The Symphonic Testament of Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Alex Ross The New Yorker

In high school, I spent long hours in the art room, painting in a pseudo-Turneresque manner and listening to music. A former teacher had installed a record-player and assembled a collection of classical albums, favoring the stormy twilight of symphonic Romanticism. Late in the day, after everyone had gone, I could turn up the volume to wake-the-dead levels. I became fixated on John Barbirolli’s recording of the Mahler Sixth, with its zombie tread in the first movement and its helter-skelter intensity in the finale. The last movement sprawled across two LP sides, and the break between them fell at a bad moment, in the middle of a harmonic progression. Whenever I hear the Sixth, I flinch as that passage approaches.

A more unexpected discovery was Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-Sharp—the musical testament of a supernaturally gifted Austrian Jewish composer who took refuge in Hollywood after the Anschluss. I had seen “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and associated Korngold with Errol Flynn running up and down staircases. The symphony, though, seemed far removed from movie fantasy. It was a rigorous, disciplined four-movement narrative, squarely in the Beethoven-to-Bruckner line, proceeding from coiled struggle to spacious triumph. The third movement, the Adagio, rose to an agony of sorrow that felt private rather than performative; dissonances shuddered and splintered in the air. I listened to Mahler and Korngold interchangeably, not knowing that you were supposed to hail one as a master while spurning the other as a purveyor of anachronistic Romantic kitsch.

Almost forty years later, I finally got to experience the Symphony in F-Sharp live, when Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic gave a magnificent rendition of the piece at Carnegie Hall in November. This was deluxe treatment for a composer who had long worn an asterisk on account of his Hollywood fame. Arguably, the movies saved Korngold’s life: when the Nazis took over Austria, he was on the Warner Bros. lot, scoring “Robin Hood.” At the same time, his film activity eroded his reputation in so-called serious circles. For seven decades, from 1932 to 2002, the Berlin Philharmonic didn’t touch his music, and the orchestra’s performances of the symphony this fall were its first. The work’s clamorous reception at Carnegie was a kind of restitution.

Irecently visited the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Collection in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, looking for clues to the grand enigma that is the Symphony in F-Sharp. The autograph score is a massive object, consuming two hundred and two pages of broadsheet-sized paper. On the title page is written, in block red letters, “dedicated to the memory of franklin delano roosevelt.” Like most German-speaking émigrés, the composer revered Roosevelt as an enlightened savior. Korngold toiled at the project from 1947 to 1952 and knew the worth of what he had achieved. With its strict formal plan and rugged harmonic language, the symphony was self-evidently designed to mark his reëmergence as a concert composer after the interregnum of war and Hollywood.

It was not to be. When Korngold sent the manuscript to leading conductors, he was gently rebuffed, as letters in the archive attest. Bruno Walter wrote that, although he admired the work, he could no longer learn a complex new score. Fritz Reiner, after describing the piece as “nobly inspired,” deemed it too lengthy for his programs. Dimitri Mitropoulos declared, “For a long time I was searching for a work that would please me entirely, and believe me, I found it in your Symphony.” Yet he couldn’t find a place for it, either. Perhaps in response, Korngold changed the timings listed on the title page, so that a duration of forty-six minutes dwindled to forty-three. (In fact, most performances last around fifty minutes.) Despite his efforts, the symphony had only a few outings, none of them in America. Korngold died in 1957, at the age of sixty, without having written another major score.

Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Copland, Vaughan Williams, and various other composers had won notice in this period for symphonies charged by current events. Even the arch-purist Stravinsky had hinted at a war program in his Symphony in Three Movements, which premièred in 1946. Korngold, after devoting a full decade to swashbucklers and melodramas at Warner Bros., wished to reaffirm his credentials as an abstract musical thinker, but he was coy about possible messages, as a draft of a program note indicates:

Korngold completed his Symphony in F sharp in 1952. Several ideas as well as themes, especially some for the first two movements, were already conceived in earlier years. The composer characterizes his new symphony as a work of pure, absolute music with no program whatsoever, in spite of his experience, that many people—after the first hearing—read into the first movement the terror and horrors of the years 1933-45 and into the Adagio the sorrows and sufferings of the victims of that time.

Is he discouraging an interpretation of the symphony in light of the war and the Holocaust? Or is he implicitly permitting such a reading, even inviting it?

Indeed, some of the work’s thematic ideas were already in circulation, dating as far back as 1935. What Korngold doesn’t reveal is the context in which they first appeared. As the scholars Robbert van der Lek and Ben Winters have established, Korngold adapted music from at least seven of his Warner Bros. scores. The main theme of the Adagio is derived from “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” starring Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth I and Errol Flynn as her doomed lover, the Earl of Essex. The movement also incorporates fragments of two other Flynn vehicles, “Captain Blood” and “The Sea Hawk,” and a motif from the period drama “Anthony Adverse.” The scherzo draws both on the bio-pic “Juarez” and on the musical thriller “Deception,” in which Korngold invents a compositional persona for the malignant genius played by Claude Rains. The finale makes use of a bounding tune from the Ronald Reagan weepie “Kings Row.” Korngold’s craftsmanship is such that the seams are undetectable.

Are there hidden meanings in the recycling? As Winters notes, the “Captain Blood” material belongs to a series of scenes in which Blood and his comrades, rebels against the British crown, have been sold into servitude and subjected to brutal beatings. Slavery also figures in “Anthony Adverse,” although there the title character is guiltily reaping profit from the trade. The music redeployed in the symphony coincides with a title card that reads, “Sick in mind and body Anthony found no peace from the growing torment within him.” In “Private Lives,” the Adagio theme evokes Essex’s defiance, switching between major and minor modes, and it swamps the soundtrack as the dashing traitor is marched to the scaffold.

Winters detects an autobiographical subtext in these references: Korngold’s employment of slavery motifs in the Adagio “hints at the conflicted relationship he had with his film career,” and his turn to the exuberant “Kings Row” melody in the finale suggests a reconciliation with his Hollywood role. This interpretation seems limiting, particularly since Korngold had considerable latitude at Warner Bros. and was hardly an anonymous cog in the system. Given the composer’s remarks about the “terror and horrors” of war, I’d be more inclined to perceive a memorial impulse in this stringing together of musical images of forced labor, torture, and execution. The dedication to Roosevelt adds a further wrinkle. If the Adagio is a funeral oration, it is a peculiarly anguished and desperate one.

Of course, Korngold may have chosen these passages with no allegorical purpose in mind. Perhaps he was already contemplating a larger-scale musical plan, and film assignments allowed him to try out aspects of it. I used to think that the Symphony in F-Sharp was the anomalous triumph of a composer in decline. Now, having watched all of his movies and studied his manuscripts, I’m convinced that Hollywood actually brought about a further refinement of his style. The symphony is evidence of that, and its neglect is therefore all the more painful.

