In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A piece in Fortune two days ago caught my eye: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is annoyed employees didn’t listen to his back-to-office request—and now he’s ordering a return . This echoes policy changes by figures like Elon Musk at his companies: the COVID panic is over, and it's time to drop all the charades. Although this is behind a paywall, this site carries a version from Starbucks's CEO, Howard Schultz, himself "Message to Starbucks support partners: Returning to each other and to the office" ["support partners" are headquarters management employees in Starbucks-speak]: I want to share a change in our policy about hybrid work consistent with our past, but boldly about our future. Before I do, let me share context. The pandemic was a full-out attack on the ideas that make Starbucks, Starbucks. It disrupted human connection. It made the world harder for so many. And it threatened our ability to be a safe haven and a Third Place. At the SSC ["...

Cue the Dragnet theme: I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate, start to finish. I was young enough at the time to have supported McGovern in 1972, and I thirstily drank up every detail of Nixon's subsequent downfall. The appointment of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the matter in May, 1973 was a big event, since it was forced on the Nixon administration as a condition of Eliot Richardson's Senate confirmation as attorney general. In fact, for those of us who followed the story closely, this was the key sign that Nixon was on his way out. The odd thing is that Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Trump just this past November. It's hard to avoid thinking this was a deeply unserious act intended to drive a stake through the potential for a 2024 Trump run, while Trump steadily fades as a prospect even without it. Garland's problem now, though, with the opposing party in control of the House, is that...

As I said yesterday, something struck me about Mr Paul Roland's essay at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society site explaining his very hesitant journey to the North American ordinariate, about which he concludes, It was recommended to me by a Catholic friend that I join the Ordinariate because of how homeless I felt in the Catholic Church. I did not seriously consider it initially because there were no Ordinariate parishes near me, but after giving it more thought, I decided that I would join. I made that decision because I believed in the Ordinariate’s mission, in the hopes that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home, and, if nothing else, as an excuse to let myself be a little different from other Catholics in the meantime. It isn't entirely clear what sort of Catholic he is now. He says he hopes "that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home" -- but is he attending any ...

The United Methodist Church is belatedly coming to the same crisis of division that most mainline Protestant denominations have already met, the question of same-sex marriage and ordaining actively and avowedly same-sex-attracted clergy, although this has never been the exclusive issue dividing any of the denominations. In recent weeks, legacy media have begun to notice, and The Week, for example, explains , United Methodists have been more-or-less civilly disagreeing about gay rights since the 1970s, but the issue came to a head in 2019. At a UMC General Conference that year, the theologically conservative camp, aided by socially conservative United Methodists from Africa, outflanked the moderates and liberals and pushed through a resolution affirming existing UMC bans on same-sex weddings and the ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" as clergy. The UMC conservatives appear to have drawn lessons from the experience of Episcopalians in particular, recognizi...

Elon Musk gave Alex Berenson, a gadfly journalist and COVID skeptic, access to Twitter's files last week . Berenson had been banned from Twitter in 2021, but he successfully sued for reinstatement in an action separate from Musk's takeover before that took place. What Musk is really offering is the chance to search Twitter’s systems seeking information about specific topics, in a process akin to discovery in civil lawsuits. Reporters ask for searches. Twitter turns over what it finds to be read or screenshotted at Twitter headquarters but retains the original documents. . . . Musk is making available an unprecedented trove of evidence about government and private efforts to suppress free speech on the most important global platform for journalism. Musk’s decision is not risk-free and has little or no appreciable benefit for him. Everyone - Democrat, Republican, or independent - should thank him for doing it. On his Substack, Berenson outlines one particular episode o...

I'm still thinking about various remarks by observers, especially David Sacks in Saturday's post , that Elon Musk and his staff at Twitter are working on ways to improve the Twitter product, although Sacks makes the point that the product "simply hasn't changed that much in the last 10 years". So my first question is what is the product? I think the answer to that one is simple, it's an online forum or community. It's also a type of social media. That's a problem in itself, because social media is generally thought to be something unhealthy, especially if used in excess. Things that make it unhealthy include the ability to be obnoxious while concealing one's identity and the ability to portray onesself in highly favorable terms -- and especially in light of the latter, social media can be depressing when people look at their own lives and worry they don't measure up to the happy lives other users represent themselves as living. On one ha...

Coverage of the vote for US Speaker of the House has been remarkably shallow. Breitbart observes , "No speaker race had lasted 15 rounds or more in 163 years, according to House records." Simple arithmetic puts the last time that happened in 1860, which Breitbart's own crack writers failed to acknolwedge. Hmm. What happened the next year? Any students know? Following the 2020 election, some commentators compared the debate over the outcome to 1876, which resulted in the Compromise of 1877, whereby Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House on the understanding that he would remove federal troops from South Carolina. This effectively ended Reconstruction, which was one of a series of events that bookended the US Civil War. My own view for a while has been that the US is approaching a need to resolve issues nearly comparable to those that caused the 1861-65 Civil War, although I don't think armed conflict will be involved. If we look at events that...