How can I be more productive? The Economist

Read time: 5 minutes

By Uri Bram

If there’s one experience that fundamentally defines the modern working professional it’s trying, and failing, to get more work done. It took me six minutes to write that last sentence because between starting and ending I opened four new tabs, including an interesting Harvard study on how our inability to focus is making us miserable. But as a matter of deepest principle, your resident economist will never let personal inadequacy prevent him from offering advice. Stick to the following guidelines and you’ll be able to clock off at lunchtime:

1. Put your long-term self in charge

Thomas Schelling, who invented behavioural economics decades before it was a thing, encouraged his readers to think of themselves as two selves: a weak-willed short-term self and a far-sighted long-term one. Your short-term self is like a rat in a maze: it will run in random directions, or wherever it smells food, with no regard for the bigger picture. The trick to better life decisions, says Schelling, is for your long-term self (when it’s briefly in control) to drop your short-term self into a carefully structured maze, channelling your primal, impulsive actions towards inevitably good results.

For example, if your short-term self is left with any choice at all between writing a report and wasting time on the internet, it will inevitably choose the temptations of the web. As a result, Schelling says that it’s rational for the long-term self to yank the router out of the socket so that the short-term self won’t have internet to distract it. (If you like your dramatic gestures a little less dramatic, the Self Control app lets your long-term self simply block distracting websites that might tempt you later). Similarly, apps like Beeminder and Stickk let your long-term self create “commitment contracts” which will pressure your short-term self into achieving your deeper goals.

2. Remember Pareto

The Pareto principle, certain management thinkers will tell you, is that 20% of the work always gives you 80% of the results. They’re wrong, however, about the universality of the numbers. Pareto was making an empirical observation about some specific situations, for instance, that a “vital few” of the peapods in his garden were providing him most of the peas. The general concept it embodies, though – that if you just do the most important work you’ll get most of the results, and that a large amount of trifling work doesn’t add very much at all – is often true outside the vegetable patch.

As such, it’s easy to do double the work in half the time by doing 20% of the work for two-and-a-half different projects and thereby getting 200% of the output afters 50% of the hours.

3. Copy other people’s hard work

We have reached a stage in civilisation where, no matter how weird or obscure or pointless the thing you’re trying to do is, somebody out there has already done it. In the last two decades, technology has provided you with the means to find out how. You’re going through 14,000 photographs and hand-cropping each of them to exactly the size of a postcard? It’s your life, my friend, but if you google it, someone will teach you how to automate that mind-numbing task. You desperately need your spreadsheet to convert horsepower into decibel-watts? That’s a stupid thing to do, but you can bet somebody else has already stupidly done it. Ninety percent of our civilisation’s current misery could be abated if people just learned to search for somebody else’s solutions to any given problem, copied those solutions, and then napped for the rest of the day. With apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr, always remember this modern Serenity Prayer: “Lord grant me the humility to Google the things I do not know, the courage to pester my friends about the things I cannot Google, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

4. Understand the true cost of distractions

We can all agree that sleeping for seven hours straight is much better than sleeping for six hours, getting woken up by a car alarm, then sleeping for another hour. In a similar way, working for 30 minutes, being distracted by an annoying colleague, then working for another 40 minutes is in no way as good as an uninterrupted 70-minute stretch.

There are two key reasons why this is the case. First, certain types of work involve fixed starting costs: it takes a certain amount of time to gear up for a new session, regardless of how long that session turns out to be. Second, certain types of work have non-linear relationships between time taken and productivity. 30 squared + 40 squared is not equal to 70 squared – in fact, it’s only equal to 50 squared. So if your productivity goes up with the square of time taken, and you break up a 70-minute block of work into 30 minutes and 40 minutes, you’ll lose almost half your productivity, even if the interruption itself takes basically no time.

5. Use work to avoid work

John Perry, a Stanford philosopher, wrote one of the few good things ever written about procrastination, when he said that “the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.” The decoy task, says Perry, needs to have clear but spurious deadlines and be of high but spurious importance. It does the job of a father figure: you’ll never live up to its expectations, but your futile attempts to impress it might anyway be quite fruitful. For example, I’m supposed to be writing a novel, which makes writing this article much more enjoyable.

6. Find a job you actually want to do

Maybe, just maybe, the reason we find it so hard to get anything done is that most of the things we do just fundamentally don’t need doing. Maybe all the productivity lifehacks out there are ultimately missing the point: we’re avoiding our work because our work is pointless. “Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,” said either Mark Twain or Confucius, or probably neither (I would google it, but my long-term self has pulled the router out of the socket).

The Economist

Is it better to be an early bird or a night owl? The Economist

Read time: 4 minutes

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Rare is the chief executive who extols the virtues of a lie-in. Tim Cook, boss of Apple, maker of the iPhone, wakes between 4am and 5am. So does Bob Iger, his counterpart at Disney, a media giant. According to one survey, two-thirds of the chief executives of large American companies are up by 6 o’clock; for average Americans the share is less than one in three. For those aspiring to corporate greatness, the message seems clear: you snooze, you lose.

Your guest Bartleby harbours no such ambitions. But he has, in the past, experimented with early starts, and can confirm that their benefits go beyond the smug sense of satisfaction that comes from arriving at your desk before your editor. Inboxes can be cleared and tricky problems mulled over before the onslaught of emails and meetings begins, leaving you feeling well prepared for the day ahead.

Those quiet hours of the morning need not be spent solely on work. In a popular genre of TikTok videos, influencers film themselves performing elaborate morning routines in which they submerge themselves in ice baths, recite affirmations and mindfully prepare nootropic coffees. In one widely pilloried video, Kris Krohn, a business coach, details how he wakes at 4 in the morning to “align the pharmacy of the body and over-dopamine the mind”.

