Month: January 2015

In his profile of Bernie Sanders, Mark Jacobson asks the senator from Vermont what his administration might look like:

“This is how it is going to be,” Bernie says, as if he were still in his $200 car, back in the Liberty Union days [in the 1970s]. “Suppose you want to raise the minimum wage to a fair level and know that change is not going to come from inside Washington. Not in this climate. So, as president, I’d invite millions of low-income workers to come to the capitol. Like a bonus march. I’d do the same thing about making college affordable. Put out the call, invite a million students. Make sure they’re all registered to vote. Then when these congressmen come by the White House and they’re beholden to the Koch brothers, the super-PACs, or the oil companies, I will say, ‘Do what you want, but first do one thing for me: Look out the window.’ ”

“Look out the window,” Bernie repeats, liking the sound of it, the call to arms, just the sort of phrase that might get the attention of a downtrodden, detached electorate and prompt them to raise a fist in the air. “Look out the window. Because all those people are out there. They’re demanding their fair share and they’re not leaving until they get it.”

Back in October, Andrew Prokop also considered how a hypothetical Sanders presidential campaign might affect 2016:

Essentially, Sanders is calling for the Democratic Party to wage a rhetorical war on the billionaire class, to better mobilize the general public against them, and break their power. He believes the power of the rich is the defining issue of our politics, and wants to elevate it accordingly.

The specifics of how this mobilization happens, and what the public does once it’s mobilized (beyond voting out Republicans), are less clear. Sanders’ generic suggestion tends to be for a march on Washington. “You wanna lower the cost of college? Then you’re gonna have to show up in Washington with a few million of your friends!” he told an audience member in Waterloo. …

But Hillary Clinton is extremely unlikely to take up the banner of class warfare in her presidential campaign. According to a report by Amy Chozick of the New York Times, she is currently exploring, through discussions with donors and friends in business, how her campaign can address inequality “without alienating businesses or castigating the wealthy.” Beyond Clinton’s desire to raise campaign cash, there’s a long-held belief among many Democratic political consultants that messaging critical of the rich simply isn’t effective in US politics. Instead, they argue, much of the American public actually rather admires successful businessmen, and aspires to be like them. And lack of trust in government is a real and consistent force in American politics and public opinion.

William Deresiewicz, tracing a history of the creative process, notes that for today’s artist, “10,000 hours is less important now than 10,000 contacts.” So what kind of art should we expect from new generations of highly networked, creatively diversified makers?

What we see in the new paradigm—in both the artist’s external relationships and her internal creative capacity—is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? No doubt some of both, in a ratio that’s yet to be revealed. What seems more clear is that the new paradigm is going to reshape the way that artists are trained. One recently established M.F.A. program in Portland, Oregon, is conducted under the rubric of “applied craft and design.” Students, drawn from a range of disciplines, study entrepreneurship as well as creative practice. Making, the program recognizes, is now intertwined with selling, and artists need to train in both—a fact reflected in the proliferation of dual M.B.A./M.F.A. programs.

The new paradigm is also likely to alter the shape of the ensuing career. Just as everyone, we’re told, will have five or six jobs, in five or six fields, during the course of their working life, so will the career of the multiplatform, entrepreneurial artist be more vagrant and less cumulative than under the previous models. No climactic masterwork of deep maturity, no King Lear or Faust, but rather many shifting interests and directions as the winds of market forces blow you here or there.

But Robinson Meyer doubts that Deresiewicz is sizing up a real sea change in how art gets made:

The value of any discipline, whether craft or art, is not extracted solely by experts. In his essay, Deresiewicz approves of how Gertrude Stein once scolded Picasso for writing poetry. I have also heard Picasso was a terrible poet, but I really don’t know, and I can’t hazard whether some iambic innovation would have spurred him to paint differently.

I am not Picasso, though, and neither are you. And in the world I’d like to live in, everyone—whether they’re a famous painter or a CPA—would feel as though they can explore the breadth of human expression, whether through writing poetry or learning about Chinese pottery or even researching historical pickling methods. If cultural democracy comes, my guess is it will not look like 100 million specialists. It will appear as a society of curious minds, captivated by human traditions and inspired to improve upon them, interested in the many places in the world where humans have spent their attention—and hungry to invest more.

The small independent publisher Melville House has done it, turning “a five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-page PDF with the slanted margins and blurred resolution of a Xerox made by a myopic high-school Latin teacher” into a more readable text. Alexandra Schwartz, who stopped by the publisher’s offices, offers a glimpse into the process:

“There’s a lot of reasons why this is insane,” [Melville House co-founder Dennis] Johnson said. “We’ve basically shut down the company to do this at the busiest time of the year.” The cost of printing alone, he estimated, would run to six figures, a lot of money for such a small, if scrappy, operation to risk. There’s also the possibility that Americans may feel that a book detailing the chronic and grotesque abuses of its government is not in keeping with the Joy to the World spirit. As Johnson put it, “Torture isn’t something you want to carry over the holiday season.”

Still, Johnson has faith in the power of the book as a physical object—“You can still read the first book ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible. I’ve seen it. It still works! The binding has held up!”—and in the power of the written word to move the masses to action. “They really were reading that at Valley Forge,” he said, of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” “They really did sell a hundred thousand copies of that in what was then a tiny little country. That’s probably the equivalent of—” he paused to do a mental calculation. “Tens of millions of copies today. It really did inspire people to go into revolution!”

The manuscript of the torture report was due to the printer at nine the next morning, a start-to-finish turnaround of less than seventy-two hours. A dozen full-time employees, plus a smattering of freelance proofreaders, copy-editors, interns, and volunteers sat at computers, retyping the government PDF’s tangle of text into Microsoft Word files. Melville House’s office was once a warehouse, and a nose-to-the-grindstone atmosphere—part college library, part North Pole workshop—pervaded the space.

Adam Chandler paid them a visit as well, noting the employees there couldn’t resist giving the report a literary spin:

Place the material before a group of literary minds, and a discourse begins. The report’s reference to Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, the pseudonyms of the CIA’s contract psychologists who were paid $81 million to help create the interrogation program, recalled “Thomas Pynchon names,” according to some of those gathered.

Other passages in the text were reminiscent of “a John le Carré novel,” “an Oscar Wilde story,” and “a really boring porno.” (The delirious team of about 15 employees and volunteers, which had been working on the project more or less without rest since Tuesday, found this last remark hilarious.)

The report’s linguistic flourishes were noted. “He sang like a tweetie bird. He opened up right away and was cooperative from the outset,” one quote read. One official repeatedly referred to the detainees as “yahoos.”

The first printing of 50,000 sold out in one day, and the publisher is preparing a reprint.