From Vulture:

Octavia Estelle Butler was named after two of the most important people in her life: her mother, Octavia Margaret Guy, and her grandmother, Estella. Her grandmother was an astonishing woman. She raised seven children on a plantation in Louisiana, chopping sugarcane, boiling laundry in hot cauldrons, and cooking and cleaning, not only for her family but for the white family that owned the land. There was no school for Black children, but Estella taught Octavia Margaret enough to read and write. As far as Butler could tell, her grandmother’s life wasn’t far removed from slavery — the only difference was she had worked hard enough and saved enough money to move everyone out west during the Great Migration, to Pasadena, California, in the early 1920s.

Octavia Margaret worked from an early age; she attended school in California but was pulled out after a few years to help earn money. When Butler was very young, her family used to “stay on the place,” meaning they lived on the property of the family they worked for. Her father, Laurice James Butler, worked as a shoeshiner and died when she was 3 years old. Later, her mother would rent a spot for the two of them in Pasadena and work as a day laborer for wealthy white women. Octavia Margaret’s dream was to have her own place where she could tend her garden. She was quiet and deeply religious, and she read Butler bedtime stories until she was 6, at which point she said, “Here’s the book. Now you read.”

In her family, Butler went by Junie, short for Junior, and in the world, she went by Estelle or Estella to avoid confusion for people looking for her mother. As a girl, she was shy. She broke down in tears when she had to speak in front of the class. Her youth was filled with drudgery and torment. The first time she remembered someone calling her “ugly” was in the first grade — bullying that continued through her adolescence. “I wanted to disappear,” she said. “Instead, I grew six feet tall.” The boys resented her growth spurt, and sometimes she would get mistaken for a friend’s mother or chased out of the women’s bathroom. She was called slurs. It was the only time in her life she really considered suicide.

She kept her own company. In her elementary-school progress reports, one teacher wrote that “she dreams a lot and has poor concentration.” That was true. She did dream a lot, and she began to write her dreams down in a large pink notebook she carried around with her. “I usually had very few friends, and I was lonely,” Butler said. “But when I wrote, I wasn’t.” By the time she was 10, she was writing her own worlds. At first, they were inspired by animals. She loved horses like those in The Black Stallion. When she saw an old pony at a carnival with festering sores swarmed by flies, she realized the sores had come from the other kids kicking the animal to make it go faster. Children’s capacity for cruelty stayed with her. She went home and wrote stories of wild horses that could shape-shift and that “made fools of the men who came to catch them.”

She found a refuge at the Pasadena Public Library, where she leaped into science fiction. She especially liked Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Zenna Henderson, whose book Pilgrimage she would buy for her friends to read. She was a comic-book nerd: first DC and then Marvel. When she was 12 years old, she watched Devil Girl From Mars, a black-and-white British science-fiction movie about a female alien commander named Nyah who has mind-control powers, a vaporizing ray gun, and a tight leather outfit with a cape that touches the floor. Butler thought she could come up with a better story than that, so she began to write her own: temporary escape hatches from a life of “boredom, calluses, humiliation, and not enough money,” as she saw it. “I needed my fantasies to shield me from the world.”

When she learned she could make a living doing this, she never let the thought go. Later, she would call it her “positive obsession” and would put it all on the line. Her mother’s youngest sister, who was the first in the family to go to college, became a nurse. Despite her family’s warnings, she did exactly what she wanted to do. That same aunt would tell Butler, “Negroes can’t be writers,” and advise her to get a sensible job as a teacher or civil servant. She could have stability and a nice pension, and if she really wanted to, she could write on the side. “My aunt was too late with it, though,” Butler said. “She had already taught me the only lesson I was willing to learn from her. I did as she had done and ignored what she said.”

Butler would grow up to write and publish a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. She did not believe in talent as much as hard work. She never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they should learn, study, observe, and persist. Persistence was the lesson she received from her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt. In her lifetime, she would become the first published Black female science-fiction writer and be considered one of the forebears of Afrofuturism. “I may never get the chance to do all the things I want to do,” a 17-year-old Butler wrote in her journals, now archived at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. “To write 1 (or more) best sellers, to initiate a new type of writing, to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes (in reverse order), and to sit my mother down in her own house before she is too old and tired to enjoy it.” The world would catch up to her dreams. In 2020, Parable of the Sower would hit the best-seller list 27 years after its initial publication and 14 years after Butler’s death. After years of imitation, Hollywood has put adaptations of nearly all of her novels into development, beginning with a Kindred show coming to Hulu in December. She is now experiencing a canonization that had only just begun in the last decade of her life.

