State Intermediate

“Dang! Have you ever seen waves get so cold they turn to slurpee? We haven’t.”

I tend of late to take less joy in almost everything I encounter. Even the things that would have brought me great satisfaction only recently now provide me no pleasure and are often occasions to reflect on how empty and worthless so much of what steadily surrounds us truly turns out to be.

Part of this is surely a function of aging and its concomitant inability to pretend that you haven’t seen it all before and don’t know how it’s all going to end up (I don’t want to ruin it for you if you are yourself a young person, but let me just give you this hint: No one walks out of it particularly pleased with anything. The good news is none of it matters anyway, but that is a lesson which does not offer a great deal of comfort. And that’s as good as it gets, news-wise. Sorry, young person.).

Some of it may be a symptom of this profound and perpetual winter under which we have suffered seemingly forever. But the biggest block of it must be the sheer quantity and volume of mental noise blasted at all of us without end in our age of Everything All The Time. There is no quiet moment in which to pause and reflect, or even to just pause, fuck reflecting. It’s always on and always shouting and it has shaken the very ways in which our perception of time itself was once understood.

Consider this: Christmas was two months ago. How many horrible lives have you lived in the nine weeks since Christmas? And yet what have you done with all that time? If you had planned something as simple as spending an evening in to read a magazine no sooner would you have turned the first couple of pages over to find that it was somehow nearly midnight and the lids of your eyes were growing heavy and insistent that you draw down the shades on the day. But at eight you had gotten yourself all settled in on your couch, fully prepared to devote all your attention to the issue at hand. What happened? How did you get distracted?

Asked to account for your time in a court of law or before some other organ of judgment the best you could do would be to mutter under your breath about keeping up with the cultural conversation but you yourself would not even know nor could you accurately account for those hours. This relentless onslaught has reversed our very experience of life’s passing, in that we now live in a world where the days go by so quickly but the years take forever. It’s why I have to laugh when well-intentioned people tell me that life is short and I should savor every minute of it. Really? In what world? May is two months from now, and we will all die a thousand deaths between now and then and it probably won’t even get all that much warmer.

Brevity is as illusory as the idea that there might ever be some respite from the chronic cacophony that floods through every crack and crevice of our existence. It’s always on and it is never quiet and it never lets you forget just how terrible everything is and how much worse it is all getting.

And now they’re trying to tell me that, when the time comes where I finally approach my eternal reward, they might prolong my agony by sticking my head on a whole other body? What kind of nightmare world do we live in that would force multiple bodies to have to put up with my horrible head? Anyway, give all of that a good think before you tell me to cheer up again. Asshole.

★★★ Plumes flew like proud white pennants from each apartment tower, against the clear sky. Even the dirtier ice had a pleasant hard-frozen sheen to it. Condensation streamed down the inside of a cleaners’ window; a patch of frost clung to the face of the curb where steam was trickling up from a grate. Oblong depressions marked where tires had sat in the slush as it froze solid again. Yet though the deep cold reigned, it was a reign without terror. One could defy it by skipping long underwear or going briefly without gloves, or by taking the long way to work to pick up a cup of tea on Grand Street. The sun was bright enough to dissolve the worst of the black ice at midday, and to leave a startling pink spray of speckles behind when it sank out of sight behind the buildings.

by Zach Dorfman

The music was everywhere there were tourists. Since arriving in Peru, I’d heard the same songs looped interminably by flute bands: in public squares, hotel lobbies, bazaars, bars, and cheap buffets; in Cusco and Aguas Calientes and Urubamba and Ollantaytambo; and, increasingly, in my sleep. A few general guidelines materialized. First, no group could possibly resist “El Cóndor Pasa,” famous for being repurposed by Simon and Garfunkel in 1970 (“I’d rather be a hammer than a naaaail/yes I wouuuld/if I only couuulld//yes I wouuuld,” and so on). Second, the flute bands would, over the course of their set, eventually return the favor by likewise appropriating some classic Anglo-American pop music: songs like “Hotel California,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Hey Jude” (but never, curiously, any Jethro Tull). And, at 6:45 in the morning, Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind.”

I was waiting to board the Andean Explorer, a once-a-day luxury train that runs from Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, with its magnificent sixteenth-century cathedral that sits across the main city square from Starbucks and North Face annexes, to the city of Puno (“The Folklore Capital of Peru”), which sits on a polluted bay on the shore of Lake Titicaca. The age of the average rider seemed to hover around sixty, the lobby full of pasty Australian retirees travelling with large tour groups. We were informed over a loudspeaker that the ride was estimated at roughly ten hours; this, we later learned, was unduly optimistic.