Petrenko, who has led the Berlin Philharmonic since 2019, is the first Jewish music director in the orchestra’s history. Given that one of his predecessors (Wilhelm Furtwängler) was Hitler’s favorite conductor and another (Herbert von Karajan) joined the Nazi Party not once but twice, Petrenko’s championing of Korngold has a corrective edge. In the same spirit, the conductor has featured Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Kurt Weill, who fled the Nazis, and Ervín Schulhoff, who died in a German internment camp. Preceding the Korngold on the Carnegie program—which the Philharmonic duplicated in visits to Boston and Ann Arbor—was Mozart’s First Violin Concerto, with Noah Bendix-Balgley, one of the orchestra’s concertmasters, as soloist. A descendant of German Jewish émigrés, Bendix-Balgley offered two klezmer tunes as an encore.

Yet Petrenko elected not to dramatize the symphony’s historical background—at least, not on the surface. The performance, like much of this conductor’s work, was tightly controlled, finely detailed, lacking in extravagant gestures. For full-on wildness, you have to go back to the first recording—Rudolf Kempe’s, with the Munich Philharmonic, the one that shook the rafters of my high-school art room. (There have been ten recordings to date; my other favorite is James DePreist’s, with the Oregon Symphony.) At the same time, Kempe’s hectic assault can be wearying over the long haul. Petrenko, by contrast, showed an overriding concern with clarity of texture and continuity of structure. The score contains fiendish difficulties, with whiplash transitions, frequent changes of meter, and unison lines that lunge unpredictably. Instrumental solos are intimate and demanding. The Berliners executed all of it flawlessly, and Petrenko kept the music moving forward without missing its depths. His belief in the piece was obvious.

The three-dimensional richness of the playing emphasized the intricacy of Korngold’s harmonic thinking. We take it for granted that Korngold was a tonally oriented composer who rejected twentieth-century modernism. But his version of tonality can be exceedingly warped. At Carnegie, I was struck anew by his avoidance of unambiguous cadences. As the craggy first movement moves toward a peaceful F-sharp-major close, there is interference from the clarinet, which lands on an A-natural, piercingly at odds with an A-sharp in the trumpets. The clarinet then falls silent, yet the sonority retains a sickly air. The Adagio ends on a weirdly voiced D-minor chord, with oboe and trumpet adding a destabilizing C. Even at the symphony’s jubilant conclusion, the flute throws an extraneous G-sharp into the F-sharp-major frolic.

As for the coda of the Adagio, it becomes the site of a late-Romantic meltdown. Korngold, in his note, gave it the curious label “exstatic ‘Abgesang’ (Aftersong)”; maybe he understood ecstasy in the literal sense of standing outside oneself. The section begins with shimmering tremolos and sensuous arabesques, but the atmosphere rapidly deteriorates, leading to two cataclysmic bars that superimpose F-minor and D-minor progressions in a seven-note howl. Two further attempts at resolving to D minor are marred by colliding tonal plates. Similar effects can be heard in the execution scene of “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” but the symphony maximizes the chaos. Rolls on the bass drum threaten to engulf the entire tottering edifice in a cloud of noise.

In Los Angeles, Korngold had convivial relations with his fellow-émigré Arnold Schoenberg, whose revolutionary turn toward atonality seemed diametrically opposed to his own path. The symphony’s expressionistic dissonances show that the two composers were not as far apart as the binary schemes of music history would have us believe. By never cutting himself loose from tonality, Korngold retained an advantage: he could release the expressive power of the system in crisis, again and again. This, possibly, is the ultimate program of the Symphony in F-Sharp, if it has one: tradition facing down its own extinction, and then dancing back to life. 

How One of the Country’s Most Storied C.E.O.s Destroyed His Legacy

How One of the Country’s Most Storied C.E.O.s Destroyed His Legacy

By William D. Cohan 

Mr. Cohan is the author of “Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.”

Jack Welch, one of the most celebrated corporate chieftains of his time, spent the last few years of his life profoundly regretting what he believed was the most important decision of his career: his choice of successor.

This angry admission came flying at me before I could even sit down to join Mr. Welch, who was the chairman and C.E.O. of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, for lunch at a Nantucket golf club in August 2018. For all of his much-celebrated prowess, he believed he had made what may be one of the most common management mistakes around: falling for a candidate’s charm and political skills rather than choosing the person who was likeliest to do the best job. Choosing the wrong C.E.O. was a theme Mr. Welch returned to often during our many conversations before his death in March 2020, at 84.

He felt responsible. He felt guilty. He wanted me to know that he made a major mistake.

Mr. Welch’s need to own what he felt was the biggest error of his career adds another dimension to the ongoing debate that surrounds his legacy. Did he break capitalism by prioritizing G.E.’s quarterly profits and stock price over its employees? Is the revisionist history accurate that Mr. Welch did more damage than good and made G.E. unmanageable?

I think Mr. Welch was an amazing leader who inspired his colleagues to accomplish more than could have reasonably been expected of them while generating an incredible amount of value for G.E.’s shareholders and employees. But I also think he messed up the succession process,

He was certainly a prodigy, rising swiftly up the ranks from his start in G.E.’s plastics business in Pittsfield, Mass. Under his 20-year reign, G.E. grew to become the most respected and valuable company in the world — by 2000 it was worth more than $600 billion. G.E. was also fundamental to American life, producing everything from light bulbs to jet engines. It had the most influence of any corporation on Wall Street and in Washington. In its heyday, G.E. was Microsoft, Apple and Google combined in terms of prestige, technological prowess and management expertise.

Mr. Welch knew that choosing his successor was the most important job he had. By tradition, G.E.’s leaders put the names of possible future leaders in an envelope in case something unexpected happened. But Mr. Welch hated the process by which he was selected. His predecessor, Reginald Jones, demanded that Mr. Welch decamp to corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Conn., some two years before the final decision was made so Mr. Jones could watch him in action. Mr. Welch told me he felt like he was “walking on eggshells.”

When it was his turn to choose his successor, Mr. Welch allowed the three finalists to keep doing their jobs in the field. It wasn’t a bad idea, except for the fact that whenever the three men did meet with Mr. Welch, they were in overdrive suck-up mode. The most polished politician was Jeff Immelt, a former Dartmouth offensive tackle, fraternity president and graduate of Harvard Business School who seemed out of C.E.O. central casting. Some board members warned Mr. Welch against Mr. Immelt, arguing that the more accomplished Jim McNerney would be the better choice.

But Mr. Welch had made up his mind. And he was used to getting his way. Mr. Immelt took the reins of G.E. days before Sept. 11, 2001.

What surprised me most during my conversations with Mr. Welch was how eager he was to share what he thought of as Mr. Immelt’s mistakes running G.E.: He freaked out during the financial crisis and sold G.E.’s majority stake in NBC Universal, which included the television network and Hollywood studio, too cheaply; he overpaid for acquisitions; he dismantled the highly profitable but risky G.E. Capital and failed to replace its lost earnings; he drove away talented executives because he didn’t listen to them. And on and on.

