Government Executive - Authors - Megan Garber

Good Riddance to the Handshake

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 14 May 2020 07:00:00 -0400

In February 1958, Science Digest, inspired by the launch of Sputnik and the consequent hastening of the space race, asked a question that was both timely and absurd: What will space people look like? Consulting unnamed scientists, the magazine concluded that extraterrestrials would likely “bear a strong resemblance to the man next door”: an upright posture, two eyes, two arms, two legs. The planetary neighbors would act like humans as well; the Digest supplemented its story with a drawing of two visitors arriving, via flying saucer, on Earth. One of them, smiling, extends its hand to a man who awaits them—a being so humanlike, in body and in culture, that it, too, uses handshakes as a gesture of greeting. Take comfort, Earthlings, the article suggested: Whatever mysteries might swirl in space’s inky unknown, there is no need to fear. Space people will be just like us.

Handshakes, historically, have often been invoked in that way: as signals of easy equality, as hope for a friction-free world. Their mathematical simplicity—hand to hand, flesh to flesh—implies the dissolution of the differences that might otherwise separate one person from another. In practice, however, the gestures have been much more fraught. And today, as a global pandemic brings a new round of anxious questions about what it means to be a denizen of Earth, the handshake has finally shed its old idealisms. “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last month, explaining how efficiently handshakes can spread illness. In April, Gregory Poland, an infectious-disease expert at the Mayo Clinic, captured the new wisdom like this: “When you extend your hand, you’re extending a bioweapon.”

This moment, then, may well bring with it the end of handshakes. If so: Good riddance. It is high time for them to go—and not only because their new risks far outweigh their old rewards. The gestures, like the image of cheerful “space people” emerging from their saucers to say hi with humanoid hands, have been their own versions of wishful thinking. But handshakes were never as egalitarian as people wanted them to be.

Twenty-nine seconds. that’s how long the handshake between President Donald Trump and President Emmanuel Macron lasted. In July 2017, the two world leaders, along with their wives, had been walking down the Champs-Élysées as part of a military parade celebrating both Bastille Day and the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I. During a pause in the music, the men grasped hands. Neither would let go. The ongoing grip became a news story. Fox News reported that “Presidents Trump and Macron Shook Hands for a Really Long Time.” CNN’s Chris Cillizza offered a second-by-second analysis of the shake that refused to be shaken. The Independent recruited several body-language experts to analyze the presidents’ performative glad-handing.

This was the second time that Trump and Macron had locked their hands and their wits via a preposterously aggressive handshake. It was also one of many, many times that the current American president attempted to treat the handshake as a power play in miniature. (“A History of President Trump’s Awkward Handshakes” was published in Time magazine just four months into his presidency.) In one way, Trump’s approach to flesh-pressing echoes traditions established by previous presidents. William McKinley—who would be killed, eventually, by a gun that was hidden in the sleeve of an assassin who seemed to be offering a handshake—was famous for the “McKinley grip,” a grasp so efficient that it allowed him to meet the palms of as many as 50 people a minute. Teddy Roosevelt once shook the hands of 8,513 people in a single day. (And then, according to his biographer, Edmund Morris, he “went upstairs and privately, disgustedly, scrubbed himself clean.”) Even in an age of mass media and digital outreach, U.S. presidents are estimated to shake hands with some 65,000 people a year.

Typically, those handshakes suggest retail politics in action—leaders’ desire to connect with their constituents. But as the unorthodoxy of the Trump presidency has collided with the crisis of a global pandemic, handshakes have tended to suggest something else: defiance. “I love the people of this country, and you can’t be a politician and not shake hands,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall in early March, as the coronavirus was spreading both globally and in the U.S. “And I’ll be shaking hands with people—and they want to say hello and hug you and kiss you—I don’t care.” (This was, notably, a reversal of the reportedly germophobic president’s earlier stance: “I am not a big fan of the handshake,” Trump said in 1999. “I think it’s barbaric ... Shaking hands, you catch colds, you catch the flu, you catch it, you catch all sorts of things. Who knows what you don’t catch?”) Mike Pence initially echoed Trump’s contrarianism. “As the president has said, in our line of work, you shake hands when someone wants to shake your hand, and I expect the president will continue to do that, I’ll continue to do it,” the vice president declared at a coronavirus-task-force briefing on March 10.

He has since changed course, as has Trump. But their initial reluctance was revealing. The president and vice president were treating handshakes as both arguments and empty assurances: signals that the pandemic was not as dire as the experts were warning it was. The leaders’ particular definition of liberty would include the freedom to shake hands—even when the hands themselves could pose risks to other people. My colleague James Fallows described a March 13 White House press conference like this:

A series of CEOs came to the microphone to describe what their companies were doing to speed testing or help out in other ways. Trump caught the first three or four of them unawares, by shaking their hands as they moved away from the lectern. All seemed startled, as you can see in the video.

Then the other CEOs began to catch on, and a following group of them scuttled away from the microphone before Trump could grab them for a handshake, or held their own hands clenched together, in a protective prayer-style grasp.

This was classic Trump: oblivious, insistent, alarming. The ensnarement of others in his grip, during an event about the risks of human touch, was another instance of President Trump’s Awkward Handshakes—except that the awkwardness in this case was a direct harbinger of danger to come. But the awkwardness was Trumpian in another way, too: Here was the American president taking a gesture of alleged equality and turning it into a ratification of his own power. Here was Donald Trump, once again, making himself unavoidable.

The handshake, thus deployed, was one more way that Trump’s presidency has been a deviation. Historically, after all, handshakes do seem to have been symbols of equality between the two parties who engaged in them. One of the earliest known depictions of a handshake—from the ninth century b.c.—shows King Shalmaneser III of Assyria and King Marduk-Zakir-Shumi I of Babylonia shaking hands in a gesture of apparent concord. References to handshakes are sprinkled throughout The Iliad and The Odyssey, usually as displays of two-way trust. Many gravestones in ancient Greece depicted handshakes between the deceased person and a member of their family, suggesting both a final farewell and a continuity between the living and the dead. “The gesture was performed by two people in a dialogical composition,” one report notes, “which clearly showed their mutual relationship.” In sculptures of Western antiquity, mortals and gods sometimes commune through handshakes, as if the meeting of hands might nullify the distance between them.

Some historians also speculate that the “shake” element of the handshake was an outgrowth of the signaling of good faith: The up-and-down motion, the thinking goes, would dislodge any weapons that might have been hidden up a sleeve. The default of the right hand being offered by each party fits that speculation. That hand, Harper’s Weekly observed in 1870, is “the hand alike of offense and defense.” The offering of it to the other party, the magazine suggested, was meant “to show that the hand was empty, and that neither war nor treachery was intended.”

That symbolism extended into colonial-American times. The historian Michael Zuckerman has written that the Quakers, resenting every “courtly gesture of subordination,” opted instead for the “practice of the handshake, extended to everyone regardless of station.” The move, the writer Ed Simon notes, “offered a fusion of democracy and the divine, the aristocratic bow replaced with the egalitarian handshake.”

Today, though, that egalitarianism is often an illusion. Handshakes, for one thing, are a Western norm that has been adopted more broadly because of American influence on international business and global culture. And while the gestures might symbolize mutual respect, they are also sites of individual judgment. Do a quick internet search and you’ll find a host of urgently toned articles telling readers how to avoid making a poor first impression with a handshake that is too weak or not weak enough or too eager or not eager enough or, worst of all, clammy. (How does one prevent the unfortunate possession of a clammy hand? The articles typically leave that question unanswered.) Harper’s Weekly, as it considered the origins of the handshake in 1870, also observed that handshakes can be particularly fraught for women, and cautioned them against vigorous hand-shaking. “It is for them to receive homage, not to give it,” the magazine mused.

Three years ago, a Reddit user asked a question: “Why is a ‘limp’ handshake considered bad?” This was the top-voted answer:

A handshake between men is a nonverbal conversation. If they match my grip, I see them as an equal. If they’re limp, I see them more as a pussy. If they try to crush my hand, then I see them as an asshat. With women, I match their grip but if they do the whole knuckles up, limp grip and wrist, then I immediately think that they may be uppity.

The poster added, gallantly: “Granted, I try to reserve judgement.”

And so: the handshake, if it goes, will not be missed. There are so many better options—gestures that are not only safer, from a germ-spreading point of view, but also more fully egalitarian. We have already seen some of them on full display. As the coronavirus spread, cricket teams in Britain opted for fist bumps instead of handshakes before their games. In the Scottish Premier League, teams simply forwent the traditional pre-match handshake, to no detrimental effect.

Leaders, too, are modeling alternatives. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been bowing to fellow leaders in lieu of a handshake. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, tweeted that he was “opting for hand-on-heart instead of hand shakes” as a greeting. Even Mike Pence has replaced the handshake; he was recently recorded extending an elbow, for a friendly bump, instead of a hand. Jerome Adams, the U.S. surgeon general, has modeled the elbow bump as well.

The American Lung Association shared a video that offered five alternatives to the handshake: the elbow bump, the foot tap, the head nod, the yoga bow, and the wave. The “Wuhan shake”—bumping shoes, rather than shaking hands—has gone viral. So have other tongue-in-cheek alternatives to hand-shaking. On his show in early March, Stephen Colbert suggested “the selfie” (in which you shake hands with yourself) and “the intern” (in which you outsource the hand-shaking to someone else). The satirical magazine Broadway Beat (“Fake Broadway News for Real Broadway Newsies”) recently suggested that the best replacement for a handshake is jazz hands. “If we have any hope of saving the world from this crippling disease,” the magazine wrote, “by God, it is with sassy, interpretative movement.”

Handshakes—along with so many other arbitrary norms—have fallen out of favor before. In the 1920s, after the influenza epidemic that killed millions of people around the world, the American Journal of Nursing began warning that hands could function as vectors of bacterial transfer. It recommended that Americans adapt the Chinese custom at the time: to shake one’s own hands together as a gesture of friendship and trust. Following an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, the publisher Mathew Carey noted, “The old custom of shaking hands fell into such general disuse, that many shrank back with affright at even the offer of the hand.” In the 15th century, the bubonic plague led Britain’s King Henry VI to ban the custom of kissing on the cheeks as a mode of greeting. The historian Thucydides, writing of a plague in Athens, observed how efficiently disease could compel people to change behaviors that had been honed into habits. “As the disaster deepened,” he wrote, “men became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane.”

This, too, is a moment of rethinking, of reconsidering, of recalibrating. The coronavirus pandemic, Quartz recently reported, has led the Emily Post Institute to amend its long-standing position on the politeness of handshakes. Do something else, the etiquette experts now recommend. Myka Meier, the author of Modern Etiquette Made Easy, suggests that until a commonly accepted form of greeting comes along to replace the wordless handshake, people can use another tool in the etiquette arsenal: their voice. “If someone reaches out to shake your hand, either socially or in business, you can simply say, ‘I’m going handshake-free to be extra careful,’” she told the New York Post. “It shows thoughtfulness for other people’s health and well-being.”

That is the basis of etiquette: respect for the other. Prioritizing other people’s well-being above one’s own. The handshake no longer fits that ethos. The gesture that once evoked the shaking-loose of weapons no longer makes sense when the human hand itself can double as a “bioweapon.” The greeting that suggested egalitarianism no longer works in an environment of such deeply uneven risk. If the handshake dies, historians of the future might mark its date of death as the spring of 2020—when the American president treated the gesture as a tool of defiance, and when many others, summoning a world’s worth of wisdom, proved how easily the handshake could be replaced by other greetings. Handshakes are not—apologies to the “space people” of the American 1950s—universal. They are not inevitable. Power grabs, low-grade and literal: Goodbye to all that.