Like its relative the Hiram Bingham (which travels from Cusco to Machu Picchu, a much shorter journey that is actually more expensive), the Andean Explorer is privately owned and operated by a company called PeruRail and serves no local purpose whatsoever. A round-trip ticket on the Bingham — named for the American explorer who “discovered” Machu Picchu — costs roughly eight hundred dollars, or twelve percent of an average Peruvian’s yearly earnings. (And average earnings in the Andean Highlands are less than a twentieth of those in Lima; poverty rates in the highlands reach past fifty percent, with indigenous communities particularly affected.)

We departed Wanchaq Station at around eight AM. The train snaked through the outskirts of Cusco, paralleling the Huatanay River. Slowly, the city gave way to open country: undulating valleys, russet river canyons with frothing rapids, and charming old colonial churches. After an hour or two, we passed through a small town, which exemplified the aggressive disrepair characterizing some of the contemporary housing stock in parts of Peru. Boxy, sun-scorched dwellings pushed up neatly against one another, the streets treeless and dusty. (I was later told this dilapidation is at least partially purposeful: The Peruvian government does not tax “unfinished” dwellings. The exterior of homes are left — or made — decrepit. This tactic also has the advantage of deterring thieves.)

You wouldn’t know it from the tourist infrastructure that has been built up around Cuzco and Machu Picchu, but Peru is still recovering from two decades of blood and ruin. From the early eighties to the turn of the millennium, it struggled through one of the worst conflicts in twentieth-century Latin America. The Shining Path, a millenarian Maoist insurgency that both drew from and brutalized the poor indigenous population in equal measure, engineered a campaign of terror that stretched from the Andean heartland of Peru to cosmopolitan Lima. Over the course of Peru’s “Years of Lead,” (as the Italians memorably call their own struggle with radical militancy in the seventies), the Shining Path killed an estimated thirty-eight thousand people. The state responded with a furious counterinsurgency — roving paramilitary death squads and all — that terrorized the same populations preyed upon by the Shining Path. In 1992, citing the need for a freer hand in dealing with terrorism (and ruinous hyperinflation), President Alberto Fujimori dissolved parliament in an autogolpe, or “self-coup,” setting off a constitutional crisis. Government-affiliated groups are considered responsible for roughly thirty-two thousand deaths.

No one suffered more in this conflict than the indigenous, generally Quechua-speaking people of the Peruvian Andes. Six Andean provinces account for eighty-five percent of all related deaths. Caught between paramilitary forces and the Shining Path, highland villagers were occupied and then re-occupied, tortured for cooperation and then again for non-cooperation, massacred for being government supporters and massacred for being Maoists, in a kind of widening gyre of suffering. In total, seventy-five percent of all those killed were Quechua-speakers.

After the 1992 capture of its leader and founder, Abimael Guzman, the Shining Path began to fade — violently — from Peruvian life. But it has never quite disappeared entirely. From its remaining strongholds in the Peruvian jungle, it has become deeply involved in the lucrative cocaine trade. (Outpacing Colombia, Peru is now the world’s greatest producer of the drug.) Between 2008 and early 2013, the Shining Path killed more than eighty Peruvian soldiers and policemen; in 2012, the group kidnapped (and eventually released) thirty-six laborers helping construct a natural gas pipeline. Though the Peruvian government has arrested or killed many of the Shining Path’s remaining leaders, it seems to have a protean ability to regroup, even under great outside pressure.

The Andean Explorer is a magnificent specimen, a romantic anachronism. Fashioned after the classic American Pullman models, it is undoubtedly the most luxurious train I’ve ridden. In the main cabins, each passenger has a personal, freestanding plush wing chair, set neatly around a table fitted with a crisp white tablecloth and small lamp. Servers in formal dress constantly plied us with (mediocre) food, coffee, juice, and complementary drinks. Distractions punctuated empty time. There was a fashion show, a tea service, dancers dressed in glowing costume, and happy hour, with more roving mercenary flute bands. There was a bar car in the back of the train with an open-air lounge, providing a constantly receding survey of the landscape. The bathroom had a fake copper mail slot for you to deliver your soiled toilet paper. (In Peru, waste paper is normally deposited in trash bins beside the bowl itself.)