Mr. Immelt was a “know-it-all,” Mr. Welch told me. “And you couldn’t be a know-it-all and run a company that size. That’s it in a nutshell. He had the answer to everything. He knew who was buried in the unknown soldier’s tomb, OK? He didn’t listen to anybody,” Mr. Welch said. “If you want to pin failure on me, I missed it.”

Mr. Immelt was loath to criticize Mr. Welch, but suffice it to say that their relationship was rocky. Whereas Mr. Welch told me he thought he had left Mr. Immelt a royal flush to play, to Mr. Immelt it felt more like a losing hand. Mr. Immelt couldn’t get G.E. out of the insurance businesses fast enough. Whereas Mr. Welch loved NBC, Mr. Immelt found it an expensive albatross. Mr. Immelt instead pushed G.E. into renewable energy, oil and gas, water, software development and digital connectivity.

Some of Mr. Immelt’s big initiatives worked; most didn’t.

Today, G.E. is nearly irrelevant. Its market capitalization has shrunk to $95 billion on a good day, not much higher than that of Mondelez International, the maker of Oreo cookies and Triscuit crackers. In early 2023, G.E. will begin a historic dismantling into three separate companies, leaving only a jet engine business. It will be stripped of its once grand corporate headquarters in Boston and much of its exceptionalism.

It’s a cautionary tale of hype and hubris, and one that underscores the critical importance of choosing the right C.E.O. This may seem like an obvious point, yet it’s amazing how often the wrong person is chosen. (Need I mention Kenneth Lay, Bernard Ebbers or John Sculley?)

Why did Mr. Welch choose Mr. Immelt as his successor when he could just have easily chosen Mr. McNerney, who wound up a successful C.E.O. of both 3M and Boeing, or Robert Nardelli, who had a decent run as the C.E.O. of Home Depot and Chrysler? Or he could have retained David Cote, whom he forced out in 1999 and who went on to become a brilliant leader of Honeywell, which soon enough surpassed G.E. in market value.

If you conduct a corporate autopsy on G.E., as I have, it’s easy to see that Jeff Immelt presided over the demise of what once was the world’s most influential and powerful company. But by his own crass admissions to me, so did Mr. Welch.

Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward?

They dominated far longer than they were dominated, and, a new book contends, shaped the United States in profound ways.


By David Treuer The New Yorker

I remember when I first encountered what must be the best-selling book of Native American history ever published, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown. I was twenty years old, and had made my way from the Leech Lake Reservation, in northern Minnesota, where I grew up, to Princeton, in a part of New Jersey that seemed to have no Indians at all. Since “Bury My Heart” appeared, in 1970, it has been translated into seventeen languages, and sold millions of copies. In the opening pages, Brown wrote, “The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890—the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.”

I read this on the hundredth anniversary of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, in South Dakota. It was the last major armed conflict between an Indian tribe and the U.S. government, and more than two hundred and fifty Lakota men, women, and children were murdered there. Far from my Ojibwe homeland—marooned, I sometimes felt, on the distant shore of a self-satisfied republic—I readily accepted the version of history promoted by Brown’s book: that Native American history was a litany of abuses (disease, slavery, warfare, dispossession, forced removal, the near-extermination of the American bison, land grabs, forced assimilation) that had erased our way of life. And yet my culture and civilization didn’t feel gone. When I looked westward and back in time, I couldn’t help think that Brown’s historical record was incomplete—that the announcement of our collective death was rather premature.

Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Indigenous Continent” (Liveright) boldly sets out a counternarrative. In its opening pages, Hämäläinen—a Helsinki-born scholar at Oxford who specializes in early and Indigenous American history—maintains that the America we know was, in its borders, shape, and culture, far from inevitable. Even after the so-called colonial era, tribal nations often played a determining role in American history. In his view, we should speak not of “colonial America” but of “an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial,” and recognize that the central reality of the period was ongoing Indigenous resistance. By 1776, he notes, European powers had claimed most of the continent, but Indigenous people continued to control it. Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with Native nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better. The result, he promises, will be a North American history recentered on Native people and their own “overwhelming and persisting” power. Like treaties, though, scholarly promises have often been broken. Is Hämäläinen true to his word?

Throughout the roughly chronological work, Hämäläinen stresses movement. Tribal travelers crossed the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age, and then, around 1100 B.C.E., traversed an ice-free corridor along the flank of the Rocky Mountains, following game and evolving, culturally, as they went. Hämäläinen notes that other migration waves may have moved, in skin boats, through a maritime route, a seafood-rich “kelp highway,” that traced the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Patagonia. However settlement occurred, it happened quickly.

Hämäläinen spends the opening pages of the book detailing the rise and fall of early empires, in the Southwest and the Midwest in particular. “A distinctive pattern of simultaneous centralization and decentralization,” he says, characterized Indigenous history in the early second millennium C.E. Regional centers of power emerged; subordinate groups would rebel or break off and sometimes create their own centers of power. Some of these societies were highly stratified and hierarchical, with élites and, in certain cases, a kinglike single ruler. Such societies led to the development of Mogollon, Hohokam, and Ancestral Puebloan cultures in the Southwest. An ecological warm period, combined with new food technologies (the breeding and cultivation of corn, beans, and squash), helped give rise to the city of Cahokia, where the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers joined—the site of present-day St. Louis. Cahokia grew in population and size and had hundreds of ceremonial structures in the form of earthen mounds and plazas. At its peak, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, about forty thousand people lived in the vicinity. (It took seven centuries before North America saw a more populous city: Philadelphia, in 1790.)

But political culture was affected by climate. As temperatures dropped during the Little Ice Age, in the fourteenth century, Hämäläinen writes, “everything had to be smaller.” Cahokia’s society fractured into more mobile, less hierarchical groups, with hunting replacing farming as the dominant mode of living, and something similar happened in other dense Mississippian settlements. “Across the eastern half of the continent, people seem to have rejected the domineering priestly class for more collective and egalitarian social arrangements,” he concludes.

Hämäläinen’s broader point is that, long before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of the New World didn’t inhabit the stasis of an ethnographer’s account; they experienced a tumultuous process of continual change, which is to say, they were social and political actors. By the sixteenth century, around five million Native people had inhabited or made use of almost every part of North America. The usual story depicts them as dwelling in harmony with one another and the natural world in some cultural and ecological Eden that was then torn apart by Europeans. In fact, as Hämäläinen shows, they manipulated nature—rerouting water to create gardens in the desert, domesticating cultivars through seed selection—and they projected power, sometimes in violent ways, subordinating or being subordinated to their neighbors. They didn’t live in harmony; they lived in history.

Just as the initial settlement of the New World was marked by movement, so, too, were Indigenous forms of domination. It’s a thesis that Hämäläinen elaborated in an influential previous book, “The Comanche Empire” (2008): where European empires tended to be sedentary, marking power through permanent structures, dominant Native ones were “kinetic empires,” with everything—markets, missions, political assemblies—kept fluid and in motion. From the perspective of their neighbors, who were subject to their opportunistic, long-distance raids, the Comanches were, he noted, “everywhere and nowhere.”

