In Lawrence Wright's prophetic novel, The End Of October (2020) predicts a breakdown of society in the midst of a pandemic. With a different cause of the breakdown, our current stiutation is eerily similar. If this is a (fair & balanced) report about cities across the nation that have become hellholes of violence, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The Atlantic]
Are They Police Departments Or Armies?
By Nick Baumann
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
This is what escalation looks like. “The situation on the ground in Minneapolis & St. Paul has shifted & the response tonight will be different as a result,” the Minnesota Department of Public Safety tweeted as businesses boarded up their windows and the Saturday sun sank low over the Twin Cities. The National Guard and law-enforcement presence would “triple in size,” the state agency warned, “to address a sophisticated network of urban warfare.”
“urban warfare” is a striking choice of words for a state agency, and one that cable-news anchors seized on and repeated in the fiery hours that followed. For the fifth straight night, Americans marched and chanted—and some rioted and looted—overwhelmed with frustration and rage by the Monday killing of George Floyd, who died while a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck [PDF] for eight minutes and 46 seconds. Prosecutors charged Chauvin with manslaughter and third-degree murder on Friday, but three other police officers involved in the incident remain free. And the current protests are about not one black man’s death, but thousands of them, and centuries of discrimination, dehumanization, and denial of basic civil rights.
The police and the US military are separate institutions because policing a community and fighting a war are supposed to be separate jobs. In traditional “wars,” both sides are heavily armed. In Minnesota, only the agents of the state appear to be wearing body armor and carrying long guns. And yet: State officials are calling this “warfare” on official public channels. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety and a spokesperson for Governor Tim Walz did not respond to requests for comment about the language.
“War” is not how public officials have referred to the protests by pro-Confederate and white-nationalist groups in recent years; those gatherings have not generally been dispersed by tear gas and rubber bullets. Nor were the armed “Liberate” protesters who swarmed the Michigan statehouse earlier this month removed by force; instead, the legislature canceled its session. But perhaps it was inevitable that officials would turn to military language as demonstrations spread across the country this week. In cities large and small, police departments are now outfitted like military units. When you’re driving an armored vehicle down Main Street, civilians can begin to look like insurgents.
Militarization can escalate already tense situations. Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown escalated dramatically on their second day, when police showed up in Humvees, wearing camouflage, and carrying M4s. This can be taken to even more absurd extremes: That same year, the police department in Fargo, North Dakota, attracted my colleague James Fallows’s attention for riding through the snow in full military-style camo, hanging off their armored vehicle. The last major “public disturbance” in the area had been during the 2001 Testicle Festival, more than a decade earlier.
The state of Minnesota’s “urban warfare” rhetoric is the inevitable consequence of this decades-long militarization of American police departments, Arthur Rizer, a policing expert at the center-right R Street Institute, told me late Saturday.
“You create this world where you’re not just militarizing the police—you equip the police like soldiers, you train the police like soldiers. Why are you surprised when they act like soldiers?” Rizer, a former police officer and soldier, said. “The mission of the police is to protect and serve. But the premise of the soldier is to engage the enemy in close combat and destroy them. When you blur those lines together with statements like that … It’s an absolute breakdown of civil society.”
American police officers generally believe that carrying military equipment and wearing military gear makes them feel like they can do more, and that it makes them scarier, Rizer’s research has found. Officers even acknowledge that acting and dressing like soldiers could change how the public feels about them. But “they don’t care,” he said. Most of the time, heavily armed police units such as SWAT teams are used not for the hostage and active-shooter scenarios for which they are ostensibly designed, but instead for work like executing search warrants, a 2014 study [PDF] found. And agencies that use military equipment kill civilians at much higher rates than agencies that don’t, according to a 2017 study.
After Georgia protesters vandalized CNN’s Atlanta headquarters on Friday, the rapper and activist Killer Mike addressed the city’s residents in a clip that circulated widely. “I’m glad [protesters] only took down a sign and defaced a building, and they’re not killing human beings like that policeman did,” he said. “I’m glad that they only destroyed some brick and mortar, and they didn’t rip a father from a son, they didn’t rip a son from a mother, like the policeman did.” Like other activists and politicians across the country, including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, Georgia’s John Lewis, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, he pleaded for people to stop setting fire to America’s cities. “It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house, so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization. And now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize.”
That’s not the only option for how police can respond to moments like this one. On Saturday afternoon, police officers in Camden, New Jersey—not dressed like soldiers—joined protesters in their march for justice. ###
[Nick Baumann is The Atlantic’s Politics Editor. He came to the magazine as the Politics Editor in January 2020. Previously Baumann worked as a writer at the Huffington Post (2015-2020), Mother Jones (2007-2015), and The Economist (2006-2007). He received a BA (history) from Yale University (CT).]
Roll Over, Shakespeare — In "Richard III," The Unhorsed English King Cries "A Horse, A Horse, My Kingdom For A Horse" & In 2020, Disillusioned People Riot In Many US Cities Seeking A Horse Leader To Provide Justice For Victims Of Murders-By-A-Cop
Today, BoBo Boy (David Brooks) returns to this blog within this week with a sensible essay about leadership (and the lack thereof) in an unraveling nation this week.
In aside, Brooks is referred to as "BoBo Boy" in this blog because of one of his early books —Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) — when Brooks discerned a new group in the US. "BoBo" is an abbreviated form of the words bourgeois and bohemian, suggesting a fusion of two distinct social classes (the counter-cultural, hedonistic and artistic bohemian, and the white collar, capitalist bourgeois). And in Brooks's telling, the BoBos displaced the Yuppies (Young Urban Professionals) who dominated the late 20th century.
And finally, an H/T (Hat Tip) to a young (at heart) reader of this blog for the alert to today's essay by the BoBo Boy (David Brooks) about our Leadership Crisis. The nation is unraveling. If this is a (fair & balanced) fire-bell ringing in the night, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
If We Had A Real Leader
By BoBo Boy (David Brooks)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
This week I had a conversation that left a mark. It was with Mary Louise Kelly and E.J. Dionne on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and it was about how past presidents had handled moments of national mourning — Lincoln after Gettysburg, Reagan after the Challenger explosion and Obama after the Sandy Hook school shootings.