We climbed through the Altiplano and the terrain changed rapidly. Signs of human settlement became sparser before nearly disappearing entirely. The grass browned, the livestock took on a harried look, and the light became harsher and flatter, rebelling against the verticality of the giant peaks that would emerge from intermittent hibernation between the empty dried-out hills. A vintage crimson Volkswagen Beetle briefly raced the train on the highway paralleling the track. The air was pinched. At over fourteen thousand feet, we were far above tree line; the country seemed less lifeless than utterly deathless, beyond the cycle of both and uncaring of either. It was beautiful, like something Thomas Mann would have conjured up from the rib of a llama.

After a brief stop at La Raya, a tiny trading post with an even tinier church, the train descended again. Evidence of agriculture became more marked, and the shadows of Indian peasants crisscrossed next season’s plantings. Dirt roads bisected the landscape more frequently. We re-entered the world of machines: cars, trucks, mototaxis. Soon it became clear that we were on the outskirts of a real town, even, perhaps, a real city.

We came upon Juliaca, the regional capital with over two hundred thousand residents, around an hour before sunset. The train slowed as it approached the city’s urban fringes. “It’s an illegal city,” a man from Puno later told me, “full of smugglers bringing goods back and forth from Bolivia.” When I asked him what people were smuggling, he mentioned gasoline, “and other things.” (An estimated sixty percent of Juliaca’s residents are involved in the trafficking business. Authorities believe illegal cross-border trading is a billion-and-a-half-dollar-a-year industry in Peru.)

This part of town was shambolic to its core. The streets were unpaved and uneven, and led only, as far as I could see, to proliferating garbage piles and scoured buildings. The streets appeared ambivalent about their very direction; the track bisected a large intersection of sorts, an ersatz plaza borne from this tortuous urban delta. The train slowed and eventually halted in the center. I had just gone to the open-air bar car to watch the sun set. There were a few other passengers present, but not many. People emerged out of businesses, schools, warrens, who knows, watching the train sit there. Children in crisp uniforms bought candy ice from a vender. An elderly man stumbled up to the back of the bar car, performing the universal harangue of the old drunk. Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty, then forty-five. Soon I was the only customer left inside the bar, sitting cross-legged over a mahogany bench, mixed drink in hand, curiously entranced and frozen in place.

A truck was parked in the middle of the track, blocking the train, and no one could locate its owner. We couldn’t do much at all, besides wait. The bartender told me that the police were on their way, but had no idea when we’d start moving again. He told me this in a matter-of-fact manner, but he seemed like he was unsettled and trying to hide it.

When I walked through the main cabins en route to my own, I realized that the mood aboard was much altered. People squirmed in their seats; spoke in conspiratorial tones; avoided craning their necks to the right or left while stealing furtive glances out the window. Books — flaccid romance novels with unintentionally hilarious cover art, masturbatory self-help pamphlets posing as epic stories of self-discovery, pedantic adventure lit for Real Dudes — sat face up on white tablecloths.

As darkness descended the lights of the train switched on, the table lamps illuminating each passenger with perfectly diffuse light. It became far easier to see into the train than out of it. Outside, it was all imprints and shadows. Inside, the staff decided to hand out flutes of champagne. Never before has so much free champagne been given out for so few toasts.

The train rumbled into motion roughly two hours later, but people were too depleted to cheer, or even for polite applause — besides, an overenthusiastic reaction would have betrayed something unsavory about people’s response to the whole event, some aspects of the situation that no one really wanted to confront, not now, and maybe not ever. We were once again comfortably ensconced in fantasy, on the outside while in the train, looking inside to the enclosed space that was Peru. Things were back to normal now. The Andean Explorer passed through a marketplace so dense it nearly brushed the tin roofs of the makeshift stalls on either side of the track, the shops’ bare bulbs vibrating back and forth like censers. People stood and watched the train pass by, a few snapping photos on their cellphones. We pushed through the urban notch, accelerating, back into the night.

One afternoon late last summer, when Zelda was seven months old, we were on a long walk in our Brooklyn neighborhood. It was about the time when we usually ventured home to play in her room for a while before having dinner in the kitchen. But there was a breeze coming off the river and I didn’t feel like going home just yet. The sun was not too hot, and there was a beautiful light shimmering over Greenpoint. Our courage was up. The restaurant at the end of our street had tables out on the sidewalk, and just one was occupied. “Let’s have dinner here, Zelda,” I said, locking the foot brake on her stroller. We sat down and lazily gazed at the menu while we waited for the high chair. I looked over at the only other patron: a woman, about my age, sitting alone, reading The New Yorker. Her hair looked freshly cut and styled. “Oh fuck, she’s reading The New Yorker,” I thought to myself, laughing. Just a woman alone at a sidewalk cafe reading a magazine. How luxurious. How common.