The same kinetic strategy often characterized the Native response to European invasion and settlement—the early Spanish attempts to colonize Florida and the American Southwest, the English efforts to gain a foothold on the East Coast, followed by the French in the north and mid-continent, and the Dutch efforts around New York and the Hudson Valley. Hämäläinen wants us to see these colonial forays from a Native perspective, and to focus on how tribal nations retained their ascendancy.

When Hernando de Soto explored Florida and regions to the north, Hämäläinen recounts, he ventured into the territory of the Cofitachequi Nation, where he met its leader, known as the Lady of Cofitachequi, who was brought to the meeting on a litter. Perhaps sensing a chance to trade, she gave de Soto a pearl necklace; in response, he took her captive. The expedition moved on, in pursuit of even greater wealth. All this could sound like a story of colonial triumph, but Hämäläinen argues that we have it backward: “Soto and other conquistadors believed they were conquering new lands for the Spanish Empire, but in reality, Indians were carefully steering the Europeans’ course, sending them away with fantastical stories of treasures farther ahead.” And that’s a pattern that he regularly lays out: often, when European conquerors thought that they were subjugating tribal nations, the Europeans were actually being manipulated and controlled by them.

And what looked like bold military successes frequently involved a misunderstanding of Indigenous political structures. In the American Southwest, conquistadors such as Juan de Oñate and Vicente de Zaldívar thought they were controlling the so-called Pueblo Empire by decapitating it, as had been done among the Incas and the Maya. Yet the Pueblo communities in the Southwest were a loosely allied network of autonomous towns, rather than a centrally organized kingdom. Massacres at places like Acoma—where, in 1599, the Spanish killed around eight hundred Pueblo in retaliation for the deaths of a dozen Spanish soldiers—didn’t change the balance of power; they merely taught Indigenous people that the Spaniards were to be resisted. By the end of the sixteenth century, after nearly a hundred years of attempted conquests, Spain had failed to establish any serious settlements in North America.

Hämäläinen shows how the persistent power of Indigenous people similarly caused the early collapse of Jamestown. During the “starving time” of 1609-10, the English colonists—unable to hunt and unwilling to farm—ate dogs, cats, rats, horses, and, occasionally, one another. They failed to take the measure of the Powhatans, who had already subjugated a number of rival tribal nations. Now it was the ravaged colonists, Hämäläinen tells us, who were incorporated into Powhatan power structures. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1611, three English ships, bearing hundreds of soldiers, showed up; as Jamestown was reoccupied, the English burned Powhatan cornfields and slaughtered entire Native settlements. It sounds like a familiar story of colonial cruelty, and yet Hämäläinen offers a different emphasis: such massacres, he says, were the actions of terrified, isolated, weak, and ultimately unstable communities. In Hämäläinen’s view, the colonial violence “exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule.” He notes that into the mid-seventeenth century—a century and a half after Columbus—the coastal settlements established by the English, French, and Dutch colonists remained fragile and hemmed in; most of the continent was effectively off limits to them. The struggle was for survival more than for territorial expansion.

Only in the late seventeenth century did the French and the English begin to push into the heartland, engaging complex configurations of Indigenous power in contending for control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Yet even then colonial gains were precarious and provisional. By the mid-eighteenth century, Indian rebellions had rolled back European incursions; the Spanish, the French, and the English clung mainly to the coasts and rivers. The vast interior of the continent was largely unknown to them, and the tidy lines of the thirteen colonies were more aspirational than actual.

As the Europeans sought to entrench an imperial presence on the continent, many tribes conglomerated into lasting yet plastic empires of their own. The Iroquois Confederacy (made up of the Cayuga, the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and the Tuscarora) was the most significant power in the Northeast; the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) was largely in control of the western Great Lakes; and, later, the Comanche on the southern Plains and the Lakota (along with the Nakota and the Dakota, who spoke distinct dialects of the same language) had military control of larger sections of the continent than any single European power did. Hämäläinen encourages us to see this time not as a period of colonial conquest but as a clash of empires, some European and some Indigenous.

Indigenous foreign policy among the Iroquois and the Three Fires confederacies had evolved into a kind of kinetic détente. My ancestors kept the French and the British off balance by making and breaking alliances as necessary, preventing both from getting the upper hand and keeping both dependent on Native nations. One of the side effects of this policy was the Seven Years’ War, which can plausibly be regarded as the first world war. The conflict began in what’s now Ohio, where an Odawa-French war chief named Charles Langlade led a coalition of Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe soldiers against a British fort near Pickawillany. They killed thirteen Miami soldiers and took the British hostage. The attackers executed an English blacksmith, who had been wounded in the attack, and then boiled and ate his heart in front of the horrified garrison. Vignettes such as these make the point that tribal nations, including my own, were shoving Europeans around (and eating their hearts) for quite a long time, and help dislodge the idea that tribes were either passively doomed or ineffectually violent.

In time, the reasons for the clash of Indigenous and European empires began to change: the contest wasn’t simply for resources and the ability to transport them but for land itself. As the colonies expanded, accordingly, the elimination of tribal nations became a goal. By the time of the American Revolution, the French had been almost entirely expelled from what is now the United States, and the British pushed into what is now Canada; the Spanish, meanwhile, had divested themselves of most of their holdings north of the Rio Grande through war, treaties, and trade. Yet many tribal nations remained, too strong to ignore or subdue. Thayendanegea, an Iroquois leader, warned President Washington’s Secretary of War, “You consider yourselves as independent people; we, as the original inhabitants of this country, and sovereigns of the soil, look upon ourselves as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations.”

Meanwhile, the new American nation found itself crushed under war debt; individual former colonies had different needs and pursued different foreign policies. The government couldn’t sustain multiple wars against multiple Indigenous groups. Instead, it deployed treaties and settlements as a means of subjugation. In the Ohio Country, Congress sold millions of acres of land it didn’t own to coastal speculators, who in turn enticed settlers with large tracts for little money. “The strategy was obvious: once the land was sold, colonists would eradicate Native Americans on their own,” Hämäläinen writes.

All in all, between 1783 and 1803, fighting with tribes drained the U.S. Treasury and absorbed roughly eighty per cent of all federal spending. As a result, the government was forced to expand its authority over regional entities; new powers granted by the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, in 1790, elbowed aside individual states when it came to the making of treaties and to the control of trade with tribal nations. It was in reaction to Native power and resistance that the augmented role of the federal government—the “United” part of the United States—arose.

As the U.S. grew through the nineteenth century, the balances of power once again shifted; spasms of violence ranged across the West and pitted the Comanche, the Apache, the Cheyenne, and the Lakota against one another and against the federal government. The United States drew on its increasing supply of bodies and of wealth to destroy, bypass, or enfold Native nations on its march to the Pacific. In the last few chapters of “Indigenous Continent,” Hämäläinen, whose book on the Comanche was followed by one on the Lakota, spends a fair amount of time on these two highly kinetic nations.