The conversation left me wondering what America’s experience of the pandemic would be like if we had a real leader in the White House.
If we had a real leader, he would have realized that tragedies like 100,000 COVID-19 deaths touch something deeper than politics: They touch our shared vulnerability and our profound and natural sympathy for one another.
In such moments, a real leader steps outside of his political role and reveals himself uncloaked and humbled, as someone who can draw on his own pains and simply be present with others as one sufferer among a common sea of sufferers.
If we had a real leader, she would speak of the dead not as a faceless mass but as individual persons, each seen in unique dignity. Such a leader would draw on the common sources of our civilization, the stores of wisdom that bring collective strength in hard times.
Lincoln went back to the old biblical cadences to comfort a nation. After the church shooting in Charleston, Barack Obama went to “Amazing Grace,” the old abolitionist anthem that has wafted down through the long history of African-American suffering and redemption.
In his impromptu remarks right after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy recalled the slaying of his own brother and quoted Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
If we had a real leader, he would be bracingly honest about how bad things are, like Churchill after the fall of Europe. He would have stored in his upbringing the understanding that hard times are the making of character, a revelation of character and a test of character. He would offer up the reality that to be an American is both a gift and a task. Every generation faces its own apocalypse, and, of course, we will live up to our moment just as our ancestors did theirs.
If we had a real leader, she would remind us of our common covenants and our common purposes. America is a diverse country joined more by a common future than by common pasts. In times of hardships real leaders re-articulate the purpose of America, why we endure these hardships and what good we will make out of them
After the Challenger explosion, Reagan reminded us that we are a nation of explorers and that the explorations at the frontiers of science would go on, thanks in part to those who “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
At Gettysburg, Lincoln crisply described why the fallen had sacrificed their lives — to show that a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” can long endure and also to bring about “a new birth of freedom” for all the world.
Of course, right now we don’t have a real leader. We have Donald Trump, a man who can’t fathom empathy or express empathy, who can’t laugh or cry, love or be loved — a damaged narcissist who is unable to see the true existence of other human beings except insofar as they are good or bad for himself.
But it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.
All the leaders I have quoted above were educated under a curriculum that put character formation at the absolute center of education. They were trained by people who assumed that life would throw up hard and unexpected tests, and it was the job of a school, as one headmaster put it, to produce young people who would be “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”
Think of the generations of religious and civic missionaries, like Frances Perkins, who flowed out of Mount Holyoke. Think of all the Morehouse Men and Spelman Women. Think of all the young students, in schools everywhere, assigned Plutarch and Thucydides, Isaiah and Frederick Douglass — the great lessons from the past on how to lead, endure, triumph or fail. Only the great books stay in the mind for decades and serve as storehouses of wisdom when hard times come.
Right now, science and the humanities should be in lock step: science producing vaccines, with the humanities stocking leaders and citizens with the capacities of resilience, care and collaboration until they come. But, instead, the humanities are in crisis at the exact moment history is revealing how vital moral formation really is
One of the lessons of this crisis is that help isn’t coming from some centralized place at the top of society. If you want real leadership, look around you. ###
[David Brooks became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003. He has been a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”'Brooks' . Brooks's most recent book is The Grass Library: Essays (forthcoming 6/2/2020). See all of his books here. Brooks received a BA (history) from the University of Chicago (IL) and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.]
This blogger has always liked nicknames — the more sarcastic, the better — for most of his life, but the NY Fishwrap's Krait (Gail Collins) reveals a soft spot for sarcastic nicknames herself. If this is (fair & balanced) political humor, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg). [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x NY Fishwrap]
The Wonderful World Of Trump Worsts
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
But Donald Trump can’t do everything awful by himself. How about backup nominees? There’s Mitch McConnell, of course. And Mike Pompeo, who was slogging through a disastrous year even before Tom Friedman suggested he was the worst secretary of state in all of American history.
Among the many Pompeo messes, the most memorable are the allegations that he used a government employee for personal services that included dog-walking and picking up the dry cleaning. Hardly the most significant, but an excellent reminder that this administration has perhaps set a record for cabinet members prone to dumb disasters. Remember the EPA head who sent his aide shopping for a mattress at the Trump hotel?
I want to put a word in here for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is often unfairly overlooked when it comes to counting terrible people in the current government. This is because of her general ineptitude, and you should thank God every day this woman doesn’t know how to get things done.
DeVos has focused her career on attempts to direct government money to private schools — particularly, it seems, bad private schools. Remember when she reformed the whole system in Michigan by making everything worse? Right now, she’s battling nefarious attempts to target Coronavirus relief funds to the districts that actually need the money most.
So many possible Worsts. There’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex (yes, he’s still here) Azar. We’ve been so busy watching Azar fail to deal with the Coronavirus crisis that we totally lost track of the fact that he never did do anything about prescription drug prices.
There’s Ron DeSantis of Florida, who keeps claiming a Worst Governor award for his out-of-control policy on beach access. We suspected something like this was coming when he declared professional wrestling was an essential state industry.
But it’s sort of hard to focus on the supporting cast when the big boss has been so off-the-wall. Do you think Trump’s refusal to wear a mask is an attempt to woo the political right, or deny the reality of our current health crisis? Or just a sign he doesn’t think it’s attractive?
I’d go for the most superficial explanation. The president always prioritizes the way things look, even though he personally winds up making the worst possible choices in everything from tanning makeup to leisure wear. And obviously none of his friends have hinted that those golfing photos aren’t all that flattering.
What about Joe Biden? He hasn’t been the worst at much — some Democrats would be happy to see him do anything that aggressive. But he did come up with what may turn out to be the Worst Political Nickname of the Summer, when he announced he’d refer to Donald Trump as “President Tweety."