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An Indelible Image From Trump's 'On Both Sides' Press Conference

Megan Garber — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 15:47:43 -0400

It read like a poem—or, perhaps, an elegy.

"We
strongest
this egregious
bigotry, and
no place in"

And there the words ended. They were snippets of the text of the statement President Trump had delivered on Saturday, reacting to the events that had taken place in Charlottesville. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence,” he said—before adding, apparently as an ad-lib: “On many sides, on many sides.” They were words that the president had repeated on Monday, when he made, under pressure from his colleagues and from American citizens, a more expansive statement on Charlottesville. The bigotry on display in that city, he said, reading directly from a prompter, “has no place in America.”

On Tuesday, however, those words were replaced with new ones—during a press conference, set in the lobby of Trump Tower, that was meant to be about infrastructure. At one point, as President Trump spoke, he removed from his jacket pocket the text of the earlier statement, printed in large and blunt sans serif, to refer to what he had said before: “I brought it, I brought it,” he said, reading the text before putting it down, figuratively and extremely literally. The Associated Press photographer Pablo Martinez Monsivais captured the moment—in which only those few words, the we and the strongestand the egregious bigotry, were visible to viewers—and the reporter Colin Campbell tweeted the results: Here was the president referring to the carefully calibrated words that had been prepared for him. And here he was, replacing them—effectively erasing them—with new ones: words that, as The New York Times summed it up, give white supremacists “an unequivocal boost.” Words that led David Duke to cheer for the new order of things.

And, also, significantly: spoken words. Words that had not been prepared or otherwise vetted, but that seemed to have come directly from the mind of the president. Words, delivered in the presence of cabinet members who had come to talk about roads and bridges, that reportedly left members of the president’s staff “stunned and disheartened” precisely because they were public airings of “opinions that the president had long expressed in private.” Words that regressed to Saturday’s ad-libbed false equivalence: many sides, many sides.

Tuesday’s press conference will very likely be remembered as a moment of extreme moral clarity—the moment in which the emperor, speaking in his golden chamber with the aid of scrolls and servants, revealed himself, once again, for what he is. But there was something else that crystallized in that press conference: that image of the president, taking the words of reconciliation—words that had been selected and edited and set in the permanence of print—and undoing them. The president privileging his own words, the work of a mind in a moment, over those that had been chosen for him. In an instant, the “we” of the statement had been replaced, effectively, with an “I.”

Writing suggests rationality. Writing suggests consideration. Writing suggests external memory—Plato was wary of it, for precisely this reason—but it also suggests memory that is, by default, collective. The law distinguishes between written agreements and verbal ones, between libel and slander, between words that come in the heat of the moment, essentially, and words that take their time to breathe and cool. So do most people: When you really care about something—when you want to make sure you don’t forget about it—you generally write it down.

Those distinctions, however, are considerably less meaningful when it comes to American presidents, whose words are understood to be not merely their own, but the nation’s. Presidential words are traditionally the work of many behind-the-scenes writers; even when those words are spoken and “off the cuff”—even when they’re uttered in impromptu press conferences or on whimsical comedy shows—they have still, traditionally, adopted the deliberately calibrated approaches of text. Let me be clear, President Obama would say. Read my lips, George H. W. Bush put it, ruinously.

This caution, certainly, can be a frustration to people who simply want to know what a president is thinking. There’s a reason that “scripted,” in the political context, is usually something of a slur. In a broader sense, though, the sanctity of presidential words has long been an element of the compact between the presidency and the public. He will speak intentionally, the promise goes. He will speak carefully. He will speak understanding that he is speaking not merely for himself, but for all Americans. He will speak with the knowledge that, though he may be president, his mind—his particular sense of the world—is not the only one that matters.

Donald Trump rejects these norms. He treats his Twitter feed not as President Obama treated his—as a platform through which the White House, with all the institutions embedded in it, might speak to the nation—but as a mainline to the presidential mind. All the insults. All the typos. All the statements that would seem to suggest national policy, coming as they do from the president, but that often amount simply to angry observations. When President Trump speaks, in other words, he speaks for himself—often to the surprise and occasionally to the horror of the people charged with sending messages on behalf of the White House. It’s one reason Trump’s admirers admire him: the honesty of it, the ease of it, the rip-out-the-middleman efficiency of it. President Trump tells it like it is, they note. No political correctness here. No compromise here.

The other way of looking at the president’s attitude, though, is the way that is captured so elegantly in Pablo Martinez Monsivais’s image of those curtailed notes: as a rejection of the communal nature of government. Here were words that had been printed out for the president—words that he had delivered to a wounded and weary nation. Here were words that were written down in every meaningful sense of that phrase: carefully selected by a team of committed people, with an eye toward inclusion and an aim at the sweep of history. Words that were edited, and considered, and reconsidered, and calibrated for a country that is as diverse as it is immense.

And, then: Here were those same words, undone in the span of minutes. Here was all that careful writing, and editing, and fact-checking, nullified by the president’s erroneous equivalencies, by his ad-libbed words about the “alt-left” and George Washington. Here was the American president, choosing the workings of his own mind over the workings of the presidency. On Tuesday, President Trump used printed text to remind reporters, and the country, of what he had said before—what he had read before: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America.” The president added, shifting in subject from the plural “we” to the singular Donald Trump: “And then I went on from there.”

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‘Covfefe’: A Typo? A Conspiracy? A Metaphor for America?

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 09:46:15 -0400

“What is ‘covfefe’?”

That was the voice of a White House reporter, on Wednesday afternoon, asking a question of White House press secretary Sean Spicer on behalf of herself and many confused Americans. Her question was practical and philosophical and full of frustration: What, truly, is “covfefe”? Was it the word “coverage,” autocorrected? An errant Starbucks order? An English verb of Old Norse origin, meaning “to back out of the Paris climate accord”? A coded—pardon me, a covded—message from the Illuminati, its true meaning known only to Robert Langdon and/or the innards of a Jeffersonian codex?

Yeah, it was probably a typo. That is the simplest answer, the Occam’s razor answer. When the president sent a tweet out to his 31 million followers late on Tuesday evening—“Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” the message read in its entirety—the posting seemed the result of that most common of internet snafus: sending a thing out before the thing is ready to be sent. The president, very likely, was writing something about his negative press coverage, and mistakenly hit a wrong button, and then mistakenly hit “Tweet.” Thumbus interruptus, who among us, etc.

Trump seemed to admit to having typo-ed when, on Wednesday morning, he deleted the “covfefe” tweet and sent a teasing note in its place: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!”

Enjoy it, of course, people had. All those jokes. All those memes. All that convfefiality. But that was Tuesday night. By Wednesday, the nation was ready to move on.

But then! On Wednesday afternoon, Spicer conducted his off-camera press conference. And the press secretary seemed to deny the Occam-y explanation of “covfefe.” According to audio of the briefing:

“Do you think people should be concerned that the president posted somewhat of an incoherent tweet last night and that it then stayed up for hours?” a reporter asked Spicer.

“Um, no,” the press secretary replied.

“Why did it stay up so long? Is no one watching this?” the reporter asked.

“I think the president and a small group of people knew exactly what he meant,” Spicer answered.

At which point chaos erupted among the press gallery. Their cries went like this, according to one transcript:

“Wait a minute!”

“What does he mean?”

“What does the president mean?”

“What is ‘covfefe’?”

“Oh, my gosh.”

With that, in a single statement made to a room of terribly confused reporters, the White House press secretary turned what appeared to be a simple typo—the kind of mistake that speaks to the direct-to-the-people communications approach that the president’s supporters so often admire in him—into … something more. An inside joke? A coded message among “the president and a small group of people?” And so “covfefe” became, in an instant … a covfspiracy theory. The Boston Globe called Spicer’s explanation “head-scratching.” The Hill called it “cryptic.” HuffPost called it “eyebrow-raising.”

What it also was, though, was unnecessary. That first reporter in Spicer’s briefing had asked a fairly straightforward question—not “what did the president mean by ‘covfefe,’” because who can know what lurks within the hearts of men, etc.—but rather “should people be concerned” that the errant tweet was left up for so long. At which point Spicer could have admitted that the tweet was a typo, and reiterated that that kind of unmediated communication is one of the president’s political assets; or excoriated the press for focusing on a single tweet when there are so many bigger stories taking place; or, indeed, explained what “covfefe,” if not a typo, actually meant.

Spicer did none of those things. He suggested that the garbled word did mean something, but then, in the same sentence, suggested that the meaning was something the press, and by extension the American public, would not be privileged to learn. He emphasized the us-versus-them ethos that has defined the Trump White House’s approach to the media. He took something simple—so achingly simple—and gave it the whiff of conspiracy. He took Occam’s razor and gave it his own spin: In his briefing room, the press secretary suggested, the most convoluted explanation of something is usually the correct one.

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Are We Having Too Much Fun?

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 15:19:13 -0400

Earlier this month, thousands of protesters gathered at Washington’s National Mall to advocate for an assortment of causes: action against global climate change, federal funding for scientific research, an empirical approach to the world and its mysteries. The protesters at the March for Science, as scientists are wont to do, followed what has become one of the formulas for such an event, holding clever signs, wearing cheeky costumes, and attempting, in general, to carnivalize their anger. “Make the Barrier Reef Great Again,” read one sign at the March. “This is my sine,” read another. “I KNEW TO WEAR THIS,” one woman had written on the poncho she wore that soggy Saturday, “BECAUSE SCIENCE PREDICTED THE RAIN.” Three protesters, sporting sensible footwear and matching Tyrannosaurus rex costumes, waved poster boards bearing messages like “Jurassick of this shit.”

There was a time when irony was supposed to have died—when Americans, frightened and shaken and weary, worried that the world had robbed them of their constitutional right to laughter. They needn’t have fretted: Irony—satire—political discourse that operates through the productive hedge of the joke—have not only evaded death in past decades; they have, instead, been enjoying a renaissance. Jokes have informed many prominent, though certainly not all, political protests; they have also, more broadly, come to shape the way people understand the world around them. Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy. Jokes, in other words, with their charms and their appealing self-effacement and their plausible deniability (just kidding!), are helping people to do the messy work of democracy: to engage, to argue, and, every once in a while, to launch a successful bid for the presidency of the United States.

Scrolling through Instagram to see the pictures from the March for Science, I marveled at the protest’s display of teasing American wit. (“Remember polio? No? Thanks, science!”) And then I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way—Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny—but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda.

Postman died in 2003; were he still with us, though, he would likely be both horrified and unsurprised to see protesters fighting for the fate of the planet with the help of a punnified Labrador—or, for that matter, to see the case for women’s inalienable rights being made by people dressed as plush vulvas. He might whisper that, in politics, the line between engagement and apathy is thinner than we want to believe. He might suggest that fun is fun, definitely, but, given its amorality, a pretty awkward ethic. He might warn, with a Cassandric sigh, that there is something delightful and also not very delightful at all about a trio of Tyrannosauri who, in the name of saving the world, try their hardest to go viral on Facebook.

Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That’s the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans’ “vast descent into triviality,” and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans’ great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun.

* * *

In 1984, Americans took a look around at the world they had created for themselves and breathed a collective sigh of relief. The year George Orwell had appointed as the locus of his dark and only lightly fictionalized predictions—war, governmental manipulation, surveillance not just of actions, but of thoughts themselves—had brought with it, in reality, only the gentlest of dystopias. Sure, there was corporatism. Sure, there was communism. And yet, for most of the Americans living through that heady decade, 1984 had not, for all practical purposes, become Nineteen Eighty-Four. They surveyed themselves, and they congratulated themselves: They had escaped.