As I wrestled Zelda into her high chair, she started yelling. Not an angry yell, but one that was designed to get another’s attention. With her strapped in, I sat back down and looked at her. She was smiling and calling to the woman reading alone. The woman was wearing sunglasses and so was I, but still, I thought I detected a hint of annoyance. Everything in that moment was laden with meaning for me: I felt judged because my baby was being annoying and loud. I looked at Zelda’s little sundress and noticed that it had pink stains — from strawberries — down the front of it. I looked down at myself and saw that my jeans had a mysterious faint crust on the thighs from some forgotten moment of exasperation earlier when I’d simply “woosh,” rubbed my hands down my legs as a form of cleaning or drying or Jesus, I don’t know. Zelda yelled again. A happy yell. She waved frantically, waiting for a nod or a hint of recognition. She wasn’t used to being ignored. We’d sat several tables away from the lone reader on purpose just to avoid this exact scenario. “Zelda,” I said, “the lady is reading. Talk to me instead,” I said to her, trying to strike a tonal balance of level-headedness and also scoffing “babies are so dumb”-ness. The lone reader sipped her glass of wine. Zelda’s imploring got louder.

“This is a shitshow,” I thought to myself, my confidence deflating in one moment. “This woman alone, she hates me and she hates my baby for ruining her quiet Tuesday afternoon. And I hate us too. We’re annoying and gross and terrible.” I didn’t believe any of this but I felt it, completely.

I felt it as I heard a wailing baby from far off, a baby that wasn’t mine, as I ordered my own glass of wine. “Wow, loud baby,” I thought to myself as my own darling nightmare leaned over in her high chair to lick the table. I felt it still, moments later, as I saw a man in his thirties pushing an expensive, gigantic stroller down Kent Street, the wailing baby identified. “Poor guy,” I thought, “his baby is worse off than mine.” Zelda was still trying to lick the table. And I felt the feeling, still, though it began to thaw and melt away, as the woman alone reading her New Yorker removed her sunglasses and put them on the table, chugged the last of her wine, and stood up. I saw a stain on the thigh of her skinny jeans as the napkin dropped from her lap to the dirty sidewalk. She turned to the man in the stroller, who was now within earshot, baby still screaming bloody murder. “I guess he’s not going to sleep,” she said to him as he engaged the foot brake. “We should go then,” she said, glancing at me and my now silent baby.

“How old is he?” I asked, sipping my glass of wine. “Nine weeks tomorrow,” she said, smiling weakly. “How old is she?” She gestured to Zelda, who waved, smiling a drooly smile. “Just passed seven months” I smiled back. Little old nine-weeks was still wailing, dad desperately attempting to jam a pacifier into its mouth over and over. “Does it get easier?” he asked, looking up at me for the first time.

“Oh, we have our days,” I said.

“This seems like one of the good ones,” mom said, jamming her New Yorker into the stroller. “I guess so,” I said, shrugging and smiling at my baby.

Before I had a baby, I disliked them intensely. I could get along with toddlers and children; we had things in common, like getting food on the front of our clothes during meals and barking back at the dog when she barks at us. Babies seemed annoying and loud and unmanageable.

I spent a lot of time in high school babysitting. I enjoyed it, but as I fumbled towards adulthood, babies became an aberration in my life. My only experience with them, for a very long time, was seeing them throw food onto the floors of the various restaurants that I worked in. Or hearing them scream on airplanes. One of the first times I travelled long distance with my husband, I remember how shocked he was when I craned my neck around, looking frantically for the source of the screaming. “Who brings a baby on a seven hour flight?” I screeched. “I hope someone died, at least.” The sound of a baby, wailing uncontrollably, was worse than any sound imaginable, to me just then. “It’s not the baby I’m upset about, it can’t help it. It’s the parents I’m angry with!” The parents, I reasoned, were putting this baby — who obviously belonged at HOME — into situations where both it and I were unhappy. Shame on them.

If there is such a thing as eating one’s words, allow me to feast on them now, barely chewing, gulping them down with a giant glass of pinot noir, since I now have a one year old baby. As soon as the ground thawed and we began to explore, around the time the baby was just a few months old, I decided to “take her out.” In practice, this meant to stores and to restaurants. At first, it was a nightmare: her in her stroller, me choking down a salad at the neighborhood bistro, nervous on behalf of the other patrons, since she could and would lose it at any moment. But there’s nothing a parent learns to ignore faster than the sound of a baby screaming, and I acknowledge this with some sense of the irony involved.