Although Mr Krohn’s routine may lack scientific rigour, plenty of research finds merit in early rising. In a study conducted in 2012 by Renée Biss and Lynn Hasher, then both at the University of Toronto, early birds reported feeling happier and healthier. Night owls, their nocturnal opposites, tend to have less sleep, which can weigh on their mood and health—as well as their productivity. Andrew Conlin of the University of Oulu, in Finland, and co-authors found that men who rose late made 4% less money than those who were up early (they did not test whether an extra 4% is enough to entice slumberers to throw off their duvets).

Early birds are certainly held in higher regard. Rolling into the office late continues to be frowned upon in most workplaces. A study published in 2022 by Jessica Dietch of Oregon State University and her co-authors found that night owls were perceived by respondents as being “lazy”, “undisciplined” and “immature”. To pile on the stereotypes, they are fatter, too, according to research by Lap Ah Tse of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and colleagues.

Rising early is not, though, all upside. Those ready and waiting to receive work when the boss arrives may be given more of it. If the early bird gets the worm, the clever worm stays in bed. Urgent tasks often come up during the day, meaning that those who come in early may end up working just as late as their dawn-averse colleagues. And the more emails you send in the morning, the more responses you are bound to get back.

Waking before sunrise also risks turning you into a bore. Some larks cannot resist describing how much they got done while owls bashed the snooze button. Others go home early to tuck themselves in rather than socialise after hours. Night owls, by contrast, let loose. Research shows they drink more and take more drugs. They also have more sex. Christoph Randler and colleagues at the Heidelberg University of Education found that men who stayed up later had “higher mating success”. In the eyes of many, late nights are the preserve of youth, whereas early mornings are the domain of the geriatric.

Efforts to alter your circadian rhythm are likely to end in sleepy frustration. A person’s chronotype, to use the scientific lingo, is largely a product of their genes. Dimming your lights at night and buying a special alarm clock will not magically transform you into a morning person. Those early hours will be of little use if they are spent staring blankly at a screen through bleary eyes. This Bartleby abandoned his efforts at early starts after growing alarmed at the quantities of caffeine he required to stay awake. Early birds, for their part, lose out by never being the life of the party after the sun goes down. If nothing else, that gives them one fewer thing to feel smug about.

Perhaps the best advice, then, is to stop worrying about your body clock. Most people are neither early birds nor night owls, but in between. They do not perform well first thing in the morning or late in the evening. Many, including your columnist, get sleepy in the afternoon, too. That is why most offices operate between 9 and 5—and why they ought to have nap rooms. ■

Lies About Immigration Help No One. By The Atlantic - Politics by Caitlin Dickerson

Sep 21, 2024 at 10:22 PM//keep unread//hide

A growing number of Americans are pointing to immigration as a top concern heading into the election. But a substantive debate on the issue has become impossible, given that Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, are only escalating their use of outright lies and xenophobia in lieu of anything resembling fact-based policy solutions.

On the campaign trail, Trump has said that immigrants are “animals” and “not human,” and  implied that millions are crossing the border each month; publicly available data show that the real number has never exceeded 200,000 a month this year. When Vance took to X to declare that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets, and Trump repeated the lie in a nationally televised debate the next day, those of us who have studied the United States’ history of dehumanizing immigrants felt as if the clock had turned back 150 years, to when the same specious claim was used to justify vigilante violence against Chinese Americans, and laws including the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Trump and Vance’s claims, along with other copycat assertions meant to imply that nonwhite immigrants are inherently immoral, such as the one about “Haitian prostitutes” aired at a Springfield city-commission meeting, have surfaced throughout American history. But their prominence in the mainstream political debate, Jesse Rhodes, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me, suggests a society in decline—one where “politicians can speak to the worst aspects of human psychology and human emotions and get a positive response.”

This summer, a survey by Rhodes and some of his colleagues found that nearly a quarter of Americans now believe that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that “many immigrants are terrorists.” More than a third of respondents said that “millions of undocumented immigrants illegally cast votes in our elections.”

These views are components of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and fears of white extinction that have enjoyed some support since at least the 1890s. But Rhodes told me that, among political scientists, “there was a belief or hope or conceit—and I think maybe in retrospect it was naive—that we had gotten past that.”

Trump’s bald embrace of xenophobia is upending the long-held belief among political scientists that, since the civil-rights movement, which also involved the elimination of quotas in American immigration laws that were based on eugenics, overtly racist appeals would only harm the electoral chances of anyone running for public office. These researchers believed that the United States had transitioned into an era of “dog-whistle politics,” where appeals that were meant to divide people based on identity alone could succeed only if they were veiled in euphemism, as was the case with references to “welfare queens” and inner cities in decades past. As recently as 2019, Republican Congressman Steve King lost his committee assignments and then a primary after claiming that there was nothing wrong with being a white supremacist. (He later said he rejected the label and the “evil ideology” behind it.)

But the Republican Party’s continued embrace of Trump suggests that the transition was either incomplete or reversible. Rhodes told me it means that America is in danger of falling into “groupism”—meaning a society that is organized around the belief that differences in race or immigration status are absolute and insurmountable, and where individual political decision making is based solely on advancing the interests of one’s own identity group. “Most political psychologists believe that an inclination toward groupism and those orientations, when inflamed, can lead to really bad consequences—raw discrimination and bias and, in extreme cases, genocide,” Rhodes told me. Of course, recent cases of violence motivated by fears about white replacement have already surfaced in mass shootings targeting immigrants and Black people in El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, for example.

Mae Ngai, a historian at Columbia University who has studied the wave of anti-Chinese violence up and down the West Coast in the mid-to-late-19th century that included dozens of instances of harassment, arson, and lynchings, told me she was “very worried” about the implications of Trump’s language, not so much on the election as in the groundwater of public opinion.