“I never bought into my invisibility or non-existence as a Black person,” Butler wrote in a journal entry in 1999. “As a female and as an African-American, I wrote myself into the world. I wrote myself into the present, the future, and the past.” For Butler, writing was a way to manifest a person powerful enough to overcome the circumstances of her birth and what she saw as her own personal failings. Her characters were brazen when she felt timid, leaders when she felt she lacked charisma. They were blueprints for her own existence. “I can write about ideal me’s,” she wrote on the cusp of turning 29. “I can write about the women I wish I was or the women I sometimes feel like. I don’t think I’ve ever written about the woman I am though. That is the woman I read and write to get away from. She has become a victim. A victim of her upbringing, a victim of her fears, a victim of her poverty — spiritual and financial. She is a victim of herself. She must climb out of herself and make her fate. How can she do this?”

. . . .

Butler was on the 6 p.m. Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh heading home from the Clarion Workshop for science-fiction writers. She felt proud of the past six weeks. She had just turned 23, and Clarion was the first time she was taken seriously as a writer. After graduating from high school, she had continued to live at home while attending Pasadena City College. She exhausted the creative-writing classes there and the extension classes at UCLA, where a teacher had once asked her, “Can’t you write anything normal?” She got into a screenwriting class at the Open Door Workshop through the Writer’s Guild of America, where she met the writer Harlan Ellison. She knew his work well, particularly his anthology Dangerous Visions, which was part of a literary, more socially minded turn in the genre. He later said she “couldn’t write screenplays for shit” but knew she was talented and encouraged her to go to Clarion, even giving her some money.

Clarion was the farthest Butler had ever been from home and required a three-day cross-country trip to get there. Adjusting was difficult at first. Western Pennsylvania was hot, humid, and lonely. The radio stations stopped playing at eight. When the other students socialized, she wrote letters to her friends and mother — six in the first week. Epistolary writing was a way to unload and unblock herself and, at least at Clarion, to feel less isolated. “Write me and prove that there are still some Negroes somewhere in the world,” she wrote to her mother early on. Ellison did tell her there would be one Black teacher there: Samuel Delany, who at 28 was a literary wunderkind. He’d published nine novels by then, winning the Nebula Award — the field’s highest honor — for Best Novel two years in a row. When Butler saw him for the first time, she told him he looked like a wild man from Borneo. (She probably shouldn’t have said that, she thought later.) When she felt particularly hard on herself, she would write letters to her mother she never sent. “I’m not doing anything,” she wrote. “I’m hiding in this blasted room crying to you. Which is disgusting.” Her mother had forgone dental work so Butler could attend. She wouldn’t complain like that.

Yes, she was still shy. She rarely spoke in class, and when she did, she put her hand over her mouth. (“She would never volunteer an answer,” Delany recalled, “but whenever I called on her, she always had an answer and it was always very smart.”) But Ellison’s session was a shot in the arm. Butler hadn’t turned in anything all workshop, and his one-story-a-day gauntlet invigorated her. She finished “Childfinder” at 4 a.m. — a story about a Black woman named Barbara who has the ability to locate children with latent psionic abilities and to nurture them. She sold the story to Ellison for his next anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions, and an editor at Doubleday encouraged her to send along her book manuscript for Psychogenesis, a world she had been building out since her teens.

Ellison was a social force: vexing and impossible to feel neutral toward. He would tell Butler to “Write Black!” and “Write the ghetto the way you see it!” — advice that annoyed her. She also had a crush on him. In her journals, she gave him a code name, El Llano, something she did for all of her crushes (William Shatner was “Gelly”). She wanted someone who could help guide her career, and she had hoped Ellison could be her mentor, champion, and lover. “Llano could easily be that master,” she wrote. But she was wary of losing herself. “If I am not careful, he will take over without even realizing it. A master must teach me to use my own talent, not to lean on his. I love him, but this is not what he teaches. So I will continue to love him and teach myself.”

. . . .

The high of Clarion wore off quickly. Ellison had promised “Childfinder” would make Butler a star, but the publication of The Last Dangerous Visions kept getting delayed. She sent fragments of Psychogenesis to Diane Cleaver, the Doubleday editor she met at the workshop. Cleaver said it was promising but she would need the complete manuscript. Over the next five years, Butler didn’t sell any writing but wrote constantly. She had moved into her own place in Los Angeles, one side of a single-story duplex in Mid City. On Saturdays, she packed a draft of Psychogenesis into her briefcase and went to the library to do research. One day, she lost the briefcase in a department store; from this point on, she always made a backup copy of her work.

She tried to stick to a tight schedule. Every morning at 2 a.m., she woke up to write. This was the best time, before the day was filled with other people, when her mind could roam freely. Sunrise brought the life she did not ask for: menial jobs at factories, offices, and warehouses. She subsisted on work from a blue-collar temp agency she called “the Slave Market.” Her mother wished she would get a full-time job as a secretary, but Butler preferred manual labor because she didn’t have to “smile and pretend I was having a good time.” Her body hurt; she needed to go to the dentist. She took NoDoz to stay awake during the day. She was always crunching numbers: the price of paper, how far she could stretch a $99.07 biweekly paycheck. “Poverty is a constant, convenient, and unfortunately valid excuse for inaction,” she wrote in one journal entry.