Does that sound like a good plan to you? When I think of “Tweety” I think about that yellow canary in old cartoons who kept saying “I tawt I taw a puddy tat.” Not exactly flattering, but a lot less damaging than, say, President Pandemic.
Meanwhile, Trump keeps calling Biden “Sleepy Joe.” Now this is the election that’s going to have you awash in rage and terror for the next five months. But if you think of it as Sleepy Joe versus a canary it sounds pretty darned relaxing.
When all else fails, Republicans just claim Biden is best friends with China. Waiting for news on the spaceship launch, the Republican National Committee did manage to send out an attack on Biden for wanting to work with what it called “the United States’ greatest space adversary, China.”
Trump’s new press secretary, Kayleigh (“I will never lie to you”) McEnany, claimed the administration now has a “relationship of disappointment and frustration” with China that’s “put American lives at risk.” She’s only been on the job a few weeks, but she’s definitely a potential contender in Worst contests of the future. The other day she volunteered that Trump was possibly “the best president this country will ever have.”
Just a quick break here. Do you think historians will rate Donald Trump as better than Abraham Lincoln? Certainly Trump does. He’s always suggesting that. (“You know, a poll just came out that I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party. … I beat our Honest Abe.”)
Of course, in the real world he’s way closer to the race for the bottom and he’s edging out some tough competition. There was Warren Harding, but Harding was pretty good on social issues like race. Richard Nixon knew a lot about foreign affairs. Franklin Pierce failed to head off the Civil War, but he definitely would have looked better on a golf course. ###
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page.Her most recent book isNo Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (2019), See other books by Gail Collins here. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University (WI) and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]
The problem of electronic device obsolescence was mad real to this blogger a month ago. He and four old (emphasis intended) college chums attempted to gather in a 5-party FaceTime session on the geezers' iPhones. Immediately there was a problem when four of the geezers could see and talk with one another and one geezer was limited to audio with no video. We were bemused and one of the geezers, retired from an information technology career, asked the other four to send him the operating system version that was installed on their iPhone. The most current version is iOS 13.5 at the end of May 2020. Our proficient geezer reported that one of the iPhone (belonging to the geezer with audio and no video) had an earlier operating system version that could not be upgraded. Mystery solved, but the video-less geezer had to listen to repeated reminders to get a newer iPhone. What would happen to an old iPhone is told by computer scientist/writer of today's essay. If this is a (fair & balanced) cautionary tale of shredded Apple products (as well as competing brands) going into landfills at a rate that spells environmental disaster, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x OneZero]
How Apple Decides Which Products Are "‘Vintage" And "Obsolete"
By Maddie Stone
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
For the past eight years, I’ve been working mainly on a late 2012 iMac. I’m no Luddite, but the computer has held up well over the years, and I’ve never felt the need to replace it. Recently, though, my iMac developed its first serious tic: The fan has started to power on loudly every time the computer goes to sleep. While the computer is long past warranty, I decided to call up Apple to see if the company could offer any help. When I did, I learned my iMac is considered “vintage” and was told Apple won’t touch it.
Instead, an Apple Support representative referred me to an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) in my area. When I called the shop, the owner told me he could take a look at the device but would make no guarantees. What’s more, because of the Coronavirus pandemic, his shop was experiencing a three-week backlog. I had two choices: Hunt around for a way to fix my iMac faster, or hand off the computer to an Apple-approved repair business and wait several weeks for a diagnosis.
The Apple Support representative I spoke with was quick to offer his opinion: “You only want to go to the guys we recommend,” he told me. I chose to keep shopping around.
As our devices age, they lose manufacturer support. With Coronavirus lockdowns placing restrictions on repair businesses, that support is now more limited than ever. But while my iMac’s hyperactive fan is a nuisance I can live with, there are many people whose broken tech needs immediate attention so that they can work and learn remotely or stay in touch with loved ones. The pandemic has, inadvertently, laid bare a truth about our devices: Manufacturers can’t be our only option for fixing them. Especially when they take such a myopic view of what’s worth fixing.
According to Apple, “vintage” devices are those that the company discontinued selling more than five and less than seven years ago. Once Apple hasn’t sold a product for seven years, it’s considered “obsolete,” meaning the company won’t offer any repair services. But vintage products exist in a liminal space: Despite what I learned when I called Apple Support, Apple Stores as well as AASPs can, in theory, repair them for you “subject to availability of inventory, or as required by law,” according to Apple.
In practice, people in the repair community told me Apple isn’t particularly interested in fixing vintage tech. “The AASPs I’ve spoken to in the past have told me they don’t bother with customers looking to repair older devices,” said Rob Link, a right-to-repair advocate who owns a company that sells repair parts for older devices including iPhones, iPods, and iPads. In the past, Link said, he would call up AASPs to see if they had older parts to sell “but I would stop when no one did.”
“If you’re taking in a vintage piece of equipment [to an AASP], outside of them still having something sitting on the shelf from years before, you’re not going to be able to get service,” said Adrian Avery-Johnson, the owner of Bridgetown Electronics Repair, an independent repair shop located in Portland, Oregon.
AASPs are businesses that Apple has authorized to conduct repairs with access to original Apple parts and diagnostic tools. While AASPs are permitted to repair out-of-warranty devices, including vintage devices, Avery-Johnson believes the incentive structure of the program discourages businesses from doing so by financially rewarding them [PDF] based on how quickly they conduct repairs on in-warranty devices or those covered by AppleCare. It would be “burdensome,” Avery-Johnson said, for AASPs to manage a parallel supply chain of parts for older models, especially when time spent working on those models is “time that they could be doing a supported repair” to remain in good standing with Apple.
Vintage is “another word for dropping support,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, told me in an email. Gordon-Byrne said that most manufacturers designate an “end of service life” date, and that five years is “not particularly nefarious while clearly forcing consumers into new purchases.” Apple says that it loses money on device repair, so it makes sense that the company wouldn’t be incentivized to offer repair service for products that are long past warranty.