Rhodes told me that the moment we are living in now—one of fast demographic change, an unstable economy, and lots of immigration—is ripe for exploitation by proponents of groupism, because so many Americans are overwhelmed with anxiety about their prospects in life and about where the country is going. He posited that in a counterfactual scenario—an economy and society where everyone was thriving and people felt relatively secure—“folks like Donald Trump would be out there, but they wouldn’t be getting much traction.” He added, “The stuff he’s talking about, neo-Nazis have been talking about for decades.”

To simply say that Americans’ views of immigrants have become wholly and irrevocably negative would be misleading, however. At the same time that respondents to the Amherst poll indicated a growing embrace of ideas rooted in the Great Replacement theory, a majority also said that diversity strengthens the character of our nation, and that they favored allowing people who meet the requirements and have not committed any crimes to become citizens. Those beliefs can be difficult to square with the fact that, according to the poll, 26 percent of Americans would ban all migration from majority-Muslim countries, and about half support deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, building a wall, and using the National Guard to enforce immigration laws.

To their credit, elected officials in Springfield have been quick and outspoken in challenging the false stories about their town. Perhaps more important, they’ve responded with nuance, acknowledging at once the strain on schools and hospitals that immigrants have brought to their community, the economic bounty that has come from their work in factories for Honda and Dole, and the infusion of joy and vitality into their churches. Numerous American cities now hope to emulate Springfield’s success by drawing in new immigrants.

American voters have consistently indicated that they want order at the southern border, yet many economists agree that the large amount of immigration the U.S. experienced in recent years is a major reason the economy bounced back from the COVID-related downturn faster than that of any other nation in the world. This complex picture of immigration and its implications calls for the hard work of policy making and statesmanship. Again and again, misinformation and fearmongering have only made things worse.

Trump and Vance’s Campaign of Racist Terror in Springfield Is Working. By Asawin Suebsaeng

archive.md

Trump and Vance’s Campaign of Racist Terror in Springfield Is Working

17 - 21 minutes

September 21, 2024

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO — Before Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and other prominent conservatives started talking about their city, the volunteers and leadership at St. Vincent de Paul — a Catholic social services nonprofit serving the broader community and Haitian immigrants — never felt the need for the state’s Department of Public Safety to visit their welcome center, to brief the staff on emergency and worst-case-scenario protocols.

That all changed earlier this month, according to Casey Rollins, executive director of the Springfield District Council of St. Vincent de Paul. On Thursday, when Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine visited their building, he brought along with him envoys from the public safety department, which is set to return next week to finish discussing the staff’s security measures.

According to Rollins, in recent days, she has had to review emergency and evacuation procedures with staffers, particularly the elderly ones. This month, they’ve started locking the doors during business hours and greeting people when they come in, to make sure they know who they are. They monitor the parking-lot area more diligently than they have before. And now, the local police department tells Rollins to call them whenever she or her fellow volunteers notice something amiss. The detectives have urged her to call immediately, even when Rollins thinks it’s probably nothing.

It didn’t have to be this way — but, former President Trump and his running mate, Ohio’s junior senator, gave voice to a baseless, racist lie about the small city’s growing Haitian immigrant community stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and made it a centerpiece of their campaign during the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election. In the aftermath, Rollins says that she and her fellow Vincentians have had to take new security precautions and have uncomfortable conversations that they once never expected to have.

When Rolling Stone visited their offices early this week, the first thing this reporter saw was a long line of predominantly Haitian immigrants, young families, and small children lining the waiting room, as other Haitian volunteers and translators working with St. Vincent de Paul assisted them in filling out employment paperwork and other English-language documents. 

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“With everything going on right now, with everything being said, how can you not worry that someone with bad intentions might have less than honorable intentions?” Rollins says, fighting back tears.

Further, Rollins says they are dealing with a barrage of “menacing” messages and enraged phone calls from strangers blaming their nonprofit for helping the documented immigrants and Haitians who are “taking over” Springfield. She stresses, though, that the outbreaks of hatred and bitterness have been more than balanced by an outpouring of generosity and compassion, with donations and shows of solidarity flooding their offices — and “not just for Haitians, but for all of the community in Springfield. It’s been absolutely amazing.” It’s a level of support, amid a backdrop of politicized wrath, that she says moves her to tears “more often than the sad stuff does.”

Still, she mentions that some longtime volunteers have stopped coming altogether, because the deluge of hate and threats has been too much to handle. Recently, she says, she was startled when a package showed up in front of her house, and was relieved only after hearing from her husband that he, in fact, was expecting a box in the mail. Some in the community have shoveled blame and ire on Catholic ministries for the influx of Haitians, with one person messaging Rollins a photo of a nasty flier they’d spotted in town. The image trashed “SOUTHWESTERN [OHIO] CATHOLIC CHARITIES” for “WELCOMING 20,000 IMMIGRANTS TO YOUR DOORSTEP!” The graphic identified three men, for angry readers to jeer at, and also featured a dead dog being served on a plate.

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Rollins did, however, mention that — for all the state and national politicians targeting the town’s Haitian population — there were two politicians who stood out as substantively assisting and collaborating with her group and their efforts behind the scenes: Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and DeWine.

“This welcome center is now like a safe haven,” says John Ceddia, president for St. Vincent de Paul Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s council. He was in Springfield this week to lend his support to the local Vincentians. “It was not what I expected to see on Monday when I went up there, but driving home last night [on Thursday], I was just smiling. Because I was so surprised at how peaceful that building was with the Haitian community… who are trying to find work, and be part of the community… One [Haitian] fellow I spoke with for about an hour this week, I asked him if his community felt at ease. He said: ‘No. We have to follow our kids to and from school. We are looking forward to the day when we don’t have to do that.’ And that hit me right between the eyes.”

On Tuesday, at the entrance of the St. Vincent de Paul free food pantry, a bespectacled 95-year-old woman named Gladys Schneeburger was at the front desk, smiling and sitting in front of the landline and desktop computer. Her fellow Vincentians call her “the gatekeeper.” Rolling Stone asked her why — given everything going on in the city and the additional, serious security concerns — she continued doing the highly visible work she was doing. “Oh, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else… no matter what,” she said. “This is something I need to do.”