“Indigenous Continent” itself has a kinetic quality; the account is magisterial but also frenzied, bringing in a plethora of instances in its effort to complicate the standard account. Hämäläinen is fond of the long-distance scholarly raid, and the book often proceeds at a gallop. Still, the pace and the scope of the book have a force of their own: Hämäläinen makes it clear that America’s past is crazily, energetically, tumultuously crowded with incident; that Indigenous power has affected everything about America.

Has he delivered on the idea of an “Indigenous continent”? That’s a harder question. The great value of Hämäläinen’s work is as a corrective polemic. In restoring historical agency to Native peoples, he joins a number of accomplished historians who over the past generation have advanced Native scholarship, including Richard White, Patricia Limerick, Ned Blackhawk, Michael McDonnell, Elizabeth Fenn, and others. The Native historian Joshua Reid has startlingly challenged the very “bifurcation of Indian versus non-Indian colonists.” Because we know how things turned out, the argument goes, we’re tempted to fixate on the power struggles between European and Native groups while overlooking power struggles among Native peoples. The Lakota, for example, are intelligible only in relation to the Dakota and the Mandan and the Arikara and the Hidatsa as well as to the Ojibwe, the French, the English, and, later, the Americans. Similarly, the Iroquois come into focus only by way of their relationships with the Dutch, the English, the Wyandot, the Shawnee, the French, the English, and the Choctaw. Hämäläinen shows us, again and again, how various European and tribal nations ebbed and flowed not in isolation but in constant tension.

And yet the limitations of Hämäläinen’s approach are striking, too. Despite his avowed aim to tell the story of North America from an Indigenous perspective, the main history he relates largely follows the white settlers in their movements. We get conflict zones in the Appalachians, south of the Great Lakes, in the Ohio River Valley, and, later, on the Great Plains, but in each instance Hämäläinen replicates the very thing he has said he was writing against: a fundamentally east-to-west story of European colonial expansion. Nor is the purview of “Indigenous Continent” exactly continental. Hämäläinen spends hardly any time in the Pacific Northwest or along the California coast. We learn little about the alliances and conflicts between tribal nations and the Spanish which flowed from north to south along the Rio Grande, from what is now Colorado to Mexico City. We learn little, for that matter, about the alliances and conflicts that the Iroquois and the Three Fires confederacies had with the British and the French in what is now Canada, extending all the way north to Hudson Bay. What we get is less an “Indigenous continent” than a Native United States.

The book is, at times, breathless in its exposition, and nuance is sometimes lost in the shuffle. So, too, are the attempts to include Indigenous concepts—linguistic, spiritual, cultural. Scholars will debate whether the formation and expansion of certain tribal nations are best understood in reference to European models of empire. And Hämäläinen’s eagerness to characterize the colonial slaughter of Indigenous people as evidence of fear and weakness wears thin as the tide turns, and the story of pitched battle gives way to one of systematic subjugation.

There is, of course, only so much that one book can do. As it is, the tremendous scope of “Indigenous Continent” exacts a narrative cost: often it reads like a monkish chronicle—a quick succession of names, dates, harvests, tragedies, schisms, rejoinings, subsequent sunderings, wins, losses. But, if Hämäläinen’s achievements are more circumscribed than his ambitions, it’s impossible not to honor both. I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand. It would have helped me see that there was indeed a larger story: that my civilization hadn’t been destroyed; that my tribe’s contribution to the past wasn’t merely to fade away in the face of history; that Native peoples—for better or for worse—made this country what it was, and have a role to play in what it now struggles to be. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 14, 2022, issue, with the headline “On Native Grounds.”

Darkness Visible

by Christopher Horner 3 Quarks Daily

Port Sunlight was a model village constructed in Wirral, in the Liverpool area, by the Lever brothers, and especially under the inspiration of William Lever, later lord Leverhulme. Their fortune was based on the manufacture of soap, and the village was built next to the factory in the Victorian/Edwardian era, for the employees and their families. It’s certainly a remarkable place, with different houses designed by various architects, parks, allotments, everything an Edwardian working-class person might want. An enlightened employer, Lever was still a paternalist: he claimed his village was an exercise in profit sharing, because “It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation.” Overseers had the right to visit any house at any time to check for ‘cleanliness’ and that the rules about who could live in which house were observed (men and women could only share accommodation if they were in the same family). Still, by the stands of the day it was quite progressive – schools, art gallery, recreation of all sorts for the employees were important.

Near the center of the place is the Lady Lever Art gallery. In there is an enormous collection of art objects, much of it reflecting the taste, as one might expect, of the times – pre-Raphaelites art, heavy ‘historical paintings and more. There is also some art from other periods, including the 18th century. And it’s here I was startled when I visited the place. For one painting depicts a lady of that time, with a black slave. Now there were many people of African origin in England in the late 1700s, up to three percent of the total population of London (estimates vary a lot). And there are plenty of paintings of the noble and landed gentry and their ladies featuring a black boy or girl as a kind of accessory, signaling the status of the main subject of the portrait. But this image – of a French mistress and slave, the only one in the gallery to feature a person of colour, was particularly egregious. To quote the Liverpool museums website:

The oil painting, created in 1705 and attributed to Jean Baptiste Santerre (1658-1717), is the Gallery’s only work of art from the 18th century which depicts a person of colour. It shows an enslaved African boy, brought from a plantation to work as an unpaid house servant. His name is not known, and he wears a degrading metal collar around his neck which was used to mark enslaved people as property. Catherine-Marie Legendre (d.1749), was the wife of French nobleman, Claude Pecoil (1629-1722), Marquise de Septime.

At this time, it was not uncommon for wealthy white women to be painted with an enslaved Black servant in a way that signified her position in society. Often dressed in ornate outfits, they were depicted as trappings of wealth. Furthermore, their dark skin was often used in portraiture to highlight the paleness of the sitter’s skin, as pale skin was considered a sign of beauty. Here, the boy is offering a bowl of rare and exotic fruit, while Legendre’s hand rests on the boy’s head to signify her ownership.

On the website, and in the gallery itself, we read these words:

Does this portrait belong on the walls of the gallery today? Does it help us understand and tell the history of slavery or does it continue to honour someone who benefited from the slave trade?

Viewers are then invited to email their comments.

Yes: it does need to be shown. We need more awareness and discussion of the history of slavery, not less, for it still marks our world in many ways, and Liverpool was a major contributor to the slave trade of the 18th century. Fortunately, Liverpool museums seem to have worked with the local Black Lives Matter movement in coming to the design to show it. Alyson Pollard, Head of the Lady Lever Art Gallery writes (and this is on the wall in the gallery, as well):

The Lady Lever Art Gallery is seeking to display, more openly, the Black histories and stories linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its legacies which are not currently transparent in the collections. Displaying this disturbing painting prominently, and acknowledging its context is the beginning of a long-term project to ensure our collections are not seen and viewed through a single historic lens but instead reflect multiple histories. The painting was previously displayed high up on a wall in the William and Mary room and under reflective glass. Its depiction of life for the very wealthy and of the injustices suffered by people of colour at this time make this a very significant image and one which we felt needed to be in a more prominent location.