Sara Behdad, an associate professor at the University of Florida whose studies the life cycle of electronics and e-waste management, said that the cost of maintaining the supply chains needed to produce parts for vintage and obsolete models is likely “the main reason to dissuade [Apple] from offering repair services.”
“Even if they want to offer repair services, if the product was sold five years ago, it’s not cost-efficient for them to really have all the parts available,” Behdad said.
Apple declined to comment on the record for this story.
Just because Apple doesn’t want to be held responsible for fixing your old stuff doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t try to, though. There are plenty of independent repair shops willing to fix vintage and obsolete Apple devices with new or used aftermarket parts. There are also countless free tutorials on YouTube and websites like iFixit that DIY-ers can follow to attempt to fix older devices at home.
“I don’t believe I ever ran into an Apple device I couldn’t find a part for somewhere in the world,” Link said. “This is true today with most of the top tier of independent repair shops.”
Generally speaking, the challenge of repairing an old device isn’t the availability of parts or expertise — it’s whether the device is repairable. Unfortunately, when it comes to Apple devices, repairability is a serious problem, one that only seems to be getting worse. Several repair professionals told me that today’s vintage devices are far easier to fix than the devices Apple will be sunsetting in a few years’ time due to a combination of design choices and software locks.
On the design side, Apple’s modus operandi for the past decade has been to roll out products that are thinner, sleeker, and have fewer individual components than their predecessors. As a result, they are increasingly difficult to open up and fix, whether the case is secured shut with proprietary screws, the batteries are glued in place, or a key component like the hard drive is soldered to the logic board.
Even more troubling to some repair professionals is Apple’s increased use of anti-theft software locks that turn used devices into expensive bricks when they’re not properly reset before being handed off to a new owner. “Anyone in the [refurbishing] industry knows if you get a pile of iPhones, chances are half will be bricked because of activation lock,” said John Bumstead, whose business, RDKL, Inc., buys up old MacBooks from e-waste recyclers and restores them to good working order. A similar locking system involving the T2 security chip on MacBook Pros manufactured from 2018 onwards is starting to create the same problem for laptop refurbishers, he said.
Jessa Jones, a right-to-repair advocate and the owner of iPad Rehab, an independent repair shop located near Rochester, NY, recently had an experience that crystallized the difference between fixing a vintage Apple device and a modern one. A family sent her a dead 2008 MacBook in the hopes that they could recover photos from the hard drive. Jones was able to take the hard drive out of the computer, connect it to a working MacBook, and download the photos without any hassle. Soon after, she received another request to recover data from a MacBook, this one from 2017. By that year, Apple was soldering the memory onto the logic board, and this computer’s logic board was dead. In order to even attempt to remove the data, Jones had to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing a proprietary Apple tool to suck the data off the board. This tool appears to have been discontinued in MacBooks released in 2018 onward.
“I spent a day thinking [the 2017 MacBook owner’s] data was unrecoverable because the memory is soldered,” Jones said. “That would be the case if it was a 2020 MacBook.”
Unless Apple is forced to make a course correction on repairability, whether through consumer pressure or the passage of new laws and regulations, breathing new life into old devices is likely to keep getting harder. Bumstead expects to see many more laptops that are bricked by activation locks or shredded by e-waste recyclers because it’s more cost-effective than disassembling them. “The future is bleak,” he said.
Ultimately, more unfixable devices means more devices becoming part of the e-waste stream, already the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet at 50 million tons a year and counting. And because most of our spent electronics aren’t formally recycled for materials recovery, their untimely deaths also fuel more environmentally destructive mining and carbon-intensive manufacturing to produce replacements. Oh, and we could soon run short on some of the obscure metals we need to do so.
I don’t blame Apple for not wanting to fix my noisy, aging iMac. In fact, not long after speaking with Apple Support, I discovered a much better option: a $25 replacement CPU fan on iFixit, along with a step-by-step installation guide. The repair looks a bit challenging, but I’m grateful I have the opportunity to try. When this computer finally dies and I’ve got no choice but to upgrade, I wonder if that will still be the case. ###
[Maddie Stone is a reverse engineer and security researcher who likes to figure out how things work from chips to application software and then break it. Slides and videos for her presentations can be found here. Stone joined Google's Project Zero in 2019, Prior to that work, Stone was a reverse engineer on the Android Security Team (2017-2019). After completing a graduate degree, she was a Cyber Systems Engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (2013-2017). Stone received both a BS and an MS in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University (MD).]
Today, there is no baseball, but the next best thing is The New Yorker's Louis Menand's graceful essay about baseball in the time of George Herman (Babe) Ruth and Lou Gehrig, The Iron Horse. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of the power of sport as a cultural force, so be it. [x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
[x The New Yorker]
How Baseball Players Became Celebrities
By Louis Menand
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Professional sports right now is a covid-19 ghost town. The games have vanished. There are few events to cover and almost nothing to broadcast. Yet, eerily, the industry lives on. Reporters file stories and analysts hold forth even though the stadiums are empty. Athletes are paid even though they are sitting around the house. A chunk of your cable bill is going to Major League Baseball {MLB] even though there are no major-league baseball games to watch. MLB. is selling Mookie Betts Dodgers jerseys and the NFL is selling Tom Brady Buccaneers jerseys even though no one knows when they will ever play for those teams. In Las Vegas, you can get 3–1 odds on the Yankees to win the World Series.
It’s a reminder that the industry is much bigger than the games and, in a sense, only minimally needs them. Sports sells newspapers, television shows, Web sites, as-told-to books, and exercise regimens. Professional athletes make endorsements, get paid for appearances, take parts in movies, license their names to video games, and have their own product lines. The stars at the very top of their sports make more money from these things than they do from competing. And, of course, there’s the gambling. The idea of games in empty arenas is not as far-fetched as it sounds. As long as you have stars and scores, you have an industry. Hot-dog venders and parking-lot attendants will be out of work, but most of the business can go on.