The center and adjoining food pantry, rooms dedicated to aiding the poor and freely welcoming the stranger, now have to be more careful about who they let in. Nowadays, Rollins regularly calls the local detectives about suspicious behavior around the welcome center, fearing that some people may stop by to harass or “troll” Haitian families. 

On Tuesday, Rolling Stone’s initial sit-down interview with Rollins was interrupted when another Vincentian knocked on her door to tell her “he’s back,” referring to one such recurring character. Rollins leapt up from her chair, and immediately dialed the cell of a Springfield police officer, who showed up within minutes. (He was used to this ritual by now.) Later on in our interview, Rollins could barely hide her disgust when she saw a new message appear on her smartphone, stating that the week’s Haitian Coalition meeting would now be “VIRTUAL ONLY,” due to the wave of bomb threats and safety concerns that have throttled the small Ohio city this month and hurled it into the national spotlight.

The Haitian Coalition is hardly alone. 

In the wake of Trump, Vance, and conservatives waging a campaign of demagoguery on Springfield’s thousands of new Haitian arrivals, schools and other buildings had to be evacuated. State troopers were called in by the conservative governor, in an attempt to restore a sense of calm and normalcy. And as of Thursday, the Republican mayor of Springfield assumed temporary emergency powers in order to “mitigate public safety concerns.” DeWine and the mayor have been publicly clear that they do not condone what Team Trump is doing.

To describe Rollins as disturbed by what was happening — to her neighbors, her friends, her staff — would be a massive understatement.

“We have to be apolitical in what we do,” she says. “But when you spend all week advocating for the poor, helping our new neighbors, welcoming these people who want to be accepted in America, it is hard for that to not be read as political… because politicians and people in the media make it political… Our whole ministry is about caring for all people. We try to stay out of politics, we must avoid that. But at the same time, we are being voices for the poor, which is advocacy that sometimes looks like politics. But we are just here to help.”

Asked what she would say to Vance, Rollins answers: “You publicly reminisce about personally rising out of a world of marginalization and impoverishment. You remind us that you are the son of Ohio, representing all of the people of Ohio. You share that your Catholicism is important in guiding your life and your morality. Since Catholic social teaching emphasizes our moral imperative to ‘welcome the stranger,’ how are you effectively representing all of Ohio regarding Haitian immigrants? The world has now witnessed the anger and rebellion of many Ohioans and the contagion spreading around the country. Conversely, the world has realized the moral outrage, the outcries of acceptance, and the worldwide outreach and advocacy toward our Haitian neighbors.”

She added: “But you admittedly continue to encourage untruths and to provoke hatred among us all; politically posturing, and pawning Springfield for political gain. It is hurting all of Ohio, the nation, and our world; not just Springfield and the Haitians who are here with us. I wonder how that makes anyone in Springfield safer or more stable than we were yesterday?”

There is little chance such pleas will sway the likes of Vance and Trump. In recent days, the 2024 GOP presidential and vice presidential nominees have continued to make Springfield and the Haitians living there a topic on the campaign trail, using it in their broader pitch to voters on their hyper-draconian, nativist immigration policy platform. According to two sources familiar with the matter, they have no plans to let up, and no intentions of apologizing for what they’ve done, even in terms of collateral damage, to the city and its people. Team Trump wants to keep picking this fight, and battles in other cities and American towns like it, between now and Election Day, the sources note, because they believe this is a surefire political winner for them. 

“What it is is: Imagine if this explosion of migrants or illegals happened on your block, in your neighborhood? You don’t have a clearer real-world example of the consequences of these Biden-Harris immigration policies, and most voters do not want that to happen where they live and send their kids to school,” says a Trump adviser who has recently discussed the issue with the former president.

The Haitians who Trump and various elected Republicans are constantly demagoguing nowadays are, in fact, here legally.

Throughout the week, as this Rolling Stone reporter (who, full disclosure, is himself a Vincentian in the Cincinnati area) spent time in Springfield and the surrounding suburbs, one of the more recognizable aspects of the struggling Midwestern city is just how neatly it fits the bill of a town of so-called, predominantly white “forgotten men and women” — the kind of voters and disaffected non-voters who Trump and his ilk routinely claim to speak for, but rarely if ever aid financially. 

It is a small piece of the Buckeye State, a comfortably red and Trumpy spot on the Electoral College map, that’s been long primed for Trump and his party to tear apart — an ideal place to pit working-class and poor residents against one another on demographic lines. And at the tail end of Trump’s presidential race against Vice President Kamala Harris, the party and conservative movement have wasted absolutely no time doing so.

The steep growth of the city’s population — driven by Haitian immigrants, many on a federal program of Temporary Protected Status and seeking work — has sparked a political and local backlash of resentment and fury. In the past, the city had publicly welcomed immigrants, as had business owners, as they desperately sought more workers. In the time since, high-profile incidents have further inflamed hostilities; in 2023, a Haitian driver collided with a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. This month, Nathan Clark — the father of the deceased child, Aiden — publicly denounced Trump, Vance, and other Republicans as “morally bankrupt” for “using Aiden as a political tool,” and begged them to stop spreading hate.

But as the city became inundated with what Trump and his lieutenants had unleashed, Republicans have sought to subtly tweak their PR strategies.

Even Vance now claims he blames President Joe Biden, Harris, and federal policymakers — and not the Haitians who have come here for a better life — despite the fact he and Trump spent much of the past month targeting, blaming, and brazenly lying about the Haitians. 