Or perhaps they hadn’t. Postman opened Amusing Ourselves to Death with a nod to the year that had preceded it. He talked about the freedoms enjoyed by the Americans of 1984—cultural, commercial, political. And then he broke the bad news: They’d been measuring themselves according to the wrong dystopia. It wasn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision,” Postman noted, “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history.” Instead: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

The vehicle of their oppression, in this case? Yep, the television. Which had, Postman argued, thoroughly insinuated itself on all elements of American life—and not just in the boob-tubed, couch-potatoed, the-average-American-watches-five-hours-of-television-a-day kind of way that is so familiar in anti-TV invectives, but in a way that was decidedly more intimate. Postman was a media theorist above all, and Amusing Ourselves to Death owes debts, he acknowledges, to Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong and Daniel Boorstin and Elizabeth Eisenstein and Karl Marx and Lewis Mumford and the general notion that we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. Mumford’s theories of clocks, Ong’s theories of speech, McLuhan’s theories of everything—there they all are, making an appearance in this argument about the civic threats of laughter. Postman would wind his warnings about the dystopian dangers of television around his own adaptation of McLuhan’s aphorism: The medium, he suggested, is not simply the message—it isn’t straightforward or self-aware enough for that. The medium, instead, is the metaphor.

And the metaphorical nature of television, Postman argued, has meant that TV and its very particular logic—its assumptions, its aesthetics, its image-oriented and episodic understanding of the world—have found their way into other areas of American cultural life. Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan (the former actor, he pointed out, had won a second term in a field that included another celebrity, the former astronaut John Glenn); he wrote long after Richard Nixon had made that tentative, awkward appearance on Laugh-In (“sock it to meeeee”), and slightly before a relatively obscure governor of Arkansas would prove his ability to lead the most powerful nation in the world by playing the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show. He wrote during the time when it was the newly standard practice for national politicians like George McGovern and Jesse Jackson to both prove and amplify their popularity by hosting Saturday Night Live.

Postman was writing, in other words, just as the amusement impulse was bleeding into nearly every area of American politics, bringing both irony and redundancy to the term “political theater.” Gazing upon it all, he was decidedly unamused. He thought all the dramedies were missing the point. He thought they compromised the other things Americans should value in their civics and in their culture: wisdom, principle, meaning. He pointed to the professors in college classes who were considered good teachers only if they could effectively entertain their students. He pointed to the televangelists of the time who brought an infomercial feel to the experience of faith. He pointed to presidential debates people watched not just to hear policy proposals, but to see great performances. “We may have reached the point,” Postman remarked, “where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”

If Americans of 1985 had indeed reached that point, and if the Americans of 2017 have surpassed them in the achievement, then it’s been a long time, Postman suggested, in the making. To understand the American culture of the moment, Postman suggested, you have to go back, beyond the television and the radio and the newspaper, to the telegraph. The buzzing electrical wires laid loosely over the nation in the 19th century—the network that first gave rise to the extremely postmodernist notion of information freed of its context—was in Postman’s telling the harbinger and the ancestor of the American media of the 1980s. For Postman, the answer to the first message ever sent through telegraphic wires—the epic and ominous “what hath God wrought”—included CNN and Star Search and actors-turned-leaders and, if you project out just a little bit, Squawk on the Street and Fox & Friends and diplomacy-via-tweet and a presidential press secretary who may spread untruths from the highest podium in the land, but whose briefings are also the textbook definition of good TV, right down to the surprise cameos.

The telegraph, Postman argued, produced news and information that was, for the first time, detached from the rhythms of people’s daily lives. Because of the telegraph, someone in Baltimore could read about a scandal in New York, almost as soon as it had done its scandalizing. Because of the telegraph, headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal—became the defining element of American media production. Because of the telegraph, news became instant and easy. “Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives,” Postman wrote, “now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.” The telegraph, for the first time, “made relevance irrelevant.”

And it influenced American media, on the whole, to continue in that pattern. The telegraph gave rise to yellow journalism, which found newspapers competing for audience attention not so much via the information they shared, but via the entertainments they offered. It created a media environment that abandoned sustained narrative for more episodic delights—a condition, Postman put it, in which “facts push other facts into and out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” Most of all, it gave rise to the biases that still inform our mass media today, creating, he argued, “a world full of strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities.”

If it sounds familiar, it’s because, as Postman would have it, we are still operating in the paradigm created by the telegraph—one that is extremely good at creating in-the-moment diversions and extremely less good at instilling in its consumers a sense of continuity, meaning, and wisdom. It’s no wonder, in Postman’s reading, that, today, “fake news” has thrived, that “alternative facts” has become a thing, that so many Americans both absorb and express political opinions via memes. It’s no wonder that Malcolm Gladwell would produce an argument against contemporary American satire that would point to jokes as the masses’ new opiate. It’s no wonder, too, that some of the favorite entertainments of those masses involve a fictional genre that goes by the name of “reality.”

Postman was a postmodernist who was uniquely suspicious of postmodern thought, and he worried, as Daniel Boorstin had before him, that our images had come unmoored from our fuller realities—and that people, being tied to them, were similarly adrift. He saw a world in which Americans were made pliant and complacent because of their cravings for distraction. He knew that despots often used amusement to soften and systematize their seizings of power. He worried that television—an environment where facts and fictions swirl in the same space, cheerfully disconnected from the world’s real and hard truths—would beget a world in which truth itself was destabilized. “In a print culture,” he argued, “writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care.”

In a television culture, he argued, the opposite is true.

Postman romanticized—really, he over-romanticized—print as a paradigm. He celebrated the literacy and erudition of the early American 19th century without paying much attention to the many, many people who were excluded from the era’s notion of politics. And he had very little to say about the plain counterargument to Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is that entertainment, engaging people as it does, can be extremely democratic. Americans have long leveraged the power of the lol to effect political change (see the humor that pulses through Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, or, slightly more recently, the suffragette Alice Duer Miller’s 1915 book of satirical poetry, tellingly titled Are Women People?). Politically weaponized dinosaurs may be distinct creations of this supremely bizarre political moment; they are also, however, distinctly American.

Still, Postman understood what might come, because he understood what had been. He saw the systems of things. In one way he couldn’t have imagined the world of 2017, one in which television, still, defines so much of American life. He couldn’t have anticipated Samantha Bee or John Oliver or Seth Meyers or Stephen Colbert—he couldn’t have known how comedians would come to double, in a culture saturated with information, as journalists. He couldn’t have known that celebrities would be regularly asked to weigh in on the political conversations of the day, or that they would be excoriated for refusing to engage in those discussions. He would have laughed, probably, if he’d heard that the reality TV star who is president has promised not to fire his error-prone press secretary because “that guy gets great ratings.”

He wouldn’t, however, have been terribly surprised. Earlier this month, as President Trump launched a military strike against Syria and its leader’s crimes against humanity, Brian Williams anchored MSNBC’s coverage of the attack, narrating as footage showed U.S. missiles streaking like unsteady stars across the blank night sky. “We see these beautiful pictures,” Williams said, seeming to forget, caught as he was in the moment, the people on the other end—people for whom the bombs would be so much more than mere images. Williams quoted Leonard Cohen. He talked, with wonder, about being “guided by the beauty of our weapons.” He repeated once more: “They are beautiful pictures.”

Neil Postman couldn’t have known. But, in another way, he knew.

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'I’m Moving You to BCC'

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 14 Apr 2017 11:55:14 -0400

Have you ever been on an email chain, conversing pleasantly with colleagues and/or friends, and been suddenly informed that you have been “moved to BCC”? Was the announcement a tad startling? Maybe a bit confusing? Did the tiny part of you that remains a self-conscious tween wonder whether you had really just been informed that the party was over, while the party was so obviously still going on?

Such fears are, to an extent, well founded: You were, indeed, forcibly ghosted. To the extent that CCs and BCCs are email’s way, as the professional-resources site Levo puts it, “of including multiple recipients in a hierarchical way,” you were demoted, and extremely publicly. But that’s also to say that, in this age of incessant conversation and information overload and weaponized risotto recipes, you were shown the greatest gift another human can offer to another, on email: You were given the present of non-presence.

Here’s the quirk of email that makes “moving you to BCC” such a mercy: When someone replies-all to a conversation that contains both CCed and BCCed parties, the CCed folks will receive the reply … while the BCCed parties won’t. So to move someone to BCC in an email chain is to ensure that they won’t be part of the conversation going forward. And to inform them of the move is simply to be transparent, to all involved, about the upcoming silence.

Paul Argenti, a professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, gave me the following example of the canonical “moving you to BCC” scenario: Say Argenti introduces two people over email. Ideally, if one of them doesn’t ruin the whole vibe with an awkward “nice to e-meet you,” the two continue the conversation between themselves. Argenti, here, doesn’t need to be part of the back-and-forth that ensues—in fact, he would very probably prefer not to be. So one of the recipients of his initial email, thoughtfully recognizing this fact, removes him from the conversation. “Thanks, Paul (moving you to BCC),” that person might say.

Argenti, in his scenario, will be grateful to the (re)mover. “Moving you to BCC,” Argenti told me, is essentially a shorthand for saying, “I know you really don’t want to hear this, but I do want you to know that we’ve gotten in touch, and thank you very much.” Bim, bam, blessedly silent boom—politeness all around. It’s so elegant. It’s so merciful. And a similar approach can be used when a conversation that started with many people has narrowed to require input from fewer participants. Some thoughtful soul will take it upon themselves to do what people, email being what it is, cannot always do for themselves: remove them from the chain, with its inbox-clogging messages and its nagging attentional requirements. That person will have done their colleagues a solid, and also acknowledged a profound truth of modern life: that taking one for the team will occasionally mean taking people off the team.

Here, though, is another quirk of email architecture, one that can make “moving you to BCC” so confusing for those on the receiving end of it: “Moving you to BCC” is a future-oriented courtesy, one that operates in a conditional framework. “If this conversation continues, then you will not be part of it.” So to have been moved to BCC is to have been liberated, but only almost; until the next round of replies, you will exist in a kind of epistolary purgatory. It’s awkward, for sure: You’re there, but you soon won’t be, and the person who has made that decision on your behalf is now informing everyone else about your imminent departure. There you are, maybe and maybe not, caught up in Schrödinger’s email field.

And yet: It’s worth it, because soon you will be rendered blissfully ignorant of the rest of the chain’s proceedings. You will have been disappeared, out of courtesy. The “moving you” move is one example of what Daniel Post Senning, the great-great-grandson of Emily Post and himself an etiquette expert, calls “emerging etiquette”: conventions and courtesies that arise to fit new cultural environments. Some conventions, he told me, are fairly constant—table manners, say, since forks and knives probably aren’t changing anytime soon—and so are broad values like honesty, and consideration, and respect, which will always underscore our notions of courtesy. Other elements of etiquette, though, change with new mediums and technologies, bringing questions and confusion as they do. Is it polite to include a period at the end of a text-message, or extremely passive-aggressive? Do smartphones have a place at the dinner table? Etc.

And conventions that arise around communication, in particular, Post told me, “are some of the manners that change the most rapidly and that require the most work and attention to stay current.” When our environment—technological, and otherwise—is changing, our expectations of each other will change along with it. Our sense of politeness will change, too.

“Moving you to BCC” is one more convention that has arisen as a response to an evolving world. It’s a coded acknowledgement of a widespread technological situation: Many of us are, at the moment, drowning in emails; in 2012, per one estimate, the average person wrote a novel’s worth of emails in a year. And newsletters, ads, spam, important communications from fellow humans we know and love—there they all are, jumbled together, competing for our time and attention, as unread-email counts rise and Inbox Zero goes from an aspiration to a pipe dream. It’s a mess. But it also helps to explain why the BCC is sometimes understood to be an acronym for the “blind courtesy copy”: Deploying it is, in the end, a courtesy. It allows you to give another person that great, and ever more rare, gift: silence.

