Vox - All
-
Why are Americans spending so much? Shoppers carry Uniqlo bags in the SoHo neighborhood of New York on March 8, 2024. | John Taggart/Bloomberg via Getty Images They say the economy is bad, but they’re spending like it’s booming. Americans have been pessimistic about the economy for years. Weirdly, that’s seemed to have little impact on their willingness to open their wallets. Retail sales surged during the pandemic as home-bound workers clicked “complete purchase” on everything from Pelotons to sourdough starter. In 2020, e-commerce sales rose by 43 percent. Stimulus checks gave Americans newfound savings and excess money to burn. Supply chains couldn’t keep up with the demand. That was all supposed to come crashing down at some point. For more than a year, economists warned about the “death of the consumer” and a resulting recession — neither of which have materialized. Consumers were expected to retreat as inflation skyrocketed, hitting a 9.1 percent peak in June 2022 and remaining stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent. Instead, Americans just kept buying more, even accounting for price increases and beyond growth in their disposable income. Their spending helped drive US economic growth in 2023 and remained high in the first months of this year. In March, consumer spending increased by 0.8 percent, exceeding expectations from financial analysts. There is a sign that Americans’ shopping spree might be finally coming to an end: Retail spending stayed the same in April as compared to the previous month, falling short of analyst projections for growth. However, those numbers don’t capture spending on services — for example, health care, transportation, and insurance — which has increased markedly this year. And both Preston Caldwell, a senior US economist at Morningstar, and Scott Hoyt, a Moody’s Analytics economist, said those numbers could easily bounce back next month, even if they’re expecting spending to cool by the end of the year. “I am anticipating that we do see eventually a consumer slowdown over the course of this year,” Caldwell said. “It’s premature to say that that’s already playing out right now.” Indeed, spending is bound to come down at some point under the pressure of high interest rates, which the Fed isn’t expected to cut until later this year — or potentially at all in 2024. So why, despite all the doom and gloom among consumers, has spending been so resilient? Who is driving high spending? Two things are simultaneously true: People feel really negatively about the economy, and that’s not stopping them from spending. In May, the University of Michigan recorded its lowest consumer sentiment reading in six months — an index of 67.4 out of 100 — as part of its long-running survey. That’s up from this time last year, but still well below pre-pandemic consumer sentiment readings, which hovered in the upper 80s and 90s. The trend in sentiment was widespread across demographic lines: Consumers “expressed worries that inflation, unemployment and interest rates may all be moving in an unfavorable direction in the year ahead,” the University of Michigan report reads. It’s hard to reconcile that with high spending figures. But in short, the rich currently feel rich and account for a large share of overall spending. The middle class feels a little better off too, and likely still has some savings built up they can burn through. They might not yet have felt the pressure of high interest rates and inflation to the same degree as people who rent and have fewer investments. (But that’s due to change.) High-income consumers — households in the top 20 percent of income earning at least $244,025 before taxes as of 2022 — have been largely cushioned from economic headwinds and are flush with cash to spend. The pandemic saw Americans’ average percentage of income saved increase to an all-time high of 32 percent in April 2020 after many households received stimulus checks. That has helped fuel spending, but unlike in other high-income countries where consumers have proved more thrifty, Americans are close to depleting those savings. “The excess savings [are] still kind of sloshing their way through the system. Depending on how you estimate excess savings, they will be depleted sometime in the middle of 2024 or maybe by as late as mid-2025,” Caldwell said. Many high-income consumers also locked in low interest rates on their mortgages before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in March 2022, and they’re seeing their home values continue to go up nonetheless. The average US home price increased from $287,000 in 2019 to $450,000 in 2024. This is in part due to persistent low inventory: High interest rates have kept would-be sellers on the sidelines because their mortgage payments would be higher if they bought a new place. High-income consumers have also seen their investment portfolios balloon in the last year. The stock market repeatedly tested new highs in recent months, with the latest record set on Thursday in the wake of new data showing that inflation is slowing. And wealthy older Americans who allocate more of their portfolios to government bonds are benefiting from higher interest rates. “That sort of gives consumers an incentive to spend out of their newfound wealth,” Hoyt said. “And since this set of consumers still has excess savings left over from the pandemic, that gives them the easy, relatively liquid monies to do so.” The question is how long the stock market can sustain this run. Some analysts think stocks are currently overpriced and due for a correction — which might cause some people to finally close their wallets. “Equity prices are starting to move more into arguably overvalued territory,” Caldwell said. “So that’s probably not going to be a tailwind [for spending] over the next year.” At the same time, the factors currently fueling spending at the highest income levels aren’t universal. Not all consumers can afford to spend more. Even though inflation has come down significantly from its 2022 peak, low-income Americans are struggling with higher prices. Consumers in general say