On Thursday, MAGAfied businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, a former 2024 GOP presidential candidate who is now a Trump surrogate, visited Springfield for a round of meetings and to host a campaign-style town hall with residents and others. Throughout the day, Ramaswamy repeatedly stressed the talking point that he doesn’t “actually blame” the city’s Haitian community, stressing: “I blame the federal policies.” And as Trump’s trusted ally tried to slap a kinder, gentler face on the MAGA movement’s relentless barrage against the city’s immigrants, he repeatedly chastised the news media for hyper-fixating on the “cats and dogs” fodder, and not Springfield’s long-standing problems. 

It was obvious that Ramaswamy was playing a mug’s game, trying to shift the blame for the national hysteria away from Trump and Vance, even though they started it.

Ultimately, Ramaswamy wasn’t there to save Springfield, but to boost someone else. After a stretch of taking audience questions on Thursday night at the Bushnell Event Center in downtown Springfield, Ramaswamy declared, to enthusiastic applause: “We have to put Donald Trump back in the White House.”

At least for now, there is another thing that can be said, sadly, about Trump and Vance’s blitz of panic and terror in the heart of Springfield: It appears, on some meaningful, horrifying levels, to be working. Trump has publicly stated that, if he wins another term in the White House in this year’s presidential contest, he would want to start a mass-deportation operation in Springfield, aimed at gutting the legally documented Haitian population in the city. To Trump and his increasingly authoritarian-minded government-in-waiting, their vision and current behavior towards Springfield is a preview of what they have in store for the nation as a whole, should they return to power in January.

Trump isn’t the president, but his campaign-trail propaganda has already had his preferred effect of menacing the immigrant community and making some of their families think twice about remaining in Springfield.

Though there is a palpable sense of resilience and compassion among so many Haitians who now call Clark County their home, there is also far too much grief and trauma — the effects of which won’t vanish any time soon. 

Several Haitian families in the city who Rolling Stone approached for this story did not want to be named or even quoted anonymously, citing fear for their families. Some said they didn’t even like leaving their homes anymore. 

At Keket Bongou — a Haitian-operated Caribbean restaurant near a school and an Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles location that were both recently evacuated due to the anonymous threats — Rolling Stone met Kettlie Moise, the owner who says she has been in the United States for six years. (The food, for whatever it’s worth, is delicious, per Rolling Stone’s assessment.) She says in a brief interview that as of Tuesday, two of her Haitian employees — half her staff — are no longer coming to work, as “they’re scared… They don’t show up.”

She adds that the restaurant has lately gotten its share of unpleasant phone calls and trolls, including random callers doing things like asking if they have dog or cat on the menu. But more grimly, Moise notes that there has been a noticeable drop-off in Haitian customers. 

“They’re scared,” she continues, visibly upset. “I don’t feel good. I have to pay rent… Haitians are scared. They don’t come to eat. I feel bad… I used to feel welcome and happy [in Springfield], but now… it’s not the same.”

Asked if she ever expected it to be like this in America, or in Springfield, Ohio, for her and her Haitian friends, she simply says: “No, no… No.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Keket was so short-staffed that the person who brought this Rolling Stone reporter the chicken dish he ordered wasn’t even a server, but one of Moise’s friends — a woman named Mia Perez, an immigration lawyer of Cuban-Haitian background.

Perez recounted how she had heard, via their large support network in the area, from a number of Haitian families and individuals who were actively weighing leaving Springfield at this point, afraid that violence could erupt if tensions remain as high as they are. At least one Haitian family, Perez says, has already left — maybe for good — and is seeking a new home elsewhere in Ohio.

“They do not feel safe here anymore, but they love Ohio so much, they don’t want to leave,” Perez says. 

But to Perez, some of this is also intensely personal. 

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Over lunch, she talks about her own Haitian daughter, who was confused about why she and her fellow students had to be evacuated from school recently. Her daughter asked her mother if this had anything to do with school shootings, specifically one that had occurred in Georgia early this month. 

Perez assured her daughter that there was no threat of a school shooter. She had to explain to her child she was being evacuated due to bomb threats that had rained down on their city — and that the threats began flowing after powerful men decided to launch a racist campaign of lies against Haitians just like her.

“But I told her you have to be proud,” Perez stresses. “You have to be proud about who you are, and where we come from. You can’t let anybody — anybody — stop you from doing that.”

Springfield, Ohio Is a Warning About a Second Trump Administration. by The Rude Pundit

 / by Unknown / Sep 21, 2024 at 6:27 AM

As odious as the vast majority of her statements and her beliefs are, former Republican presidential candidate and winner of "Most Predictable Hypocrite of the Year" Nikki Haley did get something right about Donald Trump before her defiance crumbled. She spoke frequently about the "chaos" that follows in Trump's wide wake, like Godzilla without the personality marching through Tokyo again. She even had an ad called "More Chaos," where the narrator says things like "The chaos that surrounds him is bad enough" and "with Trump it’s just more chaos." It's an apt, if relatively benign, word for the clusterfuck of madness, violence, hate, and stupidity that Trump brings to pretty much every situation. 

If you want an object lesson in that chaos, you can look at what Trump and his campaign to stay out of prison...sorry, for president has done to Springfield, Ohio. In just a couple of weeks, it went from a community that was more or less functioning, growing, even succeeding, because of the influx of migrants from Haiti to a tangle of anger, threats, and division. The Haitian migrants are there completely legally thanks to getting Temporary Protected Status from the Biden administration, which means that they can stay in the United States as long as that status is renewed (currently until August 2025). They got that status because of how violent and terrible things are in Haiti. The people there really are living with gangs taking over the place, unlike the bullshit that Trump tosses around about that kind of thing here. 

