On this day (1911): Universal Negro Improvement Association founded by Marcus Garvey. Musical interlude:
Expert. From my OED app: “/ˈɛkspəːt / ▸ noun a person who is very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area: an expert in healthcare; a financial expert. ▸ adjective having or involving a great deal of knowledge or skill in a particular area: he had received expert academic advice; I have a friend who is very expert at the language. – ORIGIN Middle English (as an adjective): from French, from Latin expertus, past participle of experiri ‘try’. The noun use dates from the early 19th century Compare with experience and experiment.”
“The Informal Governance of Global Capitalism” [Law and Political Economy Project]. “In other cases, however, industry-led governing takes place entirely outside formal international bodies, through groups and associations of technical experts and industry actors, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which adopt crucial technical standards for new information and communication technologies. These largely informal processes—developed by the private sector, reinforced by market uptake, and sanctioned by domestic authorities that incorporate them into licensing or certification requirements—enable powerful companies to ‘lock-in’ global markets and effectively entrench their dominance, which has long raised questions about legitimacy and fairness. It is also, unsurprisingly, a site of intense inter-capitalist competition. This has been particularly visible in the case of telecommunications in recent years, as Chinese companies are increasingly assuming the role of norm entrepreneurs in these informal standard-setting bodies, a development that has generated anxiety about the splinteringof universal standards. Such competition highlights how informal processes obscure the role of the state, which is either entirely absent, giving free rein to commercial actors, or somewhat omnipresent, instrumentalizing those private actors. In any case, international lawyers have largely overlooked how such informal, industry-led rulemaking contributes to and is reflective of the current geopolitical shifts.” • I’m filing away “norm entrepreneurs.” Also, this is a very insightful, broad-guage article I could well have filed under Geopolitics or Class in Water Cooler. Well worth a read!
“‘Weird and capricious’: Experts struggle to understand new list of political jobs at science agencies” [Science]. “A week after President Donald Trump issued an executive order converting thousands of job titles at federal agencies from protected civil service status to employees who serve at the White House’s pleasure, science policy wonks are still trying to make sense of it. They wonder how the 2481 job titles were selected and how the reclassification will affect federal funding of research.” More: “Expanding the list of political appointees enables the president to swiftly remove underperforming employees, according to the executive order. The order promises that any openings ‘will be filled based on merit and not political affiliation.’” LOL no. More: “Many scientists and policy experts are skeptical. In the past, says Max Stier, head of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, politicizing government jobs ‘produced a corrupt, ineffective government that served the powerful rather than the public good.’” Unlike our own! More: “Wolinetz worries forcing reclassified employees at science agencies to pass a political litmus test to retain their jobs could also open the door to funding lower quality science. ‘These people are technical experts,’ she says, ‘and it will be very disruptive to have them be replaced every 4 years depending on the priorities of the next administration.’ Some observers suspect other agendas are at work. Based on the job titles for NIH, one former senior agency official says, ‘They have clearly gone after NIH leadership’ in seeking political control over NIH. The order defines ‘branch manager/division director’ as anyone who manages a portfolio of at least $20 million. ‘That’s essentially everybody,’ says the former top administrator, who requested anonymity to protect an ongoing relationship with NIH and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.” • Meanwhile, the ballroom, the reflecting pool, that stupid triumphal arch — all get their shovelfuls. It’s wonderfully clarifying, to be sure. Right out front with it.
“The myth of English insularity” [The New Statesman]. “Across 17 compact chapters, A Golden World highlights small groups of belongings and raw materials: canoes, tamed parrots and monkeys, featherwork headdresses, sealskin parkas, beaver fur, and red cochineal pigment. From these, [author Lauren] Working weaves not only stories of their acquisition and reuse, but also of their original cultivation and crafting. Incorporating the lives these ‘travelling objects’ led prior to their arrival in England allows her to highlight the contributions of indigenous experts in farming, mining, hunting and crafting to the European Renaissance. Although their names and life histories have been omitted from the archive, their skill shines through – for example in manoeuvrable canoes and ingeniously designed parkas, visible today in portraits of Inuit captives, painted after their arrival in England. These portraits were commissioned to promote the brutal enterprises of the Cathay Company, whose activities in Canada were part of a search for the elusive North-West Passage to China (then called Cathay). But Working inventively reads these and other records of acquisitive colonial ambition for the glimpses they offer of indigenous knowledge, processes and values. This knowledge persists and even flourishes in plain sight if only we learn how to look, and Working is an authoritative guide.” • “Mr. Orr is expert with tangibles” (Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven.1
Dad Joke of the Day: What’s made out of leather and sounds like a sneeze? A shoe!