A short walk from the Lady Lever Art Gallery takes you to the Port Sunlight Museum, where there is more to learn about the economy of empire. Here we learn that the ‘enlightened’ Lever drew on forced labour in the Belgian Congo to supply the palm oil for his soap. And he was an enthusiastic liberal imperialist: the resources for his manufacture lay in the places he wanted to see the empire expanded into. The website adds:

This re-display is one of several actions which the Lady Lever Art Gallery is taking in response to Black Lives Matter and the death of George Floyd. This includes openly acknowledging Lord Lever’s activities in West Africa during the period 1911 to 1925 and beginning the process of reinterpreting its collection.

Some people will argue that ‘the past cannot be judged by todays standards’. I disagree. Firstly, ‘todays standards’ where shared by many people in the time of slavery: it was denounced and fought against at the time. That is one of the reasons it doesn’t exist now. It’s also the case that the racism of slavery continues to have its long afterlife. The killing of black men and women by the law enforcement agencies in the USA, UK, France and beyond tell us something about where we are, or aren’t, when it comes to race and justice.

The BLM movement, and others like it, have forced a discussion about that past, and what it means. BLM is not ‘identity politics’: it is a universalistic demand for justice for all: black lives clearly have not, do not, matter to too many of those with the power of life and death. BLM is the latest example of the way in which what we do now helps change the meaning of the past. The aim, that of justice, surely casts a light back on to the numberless others who were used and crushed by chattel slavery – among whom that boy in the picture was one. Let them come from the shadows. Let him be seen.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” and the Santerre painting can surely stand as an example of that. But there is another insight that occurs to me in this context: that the meaning of the past, including identity of the winners and losers of past struggles, is not settled. What we do now changes the meaning of what went before:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. [1]

Who Is the Man Accused of Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband?

Who Is the Man Accused of Attacking Nancy Pelosi’s Husband?

Those who have known the suspect describe an individual who seemed to fall into isolation and deeply troubling thoughts.

By Kellen Browning, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage and Eliza Fawcett

SAN FRANCISCO — A trail of strained relationships. An itinerant life that included a stint living in a storage unit. A personality that was “consumed by darkness.”

Accounts from people who know the man accused of the break-in and violent attack Friday on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, described indications of a troubled individual and growing signs of politically fueled hate.

That man, David DePape, 42, remains in custody and will likely face several charges, including attempted homicide and assault with a deadly weapon, as early as Monday, with an arraignment expected Tuesday, the authorities said. The San Francisco district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, said on Saturday that Mr. DePape had given a statement to the San Francisco Police Department, though she declined to elaborate.

According to law enforcement officials, Mr. DePape broke into the Pelosis’ San Francisco home in the early morning hours on Friday through a back entrance. He was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington, the authorities have said, and yelled, “Where is Nancy?” In a struggle with Mr. Pelosi, 82, over a hammer, Mr. DePape struck Mr. Pelosi with it at least once as the police arrived and apprehended him, the police said. At the house, Mr. DePape had zip ties and also possessed a bag of supplies, according to the authorities, someone with knowledge of the investigation said on Sunday.

On Saturday, Ms. Pelosi said in a letter to colleagues that her husband’s condition was continuing to improve and that she thanked them for their support. “Our children, our grandchildren and I are heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack on our Pop,” she wrote. “We are grateful for the quick response of law enforcement and emergency services, and for the life-saving medical care he is receiving.”

Ms. Jenkins said that Mr. DePape had sustained “minor injuries” and had been treated at a hospital, but it was uncertain on Saturday evening whether he was still receiving medical care.

A precise sequence of the break-in is still emerging, and a portrait of Mr. DePape is only beginning to take shape. People who have known him at various points in his life reveal a shy person who sought to improve the world, but also as someone whose life seemed to drift and whose behavior seemed strange at times, even unhinged.

When Linda Schneider, 65, knew Mr. DePape for a couple of years starting in 2009, she was running an urban farm for low-income communities in the East Bay area. Mr. DePape would help her with her chickens and occasionally house-sit for her, she said.

At the time, Mr. DePape was living out of a storage unit in Berkeley and making hemp bracelets, said Ms. Schneider, who still lives in California. He had been using hard drugs but was trying to straighten his life, she said. She recalled him as being reliable, easygoing and painfully shy.

“He wouldn’t even have a bank account because he was terrified of talking to a teller,” she said.

By 2012, Ms. Schneider said she began receiving “very bizarre” emails from Mr. DePape in which he equated himself with Jesus Christ. She felt the messages were “somewhat dangerous,” she said, and she stopped communicating with him.

“This was a guy who didn’t have a lot of internal strength,” she said. “He’d follow anything a little abnormal in front of him.”

Teresa DePape, who is married to Gene DePape, Mr. DePape’s stepfather, first met David DePape when he was in high school in Powell River, British Columbia. Ms. DePape remembered him as a funny teenager who liked to joke and laugh and play computer games. He had some friends, she said, but not a lot. “He was a good kid,” she said.

Mr. DePape finished high school in Armstrong, another city in British Columbia, but the family had little contact with him after that point, she said.

“We tried to at first,” she said. “But he never responded, so we stopped.”

Mr. DePape left Canada about 20 years ago, in pursuit of a relationship that brought him to California, as reported by CNN.

Law enforcement officials over the weekend were examining what appeared to be Mr. DePape’s copious online presence, though they declined to comment publicly on his online accounts.

But a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” contains an array of angry and paranoid postings. The blog’s domain was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and a resident of that town said that Mr. DePape lived at that address. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured a flurry of antisemitic sentiments and concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.

One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.

In one post, written on Oct. 19, the author urged former President Donald J. Trump to choose Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Ms. Gabbard left the Democratic Party this month and then made several high-profile campaign appearances with Republicans running for office.

“Trump you NEEEEEEEED to make Tulsi your VP in 2024,” the user wrote. “Of the ENTIRE democrat presidential candidates in 2020. She was the only democrat candidate who WASN’T running on a platform of being an insane mentally unwell demagogue.”

But mixed in with those posts were others about religion, the occult and images of fairies that the user said he had produced using an artificial intelligence imaging system.

Several other posts were consumed with culture war issues and seemed to closely track with current events. One post was about the nearly $1 billion defamation judgment entered this month against Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy theory-driven media outlet Infowars.

Still, Ms. Schneider said that she was stunned and angered when she learned that the police had identified Mr. DePape as Mr. Pelosi’s attacker.

“Who attacks people in their 80s?” she said. “That’s just the epitome of cruelty.”