Why did 10-15,000 Haitians (not the 32,000 that Trump is stupidly tossing around) head to Springfield? Because they heard there were jobs that they could get and that the cost of living was low. That's it. It's that simple. It's no different than what any other immigrant ever wanted from this country. See, TPS is different than just letting migrants in while they await asylum claims going before a judge. The migrants under TPS can work. And that's what they did in a town that was on a downslide. They took jobs that were going unfilled. They opened businesses. They worked their asses off in this city of 58,000 and most of the people there were fine with them. Sure, there were motherfuckers because there are always motherfuckers, and, yes, tempers flared after one Haitian ran a stop sign in August 2023 and crashed his minivan into a school bus, killing one of the kids. When Trump and Vance started using the dead child as a prop weapon against immigrants in general, the boy's father told them, in essence, to keep his son's name out of their filthy whore mouths. But mostly, everyone, including the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, saw the influx of migrants as a positive, as an opportunity to make the place grow economically. Indeed, employers are thrilled to have the migrants, with some saying they would have had to close down because of the lack of workers.

And then Trump and Vance fucked it all up by bringing chaos to Springfield. They fucked it up by latching onto a hysterical, third-hand Facebook lie about migrants eating people's pets. You know they have have pets in Haiti, right? Just like people everywhere? Then it expanded to ducks and geese from the parks being taken and eaten. Again, none of it, not a single goddamn case, turned out to be true. But that didn't slow Trump, Vance, and all the MAGA masturbators from spewing hate jizz in the faces of the people of Springfield, like the goddamn Attorney General of Ohio, who has been kissing Trump's ass like it's made of candy and money. The truth didn't fucking matter, not even when Trump got fact-checked during his debate with Kamala Harris. 

He doubled down and expanded the hatred of [non-white] immigrants, and skeevy simp JD Vance went right along with it, declaring that even though the Haitians are here legally, he considers TPS an illegal program (that Trump used to protect Venezuelan migrants - no, really) and thus the Haitians are "illegal aliens" to him. Except you can't fucking do that. You can't just jabber out some bullshit and say that's reality now. They are here legally until that legal status is rescinded by assholes like Trump and Vance. One dick's rhetoric doesn't change that fact.

Every single fucking thing they accused the Haitians of turned out to be a lie. Vance said the Haitians caused more communicable diseases. But according to the Wall Street Journal, "Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015." They said that the Haitians are causing more car accidents. However, the number of car accidents in Springfield has declined in the years since the migrants have arrived, reaching a five-year low. They said that the Haitians cause more crime. The county jail has 199 people in it right now. Two of them are Haitian migrants. None of it is true. Not a single goddamned thing.

And the result of all of these lies is that the anti-immigrant right has turned life in Springfield to shit. No, again, it wasn't perfect. Obviously, a surge in people moving to a town, no matter where they're from or what their race is, is going to tax the resources of said town, and that has certainly happened. But, for the most part, that was being worked on. 

Instead of steady progress, Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged Springfield into a fucking nightmare of death threats and bomb threats against schools and hospitals and public buildings, taking away more resources from the town. Yes, the threats have been hoaxes, but you still have to have evacuations and securing the location because you don't want to be wrong if it turns out to be real. Events large and small have been cancelled, like a Culturefest and an art project that were supposed to celebrate the diversity of Springfield. Or a debate between candidates for local and state offices, which was to be held in city hall, the site of several bomb threats. 

The Haitian community is frightened, as you imagine, with some saying that they're afraid of leaving their homes. By the way, home prices are rising because one of the things the Haitian migrants do is buy shitty houses and refurbish them. Yeah, they are directly making Springfield a wealthier town. 

And imagine how fucked this must be for the kids in Springfield. Forced out of their schools and back into online classes for the past week, now funding has been diverted to make the school buildings more secure so the kids can return to the classroom on Monday. More childless cat ladies have given a shit about the kids in Springfield than self-proclaimed champion of children JD Vance has. 

The fuckery is not ending, not with Trump promising to visit, despite pleas for him not to. Bottom-feeding child of immigrant parents Vivek "Fuckboi" Ramaswamy held a town hall in Springfield, and every kind of racist backwards-ass fucknut showed up to say how bad the Haitians are. Everything they said was a repetition of a lie they heard from Trump, Vance, and right-wing media twatfleas. And that’s the point, isn't it? Nobody cared about this shit and then Trump and Vance started talking about about it and now because a small group of people listened to those fuckheads, they have made this something that we’re supposed to give a shit about. They essentially willed the problems into being. And now all these assholes are giving a shit about something they didn’t give a shit about before, but the only thing that they are right about is that there are Haitians living in Springfield. Beyond that? Nothing. 

It's chaos and it's terrorism, purely and simply. MAGA is a terrorist movement, and we should be treating it as such. Trump and Vance know exactly what their idiot hordes of voters and their conservative media click whores will do when they say something. It's ludicrous when they pretend they don't. And what's going on in Springfield is a warning about the chaos of a second Trump term. Think about what happens if he's reelected, rescinds TPS status, and deports all of Springfield's migrants. The city would be decimated. Businesses would close. Home prices would plummet. The city would die or need a massive amount of aid.

And that's just the beginning. If they can do this to Springfield, they can do it to any decently-sized town they want. Hell, if they start rounding up all immigrants that either are here undocumented, or the ones who are here legally who they just fucking declare need to be deported, it would fuck up the economies of so many places. Or the entire nation, really. 

Trump's doing this because he fucking well can because no one is trying to use legal means to stop him. He is knowingly causing terrorism. He doesn't care how many kids are scared, how many people are hurt, how much it makes communities take economic hits. He doesn't care if he turns neighbor against neighbor. He would rather all that happen than declare he is wrong. His ego is more important than your life. In his quest to get reelected and avoid prison, he will gladly drag all of down with him. He will make you cater to his racism and his hatreds or he'll make life a living hell for you. He will sow divisiveness and chaos because it benefits him. 

By the way, before you think Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is some kind of profile in courage, he says that he still supports Trump for president and he refused to call what Trump is saying "a lie" because "I don’t know what’s inside his head." So, you know, ultimately, they're all totally fine with this shit.

