I must say, 2020 is off to a great start in the crazy department. First up, let’s show some Gretatude:
• BBC Faced Dilemma Over Flying to Sweden to Interview Greta Thunberg
Everyone who travels to Sweden to interview Greta Thunberg faces the same dilemma. How do you reach her home in Stockholm without upsetting the queen of green by adding to the world’s carbon emissions? For the BBC, it was a particularly tricky decision, but its team ended up flying. “We did discuss that among ourselves,” confessed Sarah Sands, editor of Radio 4’s Today programme. “It felt awkward but we did not have the time for trains or boats.”
And no one has the time for this kind of media pretension either.
• Talk about deja vu all over again—I was sure this was an April Fool’s Day story, but no, it is in fact still just January 2:
Hillary Clinton Appointed Chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast
Hillary Clinton is to be the new chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB). She is the university’s 11th chancellor and first woman to take up the post.
In a statement, Mrs Clinton said it was a “great privilege” to become the chancellor of QUB. She takes up her role immediately and will serve for a period of five years.
While the role of chancellor is mainly a ceremonial one, securing Mrs Clinton will be seen as a coup for Queen’s. The chancellor often presides at graduation ceremonies and is also an ambassador for the university abroad.
Last time I heard that a Clinton was chancellor of a university, it was when Bill Clinton was pulling down $18 million to be the “honorary chancellor” of Laureate International Universities, a consortium of for-profit institutions. No word about how much Hillary is being paid to be the QUP chancellor, but does anyone think she is doing it for free?
• Michael Bloomberg is said to have spent something like $120 million already on TV ads for his presidential campaign, because he can. I know he is up on the air out here in California (as is fellow billionaire Tom Steyer), an expensive media market, two months ahead of the California primary. Bloomberg was a credible mayor of New York (leaving aside his retrograde views on soft drinks, gun ownership, and climate change), but this tweet is truly disturbing, and something I initially thought had to be a parody, but no—it’s real:
This really makes you wonder about whether Bloomberg, who shares the same antiquity as Joe Biden, has lost it. Because:
It’s Official: Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time
A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration.
Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
The Harvard study, by contrast, undercuts the entire premise that justifies the fad. And that leaves companies with only one justification for moving to an open plan office: less floor space, and therefore a lower rent. But even that justification is idiotic because the financial cost of the loss in productivity will be much greater than the money saved in rent.
• But if you want a side order of silly to go with your main course of crazy, you need to head over to Jacobin magazine, where the hardest of hard core cool socialist kids hang out. Right now Jacobin offers up this howler: In Defense of Kenny G. Seriously, it is a long article.
After a lot of explication about musical roots that might be persuasive to many readers, you knew it would end up here:
. . . a preference for Kenny G “invites social ostracism” by elites and by the professional managerial classes (PMC) that serve them. As much of the PMC has descended into a precarity associated with the traditional working class, musical tastes and other markers of class status have assumed disproportionate significance. The pleasure many take in heaping abuse on those appreciating simple pentatonic melodies in high-gloss arrangements is a reflection of the PMC’s increasingly tenuous purchase on social respectability.
But while doing so might provide some psychic consolation, as a political act, it is a dead end. It is clear that we now have little to gain by investing ourselves with the attitudes and ideology of elites. The 1 percent no longer worships or even respects the high arts and high culture. Its sole deity is the commercial marketplace, which it views as the omniscient arbiter of all aspects of life, including the creation and circulation of artistic products.
With the 1 percent’s abandonment of its traditional patronage role, it should be obvious to us more than ever that our prospects are intrinsically connected to the 99 percent. At the same time, it should also be apparent that many of the barriers preventing the kind of multi-class alliance we need are of our own creation. Our reflexive tendency to consign to “a basket of deplorables” those whose tastes, musical and otherwise, and cultural sensibilities fail to comport with the arbitrary dictates of educated elites is one of the most conspicuous of these.
Breaking this unattractive habit doesn’t require that we take any great pleasure in listening to Kenny G. Rather, all that is necessary when interacting with those who do is to remember the old kindergarten adage that one should either say something nice or nothing at all.
Okay Jacobin, now do country music.
• Bonus crazy:
Transgender Worker Suing Nike for $1.1 Million Cites Pronoun Abuses
A transgender former Nike contractor is seeking $1.1 million in damages from the sporting goods giant for allegedly allowing gender identity-based harassment.
According to a civil lawsuit filed this week, Nike and Mainz Brady Group, a staffing firm that hired workers for Nike, discriminated against computer engineer Jazz Lyles, who identifies as transmasculine and prefers the pronouns they/them/their. The complaint was filed with Multnomah Circuit Court in Oregon.
During Lyles’ tenure at Nike — from May 2017 to September 2018 — the engineer was repeatedly “misgendered” by coworkers, the complaint said. While Lyles notified management about the issue multiple times, the companies allegedly failed to implement any policies, procedures and trainings around the use of gender pronouns in the workplace.
I actually hope they win the lawsuit. By “they” I mean Jazz Lyles, not “they” as in Nike.
• Finally: Tulsi Gabbard went surfing. In New Hampshire. The world yearns for Bernie in a wetsuit.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.