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Hillary Clinton, Tracy Flick, and the Reclaiming of Female Ambition

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:53:05 -0400

This time last year, at a producer’s conference in Hollywood, a member of the audience asked Reese Witherspoon whether she’d ever consider playing Hillary Clinton in a movie.

She already had, Witherspoon responded: One of her earliest roles in film was Tracy Flick, the teenage villain of Election, 1999’s dark satire of high school politics. And: She was only partially joking. “When I did meet Hillary Clinton,” Witherspoon recalled, “she said, ‘Everybody talks to me about Tracy Flick in Election.’”

It is supremely strange, on the one hand, that the American public would associate the former lawyer and First Lady and U.S. senator and secretary of state—and also the mother, and the grandmother, and the woman whom the American media once spent years chastising for an expressed preference against cookie-baking—with a cupcake-wielding adolescent. On the other hand, though, the association makes perfect sense: Election is all about the layered strifes of, well, elections. It revels, in its sardonic way, in the lingering martial framework of the “campaign.” The story of Tracy Flick’s effort to win the presidency of Carver High School’s student government is a broader meditation on political ambition—and on the pitfalls and punishments that can result, in particular, when that ambition has the audacity to be realized by a woman.

Americans, who are subject to a mess of rules when it comes to self-assertion (confidence: good! arrogance: bad!; hard work: good! overeagerness: sad!), have, by extension, a generally awkward relationship with political ambition—one whose awkwardness extends across genders and generations. For women, though, the self-assertions required of political candidacy are particularly fraught. And that’s been reflected not just in news media reactions to Hillary Clinton’s runs for office, but also in broader cultural treatments of (necessarily fictional) lady presidents. Pop culture has long offered depictions of women in positions of political power; ambition, however, is another matter. People compare Clinton to Tracy Flick, the stateswoman to the organization kid, for a simple reason: Hollywood hasn’t given them anyone better to compare her to.

That’s not to say that TV and movies haven’t, in the many years leading up to a woman’s clinching of a major-party presidential nomination, provided the American public with a host of fictional female leaders. In the high-heeled footsteps of Leslie McCloud in 1964’s Kisses for My President and Julia Mansfield in 1985’s Hail to the Chief have come Kathryn Bennett in Air Force One, Elaine Barrish in Political Animals, Mackenzie Allen in Commander in Chief, Caroline Reynolds in Prison Break, Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Sally Langston in Scandal, Elizabeth McCord in Madam Secretary, Selina Meyer in Veep, and many more. These characters have been the stuff of (political) science fiction: They have been framed, self-consciously, for the future. They have been evidence of Hollywood, whose products have claimed partial credit for marriage equality and the presidency of Barack Obama, recognizing its great capacity for world-expanding, and then attempting to use that power for good—one Madame President at a time.

And yet, despite all the accomplished women who have occupied Hollywood’s various West Wings, it’s Tracy Flick, the manic pixie scheme girl—the perfectionist, the know-it-all, the girl whose hand was perma-raised—who has persevered as a metaphor. It’s Tracy Flick—not Elizabeth McCord or Mackenzie Allen or Selina Meyer, but Tracy Flick, whose ambition makes her a menace—whom Hillary Clinton is (still!) asked about. And that’s likely because of things that have, in the end, very little to do with who Clinton is and much more to do with the work she has been engaged in this year. Election is unique, and uniquely resonant, because of the premise its title suggests: It depicts a woman who is not just passively occupying political office, but actively striving for it.

Campaigning, much more than simply governing, demands a whole host of things that Americans tend to view with a mixture of resentment and resignation: Running for office requires—at all levels, but especially at the highest—bragging and smarming and compromising and pissing people off and, in all but the best of circumstances, making promises you will almost certainly be unable to keep. Fictional worlds have long recognized that significant bug of the non-fictional, generally treating campaigns either with overt disdain (see: Wag the Dog, Bullworth, The Good Wife, Veep), or, even more commonly, with a kind of muffled embarrassment. (See: The West Wing, which morally ratified its fan-fictional presidency by making clear that President Bartlet was plucked from relative obscurity—the governorship of New Hampshire—to ascend to the White House. Josiah Bartlet, Cincinnatus by way of Sorkin, did not seek office; office, the show made clear, sought him.)

And for women candidates, in particular, the calculus becomes even more difficult, since the things campaigning requires—the assorted forms of swaggering—are particularly frowned upon when they’re exhibited by women. Clinton, doing the basic campaign-trail work the American electorate demands of its would-be executives, has been accused of yelling and bragging. (Last time around, in 2008, the simple act of talking led some pundits to dismiss her as “shrill.”)

Pop-cultural products, which tend to prefer inspiration and aspiration to more pragmatic depictions, have reflected those anxieties through a kind of negative space: Their depictions of women politicians have largely spared those women (and, by extension, their audiences) the various indignities associated with campaigning. They often present their female protagonists in medias res: Their productions simply start with them in positions of power, their origin stories only eluded to. Or, more commonly, they take a Bartletian path, elevating the women through fate (or some extension thereof) to the lofts of power, with minimal striving required of the loftee. Commander in Chief’s Mackenzie Allen ascended to her show’s titular role after a coincidental promotion from vice president. Veep’s Selina Meyer, similarly, became president through the fluke of political scandal; Scandal’s Sally Langston, through the fluke of political violence. Madam Secretary, a show the Clintons have said they watch together, began with its protagonist, the former CIA agent Elizabeth McCord, becoming secretary of state when her old friend—the U.S. president—appointed her to the role.

Chosen to serve: It’s the most common and self-delusional of tropes in American politics, the result of tiara complexes and culturally enforced passive aggressions and George Washington’s insistence that, all things considered, he really would have preferred to be a gentleman farmer. And it leads, as far as depictions of women in power go, to things like Vice President Kathryn Bennett, in Air Force One, embodying her role as the film’s moral compass by resisting every chance she has to become president herself, ensuring that the executive authority of President Marshall (Harrison Ford) will never be in doubt. It leads, even, to Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope—one of the most delightful lady-pols in pop-cultural history—repeatedly confirming her worthiness for public office by demonstrating that her desire to serve comes from selflessness (rather than personal, and therefore more stereotypically masculine, and therefore more fraught, ambition).

In America, you prove your worthiness for power by proving your lack of desire for that power. If you are a woman, you have an added challenge: You must prove that you will use the power you want-but-don’t-want to act on behalf of everyone but yourself.

These assumptions, combined, have led to a series of fictional women who are generally powerful but not, you know, awkwardly powerful—women who, by way of the writers who created them, know their place. Women who, despite their occupation of the White House, end up exemplifying more regressive notions of what feminine leadership is all about: soft power, cheerful submission to the social order, the strident desire not to strive too far.

The exceptions tend to prove the rule. Commander in Chief’s Mac Allen, having obtained the presidency by default, decides to run—actively run—for a second presidential term. Selina Meyer, in Veep, does the same thing. Alicia Florrick, inThe Good Wife, runs for State’s Attorney. Claire Underwood puts herself forward for U.N. Ambassador, in a way that is typically and shamelessly Underwoodian. And the women are each, in various ways, punished for it. Claire is humiliated for her hubris. So is Alicia. Campaigning brings out the worst in Selina, highlighting, even more than office-holding does, her moral vacuities and her political ineptitudes. That other Reese Witherspoon political vehicle, the decidedly non-dark comedy Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, suggested that the high-powered Congresswoman Victoria Rudd was corrupt not because of who she was, but rather because of the many compromises, personal and ethical and otherwise, demanded by the permanent campaign. Commander in Chief, in the end—the show was cancelled after a single season—prevented Mac from engaging in a campaign that would be fully her own.

That narrative (non-)turn of events was the stuff of external coincidence, but it also neatly highlights the problem: Even a series that wanted to show a woman running for president, and to do so earnestly, devoid of judgment and exoticism … could not. With the overall result that, despite all the depictions of female leaders on TV and in film, pop culture has yet to grapple, in a deep and realistic way, with the women who defy cultural conventions in order to star in political ones. It hasn’t yet considered the political implications of the discrepancy between notions of female ambition (which is often pathologized and mistrusted and feared) and its masculine counterpart (celebrated, rewarded, normalized). As The Huffington Post summed things up, elegantly, in 2014: “Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun.”

That’s true, in its way, for even the most powerful women in the country. Rebecca Traister, in her recent (and excellent) profile of Hillary Clinton, also ended up profiling, basically, all women:

It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? Though those on both the right and the left moan about “woman cards,” it would be impossible, and dishonest, to not recognize gender as a central, defining, complicated, and often invisible force in this election. It is one of the factors that shaped Hillary Clinton, and it is one of the factors that shapes how we respond to her. Whatever your feelings about Clinton herself, this election raises important questions about how we define leadership in this country, how we feel about women who try to claim it, flawed though they may be.

It does. It will keep doing so. And some of those questions will come back to one Tracy Flick—who’s remembered as a villain, cold and calculating, but who is also, you have to admit, probably a pretty good leader. She does her homework. She prepares. She gets things done. She cares, about her own interests and those of everybody else, so insistently, and so aggressively—indeed, so ambitiously—as to blur the line between the two. She strives and she wants and she works so, so hard. That is the source of her villainy. It is also the source of her particular charisma.

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Casual Friday and the ‘End of the Office Dress Code’

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 26 May 2016 16:13:07 -0400

The New York Times ran a story Wednesday announcing “The End of the Office Dress Code.” The suit and its varied strains, the article argues—corporate uniforms that celebrate, well, corporate uniformity—are giving way to more individualized interpretations of “office attire.” As the writer Vanessa Friedman puts it, “We live in a moment in which the notion of a uniform is increasingly out of fashion, at least when it comes to the implicit codes of professional and public life.”

It’s true. We live in a time in which our moguls dress in hoodies and t-shirts, and in which more and more workers are telecommuting—working not just from home, but from PJs. It’s a time, too, when the lines between “work” and “everything else” are increasingly—and sometimes frustratingly—fluid. And so: It’s also a time when many of us are trying to figure out, together, what “work clothes” actually means, and the extent to which the term might vary across professions. As Emma McClendon, who curated a new exhibit on uniforms for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, summed it up: “We are in a very murky period.”

You can blame at least a little of the current confusion on a concept we denizens of the 21st century inherited from the 20th: Casual Friday. The day—which is a bland office perk, and also a State of Mind—arose in the 1960s, the outcome of Hawaiian shirts and Dockers khakis and guerrilla marketing and the fact that suits can be really, really boring. (More on that in a moment.) And it ultimately laid the groundwork for today’s “end of the office dress code” by proving what today’s impulse toward casual work clothes takes for granted: that professionalism need not be contingent on attire.

In that sense, Casual Friday was something of a gateway drug, its jeans and flats and relaxed cuts asking an obvious, but also revolutionary, question: Why not be casual on other days, too?

It started in 1962, in Hawaii, when the state’s Fashion Guild began a campaign to make the Hawaiian shirt—also known as the Aloha shirt—a standard component of the state’s business attire. Hawaii being really hot, and suits there being even more impractical there than they are elsewhere, the campaign was successful. As a result of the effort the guild dubbed “Operation Liberation,” the Hawaiian government soon issued an edict recommending that “the male populace return to ‘aloha attire’ during the summer months for the sake of comfort and in support of the 50th state’s garment industry.”

But why stop at the summer months? Hawaii, after all, is always hot. In 1965, the guild began lobbying the government to allow its employees to wear Hawaiian shirts each Friday, throughout the year. The effort was met with more success: “Aloha Friday” became a weekly mini-event in Hawaii.

