#this is when i enter my networking for jobs era and i i figure if women/nb ppl/queer folks aren't afraid of me then good for me

[belladonnafleur]

🌸

[xjoonchildx]

guarded | jhs x reader | chapter one: fan mail

summary: you’ve tried to separate yourself from your infamous crime family, but a new case has your carefully-constructed world crashing down around you.  now you have to figure out how to heal old wounds and handle the new man who enters your orbit.

pairing: hoseok x reader

genre: mafia AU, E2L, slow burn, tsundere, eventual smut

rating: 18+

word count: 2.8K

Chapter 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | EPILOGUE

***************************

You stare at the words for a moment before folding the paper in half and slipping it back into the envelope you pulled it from.  

Honestly?  

It’s not the first time you’ve gotten a threat. It happens from time to time in this line of work.

But this note plucks a chord of anxiety inside of you. Must be the eleven missed calls you suspect go hand-in-hand with your little love letter. Your phone hasn’t stopped buzzing for a half-hour now.

“Are you okay?”

Hyejin’s voice filters through your thoughts. She’s taken stock of the strange look that crosses your face in the split-second before you school your features back into a mask of calm.

She’s observant like that.

“Oh yeah, it’s nothing,” you say, shaking your head.  “Just some fan mail.”  

Your phone buzzes against the papers on your desk -- again -- and Hyejin raises an eyebrow.

Make that twelve.

“Tell you what,” she says, standing to stretch her legs. “I’m ready to go blind from reading these files and I could use an Americano.  You want one?”

“Actually yes,” you exhale.  “That’s exactly what I need. You’re a lifesaver.”

She gives you one last are you sure you don’t need to tell me anything? look before opening the door to your office.  You reassure her with a soft smile but the second the door to your office closes, you blow out one long, heavy breath and reach for your phone.

you: what the hell? [ 3:15 PM ]

namjoon: this can’t wait [ 3:15 PM ]

you: clearly [ 3:16 PM ]

namjoon: come in ASAP [ 3:16 PM ]

You groan.

Namjoon knows you avoid that place at all costs.

It’s not a good look for you to be seen there -- and so as a rule -- you’re not.  Your brother is usually understanding about your stance on the matter. But it’s not like him to push so there’s probably a damned good reason why he’s summoning you to his office like some wayward employee.

You glance back at the stack of files on your desk, riddled with notes and highlights.  Even after a morning spent tag-teaming with Hyejin, there’s still a shitload of work to be done. But then you look back at that envelope sitting on your desk and pick up your phone again.

you: give me thirty minutes [ 3:19 PM ]

namjoon: okay [ 3:19 PM ]

Paperwork is going to have to wait.

*****************************

You’re not a moron.  

You know what people say about your family, what they say about you.

You know what they whisper when you show up to charity galas and fundraising dinners. You know what they murmur the second their false smiles fall and you turn your back. They say that the money that paid for your prep schools and top-notch legal education is blood money; paid for by one of Seoul’s oldest and most powerful crime networks.  They say that you took a job prosecuting crime to assuage for your family’s sins.

They’re not wrong.

Your father -- your cruel, unsophisticated father -- shelled out top dollar to put you in fancy schools and fancy clothes and fancy riding lessons.  He threw elaborate birthday parties where he showered you with extravagant gifts in front of guests who were only there to celebrate because they feared turning down the invitation.

So others saw your material good fortune and mistook you for a pampered mafia princess. None of them had to come home every day to the stench of death and destruction. None of them had to endure the gossip and the looks and the cold shoulders.

That was a burden you shared with only one other person.

You and Namjoon huddled together during your lavish and turbulent childhood, leaning on one another for strength because no one else understood. He was the only safe harbor you had in the storm you both lived every day.

And then you left.

You walked away from your father and the Gajog and crossed the country to study law.  Far from the vicious gossip and prying eyes and violent drama that always awaited you in Seoul.  You walked away and decided that you weren’t going to live that life anymore.  

But you also walked away from Namjoon.

Now it’s a cold comfort, seeing your brother seated so naturally at the throne of power your father vacated when he died.  The old-school brute-force organization your father ran for decades is a thing of the past.  In its place, a well-oiled, highly-organized machine -- making far more money and far fewer mistakes.  

Namjoon single-handedly pulled the crime syndicate into a new era, dusted it off and dressed it up.  He legitimized parts of the business, took up residence in one of the city’s most expensive buildings, and basically dared law enforcement to come get him.

They still haven’t.

And there isn’t a day that Namjoon doesn’t cross your mind.  

There isn’t a day that you don’t pray that the menace that existed inside your father never takes root inside of your brother.  You pray that he can shoulder the burden of his responsibilities without rotting from the inside out.  

If anyone can, you tell yourself, it’s him.

**********************

Namjoon cuts an imposing figure behind his grandiose wooden desk.

He’s seated when his assistant first opens the door to his secure private office, but as soon as you follow her inside he makes to stand.

He looks so tall now, you think -- as though it’s been years since you’ve seen him.  

In reality, it’s only been a few months since your last brief encounter, but it’s still hard sometimes to recognize the handsome, polished man in front of you as the kid you grew up with. You’re hit with a pang of regret that it’s been so long since you’ve seen one another face-to-face.

Two men stand guard on either side of Namjoon’s desk, which doesn’t surprise you. Your brother is always surrounded by guards these days.  

The only one you recognize is Min Yoongi, who gives a slight bow in your direction as you cross the broad expanse of the office.  You’re certain you’ve never seen the second man, who stands eerily still on your brother’s other side.  You can feel the stranger’s stare from a distance and avert your eyes.

You bow to Namjoon and take a seat in the plush chair facing his desk.  A fond look passes over his features but when he opens his mouth to speak his tone is businesslike, serious.

“I know you don’t like coming in here,” he begins carefully, “and so I have to apologize for asking you to make an exception.  I hope you understand this can’t be helped.”

“Yes, of course,” you say softly. “Sorry it took me a while.  I’m buried with a new case.”

Namjoon nods.

“That case is the reason why we’ve run into a bit of trouble in the past few days,” he admits. “Some of our friends across town are pretty upset about it.  Apparently very agitated and hoping to leverage the fact that you’ve been assigned to this case to their advantage.”

“I see,” you murmur.

You knew the men you’d been assigned to build a weapons trafficking case against were part of a rival organization -- but on paper they were low-level foot soldiers, considered expendable in a business like theirs.  Why the Ssijog were so worried about losing a couple of nobodies from their ranks was a bit puzzling.

“I guess that explains this,” you say, reaching into your bag for the letter delivered to your office.  

You hand it to Namjoon and he reads the words with a tight expression before turning it over to the man you don’t recognize.  It’s a relief when the stranger’s focus moves away from you and onto that paper. You take the opportunity to get a closer look at him.

The first word that comes to mind is sharp.

Everything about the man is sharp -- from his meticulously tailored suit to his severe jawline to the angles of his body.  Intense dark eyes set in honey gold skin and black hair carefully styled off of his face. You’re caught staring when his eyes snap up from the paper and back to you.

You clear your throat, gaze darting back to your brother.

“They want you to make this go away.”

You sigh.

“I can’t do that. I don’t have that kind of authority. And besides, it would attract all the wrong kinds of attention to me and -- “ you pause, choose your next words carefully, “ -- to my ties to this organization.”

Namjoon concedes your point with a slow bob of his head.

“Right.  So we have a problem,” he admits.  “Because the message we’re getting is that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want.  And it’s been made quite clear to me that hurting you is not off the table.”

You take in a deep breath.

“This is Jung Hoseok,” Namjoon says after a short silence, motioning to the stranger at his side. You straighten when the man acknowledges you with a barely-there bow.  

“I’ve assigned him to your detail.”

“Detail,” you repeat slowly.  “Like a bodyguard.”

“Exactly like that.”

“Namjoon, I -- “ you look away from the man to turn your attention back to your brother,  “-- I can’t have one of your guys following me around.  People are going to talk.”

“Amsaja,” he sighs, “They talk anyway.”

You bristle at his use of your childhood nickname.  

You know it’s meant as an endearment but it still feels infantilizing in front of his men -- one of whom hasn’t seen you in years, one of whom knows nothing about you at all.  You’re a grown woman, a successful prosecutor, and more than just Kim Namjoon’s little sister.

“Joon -- “

There is annoyance behind the way you fire off his name and one of your brother’s eyebrows lifts in warning.  A silent reminder that in this room, in this building, in this realm, he is the absolute authority.  You swallow back the argument on the tip of your tongue.

“Namjoon,” you start again, this time with a restrained calm.  “Please. Let’s have this conversation in private.”

He drums his fingers across the surface of his wooden desk before nodding his agreement and raising a hand to motion his guards out the door.  You wait until both men are gone and the heavy door to Namjoon’s office clicks shut to speak again.

“You’re putting me in a terrible position here,” you exhale. “I’ve worked so hard to -- distance myself.  I can’t walk around with a reminder of my family history at my heels.”

Your brother stands from his seat and walks to an ornate sideboard, pours liquor from a heavy crystal decanter into a highball glass.  He takes a slow drink before speaking.

“You are worried about your image; I’m worried about your safety.  Those two concerns are not equal. Not to me.”

Your face heats at the kernel of truth in your brother’s assessment.  

Certainly, it’s about how it looks, but it’s so much more than that. It’s about the life you’ve worked so hard to build away from the drama surrounding your family name.  It’s about a future that depends on the burial of your past.

Namjoon leans against his heavy wooden desk, arms crossed.

“You should know me by now,” he continues.  “If I thought these were empty words, I wouldn’t have bothered you with them.”

“I know that,” you admit quietly.  Doesn’t make the pill any easier to swallow, though.

“Hoseok is under orders to stay with you at all times. Obviously, he won’t be physically at your side while you’re working, but he will be close by.  And he will be staying at your apartment for the time being.”

You blink.  “In my apartment?”

A flash of irritation crosses your brother’s face. “Yes, in your apartment.  I’m privy to information you don’t have.”  He takes a long drink from the highball glass.  “It’s necessary until we have this situation under control.”

“I don’t know this man,” you argue, and that eyebrow lifts again at the rising heat in your tone. “Can’t you give me Yoongi or Seokjin or someone else?”

“No.”

“Thanks for considering that, Joon.”

You don’t even bother to hide your displeasure now, climbing out of the plush chair and walking over to the massive window that makes up the back wall of your brother’s office. You look down at the street. From this height, the cars below look like toys and the people look like ants.  

Namjoon joins you in front of the window, drink in hand.

“I don’t want to fight with you, I want to protect you. Jung Hoseok has worked for me three years now and he spent many more years serving in the military.  He is the man I want for this assignment and I need you to trust me on that, too.”

You say nothing, staring out the window and feeling suddenly exhausted.  You hate everything about today -- the letter, the case, this arrangement you now have to endure.  You hate that this is the first real conversation you’ve had with your brother in months and you’re locking horns.  

“Okay,” you whisper after a while, reluctant to let the tension escalate. Your brother has asked so little of you since you severed ties with the Gajog -- and effectively, with him.  You swallow past the taste of guilt when you turn to look him in the eye.

“I’ll play ball, Jaegyueo.”

Your brother seems to soften when you use his childhood nickname in return, shoulders relaxing as he takes another sip from the highball and looks out over the city he basically runs.  

“Thank you, Amsaja.”

*************************

Hoseok

“Has she seen this?”

Hoseok stares down at the glossy photograph in his hands.  

There’s little to be gleaned from the details in the picture.  There are no shadows, no reflections, no personal items to give away any clues as to who took it or when.

You are asleep, one bare shoulder peeking out from underneath your plush bedding -- your hair spilling out onto your pillow. You appear blissfully unaware of the danger standing just a few feet away.

“Hell no,” Namjoon exhales.  “And I would like to keep it that way. She’d probably never sleep again if she saw that shit.”

Hoseok hands the photograph back.

“I need the two of you to figure out who got into her apartment.  And then I need you to bring him here.”

Namjoon doesn’t finish that train of thought -- he doesn’t have to.  Hoseok and Yoongi hear clearly everything he hasn’t said.  

“We’ll find him,” Yoongi vows, and Hoseok nods his agreement.  “It’s gonna be handled.”

Namjoon scrubs a hand down his jaw, eyes still glued to the picture on his desk.

He’s an uncharacteristically even-tempered boss, particularly in this line of work.  Seeing him this unnerved is unnerving to Hoseok, who’s seen him handle countless shitty situations with an unnatural calm.

“She’s my sister,” Namjoon says quietly.  “I don’t expect any of you to understand our dynamic, but I need you to know that her safety is my top priority.”

“Understood,” Hoseok murmurs and in that moment, the heavy door to the office opens wide. Namjoon shoves the photograph into his desk drawer.  

Hoseok studies you as you trail Namjoon’s assistant across the length of this massive office.

The first word that comes to mind is small.

You’re much smaller than Hoseok imagined you’d be, basing that assumption almost entirely on Namjoon’s tall and solid frame.  Physically, you are nearly the opposite of your brother, delicate features set in smooth skin, any appearance of height owed directly to the high-heeled shoes you’ve carefully matched to your business suit.  

Hoseok notes that you have the same stubborn set to your jaw, though -- a defense mechanism that slips momentarily when you lock eyes with your brother.  He catches the brief flash of sadness in your face before you manage it away.

In the years he’s been with the Gajog, he’s only heard your name a handful of times --  almost always followed by hushed exchanges and pained expressions.  Never once has anyone breathed your name in front of Namjoon, though.  That appears to be an invisible line everyone understands not to cross.

But now you’re here, in the flesh. One piece of the puzzle revealed.

Hoseok watches your exchange with Namjoon with curiosity. It’s not the easy back-and-forth one would expect to see between a pair of siblings -- but there is an underlying affection between the two of you. A quiet respect.

Amsaja, Namjoon had called you.  Lioness.

Hoseok doesn’t see a lioness when he looks at you, though.  

He sees a rich girl desperate to prove how much better she is than her own flesh and blood.  He sees a social climber so eager to make a name for herself in this city that she walked away from her own brother to make it happen.  

This is the moment that Hoseok decides that you’re not the kind of person he could ever respect.

Because unlike you, he would never put ambition above loyalty.

Never.