Inti Gonzalez, who said she considered Mr. DePape a father figure because her mother had a relationship with him when she was growing up, said in a blog post on her website and on her Facebook page that Mr. DePape was someone who wanted to have his voice heard, “but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”

On her blog, Ms. Gonzalez said that her mother, Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, met Mr. DePape when she was pregnant with Ms. Gonzalez. Their romantic relationship lasted only a few years, but Mr. DePape stayed around longer to take care of Ms. Gonzalez and her two younger brothers, until leaving eight years ago, when she was 13, Ms. Gonzalez said.

“There is some part of him that is a good person even though he has been very consumed by darkness,” she wrote.

Ms. Taub garnered public attention in 2012 when she spoke out against a ban on nudity proposed by Scott Wiener, the San Francisco supervisor, culminating in a 2013 nude wedding at San Francisco City Hall. Mr. DePape, a fatherly influence on Ms. Taub’s three children, planned to serve as a best man at the wedding, SFGate reported at the time.

A 2015 SF Weekly profile of Ms. Taub described her as “a seasoned 9/11 truther, aficionado of psychedelics, and sexual free spirit.” In 2021, Ms. Taub, 53, was found guilty by a jury of charges including stalking and attempted child abduction. She is incarcerated at the California Institution for Women.

On Friday, Ms. Taub’s home in Berkeley, a large Victorian-style duplex, appeared run-down, with abandoned cars in the driveway and stuffed animals hanging in the trees in the front yard. Two teenage boys appeared to live there, one of whom spoke with F.B.I. officials as a crowd of reporters looked on.

A neighbor, Ryan La Coste, 35, said that Mr. DePape had been a semi-frequent visitor to the house and continued to stop by after Ms. Taub was incarcerated.

Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong

Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong — and offer a window onto intelligence

JON HAMILTON NPR Science

A dish of living brain cells has learned to play the 1970s arcade game Pong.

About 800,000 cells linked to a computer gradually learned to sense the position of the game's electronic ball and control a virtual paddle, a team reports in the journal Neuron.

The novel achievement is part of an effort to understand how the brain learns, and how to make computers more intelligent.

"We've made huge strides with silicon computing, but they're still rigid and inflexible," says Brett Kagan, an author of the study and chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. "That's something we don't see with biology."

For example, both computers and people can learn to make a cup of tea, Kagan says. But people are able to generalize what they've learned in a way a computer can't.

"You might have never been to someone else's house, but with a bit of rummaging and searching you can probably make a decent cup of tea as long as I've got the ingredients," he says. But even a very powerful computer would struggle to carry out that task in an unfamiliar environment.

So Cortical Labs has been trying to understand how living brain cells acquire this sort of intelligence. And Kagan says the Pong experiment was a way for the company to answer a key question about how a network of brain cells learns to change its behavior:

"If we allow these cells to know the outcome of their actions, will they actually be able to change in some sort of goal-directed way," Kagan says.

To find out, the scientists used a system they've developed called DishBrain. 

This scanning electron microscope image shows a neural culture growing on a high-density multi-electrode array. This system allowed researchers to train neurons to play the video game Pong.

Cortical Labs

A layer of living neurons is grown on a special silicon chip at the bottom of a thumb-size dish filled with nutrients. The chip, which is linked to a computer, can both detect electrical signals produced by the neurons, and deliver electrical signals to them.

To test the learning ability of the cells, the computer generated a game of Pong, a two-dimensional version of table tennis that gained a cult following as one of the first and most basic video games.

Pong is played on a video screen. A black rectangle defines the table, and a white cursor represents each player's paddle, which can be moved up or down to intercept a white ball.

In the simplified version used in the experiment, there was a single paddle on the left side of the virtual table, and the ball would carom off the other sides until it evaded the paddle.

To allow the brain cells to play the game, the computer sent signals to them indicating where the bouncing ball was. At the same time, it began monitoring information coming from the cells in the form of electrical pulses.

"We took that information and we allowed it to influence this Pong game that they were playing," Kagan says. "So they could move the paddle around."

At first, the cells didn't understand the signals coming from the computer, or know what signals to send the other direction. They also had no reason to play the game.

So the scientists tried to motivate the cells using electrical stimulation: a nicely organized burst of electrical activity if they got it right. When they got it wrong, the result was a chaotic stream of white noise.

"If they hit the ball, we gave them something predictable," Kagan says. "When they missed it, they got something that was totally unpredictable."

The strategy was based on the Free Energy Principle, which states that brain cells want to be able to predict what's going on in their environment. So they would choose predictable stimulation over unpredictable stimulation.

The approach worked. Cells began to learn to generate patterns of electrical activity that would move the paddle in front of the ball, and gradually rallies got longer.

The brain cells never got that good at Pong. But interestingly, human brain cells seemed to achieve a slightly higher level of play than mouse brain cells, Kagan says.

And the level of play was remarkable, considering that each network contained fewer cells than the brain of a cockroach, Kagan says.

"If you could see a cockroach playing a game of Pong and it was able to hit the ball twice as often as it was missing it, you would be pretty impressed with that cockroach," he says.

The results hint at a future in which biology helps computers become more intelligent by changing the way that they learn, Kagan says.

But that future is probably still a long way off, says Steve M. Potter, an adjunct associate professor at Georgia Tech.

"The idea of a computer that has some living components is exciting and it's starting to become a reality," he says. "However, the kinds of learning that these things can accomplish is quite rudimentary right now."

Even so, Potter says the system that allowed cells to learn Pong could be a great tool for doing research.

"This is sort of a semi-living animal model that one can use to study all sorts of mechanisms in the nervous system, not just learning," he says.

Here’s Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter

By Michelle Goldberg NY TIMES

I’ve sometimes described being on Twitter as like staying too late at a bad party full of people who hate you. I now think this was too generous to Twitter. I mean, even the worst party's end.

Twitter is more like an existentialist parable of a party, with disembodied souls trying and failing to be properly seen, forever. It’s not surprising that the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as “this hell site.”

So I have mixed feelings about what might be the impending takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, whose neural network seems perpetually plugged into the platform. Musk first made an ill-advised move to buy Twitter in the spring. After signing papers with little due diligence, he tried to back out. Twitter sued, and on the cusp of the trial Musk reversed course again, agreeing to go forward with the sale.

It’s far from a done deal — the financing is still uncertain — but Musk appears to recognize that the alternative is potentially embarrassing litigation that he is likely to lose. (Already, the lawsuit has resulted in the release of a bunch of Musk’s text messages, showing many of his sycophantic associates channeling Kendall Roy.)

That means a Musk-owned Twitter is, at the very least, a distinct possibility. I understand why this is, for many on the left, deeply chilling. Musk’s politics are shaped by a fondness for trolling and a hatred of wokeness, and he’s likely to make the site a more congenial place for racist demagogues and conspiracy theorists. Among other things, he’s promised to reinstate Donald Trump, whose account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Other far-right figures may not be far behind, along with Russian propagandists, Covid deniers and the like. Given Twitter’s outsize influence on media and politics, this will probably make American public life even more fractious and deranged.