The world of Psychogenesis had to do with psionics — telepathy, telekinesis, mind control — which was popular in the science fiction she was reading. The possibility that you could control the circumstances of your life with your mind held a strong appeal for Butler. She believed in its real-world application, too. She had begun taking self-hypnosis classes back in high school and devoured self-help books like The Magic of Thinking Big and 10 Days to a Great New Life. She particularly loved Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, a book of motivational practices cribbed from the French psychologist Émile Coué’s concept of optimistic auto-suggestion, which originated the mantra “In every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” She would learn to manifest.

One of Hill’s exercises was to go to a quiet spot and write down a sum of money you want to earn and how you would get it. You had to do it with “faith.” For a stretch of months in 1970, Butler would follow these instructions in the morning and at night. “Goal: To own, free and clear, $100,000 in cash savings,” she wrote. These mantras sounded a drumbeat throughout her early journals. She drew up contracts for herself with writing benchmarks — I will put together an outline; I will complete a short story — and signed them “OEB.” She copied out Frank Herbert’s quote “Fear is the mind killer” and wrote it again, breaking it up into stanzas. Writing was an incantation, a spell she could cast upon herself and the reader. “The goal right now is to achieve a scene of pure emotion,” she wrote. “I want the feeling to spark in the first sentence and I want my reader, my captive to read on helplessly hating with vehemence any interruption strong enough to break through to them. I shall succeed.”

Then, in December 1975, at 28, she sold her first book. After losing the Psychogenesis draft, she began writing another novel, Patternmaster, that takes place in the same universe. It was about a struggle for succession between two psionics, a young upstart named Teray and a seemingly unbeatable being named Coransee, both vying to become the next “Patternmaster” — that is, the leader of the telepathic race known as the Patternists. Butler sent the manuscript to Doubleday. By then, Cleaver had left, and Sharon Jarvis, the science-fiction editor, accepted the submission.

Link to the rest at Vulture

From Women Writers, Women’s Books:

After reading Priya Malhotra’s gorgeous WOMAN OF AN UNCERTAIN AGE I felt compelled, rather than writing a review, to write a letter to the protagonist, Naina.

. . . .

When fifty-something Naina Mehta’s husband dies of a heart attack, she transforms herself from a suburban wife into a bold woman thirsty for new experiences. A far cry from the classic image of the aging Indian widow who dresses in subdued colors and focuses solely on her children and God.

Naina moves to New York City, takes up a low-paying job in a contemporary art gallery, and becomes besotted by Jai, her daughter’s boyfriend. But that’s only the beginning of her journey into this new world that allows her to explore the possibilities of being who she wants to be.

As Naina becomes more empowered, she dips her toes into the world of dating for the first time in her life. Maybe the possibility of love still exists for a woman of her age. But what happens if the man in question is Muslim and stirs generational wounds and the wrath of her conservative son?

Woman of an Uncertain Age explores the rocky, uncertain terrain of a middle-aged widow during a time when the parameters and ideas of midlife are being challenged. What does it mean to be a fifty-plus woman with grown children in such an environment? Especially for Naina, who comes from a culture where life is expected to follow a strict traditional course.

LETTER TO A PROTAGONIST

Dear Naina,

First of all, I’m sorry for your loss. I know it’s been quite a while since you lost your husband, but I think one can never just “move on” from such immense tragedy. It becomes part of you.

You’d be pleased to know that Priya did a remarkable job retelling your journey, her lush descriptions of your life, how you arrived in America from India, your arranged marriage, your life in New Jersey first of all, and your (brave!) move to Manhattan after the unthinkable happened, rather than doing the “expected” thing of resigning to being the dutiful widow, blending into the background, demure.

You might be less pleased to hear that Priya wrote your story candidly, unflinching, pulling no punches, and revealing far more about yourself than you would have wanted, considering you’re quite a private person.

The guilt you felt when you fell for your daughter’s boyfriend for instance.

The horror upon your daughter’s discovery, the heartwrenching months that followed.

But they were necessary revelations.

If we were to meet in real life, I assume you’d only tell me what I might want to hear, hiding the painful and embarrassing aspects of your journey (don’t we all do that, giving people the version we’d like them to hear?).

“What kind of mother are you, Naina?”

I must admit, I did question this, and it was tricky at times to refrain from judging you, but the fact that you could barely live with yourself because of what had unfolded, and the remorse which seeped from the pages made me want to climb in between the sentences to comfort you.