On the mainland, the idea for a “casual Friday” had been pioneered at Hewlett-Packard, in the 1950s. But it gained force as a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s—a response not to a warm climate, but to a cooling economy. During the recession, businesses were looking for ways to raise employee morale—without increasing salaries or otherwise spending any money. Some of them began experimenting with a broader interpretation of Aloha Friday, one that, like its Hawaiian counterpart, allowed work to become a little more playful than it might be the rest of the week. The idea quickly spread—so quickly that it led to confusion in some offices. What does “casual” mean, in the office? How casual is too casual?

“People were showing up in Hawaiian print shirts or sandals and shorts,” Rick Miller, a clothing PR agent, recalled to Marketplace. “Frankly, there were concerns on the part of management that work might become too much fun.”

And that’s where the guerrilla marketing stepped in. As companies were adopting “casual Friday,” Levi’s was looking for a way to expand its newly acquired Dockers brand beyond its traditional weekend wear. The company decided to target its signature khakis to office workers who might be searching for a less-than-a-suit-but-more-than-jeans look. In 1992, it sent out an 8-page brochure, helpfully titled “A Guide to Casual Businesswear,” to 25,000 human resource managers across the country. The brochure showcased a series of “business casual” looks—most of them, of course, involving Dockers or Levi’s. (“Use pieces from your existing business wardrobe to mix and match with casual clothing,” the caption for one instructed. “For example, jeans can be paired with a blazer or a sweater.”)

It was the right idea, at the right time. The 1990s saw “business casual” become quickly normalized—so much so that, today, it is pretty much the new office-work uniform. (Richard Branson, a tycoon who has perfected the business-casual look, recently declared that suits and ties “no longer serve any useful purpose.”) But with uniformity can come, ironically, confusion—precisely the kind of confusion that Vanessa Friedman wrote about today. What is “casual,” actually? we still wonder. Office shorts—yea or nay? Flip-flops? Yoga pants? When Mark Zuckerberg gives his keynote presentations in a t-shirt and jeans, what does that mean for the rest of us?

It is, for the moment, unclear. Which doesn’t mean that companies won’t try to impose some semblance of sartorial order on, and for, their workers. Yesterday, the publisher Condé Nast announced a new perk for its employees: a discounted membership to the designer-dud rental service Rent the Runway. It’s yet another nudge in the guise of a perk, and a reminder that, while the office dress code may be ending, unspoken expectations for office dress are still alive and well.

(Image via Flickr user TechCrunch)

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Here's Why Carly Fiorina Was the Consensus Debate Winner

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 09:33:46 -0400

Carly Fiorina stood out on the GOP debate stage last night in large part because she, well, literally stood out. The sole female candidate, the royal blue in a sea of obligatory black, handily won the debate, and that is largely because she skillfully exploited the thing that is both her biggest liability and, potentially, her biggest asset: She’s a woman.

On the one hand: The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard—who has made a point, inher previous public-persona-ing, of selling herself as a boys-club buster—spent much of her speaking time last night proving that she could also fit in with the boys. She adopted a commanding, no-nonsense stage presence. She took a condemnatory tone when discussing—and condemning the contents of—the Planned Parenthood videos. She demonstrated a deep working knowledge, if not a deep understanding, of the U.S. military. (The many mentions of missile defense! The many more mentions of the Sixth Fleet!)

These are moves—the projection of authority, the marshaling of the martial—that are, of course, adopted pretty much wholesale from the Hillary Clinton handbook. But Fiorina made another Clintonian play last night, too: She took advantage of her presence as the only woman on the debate stage to frame herself, specifically, as a representative of women. Not just Republican women, or white women, or businesswomen, or middle-aged women … but women, full stop. Women “all over this country.”

Take the response she gave to the question about the inclusion of a woman on the U.S. currency. While other candidates gave answers that ranged from the expected (“Rosa Parks,” “my wife”) to the baffling (“Margaret Thatcher,” “Ivanka Trump”), Fiorina responded curtly that women, being a majority in the country, “are not a special-interest group.” They deserve better, she suggested, than to be pandered to through a picture on a $10 bill.

To which: The crowd went wild. Here was Fiorina, a woman—the woman!—refusing to pander to women. Here was Fiorina, refusing to play the game the boys were playing. Here was Fiorina, everywoman-ing.

And then, of course, there was the moment when moderator Jake Tapper, who himself seemed to be taking some pages from the Jerry Springer handbook last night, asked Fiorina about Donald Trump’s recent comments disparaging her looks. (Trump’s quote to Rolling Stone: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”) Trump had“clarified” those comments, suggesting that he was referring to her “persona.” But, you know.

Fiorina’s reply to this question was a study in the rhetorical power of starkness. The candidate took a meaningful beat. She looked at the camera. And then she said: “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”

The line drew applause—the slow-then-fervent kind that suggests that a debate participant has managed to do the near-impossible: say something that actually surprises a debate audience.

It was also, rhetorically, an extremely skillful answer, and not just because its shortness suggested that Trump’s comments were worth no more than those 14 little words. It was powerful, too, because it exposed Trump’s misogyny for what it is: not just isolated incidents of omg-did-he-really-say-that-style comments, but something more systemic. Something that is pernicious specifically because it implicates not just the individual women who are its targets—Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly, Brande Roderick, Ivanka Trump—but all women. Trump’s sexism, Fiorina’s response suggested, is directed not just her. It’s directed, in a very real sense, at all women. Women all over this country.

This was a fairly new tack for Fiorina, who had previously dismissed Trump’s comments about her. (“I think those comments speak for themselves,” Fiorinatold Megyn Kelly last week.) And yet it’s one that is quickly becoming her strategy—not just when it comes to deflecting Trump, but when it comes to embracing her status as the woman on the stage. Earlier this week, the candidate’s superPAC released an ad that addressed Trump’s comments. “Ladies, look at this face,” the ad—“a message from Carly,” it begins, with the candidate offering the voiceover—“and look at all of your faces. The face of leadership.” The ad alternates between images of Fiorina, giving a speech to the Federation of Republican Women in Arizona, and images of anonymous female faces, smiling and hopeful. The candidate concludes: “This is the face of a 61-year-old woman. I am proud of every year and every wrinkle.”

The crowd—a crowd composed entirely of women—goes wild.

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The (Real) Story of the White House and the Big Block of Cheese

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 13:00:00 -0500

Wednesday, as you may have heard, is the White House's second annual Big Block of Cheese Day. Inspired by a fictional character in a fictional presidential administration, the very real staff of the West Wing are answering citizen questions, online—because, as the White House puts it, cheesily, "we thought it'd be a gouda idea to brie-unite a certain cast of characters to help us bring back a tradition that dates back to the days of President Andrew Jackson."

The characters in question belong to the NBC drama The West Wing. In one of the show's most famous episodes, Leo McGarry, chief of staff to president Jed Bartlet, recalled an enormous piece of cheese that a former president, in the spirit of open access, shared with American citizens. "Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of his White House, had a big block of cheese," McGarry tells his staff. He notes that the block of cheese was huge—"over two tons"—and that it was placed in the foyer of the executive mansion as part of Jackson's broader practice of "opening his doors to those who wished an audience." McGarry continued: "It is in the spirit of Andrew Jackson that I, from time to time, ask senior staff to have face-to-face meetings with those people representing organizations who have a difficult time getting our attention."

The West Wing on, um, brie-peat: Is this what our non-fictional democracy has come to? As Allison Janney, who played C.J. Cregg on the show, puts it in the event's promotional video: "You feta believe it."

You feta, indeed. The West Wing's Big Block of Cheese, as befits its creamy expanse, has become a cultural icon (and not just for the cameo performance it occasioned from a young, only-lightly-mustachioed Nick Offerman). It has beenmemorialized, in its way, in literary fiction. It has inspired a children’s picture book. It has inspired countless other acts of creative democracy, all in recognition of the fact that, if the American experiment is running as it should, every dayshould be Big Block of Cheese Day.

It turns out, however, that the Big Block of Cheese, this most American of American cheeses, is misunderstood—as a piece of history, as a piece of pop culture, as a piece of dairy. Jackson, who one historian notes "didn't think he should be guided by public opinion," offered the cheese to the public not so much in a spirit of open conversation as in one of desperation. Nor was he the first chief executive to receive an enormous cheese as a gesture of the relationship between the president and the people. The Big Block of Cheese was, more than anything else—perhaps just as it is today—a political tool, earnest and cynical in equal measure.

Here is the real story (or, if you wanted to be White House-ian about it, the Brie! True Washington Story) of the Big Block of Cheese. Which was not a block so much as a wheel. And which was not a singular dairy product so much as a series of them.

* * *

First, the story of the Jacksonian BBOC of The West Wing lore. This iconic cheddar came courtesy of Colonel Thomas Meacham, a dairy farmer in Sandy Creek, New York. In 1835, to flaunt his cheese-making ingenuity, he created ten cheeses, which he revealed at a public celebration in Oswego. The biggest of these was four feet in diameter and two feet tall. It weighed nearly 1,400 pounds. Meacham dedicated it to Andrew Jackson.

He delivered it to him, too. The enormous wheel of cheese was shipped on a schooner bound for Washington, D.C., wearing a belt that, according to a dispatch from Utica’s newspaper, was “got up with much taste, presenting a fine bust of the President, surrounded by a chain of twenty-four States united and linked together.” (Meacham proceeded to send some of the lesser specimens in his collection, two 750-pound wheels of cheddar, to Vice President Martin Van Buren and New York Governor William Marcy.)

For the president, it seems, Meacham’s gift was a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand: all that cheese! But on the other: all that cheese. According to one Washingtonian, the thing was, besides being enormous, “an evil-smelling horror”—one whose aroma stretched for several blocks beyond the White House itself.

The president gave large pieces of the cheese to his friends; that generosity, however, barely left a dent in the 1,400-pounder. As Mental Floss summed it up, “Jackson could conquer the Bank of the United States, but he was helpless against such a massive wheel of cheese.”

The solution: crowdsource the eating of the cheese. Give the cheese to the people! Jackson, with his second term winding down, had one last public reception on the docket at the White House; at it, he displayed the cheese. Some 10,000 visitors came, armed with knives and appetites, if not Purell. They carved the cheese. They ate it. They saved some for later.

The cheese was gone within two hours.

Its stench, however, remained. According to a letter written by Senator John Davis’ wife, Eliza, in 1838,

The White House has been put in order by its present occupant, and is vastly improved–(Van Buren) says he had a hard task to get rid of the smell of cheese, and in the room where it was cut, he had to air the carpet for many days; to take away the curtains and to paint and white-wash before he could get the victory over it. He has another cheese like that which General Jackson had cut, and says he knows not what to do with it. What a foolish thing for a man to have made such a present to him or anyone else.

* * *

Foolish thing, or brilliant thing? You could argue it both ways. There’s something the Sorkinian interpretation—Jackson, cheddar, democracy—doesn’t make clear, however. And this is that Jackson’s Big Block of Cheese was not, for better and probably for worse, the nation’s first Big Block of Cheese. That honor goes to a hunk of preserved cow’s milk that history has come to remember as the “Mammoth Cheese.” This ceremonial foodstuff, dating from the first years of the 19th century, was a wheel of cheddar four feet in diameter and 18 inches tall. It weighed 1,234 pounds. It was at the time, as the Baptist elder John Leland put it, "the greatest cheese ever put to press in the New World or Old."

It was Leland—who had campaigned for Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800, largely in support of the candidate’s stance on religious freedom—who was behind this innovative gift. The cheese was created by the people of Cheshire, Massachusetts—a city celebrated, just like its namesake county in England, for its cheese-making. (The cheese, the historian Jeffrey Pasley suggests, was in fact likely inspired by a British counterpart: an enormous cheese created to celebrate George III’s recovery from an illness.) It was created by combining the milk from every cow in town: according to one newspaper, some 900 cows. Processing such a massive foodstuff required the engineering of a makeshift cheese press—converted for the task from a six-foot-wide cider press, outfitted with a cheese-straining hoop—that could accommodate a cheese of its girth.