The rise of sports as big business and the handling of athletes as human capital are often dated to 1960, the year Mark McCormack founded the International Management Group, with Arnold Palmer as his first client. McCormack saw that in sports, as in Hollywood, it’s the stars that sell the product, and he turned athletic success and good publicity into dollars. Thanks to television, the number of available dollars for the clients of sports agents mushroomed.
But the possibilities had been glimpsed and the opportunities realized almost forty years earlier, by a man named Christy Walsh. Walsh was born in St. Louis in 1891, and went to college in Los Angeles. He bounced around a little—worked as a sports cartoonist and a ghostwriter—but it was his background in advertising and publicity for automobile companies that prepared him to become the first sports agent in the modern mold. He wasn’t just a promoter or a handler but someone who took charge of an athlete’s complete on-field and off-field package, who controlled the publicity as well as the contracts. He signed his first client in 1921. And that client turned out to be the greatest sports figure of his day, or possibly, with the exception of Muhammad Ali, of any day: Babe Ruth. Ruth didn’t just do what every ballplayer did but better. On the field and off, he was in a class by himself.
Walsh began working for Ruth just as advertising was joining forces with the new “science” of public relations, a union that produced the entertainment-media-merchandising combine that supplies much of the content for contemporary American culture. Walsh understood how that synergy worked, how the entertainment feeds the media and the media feeds the sales. Stories in the papers about Babe Ruth visiting an orphanage, say, are good for the Babe Ruth brand. They raise the value of Ruth’s next endorsement deal. But stories about Babe Ruth also sell newspapers, which then can sell more advertising space. It’s in everyone’s interest (including the orphanages’) to make Ruth a magnet for public eyeballs. All Ruth has to do is to keep hitting home runs and winning championships. The agent takes care of the rest.
This multiplier effect is why the stars’ incomes keep rising exponentially—why Tiger Woods, who has made about a hundred and twenty million dollars in prize money, is said to be worth close to a billion. Everyone in the combine wants Tiger to continue to make money so they can continue to make money off Tiger.
As several writers, including Jane Leavy, in The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created (2018), and Thomas Barthel, in Babe Ruth and the Creation of the Celebrity Athlete (2018), have explained, Ruth seems to have been the first athlete to leverage his success in this way, to make more money off the field than on it. By 1926, his twelfth year in the major leagues, Ruth’s salary was fifty-two thousand dollars, far more than any other ballplayer’s, but he made at least twice that much in outside income. Shortly after ending the World Series that year by being tagged out trying to steal second base, he went on a twelve-week vaudeville tour for which he was paid a hundred thousand dollars.
It’s no coincidence that the decade in which this entertainment-media-merchandising combine developed is known as the Golden Age of American sports. When writers use that term, they are not talking only about the games. They are talking about the stars, people like Ruth, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Johnny Weissmuller, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, Helen Wills, Gertrude Ederle. They dominated their sports. They set records. And the combine loves records.
Christy Walsh did not invent celebrity product endorsements and appearance fees. Before Ruth met Walsh, he had already endorsed a brand of baseball bat and of cigars, and a children’s book, The ‘Home-Run King’; or, How Pep Pindar Won His Title, had been published under his name. Walsh simply widened the stream. He arranged for Ruth to act in vaudeville and movies. He put Ruth and some of his teammates on barnstorming tours, playing exhibition games around the country. (Each year, Ruth was paid to play from fifty to a hundred off-season games.) Ruth’s endorsement appeared on more than a hundred products, including Quaker Oats and All-America underwear. (The Baby Ruth candy bar was marketed without Ruth’s consent. Ruth sued, but the courts backed the candy-maker.) His face was on the cover of magazines from Time and Vanity Fair to Hardware Age and Popular Science. In 1934, when the Associated Press ranked the most photographed people in the world, Ruth was No. 1, ahead of FDR, the Prince of Wales, and Adolf Hitler.
Walsh’s first deal for Ruth was a newspaper column, though the star never wrote—or likely even read—a word of it. Ruth’s ghostwriters were usually reporters who travelled with the team, hung out with Ruth, and picked up enough odds and ends—Ruth telling the story of his most recent home run, for instance—to turn out a weekly column. And the money was good. In the first year, after Walsh and the writers had taken their cuts, Ruth made fifteen thousand dollars. Walsh went on to create a stable of more than thirty ghostwriters who produced columns under the bylines of athletes such as Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Walter Johnson, and Rogers Hornsby. Among them was a twenty-four-year-old first baseman named Lou Gehrig.
Gehrig’s name will forever be linked with Ruth’s. They were the best hitters on the best team in baseball, the New York Yankees. Between 1920, the year Ruth started playing for the Yankees after being sold to the team by the owner of the Boston Red Sox, and 1938, Gehrig’s last full season, the Yankees won ten American League pennants and seven World Series. (Ruth also won two championships as a pitcher for the Red Sox, setting a Series record of twenty-nine and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings, which would not be broken until 1961.)
The 1927 Yankees have been called the greatest team in baseball history. With Ruth hitting third and Gehrig cleanup, the Yankees won a hundred and ten games, and lost only forty-four. Ruth batted .356 and hit sixty home runs, a single-season record that lasted for thirty-four years and has been surpassed by only four men, three of whom are widely believed to have been jacked up on steroids. Gehrig hit .373, with forty-seven homers and a hundred and seventy-three runs batted in—a record for RBIs [sic Runs Batted In needs no plural spelling] at the time and not an easy thing to do when the man ahead of you hits sixty home runs. In the World Series, the Yankees beat the Pirates in four straight.
Gehrig idolized Ruth as a ballplayer, and Ruth was easy to get along with. They travelled together, played bridge together, and barnstormed together. They had both started out as pitchers—Gehrig pitched in college, but Ruth won ninety-four games in his big-league career and had a lifetime ERA [Earned Runs Average]. of 2.28, seventeenth on the all-time list—and they sometimes pitched to each other in exhibition games. Ruth was often a guest for dinner at Gehrig’s house.