I learned some tricks. I learned to love noisy restaurants, because they hid the sounds of her loud, boisterous speaking voice. And once she was old enough to sit in a high chair, I only went to restaurants with high chairs. I had a list of them in my mind, and some of my formerly favorite haunts became absolutely off-limits. I went on off-peak hours — if the place opened at 10 for brunch, we’d be there waiting, the first people in the door. Dinner at 5PM? We’re there. We went to the same places over and over, getting to know the staff, so that they (we imagined) welcomed us. I tried to take her out when she’d just woken up — she was happier then, and hungry.

She loves going out to eat. And she makes friends at nearly any establishment we go to. But I have no illusions about her manners. Now that she is fully onboard with eating solid food, she is quite messy. The floor beneath her high chair after a meal is a bloodbath, and she hasn’t mastered the art of not pitching her bottle, or sippy cup, or bib, onto the floor whenever she has finished with it. At first, I spent a lot of time at the ends of meals on my hands and knees, wiping up piles of discarded food from the floors. Eventually, enough busboys and servers and restaurant managers discouraged me that I simply stopped trying. Now, at the end of a meal, after paying, I simply say to the server, “sorry about the mess! Her manners are a little lacking!” and hope that tipping thirty-five percent or more makes up for our daughter’s obvious faults.

I am fairly certain it does. As does being simply apologetic for it. As does not tolerating a full on outburst in a public, controlled setting. Which we don’t: once or twice, Zelda has decided that she is just not in the mood for brunch. Fair enough: off we go, out the door. I’ve left my husband several times to finish his food alone and pick up the check. I know my daughter’s limits, and I know the limits of what I, in my former, babyless days, would find tolerable. I can tell when the cute has worn off.

That’s not to say she isn’t annoying. And here is where I’ll eat my words: She is annoying. She is loud and messy and gross. She is a baby, and lacks any semblance of real-world human skills. I accept this as a harsh reality, spending, as I do, twenty-four hours a day in her company. I don’t treasure her running the butter-soaked palm of her hand down the side of my face, and shirt, and crotch, any more than anyone else would. I try to be realistic about her aptitude for the outside world, and it’s a pretty low bar some days.

As Zelda and I walked home that day, I had a stunning though obvious realization: we were all babies once. I didn’t spring into life, fully grown, an Athena in our midst. I once was an awful member of society. I once groped my mother in public and yelled for strangers’ attentions. I once hated other people’s babies, and, truth be told, I can still get a little judgy at the sight of a particularly awful baby specimen. But, now that I’m a parent of an actual, tiny, barbaric human, I see that it’s my duty to take her out, daily, into society, in order to cull her of her worst impulses. To teach her that sometimes the people sitting just one airplane seat over don’t want to talk, or that the lady reading her New Yorker five feet away isn’t her best friend. This is the social contract: we must raise our young to be human people with manners and dignity. And you, the adult humans of the world, must tolerate us while we embark on our excursion.

I apologize in advance: you are part of the journey. I promise, she will be better for it. Thank you for your patience.

Photo by Daliophoto

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting

Some people did cheat less in the morning, Sah found, but only if they were early birds to begin with. The opposite was also true: night owls cheated less in the evening. Time of day had less effect on honesty, the group concluded, than did the synchronicity between person and environment. “Our results should really dissipate those stereotypes of morning people being more saintly,” Sah says. “The important thing is the match.” Early birds aren’t ethically superior. And, to the extent that other research suggests that they are, it may just be that they are luckier: modern society, for the most part, is built around their preferences. We are expected to function well early in the morning. We can’t just wake up when our bodies tell us to and work when we feel at our peak.

Research suggests people who get up early are no more ethical than people who don’t, unless they are people who are going out of their way to get up early, which is something that can only be known by the sleeper himself. So, in conclusion: trust nobody, including morning people.

A sparse and gloomy score for a documentary about tax evasion. Also suitable for sitting at your computer and staring out the window at nothing in particular!

★★ A hissing wind came through the dead leaves still on the trees. Angled crackling or irregular ripples covered the surface of the fast-frozen sheet ice where the puddles had been. By early afternoon, the sun and salt were enough to liquify some things again, despite the biting wind. The seven-year-old wore his hood over his hat and kept looking for ways to angle out of the gusts on the walk west, toward the river. There the melted spots were fewer, the pavement blown dry. The wind held the preschool door shut, then grabbed it as it swung and held it open; it gave the stroller and the older boy’s parka a shove to speed them around the corner. “Go away, wind,” said the three-year-old, resentful and bossy. “Go away, wind.” Clouds like the belly scales of snakes slid across the sky. Then, from the shelter of the apartment, there was a tilted sheet of gray, the line of its edge angling from low in the south to high in the north. Take a picture, the seven-year-old urged. (Keep the window open, so I can stick my new year’s decorations out in the wind, the three-year-old added.) The cloud curtained the late sun into a dull circle for a while, then slid away in time to send ripe orange light bouncing off the apartment blocks, on the way to a smooth spectrum of sunset.