The cheese was not—as, really, no cheese ever is—a simple hunk of dairy. It was also a political gesture. The cheese was engraved with the decidedly Jeffersonian motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." It was intended, Pasley puts it, as a mark of the esteem "in which Jefferson was held by a small Berkshire County farming community that was monolithically Baptist in religion and Democratic Republican in politics." Leland, indeed, insisted that "no Federal cow"—by which he meant a cow owned by a Federalist farmer—be allowed to offer any milk to the endeavor, "lest it should leaven the whole lump with a distasteful savor."

Cheshire’s partisan dairy product soon became a kind of celebrity in papers both local and non-, the subject of reports and commentary alike. Federalist writers, in particular, took delight in mocking Cheshire’s gift to the president as the "Mammoth Cheese," so named for the mastodon bones that had just been unearthed in New York with aid from the Jefferson administration.

It was the first time “mammoth” was used as an adjective. And it ended up, like so many other political terms, backfiring against the people who coined it. People liked the idea of enormity that “mammoth” seemed to connote. Soon, bakers in Philadelphia were advertising "Mammoth Bread," and butchers in the same city were sending Jefferson a "Mammoth veal." As Pasley explains, "Giant foodstuffs and fossils seemed to communicate in some democratic, patriotic idiom that the Federalists did not understand."

The “Mammoth Cheese,” for its part, had originally been planned as a gift for the spring; the heft of the finished product, however, ended up requiring it to be transported in the winter. (Snow and ice, when traveled on by sled, help ease the frictions of transportation.) The 500-mile trip—by sleigh and wagon from Massachusetts to the Hudson River, by sloop to New York and then to Baltimore, and finally by wagon to Washington—took three weeks. Leland and his travel companion often stopped to preach along the way, creating a sensation (the famous cheese!) wherever they went. Leland, almost inevitably, became known as the "Mammoth Priest."

When he and his cheese finally made it to Washington, on December 29, 1801, the Mammoth Priest presented his gift to Jefferson with precisely the pomp you’d expect. And the White House reciprocated. Anticipating the arrival of the elder and his cheese, the entrance to the executive mansion was hung with sign: "THE GREATEST CHEESE IN AMERICA—FOR THE GREATEST MAN IN AMERICA." Jefferson himself, normally laconic at public celebrations, met Leland in the doorway of the presidential mansion. He was, witnesses recalled, "highly diverted" by the arrival of the cheese—so much so that, though he generally opposed such transactional customs of gift-giving, gave a $200 donation (more than 50 percent of the cheese’s market price) to Leland’s congregation to thank him for the effort.

And Jefferson used the cheese, just as everyone else did, as a political tool. When a group of Federalist congressmen visited Jefferson in the White House, intent on imposing formal rituals upon a president who had sought to reduce the ceremonies associated with the presidency, Jefferson invited them to see the cheese: to “go into the mammoth room,” as he put it, so that they could witness for themselves what one of them had previously called a “monument to human weakness and folly.”

Like Jackson’s cheese, Jefferson’s Mammoth Cheese was used in public celebrations—among them an Independence Day dinner in 1803. Unlike Jackson’s, however, the cheese remained at the White House. For more than two years. Though "no precise date can be given for the cheese's ultimate disposal,"the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia puts it, "it appears to have been present at the President's House the following New Year's Day, and was reported to still be there as late as March of 1804." Contemporary accounts describe the cheese, at that point, as "very far from being good."

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A Little Ship Just Saved the International Space Station

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 11:00:00 -0500

In a week that seems to be at least partially dedicated to space movies, the International Space Station—and the six very real humans living within its confines—just had a Hollywood-worthy moment. In late October, the European Space Agency reports, the orbiting lab was threatened with a collision by space junk, in the manner of Gravity. It was saved by some quick-thinking people on Earth—and by a little space ship that happened to be, fortunately, docked to the station when the threat arose.

The trouble began back in 2009, Smithsonian Magazine notes, when a piece of the deactivated Russian Cosmos-2251 satellite slammed into a U.S. Iridium satellite. Normally, that wouldn't matter. The debris from that collision—like the other pieces of the space junk that are stuck in orbit around Earth—is generally harmless to the ISS. But it can also be—Gravity again—incredibly destructive when it happens to be on a collision course with a human-carrying spacecraft. (Even something as tiny as a fleck of paint, the ESA points out, can cause major damage—given that it travels at more than 17,000 miles an hour.) On Earth, ground stations are charged with tracking the space junk that whirls outside of Earth, charting its trajectories for potential collisions with the ISS.

And here's where things got scary. On October 27, a team of trackers detected a piece of Cosmos-2251—a piece, the ESA notes, only about the size of a human hand—that seemed to be on a collision course with the ISS. (Calculations suggested that the object would pass, the agency puts it, "within 4km—too close for comfort.")

This, in itself, was bad luck. But there was some further bad luck, too: There's a standard emergency maneuver designed for these situations that relies on Russia’s Progress supply ships. (This reliance was only possible after 2012; before then, "if an object was spotted within 24 hours of a potential strike the astronauts returned to their spacecraft, prepared for evacuation and hoped for the best.")

None of the resupply ships, however, were in harbor during the time of the near-collision. Oof.

Fortunately there was a little bit of good luck, too—actually, a lot of good luck. The ISS currently has a craft docked to it: the Automated Transfer Vehicle Georges Lemaître, which ferries supplies to the station from Earth. The unmanned ship, despite its current status as a mere appendage of the ISS, is also controllable from Earth. Which meant that a team of engineers on the ground were able to use the space ferry to help move the ISS out of harm's way.

Just six hours prior to the potential impact, at 17:42 GMT, the ATV Control Center team, based in Toulouse, France—but working with fellow engineers at control centers in Moscow and Houston—commanded a four-minute thruster burn. The force generated by that boost was enough to shift the course of the 463-ton Station by nearly a mile—and, as a result, to get it, and its residents, out of harm’s way.

It was a tricky maneuver, one that relied on precise calculations. The goal was to move the Station enough to get it out of the path of space debris ... but not enough to put it into a worse orbital location. And not enough, as well, to affect the Progress craft that would dock with the Station a couple days after the emergency maneuver was enacted. Then again, as the ESA flight director Jean-Michel Bois put it after an emergency had been avoided, "This is what the ATV Control Center team trains for."

All's well up in space, in other words, because of some quick-thinking humans and an obliging little spacecraft. As the ESA writes, "This is the first time the Station’s international partners have avoided space debris with such urgency."

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Wait, Why Another 'Czar'?

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 15:46:58 -0400

Ron Klain may be the nation's first "Ebola czar," but he certainly won't be the first czar to take power in the United States. American democracy has, over the years, proven quite eager to appoint "czars" (or, if you prefer, "tsars"). Here is a list of America's czars, from the early 20th century to the present. It is, be warned, only partial:

car czars
war czars
weapons czars
weapons of mass destruction czars
homeland security czars
manpower czars
manufacturing czars
missile czars
oil czars
weatherization czars
intelligence czars
foreign aid czars
AIDS czars
TARP czars
patronage czars
price czars
poverty czars
anti-poverty czars
inflation czars
anti-inflation czars
public diplomacy czars
reading czars
regulatory czars
rubber czars
bioethics czars
bird flu czars
Asian Carp czars
science czars
shipping czars
AfPak (Afghanistan and Pakistan) czars
border czars
budget czars
censorship czars
climate czars
communication czars
compensation czars
consumer czars
copyright czars
cyber-security czars (a.k.a. "cyber czars")
information czars
domestic policy czars
domestic violence czars
drug czars
energy czars
ethics czars
faith-based czars
trade czars
transportation czars
urban affairs czars
food czars
food safety czars
health czars
health IT czars
technology czars
terrorism czars
Great Lakes czars

Again, that's a partial list. We have a long, weird tradition of czar-iness here in the U.S. So how did the quintessentially Russian term make its way into the workings of 21st-century American democracy? Why are we so czar-happy?

"Czar" comes from a Slavic translation for "Caesar." In Russia—pre-Soviet Russia—the term took on the sense of "Caesar" as "emperor": It suggested not just monarchic rule, but also autocratic rule. Which is why, as used in the United States, it is most commonly associated with offices that deal with national problems that are either systemic or situational, problems that require a kind of sweeping power to be solved: the financial crisis of the early 2000s, the war on drugs, global climate change, and now Ebola.

Its popularity today has been encouraged by the media—the same group who adopted it for American usage. "Czar" was first used, according to this history, in the 1920s, when Woodrow Wilson appointed the financier Bernard Baruch to run his War Industries Board. The press, just a few years after Russia's last czar had been assassinated, reclaimed the title for American purposes: News articles began referring to Baruch's new job as the nation's "industry czar."

The term caught on in 1926 when New York City's Milk Chamber of Commerce—determined, according to The New York Times, to "clean house" and "obtain the favorable opinion of the public"—appointed a "milk czar."

It was Franklin Roosevelt, though, who solidified the trend. The policies he adopted to bring the country out of depression and, after that, into war created a series of new governmental positions, including a "transportation czar," a "manpower czar," a "production czar," a "shipping czar," and—the most business card-friendly of them all—a "synthetic rubber czar." In 1942, The Washington Post remarked on the executive orders that created "new czars to control various aspects of our wartime economy." Even some members of Roosevelt's Cabinet—officials who had been confirmed, as other executive administrators hadn't been, by the Senate—came to be called "czars."

The innovation quickly became tradition—a process sped along by how headline-friendly "czar" proved to be. It also proved press-friendly in a broader sense. The word contains, in its single syllable, multitudes. It is Russian, yes; it is also anti-Soviet. It is foreign, yes; it is also, in its way, American ("Car czar"!). In all that, it is also wonderfully and frustratingly ambiguous: It can convey irony and objectivity at the same time. It can celebrate big government and, also, implicate it.

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Why Presidents Are Also Celebrities

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 19:00:00 -0400

In October of 1912, as he was leaving Milwaukee’s Gilpatrick Hotel to deliver a speech at the city’s auditorium, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. He was campaigning at the time for a third party and third term in the White House; John Schrank, an unemployed saloonkeeper, blamed TR for the murder of President McKinley, and wanted vengeance. The momentum of the bullet had been slowed by Roosevelt’s thick overcoat, his steel-reinforced eyeglass case, and the 50-page speech he had tucked into his jacket pocket. But it hadn’t been slowed that much. Schrank’s bullet penetrated, lodging finally against Roosevelt’s fourth right rib, close to his heart. But TR refused to go to the hospital. He insisted instead that he give his speech.

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he told the packed auditorium, unbuttoning his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot."

He continued: "But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

He went on: “The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

The episode was, above all, stupid and reckless. It was something the ex-president—and this is a common refrain when it comes to this particular ex-president—could never have gotten away with today. It also—and here’s another common refrain—could have killed him. But TR's refusal to abort his speech simply because of an inconveniently located bullet was also, and there is really no other way to say it, exceptionally badass. It suggested that Roosevelt, flesh and blood like the rest of us, was somehow less freighted by this fact than the rest of us.

Which is why it has become part of the mythology of Roosevelt, and along with it the mythology of the Roosevelts, and along with that the mythology of the American presidency—all of which were transformed, in ways both small and distinctly less so, by TR’s brand of manic machismo. When Roosevelt called himself a “Bull Moose,” he did it entirely unironically. As a state legislator, he had threatened to kick a fellow lawmaker "in the balls." One of his life’s big regrets was that he had not been injured—or, even better, disfigured—during his infamous adventure in Cuba. If a new form of Manifest Destiny would be an ongoing feature of the American 20th century, it was up to him, he felt, to put the “man” in it.