But they were polar opposites. Ruth was all flamboyance and swagger. He bought expensive cars and wrecked them. He wore raccoon coats and smoked big cigars. He gambled and caroused. His annual contract negotiations were big news. He was famous to the public for his appetite for food and drink; he was famous to his teammates for his appetite for sex. He made no secret of it. Fred Lieb, who covered the Yankees, wrote, “His phallus and home-run bat were his prize possessions, in that order.”
On road trips, Ruth would be out all night partying, getting back to the hotel at dawn. “I don’t room with Babe Ruth,” his assigned roommate on one trip, Ping Bodie, is supposed to have said. “I room with his suitcase.” The team, in exasperation, once hired a detective to follow him around one night when the Yankees were in Chicago. The detective reported back that Ruth had been with six women.
It had no effect on his play. “The Babe was always doing something,” Marshall Hunt, a reporter who covered Ruth year-round for the Daily News, recalled. “Perpetual motion. . . . I don’t think I ever saw him sitting around.” The key to Babe Ruth, though, was this: everybody loved him. “God, we liked that big son of a bitch,” Waite Hoyt, the ace of the 1927 Yankees team, said. “He was a constant source of joy.”
Everybody respected Lou Gehrig. They did not love him. He was good-natured but distant. He had a distinctly un-Jazz Age persona “This sturdy and serious lad takes copybook maxims as his guides in life and lives up to them,” a Times columnist wrote after the Yankees won the Series in 1927. “ ‘Strive and succeed.’ ‘Early to bed, and early to rise.’ ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ ‘Labor conquers everything.’ And all the rest of them.”
Ruth had a gift for baseball. He was not only the best power hitter on the Yankees; he was also the best bunter. When he played the outfield, he never threw to the wrong base. Those were things Gehrig had to work at. Fielding was a challenge. Just figuring out which foot to put on the bag (he played first base, the traditional position for oversized sluggers with limited defensive skills) was a challenge. “He was one of the dumbest players I’ve ever seen,” Miller Huggins, Gehrig’s first Yankee manager, said. “But he’s got one great virtue that will make him: he never makes the same mistake twice.”
“Ruth has the mind of a fifteen-year-old,” the president of the American League once said in frustration during some Ruthian commotion. Gehrig was a case of arrested development, too, but in a different way. Until 1933, when he turned thirty, he lived with his parents. He brought his mother to spring training. When the team was on the road, he would leave the hotel after dark and walk the streets by himself so his teammates would think he had plans. He usually signed whatever contract the Yankees sent him. In 1927, the year he was the American League MVP, his salary was eight thousand dollars. The following year, it was raised to twenty-five thousand. Ruth was making seventy.
In short, Gehrig was a Golden Age anomaly. In 1929, The New Yorker ran a profile of him, with the interesting title “The Little Heinie.” “Lou Gehrig,” it began, “has accidentally got himself into a class with Babe Ruth and Dempsey and other beetle-browed, self-conscious sluggers who are the heroes of our nation. This is ridiculous—he is not fitted in any way to have a public.” The reporter asked Gehrig if he planned to get married. “My mother makes a home comfortable enough for me,” he said. Unlike Ruth and Dempsey and the rest of the Golden Age stars, Gehrig did not want attention, and this was because, unlike the others, he did not need attention. He stayed in his lane. He liked being boring.
Part of the mythology of American sports in that era was that it was a means of social mobility, a way for the children of farmhands and factory workers to make their way into the middle class, and even, for special talents, to acquire wealth and celebrity. In the case of baseball, at least, the myth was mostly a myth. Ballplayers in Gehrig and Ruth’s time came from families that were relatively well off. Steven Riess, in Touching Base (1999), a study of the sport in the early years of the twentieth century, reported that, of players active between 1900 and 1919, only eleven per cent had fathers who were unskilled or semi-skilled laborers, even though forty-five per cent of workers nationwide were semi-skilled or unskilled. Ten per cent had fathers who were professionals, against three per cent in the population as a whole.
But the myth was true for some of the Golden Age stars, Ruth and Gehrig among them. When Ruth was seven years old, his parents sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Orphans, Delinquent, Incorrigible, and Wayward Boys, in Baltimore, basically a reform school run by brothers of the Order of St. Francis Xavier, and he spent most of the next dozen years there. It’s where he learned to play baseball. “I didn’t have a thing till I was eighteen years old, not a bite,” he said years later, when he was living the high life. “Now it’s bustin’ out all over.”
Gehrig’s parents were German immigrants. His father was a metalworker who was often unemployed. The family was held together by Gehrig’s mother, Christina, a dynamo who cooked, cleaned, and did laundry to support the family, and who took over the life of Lou, her only surviving child. They lived in Yorkville, in upper Manhattan, and were poor even by the standards of the neighborhood. They later moved to Washington Heights. Lou’s nickname at school was Fat.
The Gehrigs spoke German at home; Lou did not learn English until he was five. (German was also the language in Ruth’s house, and he spoke some German when he came over for dinner.) Gehrig got the attention of the sports world when he was in high school, after hitting a tape-measure home run at Cubs Park, in Chicago, where Gehrig’s team, New York City’s best, had gone to play Chicago’s best. That was in 1920, the year Ruth came to the Yankees.
Gehrig enrolled at Columbia (his mother had worked in a Columbia frat house), starting, painfully, in the extension school. He found schoolwork a struggle, but he was essentially a recruited athlete, playing football and baseball and clouting mammoth home runs.
Before Ruth came along, most major-league baseball was “small ball.” Hitters choked up on the bat and tried to advance the runner. It was a game of bunts and stolen bases. Ruth was a free swinger. He struck out a lot, as home-run hitters do, but when he connected he hit circus shots that flew over the fences and often landed on a street outside the park. It turned out that people found the monster homer more exciting than the hit-and-run. Ruth transformed the sport.