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Trump’s Deranged Plan to Lower Food Prices By Raising Them. By The Atlantic - Politics by Scott Lincicome

 / Sep 20, 2024 at 9:00 PM//keep unread//hide

At a campaign event on Tuesday night, Donald Trump vowed to lower the price of groceries by … taxing them? Responding to a question about food costs, Trump told the Michigan audience that his plan would entail both energy deregulation and protectionist restrictions on food imports, which, he claims, would help American farmers.

Leaving aside that U.S. grocery inflation has been dead in its tracks since last year—prices are up just about 1 percent compared with summer 2023—Trump is in some sense correct: Reducing fuel costs could reduce food prices a bit if the energy-intensive American agriculture industry passed on the savings to U.S. consumers. And yes, restricting imports of certain farm goods, presumably via Trump’s favorite tool, tariffs, could boost the incomes of American farmers by shielding them from foreign competition.

As a plan to lower grocery prices, however, Trump’s protectionism is ludicrous. If implemented, it could even return us to the bad old days of American grocery scarcity.

Imports are essential to the U.S. grocery market today, and to its steadily increasing abundance. In 1980, the typical supermarket carried only about 100 different produce items. Selection was limited by North American growing seasons—good luck finding a strawberry in winter—and few Americans had even heard of, let alone tasted, products such as lychee or jackfruit. Today, the variety of produce items has more than doubled, and a stroll through those same aisles reveals an incredible variety. This is thanks to global trade. According to the Food and Drug Administration, 55 percent of fresh fruits and 32 percent of fresh vegetables in the United States are sourced from abroad.

Much of this boom in international food trade is owed to agreements struck in the 1990s that allowed more products to enter the United States duty-free. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 1994, improved Americans’ access to warm-weather produce from Mexico and specialty foods from Canada. Since the late ’90s, fresh-vegetable imports—mainly from these two countries—have nearly tripled. A standout example is avocados, about 90 percent of which are imported today, almost all from Mexico. Our southern neighbor also supplied more than half of all U.S. berry imports in 2023.

Globally, the 1995 World Trade Organization agreements, especially the Agreement on Agriculture, significantly reduced worldwide food-related trade barriers. Since then, agricultural trade has more than doubled, giving the U.S. access to foods that would otherwise be unavailable or prohibitively expensive—not just produce but also meats, cheeses, and innumerable foreign specialty items.

Bringing back food tariffs, as Trump proposes, would stymie this incredible progress, especially for foods that can’t be easily grown here, such as pineapples. With less available supply and new import taxes, prices would almost certainly rise. In fact, the U.S. already imposes tariffs and other barriers on a wide range of imported foods, including beef, seafood, sugar, and tomatoes. Studies consistently show that these trade restrictions inflate consumer prices. (Sugar, for example, costs twice as much in the United States as it does globally.)

In theory, foreign exporters could lower their prices to offset new tariffs, as Trump is fond of claiming. In practice, however, this rarely happens. Evidence from the Trump presidency shows, for example, that American companies and consumers absorbed nearly all the tariffs’ costs, either through additional import taxes or higher prices for both foreign and domestic goods. Given that U.S. grocers already operate on thin margins (historically about 2 percent), the chances of these companies simply absorbing new tariff-related costs, instead of passing them on to you and me, are minimal.

Of course, if foreign food exporters did somehow pay new tariffs without raising prices, then the tariffs wouldn’t protect American farmers, as Trump says they would. The whole point of a protective tariff is to push consumers toward domestic goods by raising the prices we pay for imports. If prices didn’t change, then neither would the purchasing decisions of American shoppers.

In short, if American farmers are earning more because of Trump’s tariffs, then we’re all paying more for the food they make. And if we’re not paying more, then “our farmers” aren’t earning more. Trump can’t have it both ways.

As anyone over the age of 40 can attest, American grocery stores weren’t always the global fantasylands they are today. They were smaller, less diverse, and relatively more expensive. Trump’s plan to restrict food imports could drag us back to that era. So although we’re generally not fans of Kamala Harris’s “We are not going back” slogan, we’re with her in this particular case. We don’t want to go back to a time when, say, blueberries were the occasional luxury, and neither should you.

Elon Musk Has Turned X Into a Pressure Cooker. By Charlie Warzel

Read time: 7 minutes

Elon Musk Has Reached a New Low

Welcome to the darkest timeline.

September 19, 2024, 11:16 AM ET

On the day that Elon Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter in April 2022, I tried to game out how the acquisition might go. Three scenarios seemed plausible. There was a weird/chaotic timeline, where Musk actually tried to improve the platform, but mostly just floated harebrained schemes like putting tweets on the blockchain. There was a timeline where Musk essentially reverted Twitter to its founding ethos—one that had a naive and simplistic idea of real-time global conversation. And then there was the worst-case scenario: the dark timeline and its offshoot, the darkest-darkest timeline. Here’s how I described that one:

The darkest-darkest timeline is the one where the world’s richest man runs a communications platform in a truly vengeful, dictatorial way, which involves Musk outright using Twitter as a political tool to promote extreme right-wing agendas and to punish what he calls brain-poisoned liberals.

Some 29 months later, this appears to be the timeline we’ve living in. But even my grim predictions failed to anticipate the intensity of Musk’s radicalization. He is no longer teasing at his anti-woke views or just asking questions to provoke a response. To call him a troll or a puckish court jester is to sugarcoat what’s really going on: Musk has become one of the chief spokespeople of the far right’s political project, and he’s reaching people in real time at a massive scale with his message.

Since his endorsement of Donald Trump in July, Musk has become the MAGA movement’s second-most-influential figure after the nominee himself (sorry, J. D. Vance), and the most significant node in the Republican Party’s information system. Musk and his platform are to this election what Rupert Murdoch and Fox News were to past Republican campaigns—cynical manipulators and poisonous propaganda machines, pumping lies and outrage into the American political bloodstream.