You are a flawed human being, a beautiful, wise, and inspiring one.

It was no surprise that you turned to online dating eventually, even though you never thought you’d do so. It was entertaining to read, some of the emails you received actually made me laugh out loud.

Link to the rest at Women Writers, Women’s Books

From Public Books:

It’s no news that the university is in crisis. Foreign-language departments have perhaps been the most affected, but few humanities programs have gone unscathed. English departments form the subject of two new attempts to provide a backstory to our present disorder: Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University by Andy Hines and Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Studies by John Guillory. Both depict literary study within universities as something strange and recent. And both situate the university in longer stories of racial capitalism and class distinction. Taken together, they provide a sobering analysis of the limited political potential of today’s English departments.

At the same time, amid this morass of dysfunction, both books soothe themselves with the fact that the university has no monopoly on reading. Students are never confined to the official syllabus. Some part of literature and literary study has always been eccentric to the university curriculum, and accounts of the “outside” of university-based practices, like the one Hines finds in a Black radical tradition that emphasized literature’s political potentials, could proliferate in many directions. Disciplinary outsides and eccentricities have tended to negatively inform professional literature scholars’ assertions that study of “their” objects requires specialist training in unique methods, or that university-based study of literature is the most inherently humanizing or importantly political reading practice. Guillory and Hines flip the script. By treating the professional literary academic as only one kind of reader, they suggest that attention to the varieties of reading practice ongoing outside the university may be an optimism appropriate to our contemporary moment.

Both books part ways with what Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell describe as a liberal “crisis consensus” that envisions universities as inherently progressive institutions that need only be saved from the recent ravages of neoliberal privatization.¹ Hines depicts the English department as having been an “institutionalized cultural space governed by whiteness and anticommunism.” In his telling, the postwar establishment of the new criticism, which foregrounded close reading of the text as a self-contained aesthetic object, helped ground the emerging postwar hegemony of US liberal capitalism, which imagined itself as an apolitical unity-amid-diversity in opposition to mandated Soviet conformity. None of this could have happened without demonizing left and communist Black intellectuals who treated culture as an engine of revolutionary transformation.

In turn, Guillory’s historical breadth—encompassing the rise and fall of rhetoric, belle lettres, philology, and more—supplements some of Hines’s archival work on the late 1940s and 1950s. Guillory understands the new criticism as just one piece of a massive sociological and methodological shift that made the literary object a “verbal work of art” and, built around it, the English department as a site of disciplinary expertise. By subordinating documentary or political aspects of the text to “an aesthetic ontology,” English professors granted themselves jurisdiction over literary inquiry, and thus a role within the university in servicing the expanding professional-managerial class.

In Hines’s account, the new criticism enabled the racialized exploitation and exclusion of some people to secure the freedom of others within the “state-academic apparatus.” “Black writers, Black leftists, and communist affiliates who sought to build institutions around the critical study of Black literature,” among them Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Melvin B. Tolson, fought the new criticism’s consolidation with US institutions, seeking instead an interracial coalition that would challenge American capitalism and “the ills of racial liberalism.” Their radical vision of future possibility was undermined by a “racist interpretation complex” that made “the imagining of such efforts, and the efforts themselves, appear improbable.” The causal claim is important here: it is the racist interpretation complex, backed by and embodied within the new criticism, that undermined the work of those committed to using the study of literature and culture in service of radical social transformation.

Hines’s interest lies in the political and economic circumstances that have shaped methodologies for literary study. His is a form of attention that has itself been denigrated by the new critical formalisms that interest him, which would insist that one “focus on the text” or “look at the literature itself.” You may object that these kinds of new critical approaches in their purest expression are not especially resonant anymore in the contemporary English department. You may even say that approaches indicting new critical work as apolitical formalism—a tradition of critique to which Hines adds—have been more characteristic of the discipline since the late 1960s.

This is where Guillory’s account comes in. His sociology of the institution explains why, long after new criticism’s fall from grace, the English department continues to be relatively homogenous. For despite Hines’s materialist interest in the political-economic backgrounds framing literary inquiry, he attributes more agency than does Guillory to the new criticism as an intellectual formation, describing it variously as a “crucial instrument,” an “integral part,” and as having “played an important role” in the establishment of English as a discipline of whiteness and anticommunism that rejects political approaches to literature as a betrayal of its true import. Unlike the revolutionary conceptions of culture that flourished in the people’s schools, in which writing could express and shape radical consciousness of the need for social transformation, “new Critical methods denied the possibility of criticism garnering any material force,” Hines argues. Does a critical tendency’s own self-conception undermine its material force, or do the material forces shaping study already relegate criticism to a particular role, at best a handmaiden or a message force multiplier?

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG was tempted to go on a rant, but posted the adjacent Henry Kissinger quote instead.