**********************

tag list:

@yoongbug @brilliantlybasicb @lemonjoonah @illnevertrustmyselfagain​@sunkissed75 @taetaewonderland @shadowhale​

[literateleah]

the paradox of emily prentiss’ audience perception and character design

some of y’all about to be real mad at me, but it must be said:

emily prentiss’ character design makes no sense: my personal opinion + an objective analysis

i think it can be challenging to separate the versions of characters we have in our little brains from actual canon content, but doing so is important for understanding what those characters are truly like, especially within the context of their environment and in contrast to others around them. plus developing a deeper understanding of the media we consume is super fun and interesting! with that being said: emily prentiss should not work for the fbi and here’s why (in three parts regarding who’s responsible: cbs, paget, and fans) (sit down and grab a snack i promise this is over 3k words)

quick disclaimer: i don’t dislike emily at all! that’s my girl, i just looked closer and realized some funky things the writers did and felt the need to analyze her of course: so let’s get into it

part one: what cbs did

cbs set the stage for emily’s introduction on the heels of the departure of lola glaudini as elle greenaway! lola has clarified that she decided to leave the show because filming in los angeles was not the best environment for her personally, and after one successful season on a major network (but not much established long term plot or drama beyond elle’s departure as a character) a consistent ensemble cast was required- particularly because the bau had been criticized for being predominantly male in the first few episodes of the show and not much development was given to penelope or jj yet. enter emily prentiss.

for the duration of seasons 2-3ish, emily was framed as a chip off the block that was elle greenaway, just slightly…richer? in her first few episodes emily was hesitantly polite but ambitious, clean cut, intellectually concise and held her own within the team. she seemed equal parts intimidated and frustrated by her male superiors (gideon, hotch) but certainly proves herself among other profilers. her childhood was explored only within reference to her strained relationship with her mother (which was only ever referenced once more after the fact) and we received a short overview of her educational and career history in her first few episodes. emily fit right into the hole elle had left, and didn’t have many major storylines yet.

seasons 4-6 brought a bit more development and depth to emily’s character! she begins dropping more snarky remarks, one liners, and socially deepening her relationships with the other team members. this seems more within the lines of elle’s design, but emily arguably took more time to grow into her place within the team. during the foyet arc she was vulnerable and supportive, and the doyle arc gave her some independence and agency she didn’t have previously. this era also solidified her appearance and persona as more edgy, which falls in line with general fanon perception of her character (especially when compared to jj or penelope). i can’t address this era or season 7 without mentioning that cbs was actively trying to remove paget from the cast, similar to how they did to aj cook as well. paget has spoken about this instance before, and i believe it slightly affected her portrayal of her character, and “lauren” was somewhat of a goodbye for both paget and emily (thus why she wished for mgg to direct since they were best friends).

season 7: in my opinion, one of the best seasons for emily. she was wisened and deeply wounded by her experiences with doyle, which was understandable of course. she returned to the team she loved and learned to appreciate life in a different way, remaining mature during this time period as well! though her departure was a bit less than graceful and sudden at the end of this season, it made sense compared to some other exits the team had seen.

now *sigh* all the rest.

paget as emily appears in two separate guest appearances (once in s9 and once in s11, and she is referenced offscreen as well) before permanently reprising her role as unit chief of the bau. these appearances were most likely to boost ratings and get the team back together (i.e. 200) or just to pepper in international cases (tribute). emily’s personality remains pretty consistent here, just more mature and comfortable in leadership positions (seeing as she is running an entire branch of an international law enforcement organization). then season 12 hit.

upon the departure of thomas gibson as hotch, cbs reached out to paget to see if she would be interested in fulfilling her role as emily within a longer term unit chief position. i’ll get into why this is wack in a few paragraphs, but the remainder of her time on the show is spent on a mature portrayal that seems very distant from her previous versions. emily is more authoritative, gives orders with ease, and has no qualms about leading a team of agents or even receiving promotion offers as director of the entire bureau.

thus concludes a general summary of the canon content cbs gave us as viewers. now let's talk about what they didn’t give us, regrettably

the primary aspect of emily’s design that comes to mind for many is her queer coding. though not much was to be expected from cbs, a prime time cable tv network, each of her relationships on the show (all with men) seemed oddly forced, and without much chemistry as compared to the SOs of other main characters. rumors of scrapped plotlines have floated around about what may have been, but the ultimate lack of acknowledgement of any queer characters in the main ensemble still leaves a feeling of disappointment to audiences, and leaves more to be desired as for how emily navigates social bonds.

part two (sidebar): what paget did

i think it could be agreed within audiences that paget brewster’s portrayal of emily made the role what it was! her dry witty delivery and emotional prowess combined with sitcom acting experience made her performance a mainstay for years. i think she did the best she could with a confusing and at times flat characterization, and brought the role to life.

paget also heavily contributes to fanon indirectly with her comments outside of the show (press, cameos, twitter etc). her general continued interest and fondness for the role post production affects fan perception, particularly in what she chooses to elevate and comment on. she and aj have both spoken about viewing jemily content, and paget and thomas have both also commented on hotchniss. most cast members feel free to comment on their characters in the appropriate timing, and seem open to discussing fanon ships and theories outside of canon!

part three: what fanon did

as we can tell from this fan space as well as the presence on insta, tik tok and twitter, fans LATCHED onto emily super quickly. she’s remained a favorite over the years, and this fan persistence is what brought her back so many times after leaving (so many times). in my opinion, queer coding and a bolder female trope (in contrast to her female counterparts) are the main pulls because they resonated with so many fans- new and old. with that being said, newer fans of the show in the past year in particular have been heavily influential in fanon, solely because of the large influx of fan content and popularity of it.

fan content began to take coding and bite size moments and snippets from the show as canon, and cemented it into much of the content and discourse they created. these small pieces of emily’s character are significant, but have become magnified by how easily they are to share and edit. for example, a collection of catchy one liners from emily over the seasons makes for a great video edit intro, or gifset! there’s absolutely no problem with this content, it just all combines to create a certain fanon perception no character escapes (this isn’t a phenomenon limited to emily or the cm fandom!)

these droves of content also solidified emily’s personality as much more defined, but at the same time, simplified it in a way that’s slightly harder to explain.

fanon: more emo/goth than canon basis

fanon: more introverted/anti social than canon basis

fanon: more violent/chaotic when canon emily is relatively well mannered and doesn’t start many conflicts (particularly in the workspace)

fanon: much less maternal when canon emily displays desire on multiple occasions (even crossing professional borders) for children, particularly teenage girls (possibly projection)

(again, nothing wrong with this interpretation at all and it still varies! This is just a generalization based on most of the popular content i have seen)

part 4: why it doesn’t work

let me start with this: emily prentiss does not like her job.

we don’t receive much in depth information about emily’s internal feelings and thoughts towards her mother beyond resentment. this stems from wanting to make it on her own, as a professional and as an individual (cough cough college deposits). this makes emily’s insistence on proving herself to authority figures in her earlier seasons is interesting to watch in different circumstances. she cites her experience and denies help from her mother when justifying her placement in the bau to hotch, she is extra vigilant about being helpful on her first case with gideon, etc. nevertheless, emily forges her own path outside of diplomacy and becomes a successful profiler and agent, with the help of her privilege, wealth and name whether she likes it or not. but if we read between the lines and fill in the blanks cbs neglected, these ambitions may subconsciously be oriented towards pleasing her mother.

example one: emily’s authority issues go further than just “rebellion” or “anarchy”, she frequently questions the ethics and sustainability of the work that the bau does. every team member does this, but emily much more so than anybody else.

in “amplification”, emily almost breaks federal protocol to inform civilians of anthrax threats. she butts heads with both hotch and rossi on this front, and ends the episode with having a conversation with rossi about the ethics of lying in their line of work. emily resigns to a solemn “it be like that” and moves along, accepting this reality.

on multiple different occasions emily laments to derek about the darkness she sees on the job, and it’s shown that this gets to her quickly on particularly bad cases. this is another contradiction of the design that she can supposedly “compartmentalize” better than others on the team, when she cannot unless the lives of others are at risk (doyle arc, s7 finale).

emily also responds in this way to many cases involving children, a similarity to jj many don’t notice upon first watching the series. “seven seconds” and “children of the dark” come to mind, during the latter in which emily is prepared to cross multiple professional lines to adopt a teenage girl left orphaned by the case, until hotch stops her and establishes that her emotions can’t rule her judgement on the job. regardless of hotch’s thoughts about her attempted caretaking abilities, these actions and impulses deeply contradict the typical bureaucratic pathways of the work the bau does.

the looming reputation of her mother’s diplomatic history hangs over emily, and after going to law school and working for the cia, she most likely did want to forge her own path as far away from being a socialite: being a spy. her inner nature doesn’t always reflect this profession, and leads me to believe that with her knowledge of psychology, law procedure and care for children: emily prentiss might be more inclined to working in social work, placing suffering children and teenagers in homes they deserve.

and finally, the hill i will die on: emily prentiss was an bad unit chief

this wonderful post touches on my general sentiment, but there were many reasons as to why emily prentiss’ career arc makes little to no sense (plot holes included).

first: her background. emily attended chesapeake bay university as well as yale and achieved a ba in criminal justice. keep in mind that though timelines evidently don’t exist in the cm universe, emily prentiss is ONE YEAR older than aaron hotchner (for context). in her first episode, she professes that she has worked for the bureau for a little under ten years in midwestern offices- something the audience laters knows to not be true. emily worked with the cia and interpol as a part of a profiling team and undercover agent up until roughly TWO YEARS before her canon introduction. plot holes and time gaps aside, this makes me wonder, why didn’t she just say the cia was a backstop without revealing the highly confidential nature of her work with doyle (similar to jj’s state department backstop and cover story)? penelope or hotch could have easily accessed her file and seen that she did not in fact have experience with the bureau in midwestern offices recently, and given the fact that erin strauss set up her bau placement, i’m presuming these formalities or references were overlooked.

second: her experience within the team. emily worked as a part of the bau with the bureau for roughly 6 or 7 years. after this, she is invited to run the entire london branch of interpol, one of the most renowned international law enforcement organizations. i’m surely not the most knowledgeable on requirements or standard timelines for such matters, but with the fact that emily had never led a team in her life (not in the bau or interpol previously) and had roughly 10 years of field experience, i don’t believe she would have ever realistically been considered eligible to run the whole london department.

third: her return to the bureau. fanon depiction of their relationship aside, if you believe aaron hotchner’s last wish before going into witsec was to entrust his team to emily prentiss, you’re dead mistaken. bringing emily back was clearly a pull for ratings after the loss of two main characters (hotch and derek), but logistically a bad decision. let’s suppose emily has had 4 or 5 years of experience in london now, this established authority position would be unlikely to change at the drop of a hat, even for old teammates or friends. also considering how close they were after a decade of working closely in bureaucratic and field contexts, i firmly believe hotch would have referred jj for the job of unit chief but that’s another discussion for another time.

emily’s reign as unit chief is odd, because of the many chaotic storylines crammed into it. but amidst bad writing and viewings plummeting, emily’s character is completely flattened. completely. emily is unrecognizable, both in appearance (that god awful wig) and personality. at times she acts as a complete wise authority, giving orders and delegating local authorities as hotch did. but at other times she makes multiple illegal, emotional, and incorrect judgement calls based on personal circumstances that lead to further chaos (deleting the recording of her and reid’s mexico conversation and reprimanding luke in “luke” for the exact same thing she did in season 6 even though she enabled her to do so come to mind).

i’m not sure if this is due to paget trying to find her footing in the role again, or the writer’s bad decisions towards the end of the show wrecking any previous design for their ensemble. then, there’s the infamous “wheels up” scene in s13e1. notoriously cringey, this seems like a vague caricature of something rossi would say many years in the past (the same goes for her pep talk in “red light” in the hunt for diana reid). these moments are meant to mature emily in the audience’s eye, but instead completely removed her from who we understood her to be, and made her an unreliable leader.

part five: and why it does

in theory, emily was a bolder foil to jj, similar to elle who she arguably replaced at first. she came into her own, and stands as a more uniquely developed character than almost any other in the main ensemble. she isn’t as maternal or domestically inspiring as canon jj, less bright and sunny than penelope, not quite as stoic or intimidating as derek or hotch. And yet at the same time, she’s a fairly blank slate. stripping fanon content away entirely, canon emily has few defining traits (all of which are constantly changing), and that may be the key to why we love her so much.

[meanstreetspodcasts]

Diamond in the Rough

“I was sitting in my office shooting paper clips at a King size horse fly. It was a little sadistic but he was bigger than I was. Well, about the time I had him down on his knees begging for mercy, the door opened…” 

There’s nothing in Dick Powell’s early career to suggest he was destined to play hard-boiled private eyes.  Had his bosses at Warner Brothers had their way, he’d have stayed in the song-and-dance roles on which he built his career.  But thanks to a gamble by a director, Powell kicked off a new chapter to his career and the result were some great radio shows, including one of the medium’s best - Richard Diamond, Private Detective.

Powell got his start in Hollywood in the 30s as a singer in Warner Brothers musicals, including 42nd Street, and On the Avenue.  He was frequently cast in the role of a boyish crooner, even as he approached his 40s.  Despite his success, Powell was eager to expand into other roles.  His efforts were resisted by Warner Brothers, who wanted to keep Powell right where he was, even if he thought it was the wrong place to be.  He pursued the lead role in Double Indemnity, but it ultimately went to another actor pegged in “nice guy” roles - Fred MacMurray.

But later in 1944, RKO and director Edward Dmytryk gave Powell the role he’d been waiting for - Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, the film adaptation of the Marlowe novel Farewell, My Lovely.  The film was a success, and Powell received rave reviews for his performance.  In a flash, he had shed the crooner image he’d been desperate to shake and he embarked on the next stage of his career.

Powell recreated his role as Marlowe on the June 11, 1945 Lux Radio Theater broadcast of Murder, My Sweet, and he starred as private detective Richard Rogue in Rogue’s Gallery from 1945 to 1946.  While it was a fine series, it failed to stand out from the crowd of hard-boiled private eyes littering the airwaves in the postwar years.  For his next radio effort, Powell wanted to “make something a little bit different of a standard vehicle.”  He recorded an audition show as “the man with the action packed expense account,” Johnny Dollar, but he passed on the series for a show that sprang from the mind of Blake Edwards.  Edwards would later create the outstanding police procedural The Line-Up for radio, develop Peter Gunn for television, and would become a celebrated writer and director of film arguably most famous for the Pink Panther film series with Peter Sellers.

Powell and his producer, Don Sharp, asked Edwards if he had any ideas for a vehicle for Powell.  Edwards said he did (a lie), and went home to write what would become the pilot for Richard Diamond, Private Detective.  In Edwards’ original script, Diamond was a former OSS agent; he would evolve into an ex-cop.  One trait he would retain as the script evolved was that Diamond was as quick with a quip as he was with his fists.  This played to Powell’s natural comedic strengths, and it helped to give the show a unique voice in the sea of detective programs from the era.  Unlike other radio shamuses, Diamond would keep up a friendly relationship with his old colleagues on the force - Lt. Walt Levinson, his former partner; and the oafish Sgt. Otis Ludlum, the long-suffering butt of Diamond’s jokes.  Diamond flirted with every skirt that came through his office door, but he only had eyes for his Park Avenue girlfriend, Helen Asher.  Shows would often close at her apartment, where Diamond would sum up his case and (in a nod to Powell’s old career) Helen might coax him to do a little singing.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective premiered on NBC on April 24, 1949.  Powell was supported by Virginia Gregg as Helen; Ed Begley as Levinson; and Wilms Herbert doing double duty as Sgt. Otis and as Helen’s butler, Francis.  Joseph Kearns, Peggy Webber, Bill Johnstone, Jack Kruschen, and other West Coast actors filled out the cast.  Later in the show’s run, Frances Robinson would take over the role of Helen, and Ted de Corsia, Arthur Q. Bryan (Elmer Fudd), and Alan Reed (Fred Flinstone) would rotate in and out as Levinson.

The show ran without a sponsor for the first year before being picked up by the Rexall Drug Company (“Good health to all from Rexall!”) in June 1950.  In January 1951, the show switched networks and picked up Camel cigarettes as its new sponsor.  The show took its final bow on June 27, 1952 (although repeats popped up in the summer of 1953).  Powell pulled the plug on the show as he entered a third phase of his career as a successful director and producer.

It was in this capacity that Powell brought Richard Diamond to television in 1957 for a four-season run starring David Janssen in the title role, minus the crooning of the radio series.  Janssen would later star as Dr. Richard Kimble on The Fugitive.  The Diamond TV show is perhaps best known today for its character of Diamond’s secretary, Sam, who was only shown from the waist down to show off her legs.  The first actress to furnish Sam’s legs was a young Mary Tyler Moore.

In honor of his anniversary, here are ten of my favorite Richard Diamond radio adventures. Sit back and enjoy some sleuthing and singing with Dick Powell and company in these sensational stories.

"The Lillian Baker Case" - This one is a good showcase for Diamond's girlfriend Helen Asher, who gets to take a rare role in the case of the week. At a department store, Helen witnesses an elderly woman shoplifting. It turns out she's a wealthy eccentric, and later that afternoon she dies - allegedly after leaping from her balcony. (9/3/49)

"The Jerome J. Jerome Case" - Joseph Kearns plays the titular eccentric character - a man who claims to be a millionaire, a genius inventor, and a private detective. He wants to partner with Diamond, but as soon as the gumshoe tries to dismiss him it turns out the kook may have information about an actual murder. (9/17/49)

"The Louis Spence Case" - An unusual, but very exciting, episode finds Diamond racing against time to save his old friend Lt. Walt Levinson. A deranged bomber has escaped from prison, and he's taken the lieutenant hostage. Unless the mayor jumps to his death from city hall within the hour, the bomber will blow the precinct - and Walt - to kingdom come. (3/5/50)

"The Statue of Kali" - It's Richard Diamond's version of The Maltese Falcon (complete with Paul Frees doing his best Sydney Greenstreet). An ivory statue is delivered to Diamond by a dying man, and it's being hunted by nefarious characters from all around the world. (4/5/50)

"The Martha Campbell Kidnap Case" - Diamond is hired to deliver the ransom when a wealthy woman is kidnapped, but both he and the lady's nephew are knocked out, the ransom money is taken, and the kidnap victim is killed. Rick has to use some creativity and theatricality to figure out what happened. (7/26/50)

"The Oklahoma Cowboy Murder Case" - Diamond trades the bright lights of the big city for the clear skies of the plains in this episode that was later adapted as an episode of Peter Gunn. Rick heads west to investigate a suspicious death - a wealthy rancher who expired when he fell from his horse. (9/27/50)

"The Cover-Up Murders" - Rick and Walt partner again when a serial killer stalks the city. Part of his MO is to call the police and boast that he'll kill someone that night at eight o'clock. But what appears to be random madness may have a clear motive, and it's up to Diamond to stop the killings before more bodies drop. (11/22/50)

"Blue Serge Suit" - Jim Backus (later Mr. Howell on Gilligan's Island) is Diamond's new client - a tailor whose supply of blue serge is raided and stolen by intruders. When Diamond's own suit is snatched, he's on the trail of a gang of spies. (2/9/51)

"Lady in Distress" - A beautiful woman hires Diamond, and then she drops dead in his office. With nothing to go on - he didn't even know her name - Rick takes the case and tries to learn what had her so scared and what led to her death. It's a story that was recycled quite a few times. Jeff Regan and Johnny Dollar both solved variations of this script, but the Richard Diamond version is my favorite. (2/23/51)

"The Red Rose" - In another story later reworked as a TV episode of Peter Gunn, Diamond is hired to keep a client alive. The man hired a hit man to do away with himself, but he's had a change of heart. Unfortunately, the hit man is a committed professional and he intends to finish the job. (3/2/51)

Check out this episode!