Scouts now found themselves tasked with discovering “the next Babe Ruth,” and Gehrig qualified. He signed with the Yankees in 1923, and on June 1, 1925, he took over at first base. He would play there for 2,130 consecutive games, a month shy of fourteen years. This was an era in which ballplayers had nicknames: Pepper Martin, Mule Watson, Muddy Ruel, Rabbit Maranville, Dazzy Vance, Pie Traynor. For years, sportswriters tried to come up with a nickname for Gehrig, but nothing seemed to stick. Then, in 1931, midway through the consecutive-game streak, a reporter for the New York Sun named Will Wedge called him the "Iron Horse." It stuck.
A minor irony of the Ruth-Gehrig dichotomy is that Ruth didn’t look like an athlete. He had a big upper body but slender wrists and ankles and skinny legs—“toothpicks attached to a piano,” as someone described them. Gehrig was built like a power hitter. He was muscles from top to bottom—his heinie was not little—and, while Ruth’s homers were usually towering fly balls, Gehrig’s were line drives. Also unlike Ruth, Gehrig was extremely good-looking. He was designed for the combine.
That is what Christy Walsh must have felt when he signed Gehrig up, in the summer of 1927, the Yankees’ annus mirabilis. It was not the pennant race that was attracting the fans then. It was the so-called Home Run Derby between Gehrig and Ruth. (The press would reprise the derby in 1998 as a race between a pumped-up [on steroids] Mark McGwire and a pumped-up Sammy Sosa. The second time as farce.)
Ruth had set the single-season home-run record, fifty-nine, in 1921, and he boasted of his determination to break it. Gehrig was keeping pace, and the home-run lead seesawed between them through the summer. Walsh realized this was a good time to syndicate a column for Gehrig. “There was a ready market at boom prices, for the autobiography of this clean-living, level-headed son of a poor New York family,” as he put it in his memoir, Adios to Ghosts (1937).
There were twenty-nine first-person Lou Gehrig columns, run under the headline “Following the Babe.” “Gehrig tells his story of dreams come true—high school victories, college glory, and big league fame—in a manner that will inspire every boy and parent in the land,” an accompanying description proclaimed. The columns appeared in the Oakland Tribune, the Pittsburgh Press, and the Ottawa Daily Citizen—three outlets obscure enough that they remained undiscovered for decades.
They were finally exhumed by Alan Gaff, who has brought them out as Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir (2020). “No matter who wrote down the words, there is no doubt that Lou’s memoir came directly from the heart,” he writes. Well, some doubt is possible. Like most sports autobiographies before Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, in 1970, Gehrig’s “memoir” adheres to the code of the professional athlete, which is never to speak ill of another professional athlete or of one’s sport. So Gehrig (or his ghost) writes of Ty Cobb, “Ty has been panned a lot. But he’s a great fellow. . . . I consider Ty Cobb one of my best friends in baseball.” A recent biography, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty (2015), by Charles Leerhsen, suggests that Cobb’s reputation as an especially vicious racist is undeserved. (Gehrig, for his part, was in favor of integrating the sport, and said so.) But it is undisputed that Cobb was a mean competitor who got into fights with opposing players and fans. Gehrig supposedly once tried to get into the Tigers’ locker room after a game to beat him up. The incident is explained away in one column as a performance for the fans.
And it’s like that in all the columns. Everyone is a great fellow; baseball is a noble sport—“I don’t believe I would have met a finer group of men anywhere than I have met in baseball. Nor a squarer, fairer lot of men, either.” Are these Gehrig’s own words and voice? The information about his life clearly came from him, and one imagines the ghostwriter also asked him for his opinions of other famous players, like Cobb and Ruth, and then transformed whatever he said into anodyne language.
Unless you lived in or near a major-league city and could get to the stadium, newspaper accounts and box scores were almost the only way you could follow a team. That’s why Walsh could make good money with his ghostwriting syndicate—the national appetite for baseball news and gossip was much greater than the supply. And one reason for this had to do with the way the league did business when Gehrig and Ruth played.
The owners of the Yankees, gentlemen known as “the two Colonels,” Jacob Ruppert, Jr., and Tillinghast Huston, knew what they were doing when they paid a hundred and ten thousand dollars, plus a loan of three hundred thousand, to get Ruth from the Red Sox. Ticket sales were the main source of revenue, and Ruth started paying dividends right away. In his first year, 1920, he hit fifty-four home runs, and home attendance was more than a million, the first time any club had attracted that many fans. The Yankees were then sharing the Polo Grounds with the Giants, but in 1923 they moved into a new stadium in the Bronx, with seating for fifty-eight thousand fans. They made a lot of money.
They could have made more. In Creating the National Pastime (1996), the historian G. Edward White points out that, even as it was becoming the American sport, baseball was a business run in a strangely backward way. Basically, it seems not to have understood who its consumers were, or, even stranger, how many of them there were.
Team owners and league officials resisted several changes that would have helped the product and enhanced revenue. A glaring failure was the refusal to integrate the sport. Everyone knew there were great ballplayers in the Negro Leagues; Gehrig and Ruth sometimes played exhibition games against them. But baseball remained a Jim Crow sport until 1947.
There was also fierce resistance to night games. The technology needed to play night baseball was in place by 1909, when a minor-league game was held under the lights in Cincinnati. Everyone agreed that the conditions were fine. But the first night game in the majors, between the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies, was not played until 1935. The first night game at Yankee Stadium was not played until 1946.
The Reds played seven night games in 1935; attendance was 130,337. Attendance for the team’s sixty-nine home day games was 324,256. The lesson was obvious. But it should have been obvious all along, or at least since the introduction of Sunday games, sixteen years earlier, which had had a similar effect. Many sports fans are working-class people. They can’t go to a weekday game during work hours. Whether it was baseball traditionalism or some hope to cast the sport as a professional-class diversion, or some combination, Major League Baseball was slow to adapt its product to the lives of its fan base. Teams in the Negro Leagues were playing at night long before, because that was the only time their fans could see them.
