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The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out. Despite the fact that cigarette use is at an 80-year-low in America, smoking has, unfortunately, become cool again. At the New York Fashion Week show in February, some models accessorized their runway outfits with a cigarette. A clip of the TikTok influencer Addison Rae smoking two cigarettes is cut into her latest music video, which has more than 4 million views. The pop star Charli XCX, who was recently gifted a bouquet of cigarettes for her birthday, sparked one during her performance in Manchester last month, and has said that her brat starter pack would include “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”
All of this is despite the fact that anyone born after 1964, when the surgeon general pronounced that smoking causes cancer, should know the habit is just about the worst thing you can do if you want to live a long, healthy life. And many people grasped that much earlier: The Atlantic contributor James Parton wrote back in 1868 that “it does not pay to smoke.” When he quit tobacco, he had fewer headaches, enjoyed exercise more, and held a “better opinion of myself” (though I admit that his prescribed method for kicking the habit—drinking a “good stiff glass of whiskey and water” instead of reaching for a pipe—hasn’t held up very well).
Tobacco has been a staple of American industry and culture since its founding. “AMERICA is especially responsible to the whole world for tobacco, since the two are twin-sisters, born to the globe in a day,” an unnamed Atlantic contributor wrote in 1861, just four years after the magazine’s founding. Cigarettes later became not just ubiquitous but cool, thanks to decades of advertising. Atlantic writers have explored how cigarette companies devised campaigns in the 20th century targetingfeminists, Black consumers, and folks who aspired to be something like the real-life Marlboro man. As the writer Judith Ohikuare documented in 2014, this magazine, like many publications, was littered with such ads half a century ago. But in the decades following the surgeon general’s 1964 report, health advocates attempted to counterprogram Americans’ perception of cigarettes. Health classes across the country ensured that smoking them was permanently associated with images of gum decay and blackened, deflated lungs. “Eradicating the glamor of smoking has been one of the successes of health advocates,” Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture, wrote in 2011.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
This October, in the closing days of the presidential election, the podcaster Joe Rogan said something extraordinary. He had just hosted Donald Trump for a three-hour conversation in his studio in Austin, Texas, and wanted to make clear that he had discussed a similar arrangement with Kamala Harris’s campaign. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour,” he posted on X. “I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin.” And so Rogan declined to interview the vice president.
What a diva, some people said. If you’re offered an interview with a presidential candidate, get off your ass and get on a plane! But Rogan could dictate his own terms. He is not competing in the snake pit of D.C. journalism, where sitting opposite a major candidate delivers an instant status bump. He is the most popular podcaster alive, with a dedicated audience of right-leaning men who enjoy mixed martial arts, stand-up comedy, and wild speculation about aliens (space, not illegal); they are not political obsessives. Rogan knew that Harris needed him more than he needed her.
Nothing symbolizes the changed media landscape of this past election more than Rogan’s casual brush-off. Within a week, his interview with Trump racked up more than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and millions more on other platforms. No single event, apart from the Harris-Trump debate, had a bigger audience this election cycle. By comparison, Harris’s contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, the most popular of the cable networks, drew 8 million viewers to the live broadcast, and another 6.5 million on YouTube.
Those figures demonstrate the absurdity of talking about the “mainstream media” as many still do, especially those who disparage it. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Americans with a wide range of political views generally agree about which outlets fall within this definition: newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and television networks such as CNN. Everyone else who’s disseminating information at scale is treated like a couple of hipsters running a craft brewery who are valiantly competing with Budweiser.
That’s simply not true. Rogan is the “mainstream media” now. Elon Musk, too. In the 2024 campaign, both presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and television sit-downs—the tougher, more focused “accountability” interviews—in favor of talking directly with online personalities. (J. D. Vance, to his credit, made a point of taking reporters’ questions at his events and sat down with CNN and the Times, among others.) The result was that both Trump and Harris got away with reciting slogans rather than outlining policies. Trump has not outlined how his promised mass deportations might work in practice, nor did we ever find out if Harris still held firm to her previous stances, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalization of sex work. The vacuum was filled with vibes.
The concept of the mainstream media arose in the 20th century, when reaching a mass audience required infrastructure—a printing press, or a broadcast frequency, or a physical cable into people’s houses—and institutions. That reality made the media easy to vilify. “The press became ‘the media’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it,” Richard Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire wrote in his 1975 memoir.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
In his speech for the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, Senator John Sherman of Ohio made a number of legal points about how to understand competition. But the thrust of his argument was about law and order, for the specter of violence was hanging over a nation that had within living memory experienced a massive and traumatic civil war. And there had been significant, and violent, strikes involving railroads, sometimes nationwide.
Sherman believed America as a free people simply could not sustain the rise of immense concentrations of power in the industrial corporations he saw in his day. Congress had to act, or chaos would reign. Here’s what he said:
You must heed their appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before. The popular mind is agitated with problems that may disturb social order, and among them all none is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity that has grown within a single generation out of the concentration of capital into vast combinations to control production and trade and to break down competition.