[rpmemesbyarat]

RP Meme Lines from "AHS: Coven" Episode 13: "The Seven Wonders"

I've chosen caviar from the Caspian Sea served on blinis along with champagne as fitting stand-ins as we partake of our own last supper.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I understood like a child, I thought like a child. But when I became a woman, I put aside childish things.

Put aside fears, reservations and petty things.

Kick ass tomorrow.

What if I can't do it?

Almost sounds like you want it.

Commonly only known to the public as mind control. It's a tricky little craft. When properly exercised, can bend the strongest of wills to your desire.

Nobody controls my mind but me.

Knock it off!

Ow! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!

Well done.

I'm not done.

Now, lick it.

That's enough. Let's move on.

Having fun yet?

If your soul hasn't returned to your body by sunup, you'll die.

You're the first to return.

It was horrible. I was stuck on a network musical. It was a live version of The Sound of Music. I wasn't even the lead.

I'm right here, it's okay.

Freak. You're a freak.

No, I don't wanna kill a living thing.

No, you can't make me kill a living thing.

We have to help her.

There's nothing we can do.

Follow my voice.

You're a stone-cold bitch.

When you play with fire, you get burned.

Tag, you're it.

Gotcha. No tag-backs.

Can't we just have a little fun?

Suck it. Ha-ha-ha!

Nothing's happening.

What's "deserve" got to do with any of this?

So either crown me or kiss my ass.

I can feel all their eyes on me.

Maybe we deserve to die out.

Why did you leave me? You said you'd never leave me

My mother was always right.

How true is it that a prophet is never recognized in his own country?

Well, I guess it's different when it's your own family.

You have royal blood in your veins.

I was a fool not to have realized it earlier, seeking all this time in the dust for that which may have been right before us all along.

You must let it out.

I'd stake your life on it.

I'm not stupid.

Are you ready?

What did you see?

This thing started as a competition. I say we end it like one.

Divination. Let's rock.

This is stupid. I'm not doing it.

Let me show you real power.

Divination first.

We're doing this by the book.

I'm sick of your book.

I have so many powers, I could tear this room apart until there's nothing left but your little trinkets, but, no, I have to do this bullshit.

There's something in the thing.

Because the game is rigged, [NAME]. Wake up.

You would accuse us of chicanery?

I didn't even wanna come here.

I'm going back to Hollywood where people are normal.

I suggest you change the locks, because when I tell TMZ everything it won't be long before torches, pitchforks, and Molotov cocktails become a real big part of your day.

Peace out!

What do you want, dumb-ass?

You let her die.

Why did you let her die?

You know that dark place! We've both been there!

I did it for us.

You're not that good an actress.

No one will wonder where the body went once we bury her.

Since your extraordinary public statement last month there has been quite a bit of fanfare.

We are not a cult. We don't proselytize. We have no agenda. We're not recruiting.

Women who identify as witches are born as such and their abilities, which we call powers are part of who they are, part of their DNA, if you will.

So in fact, you're saying that it's not a choice, being a witch.

There are so many young witches who have resisted their calling because they're afraid of how they may be perceived, or what's expected of them.

But you know, when you hide in the shadows, you are less visible, you have less protection.

We'll always be targets for the ignorant. It is what it is.

There is a home and a family waiting for you.

I'm so proud of you.

Start by telling them that being an authority figure requires you to make hard, unpopular decisions for the greater good.

Your tasteful modesty is out of fashion, so knock it off.

Thanks to you, we're entering a new era.

You've planted the seeds but in order to reap their harvest, you have to clear the rot of the past.

I love your metaphors, but I have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm not suggesting. I'm insisting.

You want to be burned at the stake?

At the start of your glorious reign the last thing you need is an ABSCAM or Watergate.

I killed and I must pay for it.

I didn't hear this.

I've made many painful mistakes in my life. I want my death to have some meaning.

Stiff upper lip, my dear.

You cannot be a hypocrite. I won't stand for it.

Any last words?

Balenciaga!

I'm excited. I wanna get in there and show what I can do.

You gotta check this shit out. Line's around the block.

We'll buy more houses if we have to.

I got your back.

Should we open the doors now?

There's just one more thing I need to deal with.

I saw you die.

You men, with your fragile egos.

We still have a deal, babe.

I'm going to Paris for just a couple days.

Why? Why would she decide to do that?

I mean, it won't be pleasant for you. But if you do it right, I promise you the world.

I'm gonna put something inside you.

What happens when I wake up from this vision?

If you're gonna offer me your spit, I'll take it straight from the spigot.

I ruined a perfectly good pair of Jimmy Chaos.

I knew you'd get rid of him for me, once he served his purpose.

Whose blood was it?

I never killed anybody. Not yet.

That was the plan. Let you do the dirty work.

You didn't come here to kill me.

You were hoping I'd put you out of your misery, but I don't need to. You're close. I doubt you'll make it through the night.

Is that why you were always so awful to me? Because you knew I was going to take your power some day?

A woman becomes a mother, she can't help but see her mortality in that cherubic little face.

Every time I looked at you, I saw my own death.

You were a constant reminder of my worst fears.

Oh, and all this time, I thought you just didn't like me.

It was nothing personal, darling.

I loved you plenty, though. Just my own way. Which, I'll admit, had its limitations.

I can feel the power vibrating off of you.

It feels good, doesn't it?

I have to die for you to truly live.

I'm not crying over you. I'm crying for me.

You were the monster in every one of my closets.

A lifetime spent either trying to prove myself to you, get close to you, or get away from you.

God knows you'll do a better job of it than I ever did though you won't look half as good doing it.

For God's sake, have mercy on me. Put me out of my misery. I hurt everywhere.

You're scared, maybe for the first time in your life.

You have to do this alone. And the only way out is through. So feel the fear and the pain. Let it all in and then let it all go.

I don't think we ever hugged.

You're up. I hope you're hungry.

Oh, get those goddamn things out of my face.

Why you always gotta be like this?

I'm tired of fighting.

How long have we been here?

If you want a stiff one, come over here.

Don't be vulgar.

Maybe you ought to lay off the sauce for a while.

Drink in the fresh air.

I can't spend eternity here.

This place it reeks of fish and cat piss.

I'm in heaven.

All right, let's open the doors.

We survived. Up until now, that's all we've done.

I know together we can do more than survive. It's our time to thrive.

[dweemeister]

Joker (2019)

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot and nearly killed United States President Ronald Reagan, wounded a police officer and Secret Service agent, and permanently disabled Press Secretary James Brady (whose death in 2014 was ruled a homicide from the gunshot wound thirty-three years prior). Found not guilty due to insanity, Hinckley obsessed over Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) while planning his actions. Like Taxi Driver’s protagonist Travis Bickle, Hinckley plotted to assassinate a famous politician. Besotted with Jodie Foster (who starred in Taxi Driver) and disappointed by not attracting her attention after stalking her, Hinckley planned the assassination attempt to impress the actress.

Hinckley and Taxi Driver were both on my mind when watching Todd Phillips’ Joker. Not only do they share thematic connective tissue and similar color palettes, but both films have been plagued by discourse about whether they will inspire someone to commit horrific violence – I respect Taxi Driver as one of the best films released in the 1970s, but it is not something I could rewatch easily. Filmmakers, indeed, should have a sense of social responsibility in their creations. Joker, as a character study first and foremost, paints its politics in broad strokes – preferring to submerge, as character studies should, the audience into the mindset of its protagonist. Joker invites the audience to empathize with a tortured soul who, failed by the state and refusing to hold himself responsible for his worst actions, consciously moves beyond redemption. That point, where the Joker is beyond redemption, is found where Batman fans know him best: murdering only to see if that murder is funny. Whether he reaches that point within the bounds of this film is up for debate.

It is 1981 in Gotham City. The city belches with urban malaise. A garbage collectors’ strike roils the city; socioeconomic inequality is rife; “Super Rats” plague the streets; the municipal services are overwhelmed. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown-for-hire living and caring for his aging mother, Penny (Frances Conroy). Money is sparse and one of the few joys Arthur and Penny have is Murray Franklin’s (Robert De Niro in a role not far removed from his turn in 1983′s The King of Comedy) primetime talk show. Arthur suffers from random paroxysms of laughter (a real-life affliction known as emotional incontinence, among other names) that, at the very least, invites disdainful looks from strangers who then avoid him. Arthur is seeking help for his depression and other unspoken problems, but Gotham’s social services are soon defunded by the city government and various other events force him to his breaking point.

Also featured in this film are Arthur’s hallway neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and cameos from Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a young Bruce Wayne (Dante Pereira-Olson), and Alfred Pennyworth (Douglas Hodge).

The film does not glorify any of its hideous violence, but those who are not critical consumers of media will interpret this film how they will. Nevertheless, Joker is less on the side of its protagonist than the likes of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and will likely result in a similar reverence once this film has exited theaters. Within the film’s confines, there is nothing surprising about any of its violence; how the violence happens is shocking in its immediacy and realistic ferocity. It is contextualized as being the inevitable result of a sociopolitical system that cares not for the downtrodden, the mentally ill – to reiterate, Phillips is painting with broad political strokes. Arthur, who keeps on seeking professional help and ways to quell his silent rage, is attempting to stay his destructive behaviors long after his first homicide (as the film does not glorify violence, it also does not target those with mental illness; it directs its ire towards those without sympathy for the mentally ill). Those efforts are stymied by factors beyond his control – an almost-plot twist to shock even ardent Batman fans, the idolization of an unnamed clown who has executed three members or accomplices of Gotham’s elite.

It is here that Joker separates itself from the social cynicism and post-Vietnam War disillusionment and of Taxi Driver; it is here that Philipps’ film becomes just as much a reflection of the era it was released in and the nation of its origin as Scarface (1932 original with Paul Muni), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and The Dark Knight (2008) once did. Those films respectively capitalized on fears of Italian and Irish mafias making urban centers their criminal playgrounds, countercultural diehards claiming free-wheeling Jazz Age outlaws as their own, and a vast surveillance state crafted to declare war on terrorism. For Joker, the societal diagnosis by Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (2010′s The Fighter) is double-sided, damning those with and without power. The film decries individuals and groups who deify charismatic or compelling figures claiming their actions and/or rhetoric to be indicative of the common person’s interests. These revered figures incorporate grievance into their persona, weaponizing the language of victimhood not only to bring attention and (justifiably or unjustifiably) force change on a problem, but to absolve themselves of their personal sins. They are, dare it be written, populists. Beware those who invoke “the people” to vindicate their crusades.

Arthur Fleck, as an underemployed clown, does not ask for the attention of the masses. He wishes, “to bring laughter and joy to the world,” yet finds fulfillment in making a handful of children’s hospital patients smile. During Arthur’s first appearance as Joker, he assumes the accidental and public mantle that has set Gotham aflame – legitimizing the homicides he has committed and the public’s brutalization of authority figures by playing victim. He is consumed in self-pity; his words become a simplistic screed. Notice how appealing his words are, how rapidly rhetorical animosity precludes political violence. In Joker’s darkest sequence, the protagonist will destroy the last remnants of Arthur Fleck and become the popular icon of violent upheaval rarely seen in any of his depictions in DC Comics. This is Joker at its most dangerous, if only because of how violence – whether in oppression or in resistance – is as integral to the United States as political compromise.

We hear these beats of populism elsewhere, too, mixed with capitalist can-do. It is present in Thomas Wayne’s television appearance announcing his candidacy for Mayor of Gotham City – “I alone can fix it,” this man of wealth implies. This is a departure from otherwise sympathetic depictions of Bruce Wayne’s father over the decades in Batman comic books. As a plot development, it (along with the “almost-plot twist”) seems unnecessary if only to ground Joker in the Batman mythos. Contrast this to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where ill-intentioned, humorless capitalists operating within the military-industrial complex are repelled by the wisecracking “good” capitalists within that same system (see: Tony Stark). Murray Franklin, as a talk show host, concocts a scheme to bolster his ratings by humiliating someone in a worse life station – no background checks needed, let alone any semblance of attempting to understand his subject. Thus, Gotham is subject to personality- and grievance-based politics wrung through the corporate avarice of Network (1976). Joker may not have to space to critique capitalism in its entirety – it is a character study, after all – but the entire apple barrel seems spoiled here.

The least controversial element of Joker is Joaquin Phoenix’s magnificent lead performance. Phoenix has made a living playing men whose lives contend with inner turmoil and unsympathetic worlds. His work in The Master (2012) remains has career-defining role, but as Arthur Fleck and as Joker – through the pained laughter spells, his bodily contortions with his ribcage jutting from his frame, and a brooding nature tempered by an initial gentleness – this will be the role that crosses artistic and popular boundaries that segregate filmmaking. Phoenix may now be defined by this role, as Cesar Romero (a solid contract actor for 20th Century Fox despite being typecast as a Latin lover) and the late Heath Ledger (whose work in The Dark Knight overshadows the rest of his filmography) have been.

Director Todd Phillips, best known for The Hangover series, does an excellent job making Gotham City a character. So often consigned to be the faceless and unfortunate city wracked by domestic terrorism from curiously-named villains, never in a film has Gotham seemed like a place with its own history and haunts. The scenes on mass transit alone sell the city. Phillips’ indulgence for slow-motion (with cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s fawning camerawork) during dance sequences and almost constant dollying can be irritating. One montage between Arthur Fleck and Sophie – specifically, when he enters her apartment, confirming how unreliable a narrator he is – displays a lack of trust in the audience to make their own inferences.

Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir has crafted a score for her second film for a major American studio. Guðnadóttir’s career has been defined by an unpleasant mix of bass strings, percussion, and synth, droning repetitively, lacking the emotional catharsis that the films she has worked on are striving for. Her work on Joker is an improvement, but this is as difficult a listen as Joker is to watch. The score is almost entirely texture, not melody – melody is for those older films with sugary sentiment and Hollywood endings that do not reflect life’s ugliness, we are increasingly told. Outside of those with an ear for experimental classical music or instrumental music that groans amelodic passages rather than combining lyrical voices, this music has almost no life outside of the movie. Finally, Guðnadóttir’s style fits the film she has scored for.

As a psychological character piece, the only way that Joker could have secured a wide theatrical release in 2019 would be to tie it to bankable comic book lore. Even as Phillips pitched the idea, Joker faced stiff resistance from Warner Bros. executives – including former chairman Kevin Tsujihara and Greg Silverman – who still had the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado on their minds (that tragedy took place during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises). Warner Bros. noting how poorly Zack Snyder’s vision of DC Comics adaptations was faring, needed to extricate itself from Snyder’s adolescent approach.

In the months before Joker’s release and even within the film, Warner Bros. has embraced its past. Of all of Hollywood’s major studios, Warners always seems to be the most conscious and celebratory of its history*. During the 1930s, Warner Bros. became known for the darker content of its films (its rivals MGM, Paramount, and Fox preferred spectacle, maximizing production values, and prestige pictures). The studio became the spiritual home of the gangster film and hardboiled dramas that pushed the boundaries of violence in American cinema – but not for the sake of depicting violence. Even in their musicals (a genre stereotyped as pure escapism), Warner Bros. layered progressive social commentary amid economic depression. Joker – though its own commentary could be more focused and succinct – inherits the legacy of The Public Enemy (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), and its numerous Warner Bros. ancestors.

How curious that a drama with origins from superhero comic books has been little praised for not following the assembly line production methods of numerous films from similar source material. Cinephiles fret, correctly, that movie theaters are becoming a home to superheroes/villains and explicitly-for-children animated features to the exclusion of everything else. The mid-budget character piece is endangered; certain genres have vanished from theater marquees. Joker, to some consternation, has it both ways. It is an excellent, arguably irresponsible, work to be seen with wary eyes.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

* Okay, okay you classic film buffs who have already recognized Joker’s references. Modern Times (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937) are from United Artists and RKO, respectively. But both films have long been part of Warners’ library by acquisition.