This was a conviction shared, in its way, by Roosevelt’s fifth cousin. Franklin Delano may not have had TR’s trust-busting, gun-toting swagger—and only in part because of the mid-life bout of polio that left him briefly depressed and permanently crippled—but he shared his outsized ambition. As Ken Burns puts it in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History : “Each took unabashed delight in the power of his office to do good. Each displayed unbounded optimism and self-confidence. Each refused to surrender to physical limitations that might have destroyed them. And each had an uncanny ability to rally men and women to his cause."

Every president, by historical default, is the first of the modern presidents. But the Roosevelts were especially modern—particularly in their ability, on top of everything else, to do this rallying. Their presidencies coincided with the rise of the telegraph, which made newspapers newly nimble, and of the radio, which brought the concept of “the broadcast” to the American consciousness and way of life. They used those new tools—tools that exist to transform flesh and blood into something more—to enlarge their voices, their ideas, and themselves in the minds of their fellow Americans. And then, their voices and their images having stretched, taut, across the newly expanded nation, they used them for something small: to do the dirty business of governing. Their status as media figures helped give them the mandate they needed to shape themselves as historical figures.

Congressmen welcome FDR back after a fishing trip, 1934 (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

You’ll occasionally read arguments that we would be better off splintering those two roles the way so many other democracies do, with a prime minister to handle the politics and a ceremonial figure to handle the pancakes. These are fanciful, for the most part—Americans tend to like monarchs the same we like our eagles: distant—but they emphasize how insistently we conflate executive authority and ceremonial duty in our sense of what the presidency means in the first place. That is a mingling that is only partially mandated by the Constitution. It is a mingling that George Washington, the man who would not be king, famously deflected—an in part why he stepped aside after two terms in office. Decades' worth of presidents followed Washington's example.

Until, that is, the Roosevelts. The two presidents expanded the scope of the presidency not just through the laws they enacted and the social programs they established, but also through a more psychic innovation: their elevation of the presidency to an office of de facto celebrity. They made being president about being, in the way we understand the term today, a media figure. They fostered in the minds of the public the supremely unconstitutional idea that “president” and “government” were, to a large extent, the same thing. By the end of FDR’s 12-year presidency—he had won an unprecedented fourth term—there was, the historian David Leuchtenberg says , “an acceptance in the White House that government has a responsibility—not just to a few, but to all of the nation that no subsequent president, no matter how conservative his views, has been able to get away from."

The Roosevelts’ ascendance coincided with the rise of opinion polls, which made public opinion was newly quantifiable, and thus newly malleable. And the press—at the time the primary channel between the president and the public—was as often an accomplice to presidential manipulations as an adversary of them. Teddy Roosevelt was the first to offer the press corps a briefing room in the White House. He was an early fan of the photo-op. When, during his years in the Dakotas, three thieves stole Roosevelt’s boat, he tracked them down, marched them 45 miles to the nearest sheriff's office … and then re-staged the capture for his box camera. FDR, for his part, invited the press to his office 997 times during his administration. He called the reporters by their first names (and claimed, Burns notes, to be a newspaper man himself—having, while at Harvard, served as editor of the Crimson ). They returned the favor by, among other things, helping to keep the secret that he had been, since the age of 39, unable to walk on his own.

And, of course, FDR seized the new medium of radio for, among other things, his Fireside Chats. Those chats (and, presumably, the social programs they were meant to promote) represented the first time, a woman wrote in a letter to FDR, that "people felt like presidents cared about the common people." And the common people responded. Herbert Hoover's mail had been handled by a single clerk; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt needed 50. They made government feel newly intimate to people, imbuing the White House with a sense not just of possibility, but of family. "People like the Roosevelts,” a woman of the time says in the Burns documentary, “were the closest thing to royalty we had."

But a big part of royalty is continuity. And executive power, once unleashed, has a stubborn tendency to stick around. After the “royal” Roosevelts came the “Camelot” Kennedys (not to mention, of course, a possibly soon-to-grow-larger number of presidential dynasties). Along with them came prime-time press conferences and televised debates and dinner dates in US Weekly and 5-o'clock shadows blamed for lost elections . The Roosevelts may have, as Jon Meacham says in the documentary, “kept alive the possibility of progress that began to rewrite the role of government in American life”; they also rewrote the role of president in that life. They are in some part the reason that we ask those who seek its office not merely to present us with policy proposals, but also to charm us. To seduce us. To convince us that we would like to have a beer with them. They are the reason why, this past weekend , a scrum of reporters converged on a field in Iowa to watch a former head of state and a former Secretary of State grill some steaks. It’s probably why one of those world leaders wore gingham.

We want our presidents to double as our stars. We want them to act, if not to be, superhuman. It’s a cliché, at this point, that the wheelchair-bound Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t have been elected president today, in today’s media environment. The irony is that you can blame that, in part, on FDR.

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How Do We Welcome Astronauts Back to Earth? By Making Them Go Through Customs

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 16:39:09 -0500

In a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) Thursday afternoon, the now-retired astronaut-cum-social-media-phenomenon Chris Hadfield answered a series of redditors' questions about space travel. One of them:

"Did you have to pass through Customs or some other international checkpoint when you landed in Kazakhstan?"

Hadfield's answer? Yes! As the Canadian explains it, "NASA kept our passports and visas, and brought them to us at landing, so we had them at the Karaganda airport to leave Kazakhstan." The whole thing was, he says, "a funny but necessary detail of returning to Earth."

Hadfield and his colleagues weren't the first to take their triumphant return with a little dose of bureaucracy. The Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had to do something similar after their return from the moon in July 1969. On the way home, after their splashdown in the Pacific, they passed through the Honolulu Airport. Where they filed a standard customs form.

The flight number they listed? APOLLO 11.

The goods they declared? MOON ROCK, MOON DUST, and SAMPLES.

And the route they laid out? Florida's Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) to Honolulu, Hawaii. With a brief stopover at MOON.

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Irradiated Turkey, Thermostabilized Yams: Thanksgiving Dinner in Space

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 09:56:06 -0500

There are many wonderful things about being in space. The views. The floating. The many delightful things you can do with water drops. Etc.

You know what's less awesome, though? The food. Sure, you can do a lot of things to space food to make it less space-food-y: You can spice it and sweeten it and try to make it simulate, as much as possible, its Earth-bound counterparts. Ultimately, though, the foodstuffs you're consuming are still desiccated/rehydrated/irradiated/thermostabilized. Which is all compounded by the fact that your taste buds are sort of shot by the whole microgravity thing, anyway.

But it's Thanksgiving! And we celebrate Thanksgiving with our feasting! So how will the six people currently living on the International Space Station, among them two Americans, give their thanks—not so much for the food as with it? Here, per NASA, are the dishes that will grace the only Thanksgiving table whose crazy tablescape is space.

Turkey
Technically, it's "irradiated smoked turkey." It comes in a sealed foil pouch.According to the AP, the foodstuff that results "resembles sliced deli meat," except it's "stiffer."

That's in part because the turkey "functions just like a canned product," NASA food scientist Vicki Kloeris said in an interview this morning. It has "about a three-year shelf life." The turkey the astronauts will be feasting on this time around was produced "probably about two years ago."

Stuffing
The good: It's cornbread stuffing! The former ISS astronaut Tom Marshburn said it was his favorite dish of all the Thanksgiving offerings! The bad: It "has a broth-heavy, institutional flavor." Also, it comes in a foil pouch.

Potatoes
The good: "homestyle"! The bad: They're rehydrated. (And also, they come in a foil pouch.)

Yams
The good: they're candied! The bad: They're thermostabilized. And also,apparently, "bland inside."

Green beans
They're freeze-dried. And foil-packed. And also "taste like they've been microwaved to death." (Or, as Marshburn puts it, understatedly: "It's not quite like fresh steamed green beans.")

Cranberries
These are, as they often would be on Earth, canned. And, as jelly, they come in hotel-style little jam packs.

Pie
Well, modified pie: cobbler. In this case, cherry-blueberry cobbler. Which comes, Kloeris says, with "a little bit of crust in there." (That said: "It's not quite the same as having a slice of pice.") It comes in a, yep, foil pouch.

You may notice one thing not on the menu above: gravy. Which is, along with apple pie (the crust doesn't work in space), something of a white whale for space-food science. So far, Kloeris notes, NASA scientists haven't been able to get the ultimate Thanksgiving sauce into space-ready form. The result, for the menu above? "We have no gravy, unfortunately."

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Space Is Now a Reality TV Show

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:50:00 -0400

"Why are people so fascinated with @Cmdr_Hadfield?" the tweeter asked. "Can someone enlighten me?"

The answers were swift and sharp and unsurprising. "Dude, he's a frigging astronaut!" one replied. "Um, he's an astronaut?" another offered. "What else do you need?" Someone else explained things with a little more detail: "He's inspiring a generation of kids (my kids!) to grow up to be scientists & astronauts and not the Kardashians."

Chris Hadfield -- nom de tweet: @cmdr_hadfield -- has been doing more than inspiring people, though. He has also been entertaining them. And delighting them. He has chatted with Captain Kirk. He has covered Bowie. He has written his own music, and performed it. He has publicly celebrated Valentine's Day, and Easter, and St. Patrick's Day, and April Fool's. He has done a mind-boggling number of live chats and Q&As and video explainers. He has led Canada in a national sing-along. And all of these things have shared a remarkable predicate: They have been done, you know, from space. Hadfield has kept a running dialogue with Earth, documenting not just the numinous -- those amazing views! -- but also the mundane: the food. The fun. The exercise. The sleep. The tears. The bathroom situation.

Over the course of 144 days spent on the International Space Station (encompassing 2,336 orbits of the Earth and covering nearly 62 million miles), Hadfield didn't merely do his day job -- conducting more than 130 scientific experimentsabout the effects of microgravity on masses of various types. He also helped to change our concept of what it means to be an astronaut in the first place. He is a space explorer in the Gagarin/Glenn/Armstrong model, but he is something else, too: just a guy. A guy who happens to be in space. Hadfield, availing himself of new technologies that are just beginning to be widely adopted, made space travel seem accessible. He made it seem normal (or, in astronaut-speak, "nominal"). He took it out of the realm of the awe-inspiring and placed it squarely in the realm of the awesome.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Would You Take a One Way Ticket to Mars?

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:49:00 -0400

If you are at least 18 years of age and curious and capable and resourceful, with a capacity for self-reflection, an ability to trust other people, and a deep sense of purpose, then you can to go to Mars . Maybe. The Mars One project, which is planning to send a group of people to colonize the Red Planet, has officially opened its applications process to public voting . If you are one of the people ultimately selected for the program, if all goes according to plan, you will depart Earth in 2023 to follow in the epic footsteps of Magellan and Gagarin and Armstrong, staking a claim for humanity's extension into a new and unknown world.

The only catch? You will not be coming back.

Yep: It's named Mars One in part because what it offers is a one-way ticket. In positive terms, this means that the program promises its participants the adventure of a lifetime. In more negative ones, it means that the lifetime in question will likely reach its conclusion somewhere outside of Earth. And that's a feature, not a bug. Our new relationship with the world beyond Earth's borders, Mars One declares , "will be characterized not by rovers and probes, visits or short stays, but by permanence. From now on, we won't just be visiting planets. We'll be staying."

Mars One might be the highest-profile experiment we've yet seen when it comes to one-way space ticketing. It might be the one that has inspired the most nerdy conversations ("so, would you take a one-way ticket?") this past week. It might be, with its permanent cast of castaways, " the world's best reality TV show ."