Though the mask has been off for a while, Musk’s intentions have become even more blatant recently. Following Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, in which Swift labeled herself a “childless cat lady” in reference to an insult deployed by Vance, Musk publicly offered to impregnate the pop star. And just this past weekend, Musk did the following:

* amplified a conspiracy theory that ABC had leaked sample debate questions to the Harris campaign

* falsely claimed that “the Dems want to take your kids”

* fueled racist lies about immigrants eating pets

* shared with his nearly 200 million followers on X that “Trump must win” to “preserve freedom and meritocracy in America”

*  insinuated that it was suspicious that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” adding a thinking-face emoji. He subsequently deleted the post and argued that it was a joke that had been well received in private. “Turns out jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text,” he wrote in a follow-up on X.

Whether Musk is telling the truth about his assassination post or offering up a feeble excuse for his earnest trolling doesn’t matter. Although he’s trying to explain this post away as just a harmless bit of context collapse, what he’s really revealing is the extent to which he is captured by his audience, pecking out posts that delight the only cohort willing to offer the attention and respect he craves. The parallels to Trump may be obvious at this point, but they also account for Musk’s ability to dominate news cycles.

Like Trump in his Apprentice and The Art of the Deal eras, Musk before his political obsessions was a celebrity famous in a different, mostly nonpolitical context. Although Musk’s volatility, contrarianism, and disdain for the press were a matter of record before his MAGA turn, his carefully constructed popular image was that of a billionaire innovator and rocket scientist (Musk was reportedly an inspiration for Tony Stark’s character in the Iron Man movie franchise). Which is to say: Many people experienced Musk’s right-wing radicalization not as inevitable, but as a shocking departure. Right-wing diehards amplified him with glee, as proof of the ascendance of their movement, while liberals and the media amplified him as a distressing example of the proliferation of online brain worms in a certain slice of Silicon Valley.

That Musk is polarizing is important, but what allows him to attract attention is this change of context. A far-right influencer like Charlie Kirk or Alex Jones is expected to spread vile racist conspiracies—that is what they’ve always done to earn their living. But as with Trump in his 2016 campaign, there is still a lingering novelty to Musk’s role as MAGA’s minister of propaganda. Many people, for example, still don’t understand why a man with unlimited resources might want to spend most of his time acting as a political party’s in-house social-media team. Musk has been a troll for a while, but his popular image as a savvy entrepreneur stayed intact until only recently. He was the subject of a largely flattering, best-selling biography as recently as last year. He appeared on the cover of this magazine in 2013 as a contender for the world’s greatest living inventor. In fact, even when Musk muses about how strange it is that no one has tried to shoot Harris, popular news outlets still cover it as a departure from an imagined status quo. On Monday, a New York Times article described Musk, a man who recently hosted a fawning interview with Donald Trump on X and has amplified conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, as “the world’s richest man,” who “has established a reputation as an edgy plutocrat not bound by social conventions when it comes to expressing his opinions.”

That nearly every one of Musk’s utterances is deemed newsworthy makes him a perfect vector for right-wing propaganda. Take Musk’s role in spreading the nonsense about Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio. According to an analysis delivered by the journalist Gaby Del Valle on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Musk replied to a tweet by Kirk on September 8, in which the influencer had shared a screenshot from a Springfield resident on Facebook claiming that Haitians in the area were eating ducks, geese, and pets. Musk’s reply served to amplify the claim to his followers and admirers just two days before the presidential debate, where it was directly referenced by Trump onstage. The lies “left the ecosystem of right-wing Twitter partially because Elon Musk got involved,” Del Valle said. Like Trump before him, Musk is able to act as a clearinghouse for the fringier ideas coming from the far-right fever swamps.

Musk’s is the most followed account on X and, as its owner, he has reportedly asked engineers to algorithmically boost his posts on the platform. (Musk has denied that his tweets are deliberately amplified, but the platform shows them even to people who don’t follow him.) The architecture of the site, most notably the platform’s algorithmically sorted “For You” feed, routinely features Musk and news about Musk, which increases the likelihood that anything the billionaire shares will reach a wider audience on a service that is still at least somewhat influential in shaping American political discourse. It sounds conspiratorial to suggest that Musk is tweaking the algorithmic dials on his site or using X as a political weapon, but the truth is that Musk doesn’t even need to demand that his company boost a specific message. Musk has spent nearly two years installing his own account as X’s main character and shaping the platform’s architecture in his own image. The politics of X are inextricably linked to Musk’s own politics.

It would be far too simplistic to suggest that X is the reason for the chaos of our current political moment, or that Musk is solely responsible for the dangerous rhetoric that has contributed to terrorizing Haitian residents and thoroughly disrupting life in Springfield. Trump and Vance chose to amplify these messages too, and doubled down when called out on it. X is a comparatively small platform, past its prime. It was full of garbage before Musk bought the site, and its architecture goaded users into being the worst versions of themselves long before the billionaire’s heel turn. But under Musk’s stewardship, X has become the worst version of itself—a platform whose every policy and design choice seems intended to snuff out our better angels and efficiently raise our national political temperature.

X under Musk is a pressure cooker and an insidious force—not necessarily because it is as influential as it once was but because, to those who can’t quit it, the platform offers the impression that it is a mirror to the world. One hallmark of Fox News is its ability to conjure a political perma-crisis, in order to instill a pervasive sense of fear in its audience. X, with Musk as its de facto director of programming, has created an information ecosystem that operates in much the same way. But the effect isn’t felt just among MAGA true believers.

As we lurch closer to Election Day, it’s easy to feel as if we’ve all entered the Great Clenching—a national moment of assuming the crash-landing position and bracing for impact. One gets the sense that the darkest forces in American life are accelerating, that politicians, powerful billionaires, and regular citizens alike are emboldened in the worst way or further radicalized. Every scandal, gaffe, and tragedy seems to take on a new political significance—as a harbinger of a potential electoral outcome or an indicator of societal unraveling. And it is exactly this feeling that Musk and his platform stoke and feed off every day.

About the Author

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.