[weremarkable]

Get that Batmobile ready!BatArmie may be coming!

On Friday, as everyone was heading home for the holiday weekend, I received word that Warner Bros. and Armie Hammer had entered advanced talks about him being the star of Matt Reeves’ The Batman. At the time, I was asked to keep that to myself. The only thing I was allowed to say at the time was that he was merely “a frontrunner.”

But now I’ve been given the go-ahead to let the bat out of the cave.

The casting question that has dominated geek culture ever since the first whispers arose in 2017 that Ben Affleck would be hanging up the cowl after Justice League finally has an answer. Barring any major setbacks, Hammer is expected to become this generation’s Batman when Matt Reeves’ film arrives in theaters on June 25, 2021.

The casting brings closure to a story that, indirectly, began way back in 2007 when George Miller cast Hammer as Batman for Justice League: Mortal. He would’ve played the Caped Crusader in the first-ever film about the iconic team, alongside D.J. Cotrona, Adam Brody. It was set to film in Australia. Sets were built and costumes constructed. And then the whole thing fell apart during the 07-08 Writers Guild of America strike that overtook the industry.

In a way, Hammer getting another chance to play the Dark Knight mirrors Henry Cavill’s journey to the role of Superman. In 2004, Cavill came very close to playing the Man of Steel, only to see that disappear when the studio pulled the plug on Superman: Flyby and decided to make Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns instead. The British actor was then given a second chance in 2011 when Zack Snyder cast him as Superman for a reboot of the franchise.

Hammer has had a diverse and varied career but first rose to prominence when he was cast as both Winklevoss twins in Steven Soderbergh’s The Social Network in 2010. From there, he headlined Disney’s The Lone Ranger before teaming up with Cavill in Guy Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in 2015.

Following those forays into big budget Hollywood affairs, Hammer turned his attention towards smaller, more independent films. These last few years, he’s made a mark in films like Nocturnal Animals, Free Fire, and the 2017 award season darling Call Me By Your Name.

As of this writing, Hammer has yet to sign on the dotted line, but the feeling is that it’s only a matter of time now.

This comes three weeks after I mentioned on Episode 85 of The Fanboy Podcast that he was on the studio’s list of suggestions for familiar faces they’d like for Matt Reeves to consider. At the time, the main names floating around were Ansel Elgort, Dylan O’Brien, Logan Lerman,  Noah Centineo, Jack O’Connell, Richard Madden, Kit Harington, Nicholas Hoult, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Those were the names many fellow reporters had heard and that were making the rounds on the net when I recorded that episode.

But I’d heard Hammer was in the mix, and that many folks behind the scenes were acting like he was the frontrunner, so I mentioned him.

In the weeks since I first mentioned Hammer was in actual contention for the role of Batman after years of merely being a popular fan cast, the whispers about him became absolutely deafening as I did my digging, all leading up to Friday’s alert from a source that they were literally now at the stage where they’re ironing out the details of his deal.

Interestingly, one of the names that’s popped up since then I’m told is only half right. I’m referring to Robert Pattinson, who many have said was a frontrunner. From what I’ve gathered, he is in the mix for The Batman, but not for the titular role. One insider says it’s actually for one of the film’s villains. So that situation is where I’ll turn my attention next.

When I got the okay to share this news, I got so excited that I asked my gifted artist friend, and Revenge of the Fans contributor, Tony Artiga to whip up some artwork for me. I figured he did such an amazing job with that piece for Batman’s 80th Anniversary that he’d be the man to ask for this.

Reeves is expected to start filming The Batman later this year.

Stay tuned, because there will be a lot more coverage about this here a Revenge of The Fans this week. From a deep dive on how we got here, to where it all seems to be heading, we’re ready to kick off the Armie Hammer Era of Batman.

The news of Hammer’s casting will hardly be a surprise when you realize that he was considered the odds-on favorite for the role by bookmaker Boylesports as of two weeks ago.

[jarrettfuller]

Conan, Late Night Talk Shows, and Multi-platform comedy

1. Apartment 103

My college roommates and I were close. There were four of us — Ryan, Eric, Dustin, and me — and during the two years we lived in Apartment 103, we did everything together. We ate dinner together, around the table, like a family. We bought a Christmas tree together and made stockings for each other. We went to movies and watched every season of The Wire and Dexter. That apartment was the first place outside of my childhood house that felt like home.

It was the end of the semester and Ryan and Dustin had already gone home for the holidays; only Eric and I were left. He had made eggnog earlier in the day (as you do) and at 11:30pm, we sat in front of the television to watch Conan O'Brien's final night as host of The Tonight Show. I had just started getting into late night talk shows and was obsessed with the Tonight Show debacle. Here’s a quick refresher: in 2004, Jay Leno announced he was retiring from The Tonight Show and handing the show over to Conan O'Brien, then the lost of Late Night. At the beginning of 2009, Conan took over and the ratings dropped. NBC, in a panic, didn't want to give Conan the time to find his footing, and after a mere nine months, announced they were moving the Tonight Show back a half hour and giving Leno a new show at his old time. Conan quit and the network gave Leno his old show back. In the ten years since, Leno retired again, and every other talk show got a new host. Conan found a new home on TBS where he's been chugging away, doing his thing, quietly becoming the longest running talk show host of the current era.

Conan was never my favorite host — Letterman always held that spot for me, and now it’s Stephen Colbert of the current lineup 1 — but I always found him the most interesting of the bunch. Certainly more interesting than Leno and Fallon, and I was sad to see him lose the show2. Watching that final show with Eric — the images of Conan on The Tonight Show set, playing guitar with Max Weinberg and Will Ferrell as the credits rolled — is one of my strongest memories of late night talk shows, and certainly a highlight from Apartment 103.

2. “We’re Trying to be Anarchists”

Late last year, Conan announced that his now almost decade old TBS show would move to a half-hour format. The change would allow him to try new things on the show while also expanding his popular digital presence. Over the last few months, while the show was on hiatus, Conan launched a podcast, went on tour, and announced a new website that will archive every episode of Conan's shows. The shorter show would allow Conan to do more of what he does well — the travel shows and web exclusives like Clueless Gamer have proven surprisingly successful. By reducing the run-time for his TBS show, he'd have more time to devote to these extracurricular experiments while also easily playing with what the show itself can be.

On the new Conan, the desk is gone, the suits are gone, the band is gone. The set has been rebuilt, now just a small stage that can be reconfigured depending on what they are doing. Andy Richter is still there on the side of the stage. And Conan is still Conan. In the first few episodes I watched, the show felt largely the same, just shorter. As Rob Harvilla wrote for The Ringer, it was "addition by subtraction". The show obviously looked new and everything felt looser but the structure was still there: a monologue, a sketch or prerecorded bit, and an interview.

No show knows what it is in the first episode; or even the first year. The mistake NBC made in 2009 was jumping the gun, not giving Conan the time and space he needed to settle in and make the show his. It's hard to remember now, but Colbert's first year on the Late Show was rocky; with constant rumors that CBS wanted to swap his timeslot with James Cordon. And of course when Conan took over for Letterman back in 1993, he was rumored to be on a week-to-week contract. We shouldn't judge the new show by one week of episodes but it feels underwhelming after months of hearing how the new run-time would allow the show to be more experimental. Perhaps they are still easing their way into it, perhaps they still aren't sure what they can do. But for this new show to be truly exciting, it needs to get weirder. Conan needs to lean into what makes Conan Conan. There's still a lot of potential here.

Every time a new host takes over a franchise, there is a chance to mix up the standard talk show format popularized by Johnny Carson — there’s the monologue, a desk bit or a skit, two guests or three guests, and a musical act or stand up set — but each reincarnation is largely more of the same. Sure, Colbert made the monologue his own, where they often clock in well over ten minutes. Seth Meyers performs his monologue behind the desk. James Corden and Jimmy Fallon focus more on games and viral-style videos but it’s still just a white guy in a suit sitting behind a desk telling jokes and talking to people. It's a design problem, really: how do you work within the constraints of the format while making something your own? “We’re trying to be anarchists, but I’m trying to be a good boy and do a good job for the network,” Conan told Dave Itzoff of The New York Times. What he’s engaged in now, he said, “is this gradual progression toward me making the job fit me more — what do I like?”

That’s the tension with late night talk shows — especially with established francises like Tonight or Late Night: how do you honor the form that's been honed down over the last three decades while creating something new. Conan, perhaps more than any other late night host, has pushed himself up against that dominant form to question what else it could be. Sometimes, like Colbert or Seth Meyers, you find ways to work within in the system. But for Conan, the best way forward, I think, is to throw away that tradition and making something wholly his own. With TBS, he found a partner that gives him the space (and time) to try new things and make the show more like him. But the other, more important, question is: how central is the show to Conan's new output.

3. Building Your Own Printing Press

Ten years ago, around the same time I was watching the final episodes of Conan's Tonight Show with Eric, I started to get interesting in media distribution. The iPad would come out a few months later and this was when the first paywalls were being erected around newspaper websites. As someone who was always publishing little things online, I was excited by the potential and increasingly low-bar to entry. I wrote an essay for the now-defunct blog I kept through college on these changes and wondered out loud whether Conan even needed a new network. The essay — titled “Building Your Own Printing Press” — is no longer online but used the A.J. Liebling’s popular aphorism, “Freedom of the press is only free for those to own a printing press” as my starting point. The internet, I argued, gave everyone their own printing press. Conan was my prime example. Here's the key paragraph:

Under his exit contract with NBC, Conan O’Brien is unable to join another network until after September 1. So what will he do until then? Mr. O’Brien finds himself with a lot of free time and a lot of cash which make for the terrific combination to fully embrace independent media. It would be extremely easy for Conan to launch a new show without any network, contract, and deals and it could be all online, the way his fans watch him anyway. He would get to do his show, the way he wants to do it and not have to worry about networks giving him a hard time. The way we are consuming our media is changing and it’s about time the distribution caught up.

That was in 2009 — I was an overly optimistic (and arrogant) college student — and I realize now how much harder that would have been a decade ago. But now, in 2019, it is possible. YouTube stars are a thing. Instagram influencers is a term we now say without flinching. And it's exactly what Conan is now doing. Conan and TBS have entered a deeper partnership and are careful to continually point out the "show" isn't the only part of that partnership. There's already a podcast and a recently finished tour and I imagine we can expect more of that. Under the new contract, Conan can record as much as he wants each day and only owes TBS a half-hour. The rest can go online, or in any other place it fits. The format I wished for ten years ago probably wasn't financially possible then but it certainly is now.

This raises the question: how important is the TBS show to this new multi-platform comedy empire (ugh)? If anything, the show has been reduced to just another spoke in the wheel. By devoting less energy specifically to the show, each component can shift more freely. It’s here that Conan is truly subverting the late night form.

This is what I couldn’t quite reconcile ten years ago: Conan is on TV but his fans aren’t watching TV. The late night talk show is an archaic format; a relic from another era. Appointment viewing isn’t how people watch television anymore. (Think about how many times Netflix has tried to get into this area. So far they’ve been unable to crack it because it goes against Netflix’s whole model.) These shows are increasingly being watching in bits and pieces on YouTube the next morning. I’ve never seen an entire episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers but I’ve watched every single one of his A Closer Look segments.

Instead of prioritizing the show, Conan gives everything — the show, YouTube, his podcast — equal weight. It’s appealing to both sides of the generational divide, both packaged for TV and distributed across the web. You can watch it as a traditional talk show or online in short clips. While late night viewership decrease on television, they are increasing online. Much like newspapers and magazines struggled to get their content online in the early days of the web, so to are television networks still figuring out how to go digital. For many of these other shows, segments are clipped for YouTube or there’s a separate team making original content for online venues (that often feels like it’s separate from the show.) The other networks and hosts can take a cue from Conan and TBS, fully integrating the two, giving equal weight to both sides. As Conan said in another interview, perhaps in five years people won’t even notice that the “show” — in the traditional sense that we think about it now — is completely gone. Under this new model, it’s not impossible that ever-so-slowly, everything moves online.

Content-wise, Conan will find his footing within the new show. These first few weeks are testing the waters, being a beginner all over again. But it’s important to not overlook how much he’s already trying something new. This openness to different media platforms is, I think, the future of the genre. At least, it’s the future I wanted when I was sitting there in Apartment 103. I haven’t sat down at 11:30 to watch The Tonight Show since.

1. I’d also put Dick Cavett on my list right along Letterman, but his show never felt connected to the big four: Tonight, Late Night, Late Show, and Late Late Show. It always seemed like he always was doing his own thing. ↩

2. I’ve long held a theory about the Tonight Show. Letterman famously wanted it in the nineties after Carson retired — and Carson supposedly saw Letterman as his rightful heir — but the show went to frequent guest host Jay Leno. When Leno retired again in 2013, Jimmy Fallon took it over and is the current host. The Tonight Show is a brand name — that’s the popular show. It has to be generic, inoffensive, appeal to the most people. Letterman wouldn’t have been good on Tonight — he’s too smart and too weird. Same with Conan. Leno and Fallon and can do that. They are less interesting, better at appealing to the widest audience possible. ↩

[musescore-com]

MuseScorer of the month: Takernikov

And here comes August’s MuseScorer of the Month!

In case you missed it, each month we pick one of MuseScore.com’s brilliant members, featuring him or her in an interview available to all MuseScorers. Last month we introduced you to flutist and composer Robin M. Butler.

Now, please welcome: the MuseScorer Of August, Takeru aka Takernikov from Fukuoka, Japan.

“I love the words of my professor at the university. He said, that good music has ‘consistency’ and ‘variety’; If no consistency, it would be confusing. If no variety, it’d be boring.”

The following interview is featuring Takeru and is conducted by our staff member Alexander T.

- Hi, Takeru.It’s a pleasure to meet you! Tell our readers, please, a few words about yourself.

Hello, Alexander, nice to meet you too. Well, I’m from Fukuoka, northern side of Kyushu island, Japan, and live in this city with my wife and a little son (three years old right now). I studied acoustic design at the university, i.e. solving room acoustic issues with physics. Actually I wanted to study at conservatory but my musical skills were not good enough to pass the examination. Luckily, I had an opportunity to take composing classes at the university. So, I learnt music theory, notation, how to compose, and musical forms like sonata.Now, I’ve been an IT engineer specialized in networks for a decade, I like this job. My experience as a musician includes playing: - tuba, double bass and clarinet at high-school; - bassoon and contrabassoon at university; - piano - since I turned 15 years old.

- Cool, such a variety of instruments ! Did you come a long way to learn playing them?

Actually I was kinda tone deaf when in junior high school. There were lotta choral classes sadly, the music teacher pointed out my tone deafness every time, some students teased me. But, finally, I overcame that so-called “tone deafness”; I got interested in music, I began to play piano, which had been bought by my mother when she got married. Then, I played in a brass band in high school. As far as I remember, at some point I came across a really attracting piece called “El Camino Real”. First time I saw the score, I was confused about the key signature for transposing instruments, but I found my own way to read it. The skill I got at that time has helped me a lot later, when studying from the other composer’s work. I was also playing contrabass for a year, clarinet for two months and tuba for about two years. When I entered university, as I have already said, I began to play bassoon and contrabassoon in the “Orchestra club”. I’ve played symphonies (Brahms No.1, 4, Beethoven No.5, 7, 9, Tchaikovsky No.5, 6, Rachmaninoff No.1, 2, Dvorak No.5, 7, 8, 9, Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, and so on), overtures and suites. I tried to perform in a rock band as a keyboard player, but sadly it wasn’t good…

- But, anyway, trying something different is always (or almost always) a nice experience...Well, let’s talk about your composing experience: what is that about for you, and what or who helped you to start composing?

Apart from the composing classes at the university, I took part in picking musical pieces for upcoming concerts as a member of the council of the university orchestra (I was a leading bassoon player). We listened to all of the ‘candidate’ scores to decide whether they are playable for our orchestra, worthwhile or not. So,I read a lot of scores from Bach to Shostakovich. Especially I’ve been curious about the orchestration, I tried to understand, how do composers notate their music to make it sound really nice and beautiful.

At first, I tried to compose something with Finale when in the university, about eleven years ago, but quitted composing after I graduated. As I dislike using a mouse, I felt it was inefficient to notate with drag and drop, so I lost some motivation. Then, when I was searching for sheet music from Final Fantasy XV soundtrack for piano, I came across this amazing MuseScore notation program. I remember, that I was greatly impressed by the features MuseScore had (and still has, of course). It has intuitive UI for me, mostly I can notate with keyboard quickly as if writing a document. Till that day I hadn’t composed a piece for about ten years. But now almost everything motivates me to compose, but especially natural landscapes or some exercises (sports) I did or things happened to me...