I’ve brought you something to wear over your dress and I do not want to hear your views on killing animals to provide coats for the wealthy. I have it on the best authority that these ermine committed suicide.

Ann Cristy

PG apologizes for the break in posting.

Nothing bad happened. Meatspace obligations intruded into PG’s digital activities.

Sometimes, he wonders if meatspace macros might be an interesting idea.

Let’s see. Experts say everyone should have a unique password for every website.

Which you should change on a regular basis.

PG just counted the number of passwords he has for websites beginning with the letter “A”.

There were 104 Letter A sites.

No, PG is not going to count the number of passwords for sites beginning with something other than the letter “A”.

Why not just memorize a unique password (and sometimes a unique user ID as well) for each site PG visits?

Of course, there are 26 letters in the alphabet. If website names began with the other letters of the alphabet were also that numerous (they’re not, but this is PG’s hypothetical), that would mean that PG had to remember 2,704 different passwords, containing both letters and numbers, with various minimum character counts required by more than one site.

Mrs. PG asks him to go to the grocery store to pick up a few things, she usually provides PG with a written shopping list.

PG is almost always happy to help, but if Mrs. PG gave him a grocery list that contained 2,704 different items to pick up, even if she gave him a list, he might have to draw a line. Or put his foot down. Or something else.

If Mrs. PG asked PG to memorize a grocery list containing 2,704 items to pick up (including every flavor of yogurt and every type of soup), PG’s mind would turn to mush.

Fortunately for PG, although he’s not aware of any grocery list software, he has used a password manager for a very long time.

The Best Password Managers to Secure Your Digital Life

From Wired:

PASSWORD MANAGERS ARE the vegetables of the internet. We know they’re good for us, but most of us are happier snacking on the password equivalent of junk food. For seven years running, that’s been “123456” and “password”—the two most commonly used passwords on the web. The problem is, most of us don’t know what makes a good password and aren’t able to remember hundreds of them anyway.

The safest (if craziest) way to store your passwords is to memorize them all. (Make sure they are long, strong, and secure!) Just kidding. That might work for Memory Grand Master Ed Cooke, but most of us are not capable of such fantastic feats. We need to offload that work to password managers, which offer secure vaults that can stand in for our memory.

A password manager offers convenience and, more importantly, helps you create better passwords, which makes your online existence less vulnerable to password-based attacks. 

. . . .

Why Not Use Your Browser?

Most web browsers offer at least a rudimentary password manager. (This is where your passwords are stored when Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox ask if you’d like to save a password.) This is better than reusing the same password everywhere, but browser-based password managers are limited. In recent years Google has improved the password manager built into Chrome, and it’s better than the rest, but it’s still not as full-featured, or widely-supported as a dedicated password manager like those below.

The reason security experts recommend you use a dedicated password manager comes down to focus. Web browsers have other priorities that haven’t left much time for improving their password manager. For instance, most of them won’t generate strong passwords for you, leaving you right back at “123456.” Dedicated password managers have a singular goal and have been adding helpful features for years. Ideally, this leads to better security.

WIRED readers have also asked about Apple’s MacOS password manager, which syncs through iCloud and has some nice integrations with Apple’s Safari web browser. There’s nothing wrong with Apple’s system. In fact, I have used Keychain Access on Macs in the past, and it works great. It doesn’t have some of the nice extras you get with dedicated services, but it handles securing your passwords and syncing them between Apple devices. The main problem is that if you have any non-Apple devices, you won’t be able to sync your passwords to them, since Apple doesn’t make apps for other platforms. All in on Apple? Then this is a viable, free, built-in option worth considering.

Apple Passkeys and the “Death of the Password”

A concerted effort to get rid of the password began roughly two days after the password was invented. Passwords are a pain—you’ll get no argument here—but we don’t see them going away in the foreseeable future. The latest effort to get rid of the password comes from the FIDO Alliance, an industry group aimed at standardizing authentication methods online. 

It’s still early days, but Apple has implemented the FIDO protocols in what the company calls passkeys. Passkeys are a lot like passwords but are generated and managed by your device. You don’t need to do anything. Apple will store them in iCloud’s Keychain so they’re synced across devices, and they work in Apple’s Safari web browser. Passkeys are now available in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, but there are some limitations. Websites and services need to support the FIDO Alliance’s protocols, which, at the moment, most don’t. We expect that to change rapidly though. Since Apple is using the work of the FIDO Alliance behind the scenes, passkeys will eventually also function with Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon’s systems.

You might be wondering if passkeys are different from passwords. They really aren’t. They’re generated key pairs instead of passwords. If you are familiar with GPG keys, they’re somewhat similar in that there’s a public and private key; the site has a public key and verifies your identity by requesting the private key from your device. While passkeys aren’t a radical departure, they’re still an improvement by virtue of being pre-installed for people who aren’t going to read this article and immediately sign up to use one of the services below. If millions of people suddenly stop using 12345678 as a password, that’s a win for security. 

