heavy Rotation
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You Love to See It…
NSF Director, along with Senator Dick Durbin, visits UIUC to announce $25 million for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and $15 million for faculty at The Grainger College of Engineering.
You Hate to See It…
Circling Back…
Say It Plain…
Disclosure: I worked for NCSA and The Grainger College of Engineering for 20 years and continue a consulting relationship with Grainger Engineering.