After a week hosting and attending a conference about the future of the media, Walt Mossberg has a conclusion: “How’s the Media Industry These Days? Confused.”

It’s no secret that the media industry has been high on the list of businesses that have been disrupted by the Internet and are struggling to find a new footing.

For a few years, things appeared to be settling down a bit, as the music, written word, and video businesses seemed to be on promising digital paths.

Record labels and artists were selling music on iTunes. TV networks sold new shows there and at Amazon, and sold old ones for streaming to Netflix. Big news organizations churned out iPad apps, and more started charging for their online content, even as some of their star journalists found they could fund their own breakaway sites.

Those tentative paths to digital stability, though, are either faltering, or at least coming under serious question. In their place, media companies and creators seem to be entering a new period of confusion, as the financial, technological and consumer behaviors they counted on are changing rapidly.

This is about right! Internet media companies are behaving in a manner that suggests they are confused. This confusion is passed through many stages of managerial amplification (anxiety’s counterpart to biomagnification) before reaching employees, whose brain-eggs are becoming thin and soft as a result. It’s all very exciting.

So: Here is an informed hypothetical about one way in which things will become less confusing, at least for some publishers.

At the conference, Facebook’s chief product officer told Recode’s Peter Kafka that, yes, as has been widely rumored and reported, the company is working on a way to host publishers’ content.

Facebook is making a pitch to media publishers: Let us host your content for you, and we’ll make it look beautiful (and give you more eyeballs) in the process…

Facebook is actually having these kinds of discussion with publishers, Cox says, to figure out a model that would enable Facebook to host content that would otherwise go on a publisher’s own website. Cox says one of the challenges for publishers — including Facebook — is that reading on mobile is still a crummy experience. He believes Facebook can make it better.

“Reading news on a smartphone is still a very bad experience most of the time,” he said, citing problems like speed and general design. “We want to try and make that a better experience for publishers.”

Facebook already does this with video, and publishers who are embracing it are reaching enormous audiences. The “experience” that Cox is referring to is reading posts, and publisher cooperation would mean publishing posts directly to Facebook using some kind of Facebook CMS, I guess. (The “very bad experience” is spending a second or two loading an external website and then hitting the back button.)

So, if you sense that a media company — maybe your media company — is feeling a little confused, consider how its leaders might respond from such an offer from Facebook.

The “better experience” that Facebook is able to offer is a larger audience and, presumably, a healthy cut of some sort of advertising. Handing over a major source of revenue — not to mention analytics and audience data and the establishment of boundaries — to an outside platform might sound like a risky transfer of power. It would be! But a publisher might be able to dismiss that concern by pointing out that many publishers are already dependent on vendors and ad agencies they don’t control, rather than directly negotiated advertising deals, and that the industry seems to be moving further in that direction, and besides, platform anxiety didn’t really stop anyone from trying iOS apps, right? Six of one, half-dozen of the other, see? I mean not quite, but LET’S NOT GET DISTRACTED.

There will be concerns about reaching audiences outside of Facebook, because not everyone uses the service to find news or entertainment. But this, I suspect, misunderstands how such a system might work: A post to Facebook could be both “native” to the app and available on the web, sort of like a long tweet. You could even share it on Twitter! And so that worry can be rationalized away as well, and publishers can begin to think of Facebook, if it helps, as something like a new version of WordPress with a money plugin. (Although: where does sponsored content fit into this? I don’t know. But it would be strange for Facebook to control one mode of publisher advertising but not the other. YouTube got tired of it!)

A publisher might say ok, fine, let’s do both. Let’s publish our things on Facebook and then also publish things on our website and sell ads against that too! If it doesn’t work out we’ll still have our website; if it does, our website can be sort of like our legacy product — like a print paper!! — which we will keep around until it is no longer worth working on.