Should you use them? If you’re all in on Apple devices, then jump in wherever they’re supported. Support outside the Apple ecosystem will come with time. Dashlane, one of our picks below, has already announced it will support passkeys so you can manage both legacy passwords and passkeys in a single service. Expect other existing services to follow suit. 

If you use a variety of devices, you might want to hold off on adopting passkeys. While there is a workaround for other devices, it involves QR codes and looks a bit cumbersome. We expect Android, Windows, and other platforms to begin rolling out their own support for FIDO Alliance protocols in the future, at which point we’ll start testing and figure out the best way to navigate the passwordless future.

Link to the rest at Wired

The OP continues by discussing a variety of different password managers (some free) that you can utilize to store (and usually create) a password that nobody else is likely to guess or use. You’re a unique human, you need several thousand unique passwords. Get used to it.

(Digression: PG wants to get a t-shirt that says FIDO Alliance.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

Since Gilgamesh, apocalyptic prophecies have been a staple of human culture. These stories follow a familiar pattern: God will punish man for his sins by ending the world. But as faith has waned, the genre has taken a scientific turn, from Elizabeth Kolbert predicting mass extinction as a result of our burning fossil fuel to Nick Bostrom theorizing that our work in artificial intelligence could lead to being ruled by robots. Nouriel Roubini, with his book “MegaThreats,” makes those Cassandras look like Pollyannas.

“Will a deadly pandemic finish us before the transition to machines is complete?” asks Mr. Roubini, an economist and consultant who earned the sobriquet “Dr. Doom” for his congenital pessimism. “Will climate change destroy the planet before rational machines come to the rescue? Will we suffocate under a mountain of debt? Or will the U.S. and China destroy the world in a military conflict as competition to control the industries of the future becomes extreme?” In fields from economics to epidemiology to foreign policy to technology, the author finds reasons for fear and even panic.

But the reason he has chosen to survey 10 different megathreats, rather than emphasize just one, is that he believes a common thread unites these challenges facing humanity: They are all slow-moving, and therefore those who warn about them can for a long time look like the boy who cried wolf.

Pandemics had worried public health experts for years—the George W. Bush administration drew up detailed plans to fight them—before Covid-19 took the world by surprise. Milton Friedman warned in the 1980s that an aging population would make entitlement programs insolvent, while Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lost an election in part because of their support for reform in 2012. China has wanted to take over Taiwan since the days of Chiang Kai-shek.

Mr. Roubini writes to urge us to confront the looming dangers of climate change, pandemics, inflation, artificial intelligence, war with China, the fall of the U.S. dollar, and several other worrisome trends that earn paragraphs instead of chapters in the book. The author warns that we are lurching from a “period of relative stability to an era of severe instability, conflict, and chaos.” Our return to the dark ages may be the result of the convergence of megathreats: climate change causing pandemics, China and the U.S. fighting over control of AI technology, a declining population exacerbating a debt crisis.

Mr. Roubini halfheartedly suggests potential solutions. Maybe the U.S. could import young immigrant workers to help solve its demographic challenge, or perhaps nations could offer universal basic income to those unfortunates put out of work by robots. But he fears that most of the problems he raises are essentially unsolvable. “Spoiler alert,” he writes in the prologue. “We are in way too deep.”

At times, Mr. Roubini gets so caught up in pessimism that he seems only cursorily interested in making coherent arguments for action. For example, he approvingly cites a Natural Resources Defense Council study that estimates the potential economic effects of climate change by the end of this century: $1.9 trillion a year. Pages later, he advocates taking drastic action to mitigate climate change, citing those immediate costs at between $2 trillion and $6 trillion annually. If this is the type of math used to justify climate action, an economic argument is hard to make.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG notes that there have been innumerable business booms and busts around the world. There have also been pandemics that killed millions in their day, a far higher percentage of the population then than a similar number of deaths would be in the contemporary world.

Athens v. Sparta is the earliest state-sponsored war PG knows much about, but wars and rumors of wars are a relatively consistent fact of life. Today, modern communications bring us news about wars of any meaningful size starting anyplace in the world almost immediately.

Wikipedia has a page titled List of ongoing armed conflicts with a map which helpfully shows the location where armed conflicts all over the world. One sub-part of that page lists 6 conflicts that have caused at least 10,000 direct, violent deaths per year in battles between identified groups. And this is a list of wars with a significant number of organized fighters fighting on each side. It doesn’t include deaths from criminal acts or gang violence.

PG is not certain how many times a war has been described as, “a war to end all wars.” Such is a wonderful goal and a thing of beauty to contemplate, but wars have continued, regardless.

