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The Baffler
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Bobby’s moment comes when a man wanders into the motel parking lot and heads straight for the scuffed picnic tables that have become one of the makeshift playgrounds for the children who call the Magic Castle home. Bobby spots the man, identifies him as a threat, and leads him away from the children, scaring him off and sending him running without making a violent scene. What this sequence makes most plain, far beyond the satisfaction that comes from witnessing Bobby’s rare chance to act as an unambiguous protector, is how little stability this world is capable of offering, and how much it is still possible to lose when you have almost nothing.
This is the drama of The Florida Project: not a quest moving forward, but a period of safety falling apart. We start at a moment when things are OK, or as OK as they can be: Moonee roams the grounds around the Futureland Inn and the Magic Castle, shares free ice cream with her friends, and delights in the attraction of Bobby trying to persuade a tenant to put her bathing suit top back on; and Halley and her own friend—Scooty’s mother, Ashley—walk, arms around each other, into the Orlando night. Watching them leave the Magic Castle, you fear for them as much as you fear for their children when they run alongside the highway: they are just as vulnerable, and just as adrift in a world where there is little room for them, a world that was not made with their safety in mind.
Yet there is a stubborn beauty in this place, tough as the unrestrainable Florida flora that is even capable, sometimes, of overtaking the controlled, concrete kingdom of Disney World. At the Magic Castle, a patch of grass and a picnic table can, for a moment, become a scene of harmony, of children alone and safely at play: as long as there are a few resources, a little food, a little stability, a paycheck through next week, this can be enough. That this world suddenly wobbles, falls apart when a little security is lost—a stranger in the parking lot; a friendship broken; a bag of perfume confiscated—is not a matter of weakness in the people doing their best to hold their home together. It is a testament to how little they really need, and just how much is denied them.
damn
Disney World is a perfect realization of one man’s will, and it seems, in this way, to be a perfect distillation of what America has become on the morning I enter its gates—and seems, even more than that, to be the corporate principality on which we have come to model our entire nation. Buy your way into security, into value, into innocence, and don’t ask what happens to the people trapped outside, the people who did not work hard enough, were not deserving enough, to be here. You are here and they are not. And if the price goes up, work harder.
[...] I read about housing inequality in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and find that this story is so often a story of mothers and children. These are the people our society claims to love and support above all others, and yet their suffering is endless and untenable, and the reason is simple, really: they are not good workers. Often, they are not workers at all. What good are they? What do they produce? Why should our country take care of them, if they cannot buy their way into safety? Isn’t the inability to purchase safety proof that you deserve whatever harm befalls you?
This is the story Americans have been sold: the one that pardons the powerful and makes us pay for our own numbness. We submit to a story that tells us we will be good—that we will be made good, and therefore safe—as long as we follow the rules, as long as we forget that there are rules. We enter the castle gates because there can be no danger here, no cruelty, and no adulthood, for as long as we believe: we will be saved not just from the harm that comes to those who are of no value here, but from the knowledge that they even exist. The dream still works, and it will work for at least a little longer. Buy a ticket. See if it’s worth the price.
aaaaahh
For the old rich, an Ivy berth means status preservation. “You’ve got people trying to make sure their kids don’t fall down a class, basically,” said Kara, a consultant who asked to go by a pseudonym so as not to offend her clientele, which includes Middle Eastern royalty and scions of multinational conglomerate fortunes, as well as teachers and hairdressers. “They want what we all want, which is for their kids to have it at least as good as they do.”
It’s a different proposition, of course, for parents who came from less. In their careers, they might have seen Ivy grads glide ahead on the viscous trails left by alumni networks. Here, the thinking is: “I want to buy my kid into this system that I had to claw my way into,” Kara said. “I’d like to help them skip a few steps on the Monopoly board if I can.”