Physicality. From my OED app: /ˌfɪzɪˈkalɪti / ▸ noun [mass noun] the fact of relating to the body as opposed to the mind; physical presence: there’s an emphasis on the physicality of the actors. ▪ involvement of a lot of bodily contact or activity: the intense physicality of a dancer’s life; the sheer physicality of the game means fouls occur at regular intervals.
‘The USWNT And Brazil Stretched The Definition Of ‘Friendly’ ” [Defector]. “ ‘Accept it. Accept it. It’s an uncontrollable. You cannot change it. Get over it. Get on with it.’ Emma Hayes’s words may have aspired to equanimity, but her tone betrayed her. Coming off a 2-1 loss to Brazil in São Paolo—the first of two consecutive friendlies played on the Brazilians’ turf—the U.S. Women’s National Team coach kept coming back to her refrain: the raucous crowds, their opponent’s physicality, the officials’ (in)competence, and the late start time for Tuesday’s match were things the U.S. couldn’t control, so best not to dwell on them.” • Others’ physicality cannot be controlled…
“Loss of manual jobs could be driving toxic masculinity, says Sting” [Guardian]. “The fact many men no longer use their hands and physicality on a daily basis may be driving some of the toxic traits in modern masculinity, according to Sting. The singer, who on Wednesday announced that his musical about the last days of a shipyard was coming to the West End this autumn, told the Guardian that one of the byproducts of deindustrialisation was the loss of physical productivity for men. He said: ‘I work with my hands every day as a musician, and I’m lucky. It’s a rare thing for modern men to actually use their hands and use their strengths to do anything. We’ve lost something there. ‘I don’t have any answers, but maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we’ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength. It’s rare we have to use it.’” • I reject the “toxic masculinity” brainworm; “toxic” is pseudo-scientific, because what’s the mechanism? It’s clear, for example, that we would throw the Tate Brothers into the “toxic masculinity” bucket, but what forces shaped them into the men they became? That said, I think Sting is onto something; certainly the years I spent in the mills were formative for me, and much of that formation come from the experience of training my body to do the work I had to do.
“What photography means now” [New Statesman]. A review of The Photo London fair at Olympia (the venue, not the painting). “Photography here does not feel nostalgic or defensive. It feels expansive and curious about its own future rather than anxious for its survival.” More: “That physicality may also be part of what the ‘photography is dying’ argument misses. Online, photographs increasingly exist without scale, texture or consequence. A masterpiece, an advertisement and a stranger’s holiday snapshot now occupy more or less the same flattened visual territory, all delivered at the same speed, all disappearing upwards beneath the thumb. At Olympia, the body re-enters the equation. You feel size. Grain. Density. You notice shadows cast by frames onto walls. The slight waviness of handmade paper. The distance required to properly see a huge Steven Meisel print whose enormous photographs loom over the fair almost like the godfather of the entire enterprise, coolly presiding over the crowds below.” And: “And everywhere there is evidence of photography reclaiming its objecthood. Antique carved frames curl around 19th-century portraits like fragments salvaged from another life. Tiny cyanotypes sit inside heavy baroque surrounds, suddenly feeling devotional rather than decorative. Elsewhere, contemporary works float inside sculptural glass structures or perch inside cabinets and vitrines that make them feel half photograph, half reliquary. So much of the fair resists the clean frictionless neutrality of digital viewing. These are not merely images. They are artefacts.” • I find this very encouraging. I wouldn’t be a photographer without digital, but to me the end product is always a print. A big one.