Ditto for crop failures, pandemics, etc. In 1918-20, The Spanish Flu appeared. About 500 million people, or one-third of the global population at the time, fell ill. At least 50 million died, with 675,000 deaths occurring in the U.S. The population of the United States in 1919 was an estimated 104,514,000, so 0.646% of the US population died from the Spanish Flu. Two other world-wide influenza pandemics occurred in 1957 (the Asian Flu) and 1968 (the Hong Kong Flu).

The Asian Flu killed 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States. The Hong Kong Flu killed 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States. Covid has infected 636 million worldwide and caused 6.61 million deaths worldwide.

PG remembers hearing a quip a long time ago, “Everybody has to die from something.”

With every major outbreak of an infectious disease or virus, experts appear to warn us that the apocalypse is right around the corner. PG is not dismissing threats of various sorts, but is very optimistic about the ability of humanity to overcome and bounce back.

PG is reminded of the old adage about the news business, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

PG’s general optimism is likely to prevent him from being quoted in the Wall Street Journal any time in the future.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

On November 7, Judge Florence Pan released her memorandum opinion blocking Penguin Random House from acquiring rival Big Five publisher Simon & Schuster—and in the final analysis, after a year of legal wrangling and a three-week trial that captivated the publishing industry, it wasn’t a close case for her at all. In an economical 80-page decision, Pan found the U.S. Department of Justice showed the proposed merger would likely “lessen competition” in the market for book rights in violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.

“The government has presented a compelling case that predicts substantial harm to competition as a result of the proposed merger of PRH and S&S,” Pan concluded. DoJ attorneys properly defined a relevant market—“anticipated top selling books” with advances over $250,000—which, she noted, accounts for 70% of the advance monies paid to authors. The post-merger entity would have had a “concerningly high” 49% market share, more than twice that of its closest competitor in an already concentrated market in which “the two top competitors would hold 74% of the market and the top four market participants would control 91%.” And, citing the publishers’ previous actions a decade ago in the Apple price-fixing case, Pan found “strong evidence” of “likely unilateral and coordinated” effects that would further harm competition.

At the same time, Pan shredded each of PRH/S&S’s defenses. In a key blow, she swiftly dispatched with the defense’s central argument that the government’s focus on books with advances over $250,000 was incorrect on both the facts and the law. She was “unpersuaded” by PRH/S&S arguments that new and existing competitors (including smaller indie publishers and upstarts like Zando and Astra) would preserve competition. She rejected the idea that literary agents would keep the merged firm in check. And she dismissed the argument that “internal competition” among PRH and S&S editors would keep competition robust, finding that PRH CEO’s Markus Dohle’s “extraordinary pledge” to allow internal bidding reflected his “awareness of how threatening the combined entity would be to authors and agents.”

The full opinion comes a week after Pan released her final order blocking the merger, delaying the release of the opinion to allow for a few minor redactions of confidential information.

Few were surprised by the court’s decision last week, given that Pan appeared clearly skeptical of the proposed merger at trial. But before trial, the unfamiliar “monopsony” claims at the heart of the case had left observers unsure of how the case might play out. In the end, however, Pan found the DoJ’s approach to be highly effective, and, in a crucial blow to the defense, found the government’s “use of high advances as a proxy for anticipated book sales” to be “logical and supported by market realities.”

On the other hand, the judge was not persuaded by the publisher defendants’ efforts to portray the $250,000 advance market as an invented, arbitrary “price segment” rather than a legally cognizable submarket. And after displaying a firm grasp of publishing industry practices in the opening 22 pages of the opinion, Pan rejected the publishers’ attempts at trial to “insist that all books are the same in the market” or that it is impossible to predict which books would be “top sellers,” calling those arguments “unsupportable”

“The court has no trouble recognizing that anticipated top-selling books are distinct from the vast majority of books that do not carry the same expectations for success,” Pan wrote. “The fact that the Big Five publish 91% of anticipated top sellers supports a finding that authors of such books have unique needs and preferences. Although smaller publishers can sometimes put out an anticipated top selling book, it is the Big Five who have the backlists and the marketing, publicity, and sales advantages necessary to consistently provide the high advances and unique services that top selling authors need. It is precisely those specialized needs that make the authors of anticipated top selling books vulnerable to targeting for price reductions. Publishers of anticipated top selling books know that such authors are not able to find adequate substitutes for publishing their books because of their unique needs and preferences.”

With the submarket established, Pan easily found a prima facie case existed to block the deal, citing the dominant position of a merged PRH/S&S in an already heavily concentrated publishing industry (as calculated by the government’s expert witness, Dr. Nicholas Hill, and using a prime antitrust metric called the Herfindahl Hirschman Index).