they are budgeting more on everyday essentials like fresh produce and baby supplies. Among people living paycheck to paycheck, pandemic savings (if they ever really had any) might be long gone. Low and moderate-income consumers are also increasingly weighed down by credit card debt and struggling to pay it down due to high interest rates, which research suggests could be a major contributor to overall economic pessimism. Though credit card debt levels dipped during the pandemic, they are now returning to pre-pandemic levels, with the average balance per consumer increasing by 8.5 percent in the last year to $6,218. More than half of people earning less than $25,000 carry a balance on their credit cards. Their only consolation is that the job market remains strong, meaning they might be able to count on another paycheck — but even that might not last. Analysts including Caldwell expect the unemployment rate to rise from 3.8 percent to 3.9 percent and wage growth to slow in 2024. Ultimately, however, low-income consumers “just don’t account for that big of a share of total spending,” Hoyt said. “It’s the high end of the income distribution that accounts for a disproportionate share of the spending.”vox.com
-
Blood, flames, and horror movies: The evocative imagery of King Charles’s portrait A visitor looks at the new official portrait of King Charles III, painted by British artist Jonathan Yeo, displayed at the Philip Mould gallery, on Pall Mall, central London, on May 16, 2024 | Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images The furor over the painting points to the Crown’s larger problems. As far back as the 1500s, the British Royal Family has used formal portraits to project a positive and authoritative image. Their most recent entry, however, is giving audiences a very different impression, the latest in a series of public relations blunders at a tenuous time for the monarchy. The new portrait of King Charles, by British artist Jonathan Yeo, features the monarch looking on serenely while wearing a red Welsh Guards uniform against a red backdrop. Aside from his hands and face, the portrait is covered in red paint strokes, a visual that for some onlookers, recalled flames, blood, and horror films. “It looks like he’s bathing in blood,” a commenter quipped on an Instagram post announcing the portrait. “To me it gives the message the monarchy is going up in flames or the king is burning in hell,” another commenter wrote. King Charles unveils his first official portrait since coronation. pic.twitter.com/YVGtlnDhx7— Pop Base (@PopBase) May 17, 2024 In his description of the painting, Yeo says a chief aim was to capture Charles’s evolution as a leader and ascension to the throne. The painting also includes a butterfly hovering above Charles’s right shoulder, an addition the king reportedly suggested himself to illustrate his transformation and commitment to environmental causes. For some, the bold palette of the painting conjured more brutal aspects of the monarchy’s history, however. Certain observers have interpreted the work as a reminder of the Crown’s bloody advancement of colonialism. “It almost alludes to some sort of massacre that he’s been part of,” Tabish Khan, a London art critic, told Business Insider. “Given the royal family’s history and ties to colonialism and imperialism, it’s not hard for people to look at it and then make the leap that it’s somehow related to that.” Others have dabbled in memes referencing The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting of a villain from Ghostbusters 2, and the anecdote Charles once told about wanting to be Camilla’s tampon. And while much of the response has been poking fun at the portrait, the controversy also points to deeper issues the monarchy faces, as it navigates an uncertain transition after Queen Elizabeth II’s death and grapples with its own past. The painting aimed to capture Charles’s transformation Yeo, an established artist who has also painted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as Charles’s father Prince Philip and his wife Queen Camilla, sat with Charles four times for his first portrait as King. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 1921-2021He was a hugely impressive man in person, who’s public persona belied a fierce intelligence, quick humour and seemingly endless curiosity. Very happy memories of sittings at Buckingham Palace back in 2006#rip #princephilip pic.twitter.com/mCYS6odFRv— Jonathan Yeo (@RealJonathanYeo) April 9, 2021 “Royal portraits in the past have had an important role to play in signifying power and projecting an image,” the BBC’s Katie Razzall writes. “They were part of the tools used to ensure the survival of the monarch.” One of Yeo’s aims with the painting, which he began in 2021, was to underscore Charles’s essence as a person, how he’s changed as he’s taken on the role of king and the struggles he’s endured. “My interest is really in figuring out who someone is and trying to get that on a canvas,” Yeo told the BBC. Yeo’s website describes the color scheme as injecting a “dynamic, contemporary jolt” to the work, differentiating it from past portraits. The red is also inspired by the bright red color of the Welsh Guards uniform and is intended to give a nod to Charles’s military service; he became a colonel in the Welsh Guards in 1975. It’s also a color Yeo has used in the past, with paintings of actor Giancarlo Esposito and World War II veteran Geoffrey Pattinson featuring similar color schemes. Many of Yeo’s past works are composed much like Charles’s, with one dominant color serving as the background and the subject’s face seemingly floating in the foreground. According to Yeo, both the king and queen had previously seen parts of the painting and appeared to respond positively at the time. “Yes, you’ve got him,” Camilla reportedly said about his capturing Charles’s personality. The artist notes that Charles was surprised by the color, but broadly seemed to like the unfinished work he saw. In a video clip of the official unveiling, Charles himself appears initially startled by the painting. The