- ...and now, as I can see, you’ve got a plenty of your own pieces on MuseScore.com Can you describe at least some of them?

All-right. Let’s start with Snow Run - one Sunday morning I did a trail run with friends through an urban forest park and some ranch, the duration of the 3D map movie generated by my GPS log data on the run was 52 seconds, so I decided to compose this piece in 2/4, 52 measures with 120 bpm to make it easy to count. Composed this piece within an hour or so - I realized I could compose quicker than imagined...

- Sorry for interrupting, but I wonder - do you often compose these “GPS-log” pieces after your morning runs, and is that the only reason why most of your compositions are short?

Basically there are two reasons for that: 1: you are right about the “GPS compositions”: after I do some endurance exercise like cycling or running, there’s some service which can create some short movies by my GPS logs. Usually the duration of the movies are short, less than 1-2 minutes; I compose for this ‘movies’ on the same day and share with my friends. 2: I said “compose on the same day”. I set a deadline for myself and try to accomplish that on time. Kind of repetitive practices, it’s a good way to express my feelings and to ‘improve productivity’ in my opinion. I feel, this affects even my job activity in a good way as well.

- So, let’s continue with your compositions…

Ok, then I’ll tell you about a couple more. La Chute D'eau élargi - inspired by French impressionists, deliberately titled in French, however, it includes some pentatonic scales, so for me it sounds like some Japanese folk music. Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa - an attempt to create minimal music from my original phrases I came up with, after I was reading a picture book for my son. That sounds a little weird, but I ended up with clear and refreshing atmosphere in this piece.

- Nice pieces, the second one reminded me of Steve Reich. And now, here is our “traditional” question: what have you shared on MuseScore.com that you’re most proud of (and why are you proud of it) ?

It’s Symphonic Poem “Mamacoco”. This is the most emotional and dramatic one I have ever composed. Although I’m generally a short piece composer, the duration of this one is about 14min. and it contains almost everything I could do as a composer. Attempted to fill it with beautiful melodies and counterpoints in the tonal slow part, and to make it exciting in the quasi-atonal fast part, naturally “covered” the previous slow melodies with different instruments (brass). I was surprised what I did actually, huge resolution followed by very tensed atmosphere before the recapitulation. The last part starts with almost sad flute’s phrase, it gradually changes to a kind of brilliant sounding.

Symphonic Poem “Mamacoco” by Takernikov

- I love the melodies in it, for me “Mamacoco” sounds like ‘pastoral’ music. I wonder what composers/performers influenced you. And, generally, what are your favorites?

I love Russian composers Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and that’s why my MuseScore account name is “Takernikov”, like a Russian surname. I don’t mean that I’m limited by the Romantic era, I also respect Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt, even Steve Reich. In film composing, Hans Zimmer is the first composer that comes to my mind. Generally, most of the film composers affected me: James Horner, Steve Jablonsky, Joe Hisaishi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, etc..Honestly saying, the composer I can’t even imitate is Don Davis. His music, especially the orchestration and atonality in it, is outstanding in my opinion.

Would like to admit, that Takernikov is the first composer I met, whose beautiful music is often inspired by morning runs and whose pieces’ length really depend on the time he devoted to his physical exercises. That’s an interesting fact and Takeru is a really nice composer, it was a pleasure for me to do this interview and to meet him.

Thank you, guys, for reading.

Yours, Alexander T.

P.S. Following the nice tradition - I am adding here a piece I really enjoyed , this is a kind of “spanish sketch” composed by Mr.Takernikov.

Él irá a España by Takernikov

[betsynagler]

Women, Frat Boys, and the Conundrum of Respect

Growing up as a girl in the 80s was no picnic, and I don’t mean because of the big hair and the shoulder pads. It was an era of very confusing messages. On TV, you had Dynasty, Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company battling with reruns of the Brady Bunch, which meant that the only female empowerment on offer came scantily clad and at some point generally descended into a catfight. The movie landscape was one of Bond girls, bitches, and minimally developed love interests, where we were lucky to get one strong woman main character in some of the blockbusters of the time (Raiders of the Lost Ark, the original Star Wars trilogy – although even Princess Leia was forced to wear a metal bikini), while the movies directed at us teens, like those of John Hughes, combined sympathetic female characters with plot lines that made comedy out of bizarrely awful racial and gender stereotypes (Long Duck Dong, all of the older girls in Sixteen Candles, and almost everything in Weird Science), date rape (what Jake and Farmer Ted did to the prom queen), and sexual assault and harassment (what Bender does to Claire throughout The Breakfast Club) (and if you don’t remember what I'm talking about, read this piece by Molly Ringwald). 

This cultural landscape was often reflected back at us in our interactions at school, where my biggest problem, like so many adolescents, was that I always cared way too much what people thought of me — and I never seemed able to get them to think the right things. If I did well in my classes, I got shit for being a nerd. I played lacrosse, but even though I could run, I was too uncoordinated to cradle or shoot well, and got taunted for that. And being a year young, I was always behind in how we were supposed to interact with boys — first we were supposed to be friends with them, then we weren't, then we were supposed to flirt with them, whatever that meant — and I was mocked for that too. Eventually I developed a fairly crusty shell to help me cope, but it didn’t mean I still didn’t crave the approval of my peers, I just pretended not to. Things weren’t really good for girls who were the opposite of me, though, either. Doing poorly in school made you more popular, which was why a lot of girls played dumb, but then people also made jokes about how dumb you were. Being too good at sports made you too butch and that was unattractive too. And being “good” with boys, of course, made you a slut. In short, everything you were told to be as a girl was a double-edged sword. Sure, if you were socially savvy enough, you could turn any of those negatives around. The easiest way to do that, though, was to pick on some other girl and point out what was wrong with her, usually behind her back — which, if you had any scruples, had its own downside of making you feel like shit. It seemed like your full-time job was to try to walk the very fine line between bitch, geek, butch and slut, never able to find the perfect spot where you could be both liked and respected. Needless to say, I was not a very happy teen. 

It was also bad for boys, but the way in which it was bad, and the way that boys achieved, was entirely different. That double-edged sword didn't exist for them. Although you could be too geeky, you could easily be both a popular boy and a top student — it was even expected. Similarly, there really was no downside to doing well in sports as a boy. You could be called a dumb jock, but if you were a good enough dumb jock, nobody really cared. And success with girls? That was always a plus. No, the hard thing for boys was that they were expected to compete in all of these areas with the other boys, because winning was what earned you both respect and friends. That’s why one of the top put-downs of the era was, “He’s a loser.”

College did end up saving me from much of this. Mainly, I was finally allowed to be smart, I could be athletic without being good at team sports (because the Stanford teams were too good for most high school athletes), and there were plenty of friends to commiserate with over being clueless about guys. What did continue at Stanford, though, as at many schools, was how groups of guys interacted. This was particularly true in fraternities, which just amplified all of these terrible aspects of male bonding (or “male bondage” as one friend of mine aptly called it). That's why, to this day, we default to the term “frat boys” when talking about a certain kind of male behavior: making everything into a game between them and their pals, where winning and showing off for each other is a central part of male friendship.

A large part of that competition centered around alcohol — which was now easier to access than ever before, particularly at frat parties — and women. With men talking about what “base” they got to and “scoring,” and men the “players” (though okay, that’s really more of a 90s term), could it be any clearer that succeeding with women — which meant getting as close to sex as you could with as many women as you could — was just another thing for them to compete at? And that competition was verbal as well as physical, because even if you couldn't actually score, you could tell your friends you did, and that was the important thing. Actually connecting with or pleasing women didn't count for anything with your male friends — or it counted in a negative way and made you p-whipped. In these groups of guys, women weren't people, we were trophies. If they weren’t trying to compete for us, they were passing us around between them as a gesture of what good pals they were. I can think of several times in my 20s I saw a man trying to get a (drunk) woman who was clearly into him to go home with his friend instead. At least once this meant literally pushing her into a cab with the other guy.

It took me a while to figure out how to deal with this type of man, because they were everywhere in the 80s and early 90s, and their confidence and bravado and popularity with other guys made them attractive to me, in the same way that it made them “winners” in our culture. In college and grad school, I had plenty of male friends who weren’t like that, but it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Even the frat boys could be decent when you dealt with them one-on-one, and by the same token, when you got practically any group of young men together and added alcohol, even the least fratty among them could get sucked into that macho bullshit group dynamic. I saw it happen constantly, the urge to be one of the guys was that powerful. Plus, because how men interacted in groups of men was how they networked, talking about women was often as important to their careers as talking about sports: if you didn’t know how to do it, guys didn’t relate to or respect you, and you didn’t get ahead. So that two-faced duality, between how they acted with men and how they acted with women, was an accepted aspect of the culture.

This was a huge part of what was so challenging for me entering adulthood, and I'm sure tons of other women like me, who were trying to live and succeed in a male-dominated world: if you knew this was how men interacted with other men, how could you be smart and capable, attractive and sexual, likeable and respected? Often it felt pretty near impossible, and with many men it was — although it took me years to truly get that. I wasted so much time in grad school hanging out with groups of my male peers, feeling like I was accomplishing something by “being one of the guys.” There were some by whom I think I was considered an equal, maybe. But with most of them, it was only after literally years of planning and making films with them, going out drinking with them, listening to them talk for endless hours (because most of them didn’t listen when I talked), that I finally realized that, no matter how much they liked me, I was never going to be one of them. They would never be able to value me the way they valued their male friends/colleagues, and trying to make it so and failing was only making me feel bad about myself.

Having romantic relationships was, if anything, more difficult, because I already knew how all of those guys I hung out with talked about women. When I developed a crush on someone I went to school or worked with, I was always trying to get to a point where I felt sure the guy respected me as a three-dimensional human being before anything happened, so by the time I felt secure enough in that that I was ready to make a move (not that I knew how to do that either without feeling like a slut) the guy had already hooked up with someone else. This happened to me multiple times. In truth, I’ve only had eight sexual partners total in my life, about half of whom were one night stands, and those deliberately so, because when I decided to have sex with someone on a first date, I'd pretty much already made the decision never to see them again. Not because I thought casual sex was wrong, but because it was too complicated for me to have sex with someone and then worry about what they thought about me afterwards, or, worse, said to other guys I knew. It was just easier not to care at all and walk away. Because I knew the odds were that they wouldn't respect me, and would talk with their guy friends about me, because that was what the groups of guys I knew did. Maybe that’s not true in all industries, but the film business was certainly then, and now in many ways still is, basically a big fraternity. From Polanski to Weinstein to Lauer to Rose to Moonves, if #MeToo hasn't proven that, it hasn't proven anything.

So when you wonder why women have fought tooth and nail against Brett Kavanaugh, why we believe his accusers and feel so devastated about the future of women’s rights now that he’s on on the Supreme Court, it’s because we were there. Not in the rooms, necessarily, where he did what he did, but in ones very much like them, with drunk guys exactly like him. And the reason we never reported it? Because everything we saw and heard at the time told us it was normal. I think this is what I find so chilling when Kavanaugh says he’s not guilty of sexual assault: he doesn’t think he is guilty of it, because at the time, none of us got that that’s what it was. We just thought it was something that happened, that women were made to feel culpable for because, after all, we chose to be there, we went to those parties, we drank and hung out with those guys. So no matter how much we hated and were damaged by what we lived through, we just felt like we were expected to let it go — like Ford did, like Ramirez did, even like Julie Swetnick probably did, because even while she’s been dismissed by practically everyone as not credible, we know how guys spiked the punch at parties with something to get women drunk enough to have sex with them all the fucking time. But nobody was going to do anything about it, and if we’d said something we’d have paid a price, either amongst our peers, who would be angry with us for telling, or with authority figures, who would blame us for putting ourselves in those situations, or in our careers, when both of those groups of people wouldn’t want to hire or work with us later on. Plus, knowing those guys and how they think, I’d guess that in Kavanaugh’s mind, what he did wasn’t even really about sex. That's what you heard in Ford’s testimony: when asked what she remembered most, she said Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing “with each other.” For the two of them, it wasn't about her. It was just two frat boys sharing a good time, the way they always did.

The world is such a different place now than it was in the 80s, but after last week, it feels like women haven't moved the needle one iota on respect. It’s clear in the way that men still can't come clean on the stupid and harmful things they did as teenagers 30 years ago, much less the the way they treated women before then, because we all know that as bad as the 80s were, all the decades before that were worse. Even if Grassley, Hatch and Graham never said the word “boof,” the way they won’t listen to us now, the way they claim that we are somehow "mixed up” about things that we know for a fact, the way they still won’t put women in positions of power because they claim that we don’t want to do the work, the way everything they seek to legislate they’re doing for their “fellow man” while ignoring things like control over our bodies, pay parity, and protection under the law from rape, abuse and harassment that women need just to be equal, tells us that they didn’t respect us then, and they still don’t now. 

We know how it was. We lived it. And if you’re a woman, you’re still living with it. You feel it in how, even now, decades later, you still have trouble reconciling men and sex and respect, and you probably always will. And if we, as a culture, can’t take responsibility for that, if we still refuse to talk about it honestly, how are we ever going to move forward?

[newstfionline]

China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’

By Chris Buckley, NY Times, Sept. 8, 2018

HOTAN, China--On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.

Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.

The goal is to rid them of devotion to Islam.

Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.

“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”

This camp outside Hotan, an ancient oasis town in the Taklamakan Desert, is one of hundreds that China has built in the past few years. It is part of a campaign of breathtaking scale and ferocity that has swept up hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims for weeks or months of what critics describe as brainwashing, usually without criminal charges.

Though limited to China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is the country’s most sweeping internment program since the Mao era--and the focus of a growing chorus of international criticism.

China has sought for decades to restrict the practice of Islam and maintain an iron grip in Xinjiang, a region almost as big as Alaska where more than half the population of 24 million belongs to Muslim ethnic minority groups. Most are Uighurs, whose religion, language and culture, along with a history of independence movements and resistance to Chinese rule, have long unnerved Beijing.

After a succession of violent antigovernment attacks reached a peak in 2014, the Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping, sharply escalated the crackdown, orchestrating an unforgiving drive to turn ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities into loyal citizens and supporters of the party.

In addition to the mass detentions, the authorities have intensified the use of informers and expanded police surveillance, even installing cameras in some people’s homes. Human rights activists and experts say the campaign has traumatized Uighur society, leaving behind fractured communities and families.

China has categorically denied reports of abuses in Xinjiang. At a meeting of a United Nations panel in Geneva last month, it said it does not operate re-education camps and described the facilities in question as mild corrective institutions that provide job training.

“There is no arbitrary detention,” Hu Lianhe, an official with a role in Xinjiang policy, told the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. “There is no such thing as re-education centers.”

The committee pressed Beijing to disclose how many people have been detained and free them, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the demand as having “no factual basis” and said China’s security measures were comparable to those of other countries.

The government’s business-as-usual defense, however, is contradicted by overwhelming evidence, including official directives, studies, news reports and construction plans that have surfaced online, as well as the eyewitness accounts of a growing number of former detainees who have fled to countries such as Turkey and Kazakhstan.

The government’s own documents describe a vast network of camps--usually called “transformation through education” centers--that has expanded without public debate, specific legislative authority or any system of appeal for those detained.

The New York Times interviewed four recent camp inmates from Xinjiang who described physical and verbal abuse by guards; grinding routines of singing, lectures and self-criticism meetings; and the gnawing anxiety of not knowing when they would be released. Their accounts were echoed in interviews with more than a dozen Uighurs with relatives who were in the camps or had disappeared, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid government retaliation.

The Times also discovered reports online written by teams of Chinese officials who were assigned to monitor families with detained relatives, and a study published last year that said officials in some places were indiscriminately sending ethnic Uighurs to the camps to meet numerical quotas.

The long days in the re-education camp usually began with a jog.

Nearly every morning, Mr. Muhemet recalled, he and dozens of others--college graduates, businessmen, farmers--were told to run around an assembly ground. Impatient guards sometimes slapped and shoved the older, slower inmates, he said.

Then they were made to sing rousing patriotic hymns in Chinese, such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Those who could not remember the words were denied breakfast, and they all learned the words quickly.

Mr. Muhemet, a stocky man who ran a restaurant in Hotan before fleeing China this year, said he spent seven months in a police cell and more than two months in the camp in 2015 without ever being charged with a crime. Most days, he said, the camp inmates assembled to hear long lectures by officials who warned them not to embrace Islamic radicalism, support Uighur independence or defy the Communist Party.