I have a shred of hope, however, that if Musk makes Twitter awful enough, users will flee, and it will become less relevant. I’m usually wary of arguments that declining conditions are a catalyst to progress — contrary to the formulation often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, “the worse, the better,” worse is usually just worse. I’m going to make an exception for Twitter, though. The best thing it could do for society would be to implode.

An obvious question — one my kids ask me all the time — is why I use Twitter if I detest it so much. The easy part of the answer is that it’s useful for my job. It’s a font of breaking news, a way to quickly survey what lots of different people are saying, a tool for promoting my writing, and sometimes a vehicle for contacting sources. It was on Twitter that I learned that Musk had finally agreed, again, to buy Twitter. As soon as this column is published, I’ll post it there.

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

Twitter is not, obviously, the only social media platform with addictive qualities. But with its constant promise of breaking news, it feeds the hunger of people who work in journalism and politics, giving it a disproportionate, and largely negative, impact on those fields, and hence on our national life.

It’s true that Twitter can be good for drawing attention to injustice and galvanizing demonstrations, as it did after the killing of George Floyd. But as my colleague Zeynep Tufekci showed in her book “Twitter and Tear Gas,” while social media helps leaderless movements coalesce quickly, the absence of a real-world organizing infrastructure can fatally undermine them. That’s one reason, as The New York Times recently reported, mass protest movements “are today more likely to fail than they were at any other point since at least the 1930s.”

Twitter is much better at stoking tribalism than promoting progress. According to a 2021 study, content expressing “out-group animosity” — negative feelings toward disfavored groups — is a major driver of social-media engagement. That builds on earlier research showing that on Twitter, false information, especially about politics, spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth.” Trump was almost certainly right when he said that without Twitter, he wouldn’t have become president.

The company’s internal research has shown that Twitter’s algorithm amplifies right-wing accounts and news sources over left-wing ones. This dynamic will probably intensify quite a bit if Musk takes over. Musk has said that Twitter has “a strong left bias,” and that he wants to undo permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly call for violence. That suggests figures like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene will be welcomed back.

But as one of the people who texted Musk pointed out, returning banned right-wingers to Twitter will be a “delicate game.” After all, the reason Twitter introduced stricter moderation in the first place was that its toxicity was bad for business. Back in 2016, Disney came close to buying Twitter, but was ultimately put off in large part by the harassment rampant on the platform. “Disney’s discomfort with abuse on the site indicates that it’s a larger problem for Twitter’s business prospects than its executives imagined,” reported Bloomberg.

If Musk moves Twitter in the direction of right-wing sites like Gab, Parler and Truth Social, he might attract some new users, but at the price of repelling others. Already, Twitter user growth has slowed, and as Musk pointed out when he was trying to get out of the deal, many of its top accounts don’t post much. For A-list entertainers, The Washington Post reports, Twitter “is viewed as a high-risk, low-reward platform.” Plenty of non-celebrities feel the same way; I can’t count the number of interesting people who were once active on the site but aren’t anymore.

An influx of Trumpists is not going to improve the vibe. Twitter can’t be saved. If we’re lucky, it can be destroyed.

 

Boys and Men Are in Crisis

Boys and Men Are in Crisis Because Society Is.

MICHELLE GOLDBERG The NY Times

Many years ago, I went to a nail salon at an upscale mall in Kampala, Uganda, and was surprised that almost everyone working there was male. When I asked one of the employees why this was, he explained that doing nails was men’s work because it paid well. The salon wasn’t unique; as one local newspaper put it, “There is no visitor that comes to Uganda and won’t notice and comment about the young men carrying a basket in their hand with a manicure set.”

I thought of those male manicurists while reading Richard V. Reeves’s much-discussed new book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.” Reeves writes about the myriad ways boys and men, particularly in America, are flailing: Many are falling behind in school, disconnected from family, vulnerable to opioid abuse and to deaths of despair. He believes, I think rightly, that it is important to recruit more men into fast-growing industries now dominated by women, particularly health and education.

But though Reeves, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, recognizes material causes of men’s suffering, he’s hesitant to offer redistributive solutions. He emphasizes clever technocratic interventions, like having boys start school later than girls in order to account for their slower development, over far-reaching reforms, like increasing unionization and ending public subsidies for job-displacing automation.

The result is a book that, while often useful and interesting, also reveals the limits of wonky moderation. (I wasn’t surprised to learn that Reeves once served as director of strategy for the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat and self-described “radical” centrist.) Dismissive of partisanship, Reeves elides the political and economic decisions that have made American life brutal, in different but overlapping ways, for women and men both.

In his preface, Reeves says that he was reluctant to write “Of Boys and Men,” and that many people advised him against it because of the “current political climate.” He needn’t have worried. There’s been little left-wing backlash to the book, which is good, because the issues it raises are important.

Like many parents, I’ve seen how school is harder for my son than my daughter. “Boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading and science,” writes Reeves. Things don’t get easier when boys grow up. Men’s rates of work force participation have fallen and their suicide rates have risen. It’s possible to believe that sexism remains a major impediment to women’s flourishing and also believe that for many boys and men life is much harder than it should be.

Even if you’re not inclined to care much about men’s welfare, their growing anomie and resentment is everyone’s problem, fueling right-wing populist movements around the world. People who feel unmoored and demeaned are going to be receptive to the idea that the natural order of things has been upended, the core claim of reactionary politics.

Some of men’s dislocation is an inevitable product of modernization, which, by making physical brawn less economically important, blurs men and women’s social roles. It is not just America, after all, where more women than men earn college degrees. There are also more female than male college students in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, which suggests, at least to me, that girls may be more innately disposed to academic life.

But male problems can be either exacerbated or ameliorated by political choices. Reeves makes the case that girls are more resilient than boys, writing that “economic and social disadvantage hurts boys more than girls.” Presumably, it would follow that disinvestment in public schools — including growing class sizes and the reduction of recess and gym in favor of test prep — is also hitting boys particularly hard. Yet Reeves spends more time bemoaning the left’s use of the phrase “toxic masculinity” than discussing how schools are funded or, for that matter, the school-to-prison pipeline.

Similarly, Reeves makes a convincing case that boys benefit from male teachers, and that Black boys benefit from Black male teachers. He calls for a “massive, urgent recruitment effort,” which is a fine idea, but one that’s likely to be futile unless we stop demonizing teachers and start paying them fairly. Old-fashioned sexism means that lower-paid and lower-status jobs are dominated by women. Reeves is in favor of raising teaching salaries, but it’s something he mentions in an almost offhand way. He spends more time discussing the need for marketing campaigns to sell men on traditionally female jobs.

Reeves has his own marketing to do, so his emphases make sense: Demanding more money for schools is boring; his plan to give boys an extra year of preschool is novel and provocative. But as he writes, “The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.” If that’s true, we also need deep structural changes to heal it.