“Beautifully well-matched casting & superb singing brings alive the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden” [Planet Hugill]. “Svetlina Stoyanova’s wonderfully sung Cherubino matched her lithe, athletic sound with a similar physicality. As a youth she was believable, but this was allied to a fine feel for Mozart’s music. She was one of the few soloists to include much ornamentation, too. Yet, for all the musical sophistication this Cherubino was still an annoying little sh*t.” • Yes, what a travesty!
Fortune: Genius is ten percent inspiration and fifty percent capital gains.
Looksmaxxing. From Merriam-Webster online: “noun | LOOKS-mak-sing. Looksmaxxing refers to practices, especially among young men online, to enhance their physical appearance. These practices range in intensity, from everyday skincare to cosmetic surgery.
“The Corporal Philosophers” [Compact]. “Peters had overdosed in front of his fans and parasocial adorers. It was the second time he had lost consciousness on stream, right on the heels of multiple felony charges. Getting booked, it turned out, had been an excellent and unforeseen chance to get a professional mugshot: to ‘anglemaxx’ with his finely chiseled jawline and steely glare, to ‘mog’ the other Broward County inmates with an instantly viral bad-boy portrait. Peters’s face was the product of years of looksmaxxing. He began taking steroids at age fourteen after plunging into the online bodybuilding subculture and the so-called manosphere. He saw steroids and pharmacology as a ‘video game cheat code.’ Looksmaxxing, Peters argues, is a salve for the insecure, as he once was. Better known by his trade name, Clavicular, Peters has vaulted into popular consciousness over recent months for methods that include bonesmashing (hitting his cheekbones with a hammer) and microdosing meth to ‘lean out.’ Lately, his life has consisted of up-to-twenty-four-hour ‘IRL streams,’ attending parties, and building a rap sheet for general tomfoolery.” • There is also a thing called KBS (Korean Beauty Standards). But KBS practitioners/adherents don’t hit themselves with hammers; they go to plastic surgery clinics (which, in Korea, are world-class). So there’s something going on here that’s about more than “looks.”
“Looksmaxxing isn’t just a TikTok trend – it often reflects severe body image issues in teen boys and young men” [The Conversation]. “Much of the media coverage of looksmaxxing has focused on cultural dimensions, such as the misogynist ideology underlying this trend and its implications for cultural conversations about masculinity. Meanwhile, looksmaxxers with an especially large following of hundreds of thousands of people on social media platforms like TikTok and Kick have attained pop-culture status. But in the midst of this spectacle, the well-being of the young men participating in this trend has been largely overlooked. From my perspective as a mental health professional studying how people think and talk about emotions and mental health, the behaviors associated with looksmaxxing look suspiciously like symptoms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, also called body dysmorphic disorder.” In other words, we’ve been here before. And: “These disorders are especially harmful to young people who are in the throes of figuring out who they are, what they want and how to navigate relationships – efforts already complicated by the pressures of social media.” • “Trend” is one of those words. “Trends” simply appear, no agency implied.
“What Is The Endgame of Looksmaxxing?” [Marie Claire]. “Cue a slew of online courses on “how to be hotter”, influencers who spruik supplements, steroids, weight-loss drugs and black-market peptides, and forums where you’ll glean tips on how to chew gum to increase masseter engagement and sculpt your lower face.” We noted spruik on May 21.2 More: “Men’s self-improvement, like women’s, is typically driven by the male gaze, but it’s more gamified, competitive and hyper-analytical, presenting a potential paradigm shift for aesthetics.” And: “ ‘With the rise of AI and programs that analyse your face and tell you what needs to be done, I imagine I’ll have more clients in the next year saying, ‘This is what I’ve been told I need to do to be my most attractive self,” predicts Dr Amy Chahal, Sydney cosmetic doctor and founder of The Centre for Medical Aesthetics as well as FutureSkin.” • The end game is “I want you to use all your powers, and all your skills….”
NOTES
1 Google’s garbage-brained AI’s response was so extraordinarily wrong that I’m going to turn it into a post. Stay tuned.
2 And I insist that Also spruiked Zarathustra is my best joke EVAH.