The officials did not ban Islam but dictated very narrow limits for how it should be practiced, including a prohibition against praying at home if there were friends or guests present, he said. In other sessions, the inmates were forced to memorize laws and write essays criticizing themselves.

“In the end, all the officials had one key point,” he said. “The greatness of the Chinese Communist Party, the backwardness of Uighur culture and the advanced nature of Chinese culture.”

After two months, Mr. Muhemet’s family was finally allowed to visit the camp, located near “New Harmony Village,” a settlement built as a symbol of friendship between ethnic Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. “I couldn’t say anything,” he recalled. “I just held my two sons and wife, and cried and cried.”

The Xinjiang government issued “deradicalization” rules last year that gave vague authorization for the camps, and many counties now run several of them, according to government documents, including requests for bids from construction companies to build them.

Some facilities are designed for inmates who are allowed to go home at night. Others can house thousands around the clock. One camp outside Hotan has grown in the past two years from a few small buildings to facilities on at least 36 acres, larger than Alcatraz Island, and work appears to be underway to expand it further, according to satellite photos.

In government documents, local officials sometimes liken inmates to patients requiring isolation and emergency intervention.

“Anyone infected with an ideological ‘virus’ must be swiftly sent for the ‘residential care’ of transformation-through-education classes before illness arises,” a document issued by party authorities in Hotan said.

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

About 1.5 percent of China’s total population lives in Xinjiang. But the region accounted for more than 20 percent of arrests nationwide last year, according to official data compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group. Those figures do not include people in the re-education camps.

Residents said people have been sent to the camps for visiting relatives abroad; for possessing books about religion and Uighur culture; and even for wearing a T-shirt with a Muslim crescent. Women are sometimes detained because of transgressions by their husbands or sons.

One official directive warns people to look for 75 signs of “religious extremism,” including behavior that would be considered unremarkable in other countries: growing a beard as a young man, praying in public places outside mosques or even abruptly trying to give up smoking or drinking.

Hotan feels as if under siege by an invisible enemy. Fortified police outposts and checkpoints dot the streets every few hundred yards. Schools, kindergartens, gas stations and hospitals are garlanded in barbed wire. Surveillance cameras sprout from shops, apartment entrances and metal poles.

“It’s very tense here,” a police officer said. “We haven’t rested for three years.”

This city of 390,000 underwent a Muslim revival about a decade ago. Most Uighurs have adhered to relatively relaxed forms of Sunni Islam, and a significant number are secular. But budding prosperity and growing interaction with the Middle East fueled interest in stricter Islamic traditions. Men grew long beards, while women wore hijabs that were not a part of traditional Uighur dress.

Now the beards and hijabs are gone, and posters warn against them. Mosques appear poorly attended; people must register to enter and worship under the watch of surveillance cameras.

The government shifted to harsher policies in 2009 after protests in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, spiraled into rioting and left nearly 200 people dead. Mr. Xi and his regional functionaries went further, adopting methods reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule--mass rallies, public confessions and “work teams” assigned to ferret out dissent.

They have also wired dusty towns across Xinjiang with an array of technology that has put the region on the cutting edge of programs for surveillance cameras as well as facial and voice recognition. Spending on security in Xinjiang has soared, with nearly $8.5 billion allocated for the police, courts and other law enforcement agencies last year, nearly double the previous year’s amount.

The campaign has polarized Uighur society. Many of the ground-level enforcers are Uighurs themselves, including police officers and officials who staff the camps and security checkpoints.

Ordinary Uighurs moving about Hotan sometimes shuffle on and off buses several times to pass through metal detectors, swipe their identity cards or hand over and unlock their mobile phones for inspection.

A resident or local cadre is assigned to monitor every 10 families in Xinjiang, reporting on comings and goings and activities deemed suspicious, including praying and visits to mosques, according to residents and government reports. Residents said the police sometimes search homes for forbidden books and suspect items such as prayer mats, using special equipment to check walls and floors for hidden caches.

The authorities are also gathering biometric data and DNA. Two Uighurs, a former official and a student, said they were ordered to show up at police buildings where officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.

The pressure on Uighur villages intensifies when party “work teams” arrive and take up residence, sometimes living in local homes. The teams ask villagers to inform on relatives, friends and neighbors, and they investigate residents’ attitudes and activities, according to government reports published online.

One account published last year described how the authorities in one village arranged for detainees accused of “religious extremism” to be denounced by their relatives at a public rally, and encouraged other families to report similar activities.

“More and more people are coming forward with information,” Cao Lihai, an editor for a party journal, wrote in the report. “Some parents have personally brought in their children to give themselves up.”

A Uighur woman in her 20s who asked to be identified only by her surname, Gul, said she came under scrutiny after wearing an Islamic head wrap and reading books about religion and Uighur history. Local officials installed cameras at her family’s door--and inside their living room.

“We would always have to be careful what we said and what we did and what we read,” she said.

Every week, Ms. Gul added, a neighborhood official visited and spent at least two hours interrogating her. Eventually, the authorities sent her to a full-time re-education camp.

Ms. Gul, who fled China after being released, later tried to contact her brother to find out if he was in trouble. He sent a wordless reply, an emoticon face in tears.

Afterward, Ms. Gul’s mother sent her another message: “Please don’t call us again. We are in trouble.”

The Chinese government says it is winning a war against Islamic extremism and separatism.

Still, many who have emerged from the indoctrination program say it has hardened public attitudes against Beijing.

“It was of absolutely no use,” said Omurbek Eli, a Kazakh businessman, of his time held in a camp in 2017. “The outcome will be the opposite. They will become even more resistant to Chinese influence.”

For many families, the disappearance of a loved one into the camps can be devastating, both emotionally and economically--a point reflected in reports posted online by the party’s “work teams.”

Some of these reports describe Uighur families unable to harvest crops on their own because so many members have been taken away, and one mentioned a mother left to care for five children. In another report, an official near Hotan described holding a village meeting to calm distraught relatives of those sent to the camps.

The mass internments also break Uighur families by forcing members to disown their kin or by separating small children from their parents. So many parents have been detained in Kashgar, a city in western Xinjiang, that it has expanded boarding schools to take custody of older, “troubled” children.

Ms. Gul said the camp she was in was ramshackle enough that children who lived nearby sometimes crept up to a window late at night and called out to their mothers inside. “Their children would come and say, ‘Mother, I miss you,’” she said.

“We didn’t say anything,” she added, “because there was a camera inside the cell.”

[stoweboyd]

Work Futures Daily - Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

Almost everything is done better when you reflect, rather than react.

2018-04-20 Beacon NY - We have learned a great deal in recent decades about human cognition, in the realm of science, but very little has trickled through to the conduct of business. The theme today — in the aftermath of the mess in Philadelphia, where two Black men were arrested for trespassing at a Starbucks while waiting for a friend before buying their drinks — is about countering bias and slowing down to get there.

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On Implicit Bias Training

In the aftermath of the recent expulsion of two Black men from a Philadelphia Starbucks, and the company's plan to expose the entire US staff to implicit bias training, Katie Herzog did some research:

If you haven't taken the test, it works like this: You are shown a series of images and asked to pair them with a series of words that have either strong positive or negative correlations. For instance, I just took the test for sexuality bias, and positive words (Laughing, Happy, Friend, Friendship, Glorious, Attractive, Adore, Cheer) were contrasted with negative words (Grief, Sadness, Awful, Abuse, Selfish, Bothersome, Rotten) as well as images of either two blocky female figures (of the bathroom sign variety), two male figures, or one male and one female together. My task was to pair the images with the words, and according to the test, based on how quickly I sorted them, the test determined that I show "a moderate automatic preference for Gay people over Straight people," which, frankly, I didn't need a test to point out.

This test is hugely popular, in no small part thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about it in his best-selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell called the IAT "a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations," and, in the years since its inception, the IAT has been taken many millions of times and has been incorporated into anti-racist trainings in business, academia, criminal justice, and other fields. But, while plenty of people accept that bias is a part of the human condition (babies as young as three months show preferences for faces of their own race over others), the idea that this implicit bias leads to specific action (say, calling the police on two black men who sitting in Starbucks) is anything but proven.

She contacted Tony Greenwald, one of the creators of the test:

It's just going to be bias training theater.

Being aware of your bias does not mean you can overcome it. It is as deep in our wiring as lust and language.

One tangent that people can take to minimize bias is to slow down, to enter the state of constructive uncertainty (see 10 Work Skills for the Postnormal Era) where you actively resist coming to a conclusion, and actively remain open to gathering more information rather than following your impulse to take action.

Naom Schiber and Rachel Adams wrote about this recently:

Some experts argue that the most effective way to eliminate unconscious bias is to limit the extent to which people engage in automatic, reflexive thinking. One solution is to try to nudge workers toward more thoughtful and deliberative decision-making.

In a study involving the Seattle Police Department, researchers randomly selected a group of officers to meet with their sergeants and have an open-ended, 20-minute conversation about a recent encounter with a citizen. The encounters frequently involved minor issues like loitering — a situation analogous to the Philadelphia Starbucks incident. Over a six-week period, the officers selected to have those conversations were about 12 percent less likely to resolve an incident with an arrest.

“We were getting the police officers to slow down their thinking,” said Emily Owens, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, who was one of the researchers. Although the study didn’t look explicitly at arrest rates by race, Ms. Owens argued that, “when you’re not automating, and you’re thinking slowly, bias is less likely to influence your behavior.” (Ms. Owens stressed that the study was only suggestive and that overall the evidence on the effectiveness of bias training for police is very thin.)

On Transforming Human Resources

I am not a fan of the term 'human resources' because people aren't resources. It's a failed metaphor, but one we are lamentably stuck with.

So I am always willing to listen when some says they want to transform HR. Jonathan Shieber reports on Eightfold.ai, a new startup that might have a new tack, and apropos of the Starbucks debacle, it starts with trying to 'wring all the biases out of recruiting, hiring, professional development, and advancement':

Founded by chief executive Ashutosh Garg, a former search and personalization expert at Google and IBM research, and chief technology officer Varun Kacholia, who led the ranking team at Google and YouTube search and the News Feed team at Facebook, Eightfold.ai boasts an executive team that has a combined 80 patents and more than 6,000 citations for their research.

The two men have come together (in perhaps the most Silicon Valley fashion) to bring the analytical rigor for which their former employers are famous to the question of how best to help employees find fulfillment in the workforce.

“Employment is the backbone of society and it is a hard problem,” to match the right person with the right role, says Garg. “People pitch recruiting as a transaction… [but] to build a holistic platform is to build a company that fundamentally solves this problem,” of making work the most meaningful to the most people, he says.

How are they going to do this? By analyzing a lot of data:

“We have crawled the web for millions of profiles… including data from Wikipedia,” says Garg. “From there we have gotten data round how people have moved in organizations. We use all of this data to see who has performed well in an organization or not. Now what we do… we build models over this data to see who is capable of doing what.”

There are two important functions at play, according to Garg. The first is developing a talent network of a business — “the talent graph of a company,” he calls it. “On top of that we map how people have gone from one function to another in their career.”

Using those tools, Garg says Eightfold.ai’s services can predict the best path for each employee to reach their full potential.

In case you were wondering, Eightfold.ai is named for the eightfold path of Buddhist enlightenment. Maybe that's a stretch, but who knows.

It been well established that people are terrible at hiring — a long list of cognitive biases get in the way — so getting people out of the loop may be the best idea going. Algorithms can have biases, too, of course. And simply sucking up data about who has gotten hired in the past for what jobs could simply replicate the prejudice and inequities of yesterday into the workplace of today. They say they are working on that angle.

Eightfold.ai already counts more than 100 customers using its tools across different industries. Its software has processed more than 20 million applications to date, and increased response rates among its customers by 700 percent compared to the industry average — all while reducing screening costs and time by 90 percent, according to a statement.

A company to watch, clearly.

Quote of the Day

What is clear is that failure to meet the challenges posed by new technologies will likewise affect U.S. national security, in this case by increasing political pressures for American retrenchment, the consequences of which would be a more unstable and less prosperous world. In addition, the country will have neither the resources nor the political bandwidth to play a large global role if society is in turmoil. In such a situation, populism would be sure to grow, as would opposition to both immigration and trade despite their record of contributing to the country’s prosperity.

| Richard Haas, President, Council for Foreign Relations, The Work Ahead

On Narratives

Jeff Bezos has released his annual investors letter, in which he shared some management lessons. Amazon does not run on powerpoint, like many others. Instead, the culture is driven by narrative.

Perfect Handstands

A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. No leaning against a wall. Not for just a few seconds. Instagram good. She decided to start her journey by taking a handstand workshop at her yoga studio. She then practiced for a while but wasn’t getting the results she wanted. So, she hired a handstand coach. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but evidently this is an actual thing that exists. In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be –something this coach understood well.

Six-Page Narratives

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

Chew on that for a while.

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[junker-town]

The rise and collapse of a scalper’s sports card empire

Bribes, parking lot deals, and the cards you never had a chance to buy.

Warning: The following story contains strong language.

Tyrone sits in the middle of his three monitor setup like the cockpit of a fighter jet, one hand grasping a cup of coffee, the other his vape, alternating between stimulants and watching a scramble over spots in his newest break. “This shit’s been up 40 minutes and we only got two slots left,” he yells to his two business partners, pulling cards for their latest singles orders.

“Tyrone,” who asked not to go by his real name to keep his anonymity, elevated his hobby for collecting cards into a business three years ago, and turned it into an empire. Now he’s coming face-to-face with it all collapsing. “I knew we didn’t have forever on this,” he says, “I just figured it’d be the feds shutting it down, not some dumbasses at Target.”

May 14th was the end of an era for Tyrone. Target made the announcement they would no longer sell NBA, NFL, MLB or Pokemon cards following an incident outside a Wisconsin store in which a customer pulled a gun on another who’d just purchased cards. Signs, now posted all over stores in the country, read “To ensure the safety of our guests and team members, effective May 14th, MLB, NFL, NBA and Pokemon cards will no longer be sold in stores until further notice.” Walmart has not made an official announcement at this time, though there’s increasing speculation that they too will pull cards from shelves.

“That shit had me f***** up,” Tyrone says, shaking his head. “I dunno how it’s been working up north, but ain’t nobody in my area getting good shit from Target anyway.”

Tyrone began turning his hobby into a business like anyone else trying to get cards. He arrived at stores early on Friday morning, learning that cards weren’t stocked by Target and Walmart employees, but rather independent merchandisers who would enter the store on distributors’ behalf, and place items on the shelves. Tyrone would wait until the merchandisers arrived to put out the new cards, then pounce on them, buying out the store and immediately flipping them on eBay. It was a weekly ritual. Hit a store, move to the next, do the same.

“I’d spend HOURS in the car each week,” he laughed, remembering his beginnings. Tyrone quickly realized there was too much inconsistency. Sometimes he’d miss the merchandiser, or they’d go to another store first and throw off his route. Random shoppers would buy a fat pack (a wrapped package of multiple packs) as their nostalgia kicked in, having no idea what they were buying. This made his stock unreliable.

“It got exhausting, and frustrating as shit got bigger. That’s when I got smart about it.”

I know Luka and Ja, not Squirtle and shit.

After months of shadowing deliveries and driving around, Tyrone approached one of the merchandisers in a Walmart parking lot, and befriended them. He needed as much product as he could get his hands on, they needed to do their job. “I made it work for both of us.”

At the time the only thing really popping was basketball cards, particularly the highly sought after Panini Prizm series. If you went to Target or Walmart hoping to find Prizm basketball only to find it out of stock, there’s a good chance Tyrone had it, and you never had a chance of buying it.

“It was so easy back then,” he says. “They’d come in, put the shit on the shelves, snap a photo with their phone to show they did their job — then immediately pull it back down and buy it.” To the distributors, Tyrone’s merchandisers were doing their jobs, to the public they just thought they were too late and missed out on the cards. No one was the wiser, except for the merchandisers and Tyrone.

“I’d meet them at the end out their route, give them a stack — normally double what they paid, and everyone was happy.” As far as he sees it, Tyrone thinks the merchandisers got the better end of the deal. They just needed to meet him and make some quick money, he had to do the leg work to move the cards on the back end, but with prices skyrocketing it was worth it.

It wasn’t long before demand outstripped Tyrone’s supply, even having most of an east coast state in his pocket. He needed to expand, and began hitting up friends and family members in other states, bringing them into the fold. Before long he had numerous states, stretching from the east coast as far Texas in his network. Everyone giving kickbacks to merchandisers, sending the product to him, and profiting as he became able to sell product online for four times their value, sometimes even more.