“The 49% share that the post-merger PRH would hold is far above the levels deemed too high in other cases,” Pan held. “Moreover, the high concentration must be considered in the high context of an undeniable trend in consolidation in the publishing industry.”

And in a strong rebuke, Pan, citing the recent history of collusion and price-fixing in the 2012 Apple e-book case, cited the risk of “coordinated effects” should the merger be approved.

“As an initial matter, a history of collusion or attempted collusion is highly probative of likely harm from a merger,” Pan wrote, calling the Apple case “significant” and “a backdrop for trends in the industry that appear to demonstrate that the Big Five are already engaging in tacit collusion or parallel accommodating conduct.”

“Recent years have seen the industry-wide standardization of certain contract terms—involving payment structure, audio rights, and e-book royalties—in ways that favor publishers over authors, suggesting that the top publishers have engaged in coordinated conduct,” Pan wrote, in a particularly blistering section of the opinion. “Advances used to be paid in two installments before publishers uniformly moved to paying them in three installments and then four installments, thereby delaying authors compensation. After audiobooks became a significant source of revenue in the industry, publishers uniformly refused to acquire books without audio rights included thereby limiting authors’ ability to maximize their compensation and preventing authors from diversifying their sources of income.”

Pan cited an “illustrative” example from the evidence, in which S&S refused to bid on a highly sought after book because the agent attempted to withhold audio rights. An S&S editor noted that the other Big Five publishers also had “no audio, no deal” rules, and questioned whether one of the other Big Five houses would join the auction. Ultimately, Pan noted, the agent was forced to restart the auction with audio rights included.

“It is significant that in a market already prone to collusion, where coordinated conduct already appears to be rampant, PRH’s acquisition of S&S would reinforce the market’s oligopsonistic structure,” Pan concluded, “and create a behemoth industry leader that other market participants could easily follow.”

Meanwhile, Pan devoted less than 19 pages to the Defendants’ rebuttal, quickly dispatching with PRH/S&S’s arguments that indie publishers, new entrants, strong literary agents, and “internal” competition would keep competition for book rights robust. And in a final passage, she rejected as “not relevant to the court’s analysis” the idea that (as some industry observers have suggested) PRH would be the best home for S&S vs. a potential private-equity acquisition.

“The focus of the court’s inquiry is harm to competition in the relevant market,” Pan wrote, calling concerns about a private equity acquisition highly speculative. “Other potential buyers in the publishing industry have shown interest in acquiring S&S and it is just as likely that another publishing company will prevail in a future sale. Nor is the court moved by the desire of S&S and its employees to be acquired by PRH. It comes as no surprise that S&S would like to benefit from the extraordinary market power and other advantages that the combined entity would enjoy. The court however must focus on harm to competition in the relevant market.”

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

Without having read Judge Pan’s entire opinion, PG cannot comment on all her findings, but the excerpts he’s seen at various locations online show her to be a smart jurist who couldn’t be bamboozled by industry drivel to the effect that they’re nurturers of authors or otherwise fragile flowers that must be protected in their lock-step collusion on all sorts of things that harm a great many authors.

From DigiDay:

The venture capital market is slowing, but some investors are saying that’s a good thing — for them.

During the pandemic, VC money was getting thrown into the market and competing for opportunities for investment. Now, the VC market is correcting itself: company valuations are down, and less competition means smaller VC firms can be more deliberate with their investments. However, this also means it’ll be more difficult for media companies looking to raise capital to do so.

According to data from capital market research firm PitchBook, U.S. venture capital deal activity in “publishing” companies (defined as providers of print and internet publishing services, such as newspapers, magazines and books), was $25.2 million in Q3 2022, down from $84.4 million in Q3 2021 and $85.4 million in Q3 2020.

However, that’s up slightly from Q3 2019 at $25 million, but down from Q3 2018 at $85.3 million.

As for deal count, that’s also dipped in Q3 2022 to five deals in the quarter. In Q3 2021, there were 16 deals, and in 2020 there were 13 – the same number as in Q3 2019. It was 15 in 2018.

As of Nov. 1, 2022, the total value of VC deals for publishing companies this year was $117.4 million. While it’s not a complete comparison since there’s another quarter to go, total deal value was $484.5 million in 2021; $241.8 million in 2020; $511.6 million in 2019; and $208 million in 2018. Total deal count ranged from 51 in 2018 to 65 in 2021; it’s 35 so far in 2022.

The biggest U.S. VC deal among publishing companies in 2022 was a tie between news aggregator Flipboard’s $25 million Series A funding round led by K2 Global in July and Semafor’s $25 million seed round in June. Crypto publisher Decrypt raised $10 million in a Series A funding round in May. Lava Labs and Grid also raised $10 million this year.

Link to the rest at DigiDay