'The Great Refusal' author Casey Gerald says ruining his reputation saved his life
On Fresh Air: “A decade ago, [Casey] Gerald was a rising star, a Yale and Harvard graduate running a celebrated nonprofit. Then he shut it all down. His new book is an argument for forging a different path.”
Gerald “has walked away from his own success twice. The first time was in 2016, at the height of everything. He was a kid from Oak Cliff, a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Dallas, who had made it out the way America tells us to make it out - a football scholarship to Yale, a job at Lehman Brothers, an MBA from Harvard. He created a nonprofit that put him on magazine covers and TED stages, with a talk viewed millions of times. He opened for President Barack Obama at South By Southwest in 2016. And there was even a New York Magazine headline that asked, ‘Does Casey Gerald Know How To Fix America?'”
“And then just like that, he shut down his nonprofit, stopped answering the phone and disappeared. His memoir, ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here,’ was his first report back. Then he went quiet again. And now, after that second long silence, Casey Gerald has returned with a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a challenge. It’s called ‘The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance.’ It’s his attempt to make sense of the choice at the center of his own life - to stop trying to convince America that he deserves a place in it and take back the authority to decide what his life is for.”
Why the current tech backlash feels different. Issues of surveillance and police militarization date back at least to the Patriot Act and 9/11. Why didn’t most Americans care then, and why are they protesting now? On the Verge’s Decoder podcast with Nila Patel.
I’ve been listening to podcasts for more than 20 years. In the 80s and 90s, I recorded audio off the radio programs to listen to in the car. I’m a die-hard podcast listener. A big part of my podcast-listening is done while exercising, so I guess you can say podcasts have been lifechanging for me.
What even is a “podcast” anymore?
Until recently, “podcasts” were audio distributed over the Internet — listened to, not watched. But nearly all of today’s most popular podcasts have video too. Some are video-only.
Spoiler alert: Hosts Willa Paskin and producer Evan Chung basically conclude that the word “podcast” now has two meanings: One is the traditional meaning, audio distributed over the Internet using RSS. But a newer meaning of the word is a video program of “two or three people chatting behind big bulky microphones.”
And they note that the microphones are just props — lapel mikes and other hidden mikes have been around for decades. Those big mikes strictly for show.
I am definitely an audio-only podcast man. I listen to a couple of hours of podcasts daily (though I’m lately listening to more audiobooks as an alternative to podcasts). We watch a few talk videos too, but I am turned off by the visual podcast format, with tight closeups on faces, amateurish set design and those big mikes.
Industry Standard Tools: A list of tools of various trades that are “so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses,” compiled “by the people who use them.”
“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem,” is so very often the appropriate response when communicating with a business.
They Ran For President. What Did They Learn?
In 2004, Charlie Jane Anders interviewed people who ran for President and lost, including Larry Flynt, who said:
“[My biggest surprise was learning] what a void existed in American society, and the desire to have a candidate other than one from the two-party system. I just announced [my candidacy] sort of as a joke, and I got $60,000 in my office that first week in change, dollars, five and ten-dollar bills from people saying, ‘Go get ‘em.'“
“I never dreamed that would be the case. There were so many disenfranchised people out there that I thought, if somebody came along who was really a major contender, he could really upset the system. I was not surprised when Ross Perot had the effect on the election that he had. Bill Clinton would have never gotten elected had it not been for Ross Perot. And of course, in 2000, Al Gore would have been elected had it not been for Ralph Nader.”
“Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment,” writes Brian Goldstone at The New York Times
Millions of Americans have full-time jobs but can’t afford housing. They live in their cars, or motels, or double up with more fortunate people. These homeless are intentionally excluded from US homelessness statistics, perpetuating the myth that homeless people are mostly drug-addicted or mentally ill.
…
“For millions of Americans, the greatest threat isn’t that they’ll lose their jobs. It’s that the job will never pay enough, never provide enough hours, never offer enough stability to keep them housed.… when work no longer provides stability, when wages are too low and rents are too high, when millions of people are one medical bill, one missed paycheck, one rent hike away from losing their homes – who, exactly, is safe?”
Gloria Steinem Helped Transform the World for Everyone
Rebecca Solnit: “Much dismissiveness about feminism comes from ignorance about how profoundly feminism changed things that were so deeply entrenched, so normalized into invisibility, so ancient and customary that they first had to be denormalized, named, unpacked, and explained as to why they were incompatible with women’s status as people entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As news of Gloria Steinem’s death at 92 came in this morning, I saw a lot of this incomprehension.”
I was out walking the dog when I got in a nice chat with a neighbor. When the chat was done, the woman noted the full poop bag I was carrying, and offered to take it from me and put it in her trash. “No thanks!” I replied, chipperly. “I’m good.”
That was years ago. I still think about it now and then and wonder what kind of message I was sending.
A woke map
The US voted against a UN resolution to replace the standard Mercator Projection map of the world.
The new map accurately shows the size of land masses in relation to each other. In the Mercator Projection, designed in the 16th Century, Africa and Greenland are shown as about the same size, but in reality, Africa is 14x larger.
The US explanation for its vote is just plain stupid. I feel 14X stupider after reading it.
164 nations voted in favor of the resolution. The US was the sole “no” vote. We’re the stupidest country in the world now.
This kind of thing makes me angry in the way that greater abuses don’t. It’s just so goddamn petty.
Via jwz.org
1969 interview with Don Rickles by WMAR-TV reporter Susan White. “Rickles had a reparation for not letting reporters get a word in edgeways, so Susan decided to hilariously turn the tables…”
Rickles has a reputation for being kind, gracious and charming in his personal life and that shines through in this video.
Rebuilding is brutally expensive in Los Angeles’s burnt-out neighborhoods, so instead homeowners are reviving the lost art of house-moving, transporting historic homes across town to be installed on lots that were recently made vacant by wildfires.
Nicola Twilley at The New Yorker:
In his prime, [George] Kress was a kind of P. T. Barnum figure, dazzling the city with his ambition and showmanship. He moved greenhouses without breaking a pane, entire high schools in one piece, and office buildings while workers remained at their desks. In 1924, his clients hosted a party–with the mayor in attendance–inside a nine-bedroom Queen Anne-style building while Kress moved it more than two miles west, on Wilshire Boulevard, from the newly commercial neighborhood of Westlake to the upscale Windsor Square.
If I had a time machine, that party would be one of the first places I’d go.
Marco Arment: “If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my ‘side’ considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?”
Columbia House: The First 12 Cost A Penny, But … Columbia House was a great way to get 12 CDs, tapes or records for a penny. But its business model set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.