Just two years earlier, President Grover Cleveland, in his 1888 State of the Union, discussed that same social chaos in the wake of the rise of large corporations and the inequality they brought.
Read the rest of this article at: BIG by Matt Stoller
As a child growing up in Milan, Carlo Acutis collected stories of miracles. He wrote about the time when, in 1411, wine turned to blood in a castle chapel in Ludbreg, Croatia; of how, in 1630, a pastor in Canosio, Italy, saved his town from a flood by blessing the raging waters; of how, in 1906, a priest on the island of Tumaco, Colombia, held up a reliquary on the beach to stop an approaching tsunami. Acutis, 11 years old and a devout Catholic, began typing up these stories and posting them on his website, which he styled as a “virtual museum” of miraculous events. A section on the site invited visitors to “discover how many friends you have in heaven”, and to read stories of young saints.
Acutis hoped to one day join their ranks. He was convinced that he would die before he reached adulthood and told his mother, Antonia, that he would perish of “a broken vein in his brain”. He wanted to be buried in the town of Assisi, where his family had a summer home. In the meantime, he devoted his life to the church, which was a surprise to his largely secular parents. As a teenager, he taught catechism classes to young children, and offered them a step-by-step guide to becoming a saint. ““Always remember that you, too, can become a saint!” he would say. Every day, they were to go to mass, recite the Holy Rosary, read the scripture and confess their sins.
Describing what would-be saints needed to do in life, Acutis omitted mention of the significant tasks they would need to undertake in death. To be recognised as a saint, an individual must go through what is essentially a prolonged posthumous trial during which their physical and spiritual remains are assessed. The Vatican office responsible for this process is known as the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, and it has been in operation since 1588. The dicastery investigates whether the candidate was spiritually exemplary in life, and whether they have proven useful to the faithful in death. Crucially, and most controversially, every candidate must also have two scientifically inexplicable miracles posthumously attributed to them before they can be canonised. (God alone can perform miracles, according to the Catholic faith; saints merely intercede on behalf of believers.)
The church’s strict rules for miracles mean that many seemingly miraculous events fall short of the official requirements, leaving some saintly causes to linger for decades despite ample veneration from the faithful. “There’s been this longstanding tension between popular piety and clerical rulings,” the historian Candy Gunther Brown told me. The Vatican’s saint-making process is, “in part, an effort to have official control over popular piety”.
Its employees are some of its most devoted congregants. “It is the best of the old internet, and it’s the best of old San Francisco, and neither one of those things really exist in large measures anymore,” says the Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, another longtime staffer, who loves cycling and favors black nail polish. “It’s a window into the late-’90s web ethos and late-’90s San Francisco culture—the crunchy side, before it got all tech bro. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: “The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, / All life long crying without avail, / As the water all night long is crying to me.” The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” which is where Malone found it. Beneath Symons’s lines, Du Bois supplies musical notation for the opening phrase of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The topic, then, is sorrow, songs of sorrow, sounds of sorrow.
Malone’s album, a hushed, meditative collection of pieces for male vocal quartet, brass quintet, and organ, is steeped in melancholy, but it is not the kind of melancholy that you can absent-mindedly sink into, as if wrapping yourself in a comforter on a cold night. Malone and a group of collaborators recently presented a live rendition of “All Life Long,” at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, as part of the annual New York edition of the Polish festival Unsound. The titular work, vaguely in the key of A minor, was heard in versions for choir and for solo organ. The music seems, at first encounter, an exercise in trancelike minimalist repetition, with compactly rising-and-falling five-note phrases recurring dozens of times. The words “all life long” unfold as a primordial sigh. There is, however, a harmonic tension at the heart of the conception, as semitone dissonances pierce the texture in almost every bar—F against E, D-sharp against E, C against B. As one of these twinges is resolved, another intrudes. The tension subsides only in the last iteration, as the bare interval A-E swells and then breaks off.
This is music at once pristine and forbidding, redolent of the austere polyphony of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. You might expect the composer to be a solitary hermit, living in a lighthouse on an otherwise uninhabited island. Malone is, in fact, a thirty-year-old cosmopolite who grew up in Colorado and played in experimental bands in her teen-age years; in 2012, she moved to Stockholm, where she became active in the city’s drone-music and electronic scenes. Her husband, Stephen O’Malley, who also plays organ on “All Life Long,” is a founding member of the overpowering drone-metal band Sunn O))), which also performed at Unsound. So far, Malone has won a following more in the electronic world than in the classical sphere. The gnawing beauty of “All Life Long” may, however, bring her new admirers. Its presence is as vast as it is mysterious.
A couple of days after the Tully Hall concert, I met Malone in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, on the Lower East Side. As basketball players hooted in the background, she described her compositional methods, her favorite tuning systems, and her free-floating status among musical traditions and genres. “I grew up singing classical vocal music,” she told me. “I was in a children’s choir, and then I went to an arts middle school and high school, where I was a vocal major.” But she also gravitated toward underground-music venues in Denver, where she spent most of her youth. At the age of sixteen, she enrolled at Simon’s Rock, an early-college program in the Berkshires, where she began playing in a noise duo.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