A publisher might consider some broader implications. What if this really works, like, as a concept? Facebook would become the professional internet’s de facto CMS, making it more durable even as user attention once commanded by Facebook’s social functions wanders to WhatsApp and Instagram (which Facebook owns) and Snapchat and Vine (which is does not). A publisher might think: We don’t want to miss out on this. A publisher might worry that Facebook could be supplanted as quickly and totally as Facebook replaced its predecessors — and then what? — but then it will think: If we don’t do this, someone else will. A publisher might worry about what the point of that fancy CMS they spent all that money on was if they were just going to switch to Facebook’s, but then can say sunk costs are sunk. A publisher might wonder what happens to all those tech people — and, oh god, the ad sales team! — when Facebook handles most of the deals, and might privately thrill at this thought, and will simply say: we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

And so, given this option, I suspect many publishers will take it. It would be many, many things. But one thing it would not be, for businesses racked with insecurity about their futures, is confusing.

Image from As Valentine

by Esther Wang

Since Arthur Chu’s historic win streak on Jeopardy! early last year, he’s shrewdly turned his still-minty viral celebrity into a regular gig as a cultural critic and, as some have put it, “the ombudsman of the nerd community.” At Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown, we talked about milking his fifteen minutes, the crisis of nerd culture, and becoming an unlikely Asian-American male icon over a plate of chicken feet. (For me, since he politely declined.)

Is online celebrity strange?

It is, because stuff that’s happening on Twitter, you feel like it’s the whole world and you step off for a few minutes and it doesn’t matter to the majority of people. Even to the extent that it does, there’s a huge decoupling of what makes you important online. A lot of times, I just throw up my hands and say, “I don’t even know what my follower count means anymore.” You just have to keep that in perspective. It affects the real world but it’s something separate from the real world.

What did you do after Jeopardy!?

Call up publicists and PR firms, and said straight up, “Hey, do you work with viral celebrities?” Then I’d ask, “If you were me, how would you hang on to the fame, how would you monetize it?” I got good answers — they weren’t bad answers — but it was stuff I couldn’t imagine myself doing. It was stuff like, “Well you should take the whole idea of game theory and you should become an advice kind of guy, you should do lifehacker stuff, stuff like how-tos on how to invest, get a mortgage.” I said, “That stuff doesn’t interest me.” I didn’t want to keep talking about that for the rest of my life.

You started writing for the Daily Beast. There was that piece that was a critique of nerd culture, and specifically the misogyny in nerd culture, which seems to be a topic you’re obsessed with talking about.

I was the weird smart kid when I was in school, and it sucks being isolated for any reason. But especially guys in our culture, when you feel like you have no romantic prospects, the girls look down on you. It’s baked into our TV, books, and media, that validation comes from girls who like you, and being rejected by girls is sort of being rejected by society. I didn’t date much, and when I’d have fights with my girlfriend in high school, it would always come back to me feeling this sense of being judged. Like, you’re a girl, you’re attractive, you’re automatically on this higher level than me, on this pedestal. People always talk about this like it’s a good thing. The nice guy narrative — “Oh, I admire you so much. I would lavish so much attention on you” — that quickly becomes about getting what you want. Resentment.

I feel like what happened with Jeopardy! was that I got public recognition of my membership in this club. The nerd club. I was specifically lambasted online for being a nerd. If you want to talk about nerds being an oppressed class, a ton of people attacked me in public for being socially awkward, the way I came off. And yet I still have a huge problem with the narrative of the nerd underdog that’s being used to justify all of these things. Awkward guys have taken a lot of abuse, but we are not the actual victims right now in society. We’re taking our past victimization and using it to justify the terrible things that we do. Weirdly enough, I started saying this, and this past year become the year of the big events that highlight that. Elliot Rodger, Gamergate, the low-level nastiness that’s in gamer culture just blows up, and starts drawing attention to itself. That’s not unique there. You see it everywhere when people say, “Oh Christians are oppressed in the US. Or white people are oppressed.” Everyone wants to have that victimization narrative.

How do you see this affecting Asian-American men?

Speaking of horrible things on the Internet, there was a forum called AutoAdmit. One of their memes was this guy who would get really mad and post a photo every time he saw a white guy with an Asian girl. You know this is a long simmering issue in our community. That blog “Stuff White People Like” had a post that said, “What do white guys like? Asian women.” Everyone thought that he was an Asian guy for a while because of how angry he sounded about that. Anytime there’s a fracture between Asian man and Asian women, it’s always like, Well who are you trying to date? Why are you trying to date white guys? Why are you trying to date white girls?

I’m in this Facebook group that’s basically just Asian guys railing about why Asian women don’t date Asian men, and their perceptions about how Asian men are emasculated in the media. There’s all of this anger and resentment.