From the perspective of today’s sports business model, nothing is more peculiar than prewar baseball’s inability to grasp the financial potential of broadcasting. Some teams broadcast home games on local radio stations, but the stations did not pay a fee. In most cases, anyone with a radio license could sit in the stands and broadcast a game. It was not until 1936, a year after Ruth retired, that there was an American League policy of charging for broadcasting rights.
Radio turned out to increase attendance, too, especially in places where fans living in rural areas followed the games on the radio, and were sometimes motivated to drive two hundred miles to a city to watch a game. Still, none of the New York teams, the Yankees, the Giants, or the Dodgers, broadcast home games until 1939. That was the year Gehrig retired. In a way, it was his retirement, not his play and not even his streak, that made him an icon.
“I have one true friend,” Gehrig says in one of the ghostwritten columns, “my mother. . . . She is now, and will always be, the greatest pal I ever had.” She certainly made every effort. Jonathan Eig, in his biography of Gehrig, Luckiest Man (2005), says that Christina Gehrig systematically wrecked all of Gehrig’s nascent romances, once going to a woman’s home town to dig up dirt on her. In 1932, when the Yankees were playing World Series games in Chicago, Lou became interested in Eleanor Twitchell, a socially active twenty-eight-year-old with a sense of fashion, not Mrs. Gehrig’s type. They began dating the following spring and were married in September.
Eleanor Gehrig changed her husband’s life. She freed him from his mother’s house; she took him to the ballet and the opera. (A favorite was “Tristan und Isolde,” at which, she says, he wept, because, of course, he understood the words.) And she called on Christy Walsh to do promotional work. Walsh got Gehrig to do ads for Camel cigarettes and Aqua Velva. Gehrig was the first athlete to have his face on a Wheaties box.
A frank woman, Eleanor Gehrig left a memoir, My Luke and I (1976), which includes, along with other uncensored remembrances, a portrait of Christina Gehrig and what it was like to live in her house. It tells us a lot more about Lou Gehrig than his own memoir does:
Built something like a lady wrestler, with yellowish gray hair snatched back in a bun. No hairdresser for her, certainly no makeup. Not that it would have mattered anyway, since she was in a state of steaming perpetual motion, no idle hands, chores around the clock. A huge breakfast prepared for her husband and son, then an attack on the sinkful of dishes, then an almost compulsive session with the vegetables and meat for the night’s dinner.
Finally, she would jam a hat on her head and leave for Yankee Stadium with Lou, in time for batting practice. Afterwards, back in the kitchen while Pop walked the dogs again and the parrot kept shouting baseball lingo until he was covered for the night. And at last the evening meal, starting with caviar on toast, thick soup, a Caesar salad, meat, potatoes, the vegetables, oversized dessert, the whole works. In the backwash of this way of life, several maids came and went as members of the cast; they simply got in the way of the steamroller.
After dinner and the dishes, we would settle in the living room. Mom would grab either the crochet or knitting bag and get her fingers flying, uttering sage little philosophies like “what goes up must come down,” and Pop would invariably nod in agreement.
Eleanor saw Ruth with unsentimental eyes, too. “As for the mighty Bambino,” she tells us, “he seemed to me to be a pot-bellied, spindly-legged, good-natured buffoon. But he was clearly the big man when it came to baseball, or to anything else, for that matter. . . . You had to look at him and feel that you were watching one of the wonders of the world.”
The marriage was happy but short. Gehrig’s body began to fail him in 1938. He played in all one hundred and fifty-seven games that season, keeping his consecutive-game streak alive, and the Yankees won the World Series. But his hitting dropped off. By the following spring, it was clear that he could no longer play, and on May 2, 1939, the streak ended. He flew to Minnesota and entered the Mayo Clinic, where he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—soon known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
It seems, in Eig’s account, that the doctors never told Gehrig outright that ALS is incurable. But athletes know their bodies, and he must have understood fairly soon that this was the end. He died, “like a great clock winding down,” Eleanor said, in 1941. He was thirty-seven. When his body was displayed at the Church of the Divine Paternity, on Central Park West and Seventy-sixth Street, thousands of people stood in line to view it. Babe Ruth cut ahead of everyone. As he stood in front of the casket, he wept. Seven years later, Ruth would be dead, of throat cancer. In 1995, Gehrig’s consecutive-game record was broken by Cal Ripken, Jr. The combine was all over it.
But before he died Gehrig had, at last, his Ruthian moment. This was the speech he gave at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, his farewell to baseball. By then, everyone had heard the news. Tributes were spoken; gifts were presented. Ruth was there, said some words, put his arm around Gehrig for the cameras. Gehrig desperately wanted not to have to speak. This was exactly the kind of attention he had spent his life trying to avoid.
The announcer told the crowd that Gehrig was too moved to say anything, but a chant went up, and so he walked to the microphone. Eleanor later said that he had written an outline just in case; he clearly had some sentences memorized. Amazingly, only four of those sentences have been recorded and survive. Versions of the whole speech that you read have been pieced together from newspaper stories.
But we do have Gehrig’s voice at the start. “For the past two weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break,” he says. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” And at the end: “I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.” There is nothing self-pitying in the speech, no self-denial, no defiance. He is helping other people get through his pain. This was not colorless or boring. This was a man looking at death. In an age of showmen, in the very House That Ruth Built, it was a transcendent moment of selflessness. ###
[Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book The Metaphysical Club (2001) was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. See other books by Louis Menand here. He was an associate editor of The New Republic from 1986 to 1987, an editor at The New Yorker from 1992 to 1993, and a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books from 1994 to 2001. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. Menand received a BA (English) from Pomona College (CA) and a PhD (English) from Columbia University (NY). In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.]