“I was making less, because everyone needed a cut — but who cares. I was clearing $10k a month easy.”

Flipping fat packs and sealed product was nice, but the real money came in when Tyrone started getting his hands on hobby boxes. Larger, 12 pack boxes which brought more money, and more opportunity. “I can make stupid money on a case break, you don’t even know.”

A box, or case break, is a multi-participant venture in which a large number of people essentially gamble by buying pseudo-shares in a mass opening. Let’s say someone has a case of Prizm, you might pay $500 to get randomly assigned a team, then get every card from that team opened in a case.

For the individuals participating, it was a potential gold mine. Lucking out and getting the Pelicans could mean landing a five figure Zion Williamson card, at the expense of someone who got assigned the Hawks, and coming away with nothing. Trae Young isn’t worth big money, so Atlanta is seen as a dud slot. For people like Tyrone, selling the slots represents no risk — and all upside.

“Let’s say I’m paying three grand a case. I’m turning around and making five times that it in a break.”

With everyone desperate to open product hoping of landing a chase card, Tyrone was just in it for economics. “I’ll leave the gambling to the gamblers,” he says, “sure I’ll open something now and then for fun, but nah, moving sealed is where it’s at.” Soon, not even his vast network was enough to keep him in the cards he needed.

The fever spread from basketball into everything else. First football, then baseball, and finally Pokemon. “Pokemon makes me too nervous man,” Tyrone says to a friend who suggests they start buying it up, “we don’t know shit about those. I mean, can we break it? I don’t know. I know Luka and Ja, not Squirtle and shit. I’ll stick to what I know.”

“You have no idea how dirty this all is.”

As far as Tyrone saw it, he was providing a service. It had become impossible for anyone to get sealed product without spending thousands on boxes, and he felt that private card shops were cracking everything they were getting and selling singles online. Even then, he felt a little bad about what he was doing. “It sucks man, like I remember collecting cards as a kid,” Tyrone tells me, “none of these kids have a chance at buying packs. It’s all being eaten up.” As far as he was concerned, if Tyrone wasn’t scalping cards, someone else would — so why not him?

A large impact on the card market came not from flippers like Tyrone, but from Wall Street. During the economic downturn caused by the Covid pandemic, an increasing number of investment bankers were looking to diversify their portfolios with collectibles, and basketball cards were at the top of the list. Grading services like PSA and Beckett, once tapped only by enthusiasts trying to secure their most valuable cards, were now being flooded with requests to grade from big-dollar firms, aiming to solidify their investments.

“You have no idea how dirty this all is,” a lanky man named “Tom” calls from the back room as he assembles as eBay order. “I know this goes all the way through the system. I know Wall Street is talking to Panini and they’re engineering all this. Shit, I think ESPN is in Panini’s pocket too, pushing these players they know are signing.”

“Man, you’re tripping,” Tyrone says, rolling his eyes, not buying Tom’s conspiracy theories. “Don’t listen to him, I mean shit IS dirty, he right about that — but nah, nothing like that.”

Whether you believe the wild theories floated by collectors or not, it’s unquestionable that there’s a massive card shortage and it’s pushing prices through the roof. If you want to find a rare Zion Williamson rookie card now it’ll take not a few hundred bucks, or even a few thousand — but a second mortgage on your house.

Card collectors were tracking the price spikes daily, but when word got out to the general public that there were five- and six-figure cards being pulled from packs, it started a frenzy. Go to any store that stocked cards and you’d find empty shelves, people who were never interested in cards before were lingering around the section, looking to quickly make four times their purchase in a matter of hours be reselling online.

Word of Friday stocking got out. It wasn’t long before there were lines down the sidewalk, in the middle of a pandemic, of people waiting for store doors to open to they could rush the card rack. “My people started getting scared,” Tyrone said, referring to his merchandisers. “Not like they were afraid of getting hurt or nothing. They just didn’t want the drama of pulling the shit off shelves, someone reporting them and losing their jobs.” Soon the merchandisers started to pull out of their deals, no longer interested in the risks the quick money brought. It became more and more difficult for Tyrone to secure large numbers of cards.

This is the harsh reality of the #Pokemon TCG right now. It’s a mess pic.twitter.com/3RnbeGz07A

— Pokémon News (@TrainerINTEL) May 22, 2021

Then the news came cards were being pulled from shelves. “Nobody was ready for that. Shit, I don’t think Panini or Bowman were ready for that,” Tyrone says. Overnight the network he’d cultivated for years collapsed, but this wasn’t a man who looked like his world was crumbling around him — rather, he seemed calm. “I knew it was coming, just not this way. I have plans, believe me I have plans. Just not ready to talk about that yet.”

While Tyrone pivots to whatever he’s doing next, on Friday May 21, one week after pulling cards from the shelves, Target opened them up again for online-only sales. This time with strict limits to how many packs and boxes people could buy, effectively killing the scalping market. A great day for general consumers, and perhaps the nail in the coffin for those who made a living off cards in the last few years.

When reached for comment Target corporate said they had nothing to add to the card situation beyond their initial statement posted in stores.

[orbemnews]

Terry McAuliffe wants to be Virginia's governor again. His opponents say it's time to move on. The former governor of Virginia, four years removed from the end of his first term, is vying for another shot at leading the commonwealth, running as the closest thing to an incumbent in a place that bars governors from serving successive terms. McAuliffe enters the race as the clear frontrunner, buoyed by a significant fundraising advantage, a who’s who list of endorsements and near total name recognition. But both Democratic politics and Virginia have changed since McAuliffe’s successful 2013 run, a shift exemplified by the Democratic legislature — which went blue in 2019 with McAuliffe’s help — moving to abolish the death penalty, tighten gun laws and reckon with the legacy of the Confederacy in a commonwealth closely tied to the Civil War South. With less than three months until the Democratic gubernatorial primary, McAuliffe — who faced no primary challenge eight years ago — is now being pushed by younger, more liberal challengers to explain how a leader synonymous with the political establishment reflects the future of the commonwealth and not the politics of a bygone era. The anti-McAuliffe charge ahead of the June 8 primary has been led by former Virginia delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy and Del. Lee Carter, two gubernatorial candidates who have been unabashedly critical of the former governor. Two other Democrats — state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — haven’t been as pointed in their criticism of McAuliffe, but they have all echoed a similar message: McAuliffe’s time has passed. “He was the right candidate for that moment. He was the right governor for that moment,” said McClellan, referring to McAuliffe’s 2013 bid, which she supported. “Times have changed. Virginia has changed.” McAuliffe, a figure whose story in the Democratic Party is defined by millions of dollars raised, the Clintons and a tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee, dismisses any suggestion he isn’t the future of the party. He points out that even after his time as governor, Virginia Democrats called on him to lead the effort that eventually won control of the Virginia General Assembly, giving the party full control of the state’s government for the first time in more than two decades. “I don’t pay any attention to them,” he said of his opponents suggesting his time has come and gone. “I’m laying out my own plan on why I’m running.” Any Democrat who wins the primary will be facing a Republican Party in turmoil, one where Virginia Republicans are searching for a standard bearer at a time when the national party is split between tying themselves to the vision of former President Donald Trump or breaking away from the failed 2020 candidate. A series of Republicans are laying the groundwork for a gubernatorial bid, including state Sen. Amanda Chase, businessman Pete Snyder, Del. Kirk Cox and businessman Glenn Youngkin. McAuliffe has already flooded his Democratic opponents in three things: Money, policy and endorsements. The prolific fundraiser fired a warning shot early in the campaign when he announced he had raised $6.1 million in 2020, a staggering number that dwarfed his opponents’ own efforts. And when he announced in December, his candidacy came along with a long list of endorsements, including a number of high-profile Democrats who serve with some of his primary challengers. Since then, McAuliffe has rolled out policy after policy, aiming to both burnish his progressive credentials and argue that because Virginia is now in Democratic control, something the governor did not enjoy during his tenure, he will be able to get more done. “I leaned in (as governor), but I had a Republican legislature. Now, with a Democratic legislature, all the big things that need to be fixed, we can get done,” he said. “Heck, I just warming up. You give me a Democratic legislature, there is no stopping me.” ‘The appetite for career politicians… is long gone’ McAuliffe’s desire to run for a second term as governor has long been one of the worst kept secrets in the commonwealth. The former chair of the DNC and CNN political commentator relished the job, often joking about how his election — after Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson served as Virginia’s first and second governors — was a sign of American exceptionalism. If McAuliffe were to win in November, however, he would do something neither Henry nor Jefferson ever did: Serve two four-year terms as the commonwealth’s chief executive. The Virginia constitution prohibits governors from serving two successive terms and very few Virginia politicians have done so. The last person to do it was Mills Godwin, a segregationist who won as a Democrat in 1966 and as a Republican in 1974. McAuliffe argues that even though he feels like he accomplished everything he could as governor — “I don’t know if you could find (a regret). I mean, I worked like a dog,” he said — it just makes sense for him to reprise a role that is part Virginia’s chief executive, part commonwealth cheerleader. Virginians “know I can get things done,” McAuliffe said. “I did it before and they all know with a Democratic legislature, boy, I feel bad for those other 49 states cause I’m telling you Virginia is going to lead the country.” But his third run at governor (he tried and failed to win the party’s nomination in 2009) also means standing in the way of possible history: If either McClellan or Foy were to win, she would become both the first woman to lead Virginia and the first Black woman governor in US history. The significance of making such history, especially in a state that once housed the Capitol of the South during the Civil War, is powerful to both women. “I feel the weight of it because… to know what my family has gone through, the fights that my parents and my grandparents and my great grandparents had to fight, to know that I’m still fighting those fights and I need to keep my children from fighting those same fights, I feel the weight of that,” said McClellan, growing emotional as she described the potential for history. “I feel the weight of knowing I am running for a position in a system that was never built for me.” To McAuliffe’s opponents, the reasoning for his candidacy is deeply flawed. And no candidate is more eager to go after McAuliffe than Foy, who resigned her assembly seat in December to focus on her gubernatorial run. “I can’t allow Terry McAuliffe to run a status quo race, while he romanticizes his time as governor,” said Foy, who has argued her experience as one of the first women to every graduate from Virginia Military Institute and a mother of two who still struggles with child care and student loan debt is more representative of the commonwealth. Foy has attacked McAuliffe on everything from donations he has taken to deals he made as governor to the fact he did little to address Confederate monuments. But her overarching criticism is that she represents Virginia’s most progressive future, while McAuliffe represents the past. “The appetite for career politicians who have continued to maintain the status quo that has hurt so many Virginians is long gone,” she said in an interview. But Foy is not alone in trying to run on McAuliffe’s left. Lee Carter, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist state delegate with deep ties to the Bernie Sanders network of supporters and liberal organizations, has begun to lambast the former governor as not progressive enough. “I see him as the guy that got us here and that’s in very, very real ways,” Carter told CNN, hammering McAuliffe for his support of pipelines through the state and economic policies that focused more on the rich than the poor. “We’ve spent the last eight years fighting against some of the worst things from McAuliffe’s time as governor.” Neither McClellan nor Fairfax has been as direct in their criticism of McAuliffe as Foy and Carter, but their differences are primarily in tone, not substance. “The voters decide what they are looking for in their candidates and in their visions for the future. But I do think it is very clear that people want their leaders to be focused on a vision for the future,” said Fairfax. For Fairfax, opposing McAuliffe is personal. During a chaotic period in Virginia government, Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019. Both women still stand by their allegations. Fairfax denied both accusations and continues to fight them to this day. He had filed a defamation suit against CBS, in which he alleged the network defamed him when, in 2019, it aired interviews with the two women. A judge dismissed the case last year, but Fairfax has appealed the decision, the Associated Press reported. It is apparent that it still bothers the lieutenant governor and people close to him that McAuliffe, by then the former governor, had quickly called for him to step down due to the allegations. Voters are “totally against the politics of the past and the traditional tactics of personal destruction that we have seen govern for too long,” Fairfax said, a not-so-subtle nod to McAuliffe. ‘People are looking for tested leadership’ McAuliffe supporters, when pressed on the attacks facing the former governor, will often compare him to another centrist Democrat who has found recent success: President Joe Biden. “People are looking for tested leadership,” said Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia state Senate and a McAuliffe campaign co-chair. “They need people with experience who can hit the ground running day one, who doesn’t have to try to cultivate all those relationships.” Referring to Biden winning in 2020: “That in and of itself tell me people are looking for tested leadership.” Virginia overwhelmingly backed Biden during the 2020 primary, selecting him over liberal leaders like Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And the state, which was once considered a battleground but has moved towards Democrats in recent years, would later back Biden over Trump by 10 percentage points in November. And McAuliffe is very close, both politically and personally, with the President. Comparisons to the 2020 presidential election, however, ignore the fact that Democrats were as motivated to vote against Trump as they were to vote for Biden. “That’s so simplistic, I don’t even know what to say,” said McClellan. “Biden won in large part because he was the candidate who had the most government experience and the most experience solving people’s problems. … I have more state government experience and public service experience addressing the needs of Virginia than all of my opponents combined, including Terry McAuliffe.” Foy was even more pointed, comparing McAuliffe’s candidacy to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential run. “The comparison I hear about is Barack Obama and Hillary,” she said. “How you had people saying that there’s a person who is inevitable, who is a money machine, who has been around politics for a very long time and therefore everyone needs to make way.” The issue that these anti-McAuliffe candidates run into is space. People close to McAuliffe cheered when Carter entered the race, believing he will further box out candidates like Foy. And the longer the four challengers stay in, the harder it will be for either candidate to make up for their lack of statewide name recognition or consolidate the anti-McAuliffe support. “If you believed that was so important, wouldn’t you gather together and consolidate your vote?” asked Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Sabato concluded that, along with Virginia Democrats’ desire to win, will help McAuliffe. “Because Democrats lost for so long in Virginia… Democrats still have a minority mentality even though they are in the majority and because of that, they do tend to make practical decision in primaries,” he said. “That may be the best thing McAuliffe has, other than incumbency and money, on his behalf.” CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect first name for Glenn Youngkin. Source link Orbem News #Governor #McAuliffe #move #Opponents #Politics #Terry #TerryMcAuliffeviesforfourmoreyearsinachangedDemocraticenvironment-CNNPolitics #Time #Virginias

[dipulb3]

Terry McAuliffe wants to be Virginia's governor again. His opponents say it's time to move on.

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/terry-mcauliffe-wants-to-be-virginias-governor-again-his-opponents-say-its-time-to-move-on/

Terry McAuliffe wants to be Virginia's governor again. His opponents say it's time to move on.

The former governor of Virginia, four years removed from the end of his first term, is vying for another shot at leading the commonwealth, running as the closest thing to an incumbent in a place that bars governors from serving successive terms. McAuliffe enters the race as the clear frontrunner, buoyed by a significant fundraising advantage, a who’s who list of endorsements and near total name recognition.

But both Democratic politics and Virginia have changed since McAuliffe’s successful 2013 run, a shift exemplified by the Democratic legislature — which went blue in 2019 with McAuliffe’s help — moving to abolish the death penalty, tighten gun laws and reckon with the legacy of the Confederacy in a commonwealth closely tied to the Civil War South.

With less than three months until the Democratic gubernatorial primary, McAuliffe — who faced no primary challenge eight years ago — is now being pushed by younger, more liberal challengers to explain how a leader synonymous with the political establishment reflects the future of the commonwealth and not the politics of a bygone era.

The anti-McAuliffe charge ahead of the June 8 primary has been led by former Virginia delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy and Del. Lee Carter, two gubernatorial candidates who have been unabashedly critical of the former governor. Two other Democrats — state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — haven’t been as pointed in their criticism of McAuliffe, but they have all echoed a similar message: McAuliffe’s time has passed.

“He was the right candidate for that moment. He was the right governor for that moment,” said McClellan, referring to McAuliffe’s 2013 bid, which she supported. “Times have changed. Virginia has changed.”

McAuliffe, a figure whose story in the Democratic Party is defined by millions of dollars raised, the Clintons and a tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee, dismisses any suggestion he isn’t the future of the party. He points out that even after his time as governor, Virginia Democrats called on him to lead the effort that eventually won control of the Virginia General Assembly, giving the party full control of the state’s government for the first time in more than two decades.

“I don’t pay any attention to them,” he said of his opponents suggesting his time has come and gone. “I’m laying out my own plan on why I’m running.”