Who can blame them?
yep
If you had to construct a higher education system de novo, and you were given only two prerogatives—to transmit generational privilege while projecting an air of meritocracy—it would be hard to improve on the current setup. If the emotional well-being of young people were a priority, however, you might want to start fresh.
Students at high-achieving public and preparatory high schools have suffered a historic escalation of stress and burnout at application age. Guidance counselors see college-going students treating stress as a sort of “cultural currency” among their peers. Public health researchers have identified admissions anxiety as a cause of teenage substance use.
love it
If elite college admission is a ritual of class selection, with a cottage industry of private escorts administering the rites, then here is its deeper psychological function: instilling a sense of desert into the future ruling class. For the investment banker’s son from Phillips Exeter who gets into Yale as a varsity rower, the natural question is, well, how couldn’t you get into Yale. His response: Why don’t you ask all my old classmates who didn’t? As well you might. Maybe they would holler about busting their butts; or perhaps they’d have some ideas about how the entire system is an elaborate lie.
It is common for dreams to involve nonsensical objects or borderline categories. People who are two people, places that are both your home and a spaceship. Dreams explore the statespace and in doing so warp and play with the categories, the dimensions of perception itself, stress-testing and refining. The inner fabulist shakes up the categories of the plastic brain. Their authoring avoids a phenomenon called overfitting. Overfitting, a statistical concept, is when a model is too sensitive to the data it’s been fed, and therefore stops being generalizable. It’s learning something too well. For instance, artificial neural networks have a training data set: the data that they learn from. All training sets are finite, and often the data comes from the same source and is highly correlated in some non-obvious way. Because of this, artificial neural networks are in constant danger of becoming overfitted. When a network becomes overfitted, it will be good at dealing with the training data set but will fail at other similar data sets. All learning is basically a tradeoff between specificity and generality in this manner.
The most common way to get around the universal problem of overfitting is to expand the training set. But for real brains, the learning process that produces our experiential landscape relies on the training set of life. That set is limited in many ways, highly correlated in many ways. Life alone is not a sufficient training set for the brain. Dreams prevent our brains from overfitting our experiential statespace, blurring categories and taking unlikely trajectories. The fight against overfitting every night creates a cyclical process of annealing: during wake the brain fits to its environment via learning; then during sleep the brain “heats up” through dreams that prevent it from clinging to suboptimal solutions and models.
ooh i like this
The paymaster for Rich’s story was a tech giant, as is so often the case now, and it was not at all a coincidence that his epic about climate change unfolded not as a polemic but as a narrative human drama. Nor was it a coincidence that Rich’s essay curiously lacked a critique of capital’s sway over American politics or the power of our entrenched oligarchy and the central role these forces played in our Losing Earth. This is because the book-to-film complex is bolstered by two imperatives that now govern our nonfiction almost without exception: foreground story as an ultimate good, ahead of deep personal insight, literary style, investigative reporting, or almost any other consideration that goes into the shaping of written work; and do not question too closely the aristocracy of tech and capital that looms over us, the same people who subsidize the system that produces America’s writing. It’s impossible to say whether Rich had these considerations at the top of his mind as he shaped the piece, but it doesn’t matter. The power of book-to-film in American writing is in how it sits at the edge of the consciousness of every writer, editor, and podcast producer, a dark energy of the entertainment market that drives wealth and reward. You just have to tell a gripping story and leave the powers-that-be unnamed.
[...] Epic is just one more publishing vehicle that can’t make money by actually publishing. The company’s real money comes from presenting itself as a curator of elite content, which it offers to brands like Ford and Google in the form of long-form reporting: “Epic story hunters travel the world in search of true stories that reflect a brand’s spirit and ethos,” their business description read until recently, when Vox Media completed an acquisition of the company for an undisclosed sum. “Epic turns the stories into documentary films, magazines, books, video games, photo essays, live events, and speeches that express a brand’s values.” This is, of course, the logic of this moment—that what you might have once thought of as literary publishing is, when you get down to it, just high-status corporate content generation.
fuck me