Yeah! I mean, I can speak to this. When The Joy Luck Club, way back when, was a bestseller, the one woman’s story whose life most closely mirrored Amy Tan’s — she marries a white guy. And it’s the happy ending. Every Asian man in this story is a horrible abuser, or he’s an unloving cold fish that gets dumped for a white guy. It was a small part of what the book was about. But for a lot of Asian guys, it hit pretty hard. Some guys make it a whole part of that men’s rights activist thing, saying Asian women are privileged relative to Asian men — Asian men are almost an unnecessary demographic.

A lot of the positions you take perhaps aren’t mainstream Asian-American positions. Talking about race, talking about police violence, talking about sexism.

You get raised to run away from politics. That was how I was raised, in an evangelical Christian family. People from our backgrounds, you want to be just like everyone else. You want to integrate into American culture, you want to be invisible, you want to be the same as your white friends. For me, that was very much true. For a long time I’d say things like, “Why bring up race? Why not try to be colorblind? Why not have an identity that’s distinct from any racial background you have?” I was one of those guys. I’m an American. No hyphen.

There’s just a point — the more you confront what America actually is and how America works — you can’t say that America is apart from race. America is race. It’s a series of colonies that were founded by people taking land away from people who they felt didn’t deserve it. Because of race and then working the land with people who were enslaved because of race. It’s built on that. Do you look at your black friend and say, “I don’t see your race. It’s just a coincidence that you get stopped by cops when my white friends don’t. It’s just a coincidence that this black kid got shot”? When you try to be an actor and you look around and say, “Hey, there’s no other Asians here. Weird”? There are all these spec sheets that they put out, audition sheets, and they all say, “Whites or other race.” I’d like to keep thinking that it’s just merit, but gosh, it feels like, once you actually have your eyes open, you can’t keep lying to yourself about that stuff anymore.

What does it feel like to become a bit of an Asian-American icon?

I thought it was weird. I compared it to Linsanity when I first started thinking about it. It’s not just that there is a successful Asian-American that’s in a field that we’re not used to — we get sick and tired of the same narrative, someone with a web-based business, some computer scientist, an engineer. To see someone become successful in a different way, it’s liberating. I didn’t think an Asian-American winning on Jeopardy! by itself would be a big deal. The funny thing being there’ve been very few champions who are Asian-American — the contestant pool has been overwhelmingly white. So it was funny when it happened and people were like, “an Asian guy winning Jeopardy!, that’s predictable.”

The idea of an Asian in the news for being controversial and unapologetic, for having strong opinions… Asians are supposed to work hard and do well but not to make waves. Not to create controversy. When you’re raised to think that’s not your place, to me, it’s important to make that space. It’s okay to be loud and rude and opinionated as an Asian. It’s a good thing.

Margaret Cho comes to mind.

Yeah, like Margaret Cho! Her show, her standup is so good, and her show, as soon as they gave it to her, they were like, “We can’t let this happen, we have to shape it into something that we’re comfortable with.” Pat Morita did stand up his whole life, he was a very outspoken, profane, funny guy. But America remembers him as Mr. Miyagi.

That’s how I remember him too, to be honest.

Exactly. That’s what they want to see. So it’s always fighting to see something else, to push some other narrative.

Did this influence you as a kid? This lack of a different narrative about Asian-Americans.

I often grew up in communities where there weren’t many Asian kids, so I tried to identify with my white friends.Then there was the flip side, in high school, when we moved to California, and there were a lot of Asians. I didn’t fit in with them either. My dad always had this idea, once you’re with other Asians who won’t reject you because of your race, you’ll fit right in. I was like, “No! I’m still a weird person.” Most Asian-American kids in LA are like white American kids in LA — they have certain tastes, and it was very, very different from me. It was always me kind of feeling like, whatever community I’m in, I’m always different. Having spent a lot of my life feeling alienated from the Asian-American community, it’s weird to be welcome back.

How so?

In retrospect, I know there’s been Asian-American activists being very loud and political even before I was alive, but where I lived, it just wasn’t visible. That’s not something we do, that’s something that Black activists do. I think it would’ve made a lot of things easier for me if I’d had those messages — like it’s okay to be mad about racism, it’s okay to talk about it, it’s okay to think about and analyze things in terms of race, instead of just pretending like you don’t notice.

Would you describe yourself as an Asian-American activist?

I’d like to think of myself as one. A slacktivist, maybe. I haven’t put in as much work as people who’ve put in work, but it’s something I care about.

So what’s next for you?

I’m looking at writing a book about my journey on Jeopardy! and the idea of success around nerdy guys in America.

Any title ideas yet?

No, not yet.

Time to get on the Chu-chu train? I can tell from your face that you’re not really into that.

Ken Jennings likes Chu-phoria.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.