Any Democrat who wins the primary will be facing a Republican Party in turmoil, one where Virginia Republicans are searching for a standard bearer at a time when the national party is split between tying themselves to the vision of former President Donald Trump or breaking away from the failed 2020 candidate. A series of Republicans are laying the groundwork for a gubernatorial bid, including state Sen. Amanda Chase, businessman Pete Snyder, Del. Kirk Cox and businessman Glenn Youngkin.

McAuliffe has already flooded his Democratic opponents in three things: Money, policy and endorsements.

The prolific fundraiser fired a warning shot early in the campaign when he announced he had raised $6.1 million in 2020, a staggering number that dwarfed his opponents’ own efforts. And when he announced in December, his candidacy came along with a long list of endorsements, including a number of high-profile Democrats who serve with some of his primary challengers.

Since then, McAuliffe has rolled out policy after policy, aiming to both burnish his progressive credentials and argue that because Virginia is now in Democratic control, something the governor did not enjoy during his tenure, he will be able to get more done.

“I leaned in (as governor), but I had a Republican legislature. Now, with a Democratic legislature, all the big things that need to be fixed, we can get done,” he said. “Heck, I just warming up. You give me a Democratic legislature, there is no stopping me.”

‘The appetite for career politicians… is long gone’

McAuliffe’s desire to run for a second term as governor has long been one of the worst kept secrets in the commonwealth. The former chair of the DNC and Appradab political commentator relished the job, often joking about how his election — after Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson served as Virginia’s first and second governors — was a sign of American exceptionalism.

If McAuliffe were to win in November, however, he would do something neither Henry nor Jefferson ever did: Serve two four-year terms as the commonwealth’s chief executive. The Virginia constitution prohibits governors from serving two successive terms and very few Virginia politicians have done so. The last person to do it was Mills Godwin, a segregationist who won as a Democrat in 1966 and as a Republican in 1974.

McAuliffe argues that even though he feels like he accomplished everything he could as governor — “I don’t know if you could find (a regret). I mean, I worked like a dog,” he said — it just makes sense for him to reprise a role that is part Virginia’s chief executive, part commonwealth cheerleader.

Virginians “know I can get things done,” McAuliffe said. “I did it before and they all know with a Democratic legislature, boy, I feel bad for those other 49 states cause I’m telling you Virginia is going to lead the country.”

But his third run at governor (he tried and failed to win the party’s nomination in 2009) also means standing in the way of possible history: If either McClellan or Foy were to win, she would become both the first woman to lead Virginia and the first Black woman governor in US history.

The significance of making such history, especially in a state that once housed the Capitol of the South during the Civil War, is powerful to both women.

“I feel the weight of it because… to know what my family has gone through, the fights that my parents and my grandparents and my great grandparents had to fight, to know that I’m still fighting those fights and I need to keep my children from fighting those same fights, I feel the weight of that,” said McClellan, growing emotional as she described the potential for history. “I feel the weight of knowing I am running for a position in a system that was never built for me.”

To McAuliffe’s opponents, the reasoning for his candidacy is deeply flawed. And no candidate is more eager to go after McAuliffe than Foy, who resigned her assembly seat in December to focus on her gubernatorial run.

“I can’t allow Terry McAuliffe to run a status quo race, while he romanticizes his time as governor,” said Foy, who has argued her experience as one of the first women to every graduate from Virginia Military Institute and a mother of two who still struggles with child care and student loan debt is more representative of the commonwealth.

Foy has attacked McAuliffe on everything from donations he has taken to deals he made as governor to the fact he did little to address Confederate monuments. But her overarching criticism is that she represents Virginia’s most progressive future, while McAuliffe represents the past.

“The appetite for career politicians who have continued to maintain the status quo that has hurt so many Virginians is long gone,” she said in an interview.

But Foy is not alone in trying to run on McAuliffe’s left. Lee Carter, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist state delegate with deep ties to the Bernie Sanders network of supporters and liberal organizations, has begun to lambast the former governor as not progressive enough.

“I see him as the guy that got us here and that’s in very, very real ways,” Carter told Appradab, hammering McAuliffe for his support of pipelines through the state and economic policies that focused more on the rich than the poor. “We’ve spent the last eight years fighting against some of the worst things from McAuliffe’s time as governor.”

Neither McClellan nor Fairfax has been as direct in their criticism of McAuliffe as Foy and Carter, but their differences are primarily in tone, not substance.

“The voters decide what they are looking for in their candidates and in their visions for the future. But I do think it is very clear that people want their leaders to be focused on a vision for the future,” said Fairfax.

For Fairfax, opposing McAuliffe is personal. During a chaotic period in Virginia government, Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019. Both women still stand by their allegations.

Fairfax denied both accusations and continues to fight them to this day. He had filed a defamation suit against CBS, in which he alleged the network defamed him when, in 2019, it aired interviews with the two women. A judge dismissed the case last year, but Fairfax has appealed the decision, the Associated Press reported.

It is apparent that it still bothers the lieutenant governor and people close to him that McAuliffe, by then the former governor, had quickly called for him to step down due to the allegations.

Voters are “totally against the politics of the past and the traditional tactics of personal destruction that we have seen govern for too long,” Fairfax said, a not-so-subtle nod to McAuliffe.

‘People are looking for tested leadership’

McAuliffe supporters, when pressed on the attacks facing the former governor, will often compare him to another centrist Democrat who has found recent success: President Joe Biden.

“People are looking for tested leadership,” said Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia state Senate and a McAuliffe campaign co-chair. “They need people with experience who can hit the ground running day one, who doesn’t have to try to cultivate all those relationships.”

Referring to Biden winning in 2020: “That in and of itself tell me people are looking for tested leadership.”

Virginia overwhelmingly backed Biden during the 2020 primary, selecting him over liberal leaders like Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And the state, which was once considered a battleground but has moved towards Democrats in recent years, would later back Biden over Trump by 10 percentage points in November. And McAuliffe is very close, both politically and personally, with the President.

Comparisons to the 2020 presidential election, however, ignore the fact that Democrats were as motivated to vote against Trump as they were to vote for Biden.

“That’s so simplistic, I don’t even know what to say,” said McClellan. “Biden won in large part because he was the candidate who had the most government experience and the most experience solving people’s problems. … I have more state government experience and public service experience addressing the needs of Virginia than all of my opponents combined, including Terry McAuliffe.”

Foy was even more pointed, comparing McAuliffe’s candidacy to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential run.

“The comparison I hear about is Barack Obama and Hillary,” she said. “How you had people saying that there’s a person who is inevitable, who is a money machine, who has been around politics for a very long time and therefore everyone needs to make way.”

The issue that these anti-McAuliffe candidates run into is space. People close to McAuliffe cheered when Carter entered the race, believing he will further box out candidates like Foy. And the longer the four challengers stay in, the harder it will be for either candidate to make up for their lack of statewide name recognition or consolidate the anti-McAuliffe support.

“If you believed that was so important, wouldn’t you gather together and consolidate your vote?” asked Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Sabato concluded that, along with Virginia Democrats’ desire to win, will help McAuliffe.

“Because Democrats lost for so long in Virginia… Democrats still have a minority mentality even though they are in the majority and because of that, they do tend to make practical decision in primaries,” he said. “That may be the best thing McAuliffe has, other than incumbency and money, on his behalf.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect first name for Glenn Youngkin.

[ladystylestores]

HBO Max is live: $15/mo for a massive library, significant headaches

Like it or not, another subscription streaming service has entered the chat.

This one—HBO Max—debuts across the United States on Wednesday, and it comes from the combined AT&T-Time Warner media empire. After taking shape in 2018, the new “WarnerMedia” cluster of film and TV content has since put together a streaming library of exclusive content—particularly by yoinking content away from Netflix and other partners, in apparent defiance of AT&T’s antitrust pledge to US Congress.

WarnerMedia didn’t make the service available to Ars Technica ahead of the launch, so I jumped into the fray by claiming a free seven-day trial on launch day and picked through its first day’s content and interface. I did so to answer the following question: has WarnerMedia pulled off a service worthy of a $15/month fee?

Not necessarily.

They’re still running three services simultaneously

The easiest sales pitch is for anyone who already happily paid $15/mo for HBO Now as a standalone service. HBO Max kinda-sorta replaces HBO Now, because the former has all the same content as the latter. Pay the same, get more. If you thought HBO Now’s selection of HBO-specific series and films was worth its high price, you’re the luckiest potential user. And if you were using HBO Now on Android or iOS, its app has simply turned into HBO Max. Easy peasy.

That makes us wonder: why does HBO Now still exist? One reason is that existing set-top boxes and services support paid subscriptions to HBO Now, sometimes as a bundled package. Another reason is that some set-top boxes, particularly every single Roku and Amazon Fire TV device, currently work with HBO Now, but do not work with HBO Max.

Confusing things further, HBO Go also still exists, but this is a holdover attachment to cable-TV subscriptions that offer HBO Go as a perk. WarnerMedia had to produce the following video to try and explain things, and the result is unintentionally hilarious:

HBO Max vs. HBO Now vs. HBO Go… yes, WarnerMedia officially made this video.

And the question of whether you might get HBO Max for free with your existing cable or streaming services remains a bewildering mess. HBO Now continues to direct users to the older apps, in spite of HBO Max being advertised as an included option from providers like Charter, Verizon, Cox, and (unsurprisingly) AT&T and its subsidiaries.

There’s also the matter of WarnerMedia’s last-minute announcement of a lower-priced, ad-supported tier for the service. But how much will it cost, and when will it arrive? The industry giant isn’t saying yet beyond a vague “2021” window.

Not quite the theme park we’d hoped for

The opening splash screen.

Sidebar.

More sidebar.

On its first day of operation, HBO Max already has a “last chance” page of expiring content.

The opening page for any series has a massive sample screen.

You have to scroll quite a ways to pick through more episodes, though at least the season-skipping interface is nimble enough.

When watching videos on a desktop web browser, the interface largely resembles HBO Now, complete with the “rewind 15 seconds” button. You won’t find that convenient toggle on every platform, however.

Once you actually get into the service, HBO Max looks like it germinated from a different era, when the streaming universe hadn’t fractured into a zillion pieces. Its landing page looks as simple as “Netflix, but with our exclusives.”

Comparatively, Disney+ showed up late last year with smart ideas about how to crash the streaming-subscription party. The most brilliant is its first-impression divide into five major categories: Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. Opening Disney+ feels like walking up to a theme park, seeing five enticing gates, and knowing they’ll each have a ton of content behind them. (Of all the companies to get that right, this one makes sense.)

HBO Max can’t make up its mind about whether to hew to that archetype or to the massive-dump-of-content standard seen on the past decade of most other streaming services. The top of the interface is an unsurprising scroll of “featured” content, and this sees HBO Max puffing its chest about major exclusives: the ’90s NBC series Friends (duh, it’s still one of the world’s most popular TV series), some HBO Max exclusives, and some HBO-produced series. Below those are some “featured” scrolls of TV series and films, arguably based on popularity, then a clever “every Harry Potter film in order” block—again, a hugely popular streaming exclusive, so that’s good for HBO Max to highlight.

You’ll need to tap your remote six times (or more if you’ve built any “previously watched” and “my watchlist” libraries) to scroll down and reach the “HBO Max hubs.” These massive buttons resemble Disney+’s intro splash, and they do a better job attaching a personality to the service… but not by the same margin. Small buttons are assigned to DC (as in, DC Comics), Sesame Workshop, Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, and Looney Tunes. “HBO” gets a stupidly oversized button.

Hub hopping

HBO Max’s hubs.

The 25 series in the Cartoon Network hub, as of launch.

HBO

The 9 series in the Adult Swim hub, as of launch.

HBO

A visit to the Sesame Street hub reveals a peculiar organizational issue: categories that link to entire episodes. Those “spoofs and parodies” are tucked into longer episodes, and HBO Max doesn’t use timestamps to let watchers skip directly to the relevant bits. It’s an unwieldy attempt to guide viewers.

HBO

I created a “child” account to see what the interface looks like for kids under 13. It’s harder for them to find “hubs,” and they are instead shoved into age-gated clumps of content.

HBO

Clicking on HBO takes you to a less polished, less neatly organized version of HBO Now. Pick the “series” tab, and it’s an alphabetical dump of a most every HBO series with zero additional narrowing. If you’re in the mood for “every HBO comedy series,” you’re out of luck; you’ll have to pick through every drama and thriller on your way to find beloved comedic fare like Mr. Show and Silicon Valley, let alone to figure out which series count in which category. Curiously, stand-up comedy gets a dedicated tab within the HBO-specific interface, yet the “series” tab also includes a bunch of separate stand-up comedy.

The only genre-specific tabs generate a massive list of content from every hub. The overlap between bright-and-cheery Cartoon Network content and HBO’s darkest comedies feels less than ideal. (If you’re wondering, you can easily set parental controls to make sure Adventure Time isn’t a few clicks away from Barry.)

Some of the other hubs lead to clearly incomplete collections. Adult Swim is the worst offender at only nine series in all, while the DC button is HBO Max’s weirdest stumble. It has a plethora of content, sure, but what about recent, buzzed-out series like the Harley Quinn animated series or ’90s classics like Batman: The Animated Series? Sadly, those aren’t here, because they’re exclusive to one of WarnerMedia’s other streaming-subscription services, DC Universe. So much for corporate synergy. (Confusingly, Doom Patrol, a series that debuted on DC Universe, does appear on HBO Max.)

I can’t complain about the Turner Classic Movies or Looney Tunes selections, on the other hand, which are monstrous. The former, which at launch sports a whopping 454 films, borrows liberally from the Criterion Collection—enough that you could cancel that collection’s subscription service for a few months while picking through its HBO Max redundancies. (Be aware that TCM counts some interesting films as “classics,” but we’re not about to argue about the “classic” designation of flicks like Police Academy or Godzilla Raids Again.) The latter, meanwhile, includes hundreds of original Looney Tunes theatrical shorts throughout the years—but, gosh, HBO Max. It’s a pain to pick through the shorts as arranged in “seasons,” as if they originally aired on TV in a certain sequence, and the service only launched with three “collections” of classic shorts. Families could’ve used a hand to pick through more of this content, perhaps with more character-specific playlists? Or collections dedicated to beloved directors like Chuck Jones or Tex Avery?

I’m not an anime diehard, so I can’t speak to the seemingly anemic selection in the Crunchyroll tab. But at least the Studio Ghibli collection has nearly every one of its acclaimed films. (The holdouts are Grave of the Fireflies and the studio’s co-production work on a Lupin the Third feature-length film.)

Lack of 4K, lack of “skip opening credits”

Among the most boneheaded parts of the HBO Max rollout, however, is its utter lack of 4K content, let alone 4K combined with HDR. The same goes for Dolby Atmos surround sound. Why are these features missing? If history is any answer, the lack may be because HBO never built support for those standards in its other official apps.

That issue feels all the more glaring when HBO Max locks up films as exclusive content. If WarnerMedia wants new users to flock to its service instead of rivals’, guaranteeing 4K access to Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and other 4K showstoppers would be a worthy, competitive move. But WarnerMedia has only suggested that 4K, HDR, and Atmos support are “on our roadmap,” which is as toothless a guarantee in the streaming-app landscape as they come.

On the other side of the resolution spectrum, HBO Max is careful not to aggressively crop older videos that were originally meant for 4:3 televisions. That’s great news for the video-ratio purists at Ars Technica. You don’t have to start an online petition to get the original, uncropped versions of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, folks.

Beyond those issues, HBO Max has a paltry selection of newly created, “only for Max” content: six short series, each three episodes or fewer. It’s unclear why the company even bothered with this selection, since it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the dozens of films and series with a shiny red N on Netflix or the same kind of content found on the likes of Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Video, and even NBC’s soft-launched Peacock.

All of the above is to say: there’s a mountain of content on HBO Max, and quite a bit of stuff that counts as both popular and critically acclaimed, but the service does an awful job laying out a mat for new users to discover it. The hub-based spread of content is a pain to pick through, and so many selections (biggies like Friends and Harry Potter, plus content from Turner TV stations like Conan) don’t appear in those hubs. And it’s missing quality-of-life features you might come to expect from a streaming service, including a “skip opening credits” toggle or a “rewind 15 seconds” button-tap. (The latter tap option only appears when using HBO Max on a desktop Web browser.)

Thankfully, the basic experience of queueing and watching things you search for works just fine, and again, this library is massive—and includes multiple bottomless wells of beloved libraries. But many of these, particularly Looney Tunes and Sesame Street, deserved better. Instead of virtually leading fans into a neatly organized theme park, HBO Max asks its users to crash through the glass door of a badly managed Blockbuster Video.

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