But the one-way trip from Earth -- to the moon, to Mars -- has been a longstanding dream of space flight. One that's almost as old as the dream of space flight itself. The return leg of a trip to space has always presented particular challenges to engineers, in the way that safely landing an airplane has always presented a particular challenge to pilots. (And those challenges have extended, of course, to budget directors and administrators.) So engineers and physicists, people who tend to be pragmatic above most else, have long been proposing manned space missions that would leave the man (or woman) in question stranded in space. Temporarily, or permanently.

Meteorite Strikes Are Actually Quite Common

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 08:37:00 -0500

Early this morning, a meteor exploded in the sky above Russia, causing a shockwave that blew out windows, crippled communications infrastructure, and injured hundreds of people. The blast was terrifying for the people who witnessed it, and were touched by it, in person; but it's scary, too, for anyone who lives on Earth: Screaming, scorching, flaming objects falling suddenly from the sky are pretty much the stuff of humanity's collective nightmares.

So how common is that experience? How often does Earth experience the kind of meteorite strike that Russia just endured?

More common than you might think, actually. Cosmic debris is, after all, fairly common around Earth. (When pieces of space debris -- usually parts of comets or asteroids -- are on a collision course with Earth, they're called "meteoroids"; when meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere, they're called "meteors.") Most meteors burn up in Earth's atmosphere before they reach the ground. But when one of these objects doesn't burn up -- if it survives entry long enough to strike Earth -- it becomes a "meteorite."

A meteorite seems to be what struck Russia this morning. And meteorite strikes take place, experts say, around five to 10 times a year. Most of them, fortunately, have small impacts. But even large impacts, like the one Russia just experienced, occur about every five years, Addi Bischoff, a mineralogist at the University of Muenster in Germany, told the AP. We just don't learn much about them because most of the strikes take place in uninhabited areas where they don't cause injuries or infrastructural damage.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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What Does the Sun Sound Like?

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:41:00 -0500

Robert Alexander is a data sonification specialist, which means that his job is, essentially, to convert data into sounds. Alexander takes collections of flat, static numbers -- stock price variations, wind speeds, human pulse rates -- and transforms them into music. "I think of myself as an explorer," Alexander says in the video above. "I live in the space between art and science and technology." And in the space -- vast and narrow at the same time -- between data and beauty.

And you know something that offers a ton of both data and beauty? Our nearest star. Alexander has been putting his sonification skills to use to create, basically, a soundtrack for the sun.

To do that, he relied on data gathered by the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint NASA-ESA spacecraft that astronomers use to study the sun. The vehicle, among other things, helps to predict the solar flares -- gaseous eruptions from the solar surface, otherwise known as "coronal mass ejections" -- that can disrupt electrical grids and communications infrastructures here on Earth. Alexander manipulated those data to create songs that are both transcendent and utterly rooted in the physical world. As Motherboard's Michael Byrne puts it , "He's rendered solar flares as a human choir, and turned the sun's rotation into a a tribal beat."

Read more at The Atlantic .

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Hillary Clinton traveled 956,733 miles during her time as Secretary of State

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:35:00 -0500

Hillary Clinton was many things as Secretary of State. One of the most notable, however, was "well-traveled." During her four years as the nation's top diplomat -- and particularly during her final year in that post -- Clinton fashioned herself as something of a George Clooney of global affairs, spending almost as much time up in the air as she did on the ground.

In the process, she broke records. In July of 2012, during a trip to Finland, Clinton met Madeleine Albright's most-countries-traveled-to mark -- the record, at the time -- of 98 countries. She thensurpassed it with a trip to Latvia. The new secretary then went on to visit 12 more countries, for a closing total of 112.

If you're keeping track at home, that equates to an average of 28 countries per each year of Clinton's tenure. Imagine all the frequent-flier miles!

Women in combat: An idea whose time has come, aided by technology

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:00:00 -0500

"Women," Time magazine wrote last year, "are not small men."

This is ... true. And yet for a long time, the military -- an organization that operates under the core auspices of pragmatic conformity -- sort of ignored its truth. Martial technologies -- uniforms, weapons, vehicles -- have tended to be one-size-fits-all, or at least one-size-fits-dudes. Guns are huge and heavy. Packs the same. Body armor is long and narrow, designed for a guy's long-and-narrow frame. And with good reason, of course: It is both unsurprising and quite practical that an institution headed mostly by men, populated mostly by men, would take a male-centered approach to its equipment. Tall, heavy, narrow, straight: the tools, for the most part, matched the humans who were using them.

That has been changing, however -- and changing long before this week. The Pentagon'sdecision to end its ban on women-in-combat -- a change announced, formally, this afternoon -- is simply a decision whose time, in many, many ways, has come. But it is also, importantly, a decision that technological advances have made easier: more sensible, more practical, more impermeable to objection. While some will still make social and cultural arguments against women serving on the front lines -- most of which will boil down to the idea that it's hard for "bands of brothers" to coalesce when sisters are part of the equation -- many other objections are now, or will soon be, preempted.

Cannonballs, samurai swords, chastity belts: Items found at TSA checkpoints in 2012

Megan Garber — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:23:35 -0500

The Transportation Safety Administration is not merely a government agency. It is also a kind of real-time library, tracking the human folly that plays out at some of the human folly-est places there are: airports. Now, the TSA has released information from a year's worth of checkpoint-monitoring ... and the information it has presented is, unsurprisingly, folly-filled. (Among the objects confiscated from passenger luggage: cane swords, bottles of gunpowder, and "more inert grenades than you would ever imagine.")

Here are some of the TSA's takeaways -- some of them literal -- from a year's worth of airport screenings and confiscations:

Passengers screened, total: 637,582,122
Passengers screened, per day: 1,746,800
Total firearms discovered in carry-on bags at checkpoints across the country: 1,543
Number of those firearms that were loaded 1,215
Percentage of those firearms that were loaded: 78.7
Number of airports at which firearms were found: 199
Airport that had the highest number of firearms found: Atlanta (ATL)
Number of firearms found, total, at ATL alone: 95
Average number of firearms found per week at ATL alone: 1.8

You Probably Write a Novel's Worth of Email Every Year

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 09:32:00 -0500

So we know that the average worker spends 13 hours a week -- 28 percent of office time -- on email. Which multiplies out to (eek) 650 hours a year.

But what does that time investment look like as physical -- well, "physical" -- output? How does it amass as words typed and sent and otherwise generated?

Here's one estimate: 41,638 words. That's per the personal assistant app Cue, which integrates services like contacts, calendars, and especially email -- and which recently released data based on a sampling of its users in 2012. While the average number of email messages each user received last year was (a relatively modest) 5,579 -- and the average number of those messages each user sent was (an also modest) 879 -- the output of words sent was comparatively colossal. To put those 41,638 discrete pieces of communication in perspective, that word count, in the aggregate, is roughly equivalent to a novel that is 166 pages in length. (The industry standard for page length is 250 words per page.) Which makes the average Cue user's email output slightly greater than The Old Man and the Sea (127 pages long), slightly less than The Great Gatsby(182 pages), and just about equal to The Turn of the Screw (165 pages).

And while the 41,000+ digital word count is based on one data set from one source -- caveat typer -- it certainly tracks, at least, with my own inbox. (In fact, it strikes me as fairly conservative). And it's worth considering, as well, what the Cue data are actually measuring: not just words typed and sent, but energy expended. Those 41,000 words are 41,000 words' worth of time and effort and creativity that we've invested in manufacturing the industrial product that is email -- the social artifact that is made to be shared and yet that is ultimately defined by privacy. If an inbox is a publication, so is an outbox: a media product, distributed and broadcast in the purest sense. It's a publication we invest in, with daily dedication. And yet it's a publication that is visible, in the aggregate, to its author alone -- The Turn of the Screw, with an audience of one.

Read more at The Atlantic.

Image via KHZ/Shutterstock.com

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Why Taking Breaks Will Help You Get More Work Done

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:02:00 -0500

The most elite musicians in the world don't necessarily spend more time practicing their craft than their less-accomplished peers. Instead, they spend more time practicing smartly . "They focus their energy in packets," ASAPScience notes in the video above. "Instead of diluting their energy over the entire day, they have periods of intense work followed by breaks. Not relying on willpower, they rely on habit and discipline and scheduling."

"Discipline," sure, is easier talked about than accomplished, particularly when there is a whole Internet of cats who will be sad if you do not watch their videos. And in a mobile-aided work culture that finds the lines between "work" and "play" ever more blurred, it can be harder than ever to impose structure on productivity. But the musicians are a good reminder to anyone -- whether elite violinists or totally non-elite office workers -- that the best way to get work done just might be to make sure you're making time to play, too.

Via Gizmodo

Read more at The Atlantic.

(Image via FuzzBones / Shutterstock.com )

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The state of intellectual property around the world

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:06:22 -0500

Economies are slowing across the globe. But inventors across the globe apparently didn't get that memo. Patent filings and grants have exploded in the past few years -- fueled, in particular, by innovations coming out of, and into, China. And fueled, as well, by new fields -- computer technologies, communications platforms -- that invite inventors to make their marks on them.

A new report from the World Intellectual Property Organization -- the IP arm of the United Nations -- has documented that proliferation of patents (and trademarks, and industrial designs) as it's played out on the world stage. And their findings are pretty staggering. The study tracks data as of 2011, detailing IP trends on a worldwide, and country-by-country, basis. And while the report lends itself to a major headline -- that China's patent office has ousted the United States's as the world's largest -- the real story here is the fact that innovation, overall and officially, is on the rise. Around the world.

"Sustained growth in IP filings indicates that companies continue to innovate despite weak economic conditions," WIPO Director General Francis Gurry put it in a press conference. "This is good news, as it lays the foundation for the world economy to generate growth and prosperity in the future."

Read the entire story at The Atlantic.

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The Meme Election and the Tumblr Campaign

Megan Garber — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:51:00 -0500

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The president was not impressed.

Or, more accurately, the president was Not Impressed. When, earlier this month, the newly re-elected commander-in-chief met the gymnasts of the U.S. Olympic team , he did what any president would do: He took a photo op, posing with the Fierce Five in the Oval Office. But he also did something that not every president would do: He took a meme op. The president stood next to McKayla Maroney, she of #notimpressed fame, and the pair reenacted her signature scowl.

The photo that resulted -- a months-old meme, ossified in Internet time, made fresh by the fact that it was being acted out by a president -- was promptly posted to the Obama campaign's Tumblr, barackobama.tumblr.com , where it joined a series of fellow memes -- and animated GIFs, and videos, and snappy commentary, and earnest commentary, and other such Items of Internet. The image of a meme-faced Commander-in-Chief, cheeky and epic at the same time, was -- or, at least, seemed -- tailor-made for social media. And for, in particular, Tumblr, a medium that manages to mix irony and sincerity in pretty much equal measure.

Campaign 2012 has been dubbed, fairly or not, the " Meme Election ." And it was, all in all, the most documented, and probably the most participated-in, campaign in living ~~memery~~ memory. Much of its pageantry was live-GIFed . Obama's victory in it was met, unsurprisingly, by image round-ups with names like " Yes, We GIFed ." And GIF we did. We also hashtagged and parody-accounted and meme-made and fixtedthatforyoued and bindered and Big Birded and Eastwooded our way through many, many months of pervasive politicking -- to the extent that a section of Know Your Meme has been dedicated to covering, simply, the " 2012 United States Presidential Election ." Though it's easy to overattribute the effect that all this Internet-y activity had on the election's outcome itself -- memes are small; the country is large -- it's also pretty obvious that memes and their counterparts, both despite and because of their smallness, represent a significant shift in participatory politics. Which is to say, in politics.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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