portrait’s reception recalls the monarchy’s problems Much like US presidential portraits, the paintings of UK monarchs are intended to send a message about their leadership and character. In one of former President Barack Obama’s portraits, artist Kehinde Wiley featured him surrounded by green foliage, a move that honored his upbringing in different places, and that marked a break from past presidential portraits. The red in King Charles’s portrait had much less flattering connotations for some observers, though, as they see allusions to the country’s colonialism. For centuries, the British Empire violently seized power in numerous countries — including India, Kenya, and New Zealand — and the monarchy was a key symbol of its authority in those places. Even today, the king is still considered a figurehead, and the “head of state” in 15 independent countries that are part of the British Commonwealth. Many — including Jamaica — are actively working to remove Charles as their official “head of state,” a role that’s purely symbolic but nonetheless represents Britain’s history of oppression. In this capacity, and others, the modern monarchy remains a key symbol of the UK’s governance, even though royals don’t have practical policymaking power like Parliament and the prime minister. As such, many experts and people from former colonies have been eager to see the monarchy do more to reckon with its imperial history, and to more explicitly acknowledge it. “Imagine a very different kind of monarchy, where in the name of decency rather than politics, a monarch could say things like, ‘We acknowledge and regret the role of Britain, the British government and the British monarchy in slavery and colonialism.’ That kind of moral leadership could have such a different impact in the world,” Priya Satia, a history professor at Stanford, previously told Time. The portrait is, in a sense, the least of the monarchy’s recent problems as it navigates a difficult transition following Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign. There was the awkward rupture with Charles’s youngest son Prince Harry and his wife, American actress Meghan Markle. Charles publicly disclosed a cancer diagnosis in February. His daughter-in-law, Princess Catherine of Wales, revealed her own cancer diagnosis in March, following months of rampant speculation about her well-being. What was once a canvas for projecting royal authority has instead become another reckoning with what the monarchy stands for and the brutal history it’s failed to fully confront.vox.com
-
Why a GOP governor’s pardon of a far-right murderer is so chilling A vigil for Garrett Foster, who was murdered by Daniel Perry in the summer of 2020. | Sergio Flores/Getty Images A Texas man who killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020 was pardoned yesterday. Here’s what it says about politics in 2024. Donald Trump advertises his authoritarianism like it’s a golf course adorned with his name. The presumptive GOP nominee has repeatedly promised to sic the Justice Department on his political adversaries, vowing to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” President Joe Biden, “the entire Biden crime family, and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders and our country itself.” He has repeatedly praised the extrajudicial killing of looters and drug dealers, and implored police officers to brutalize criminal suspects. But Trump’s attitude toward lawbreakers who are aligned with his movement is decidedly more lenient. He has repeatedly assured those who commit violence on his behalf — like the January 6 rioters who tried to forestall the peaceful transfer of power in 2021 — that he will immunize them from legal accountability through presidential pardons. Thus, the frontrunner in America’s 2024 election has adopted a gangster’s mentality toward crime: the criminality of any given action is determined by its compatibility with his interests, not the law. In theory, the constitution — with its elaborate division of powers — should constrain Trump’s assaults on the rule of law. That’s surely true to a point. But if Trump’s authoritarian impulses are backed by his fellow Republicans, then the structural constraints on his power in a second term would be less than reliable. Unfortunately, two recent developments indicate that the long arc of Republican politics is bending toward lawlessness. Texas just let a far-right radical get away with murder First, in Texas, you can commit murder without suffering the legal consequences of that crime, so long as your victim’s politics are loathed by the right and your case is championed by conservative media. Or at least, this is the message sent by Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardoning of Daniel Perry. In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the proliferation of Black Lives Matter protests had filled Perry with apparent bloodlust. Then an active-duty Army officer, Perry texted and messaged friends, among other things: “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex … No protesters go near me or my car.” “I wonder if they will let [me] cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.” When a friend of Perry asked him if he could “catch me a negro daddy,” Perry replied, “That is what I am hoping.” Weeks later, Perry was driving an Uber in Austin, Texas, when he came upon a Black Lives Matter march. According to prosecutors, Perry ran a red light and drove his vehicle into the crowd, almost hitting several protesters. Activists gathered angrily around Perry’s car. Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran who was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle, approached Perry’s window. Perry then shot Foster dead. At trial, Perry’s defense team alleged that Foster had pointed his rifle at the defendant. But witnesses testified that Foster never brandished his weapon, only carried it, which is legal in Texas. And Perry corroborated that account in his initial statement to the police, saying, “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” A jury convicted Perry of murder last year. But this week, the governor of Texas used his pardoning power to release Perry from prison. In a statement, Abbott said, “Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.” He noted that in the Lone Star State, a person is justified in using deadly force against another if they “reasonably believe the deadly force is immediately necessary” for averting one’s own violent death. The Texas governor argued that it was reasonable for Perry to believe his life was at stake since Foster had held his gun in the “low-ready firing position.” Yet this claim is inconsistent with Perry’s own remarks to the police, which indicated that Foster did not aim a rifle at his killer, but merely carried it. Needless to say, seeing a person lawfully carrying a firearm cannot give one a legal right to kill them. But pesky realities like this carry less weight than conservative media’s delusional grievances. Shortly after Perry’s conviction in April 2023, then-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson aired a segment portraying Perry as a helpless victim of “a mob of rioters” and a “Soros-funded” district attorney. Carlson decried the jury’s verdict as a “legal atrocity” and lambasted Abbott for standing idly by while his state invalidated conservatives’ right to defend themselves. “So that is Greg Abbott’s position,” he said. “There is no right of self-defense in Texas.” The next day, Abbott pledged to work “as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.” Republicans are making it clear they can’t be trusted to check Trump’s most lawless impulses During a second Trump presidency, the independent power of Democratic officials might limit the reach of his authoritarian machinations. A Democratic House or Senate would serve as a check on illiberal legislation, while blue states could leverage their own constitutional authority to impede legally dubious executive orders. But as Abbott’s conduct shows, we should not trust Republican politicians to defend the rule of law. Like Trump, many in the conservative movement believe that its supporters should be held to a more lenient legal standard than its enemies. And they also evince some sympathy for political violence aimed at abetting right-wing power. Crucially, this illiberal faction of the GOP seems to include some Supreme Court justices. To this point, the Roberts Court has checked some of Trump’s more egregious affronts to the constitutional order. Should the GOP secure the opportunity to build an even larger conservative majority, however, that could change. This week, Americans received a reminder of just how radical the Supreme Court’s most right-wing justices have become. In the weeks following the January 6 insurrection, die-hard Trump supporters across the country hung upside-down flags in protest of Biden’s supposed theft of the election. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that one such flag had hung outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito, even as he was presiding over judicial challenges to the 2020 election’s results. Alito claims he had no involvement in the flying of the flag, which his wife had hung upside down in response to “a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” Notably, this explanation does not deny the political meaning of that symbol in January 2021. Alito joined Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in dissenting from the court’s decision not to hear a challenge to election procedures in Pennsylvania. Thomas’s wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, had also publicly signaled support for the January 6 demonstrators. If Trump secures the opportunity to appoint additional Supreme Court justices, it is all but certain that they will be at least as sympathetic to his extremism as Alito or the Thomas family. None of this means that Trump’s election would mark the end of the American republic. But it does suggest that both Trump and the conservative movement arrayed behind him pose an intolerable threat to the most liberal and democratic features of our system of government.vox.com
-
The video where Diddy appears to attack Cassie — and the allegations against him — explained Sean “Diddy” Combs, pictured at Howard University in October, was accused of trafficking and rape a month later by singer Cassie in a civil lawsuit that later inspired other women to come forward. | Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images for Sean “Diddy” Combs New footage seems to confirm some details of his ex-girlfriend’s lawsuit, as other cases against the rapper continue. With a violent 2016 surveillance video made public on Friday appearing to show rapper-mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs kicking, dragging, and throwing an object at his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in the hallways of a luxury hotel, the public reckoning facing Diddy is reaching a new boiling point. The graphic video, obtained and published by CNN, seems to confirm some details alleged in Ventura’s November lawsuit against Combs. According to CNN, the footage was filmed on March 5, 2016, at a now-shuttered InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles. The tape appears to show Ventura, a singer who performs under the name Cassie, walking down a hallway toward elevators, and Combs running after her in a towel. He throws her to the ground and repeatedly kicks her, and then attempts to drag her down the hallway, presumably back to their room, though she frees herself. Later, he appears to throw a vase at Ventura. In her lawsuit, Ventura, who dated Combs and was signed to his label, alleged that he abused her, urged her to have sex with male sex workers while he filmed, and that he later raped her. That lawsuit included allegations of a 2016 incident at the InterContinental hotel. In a statement at the time of the suit, Combs’s attorney responded that, “Ms. Ventura has now resorted to filing a lawsuit riddled with baseless and outrageous lies, aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation and seeking a payday.” But the publication of the video this week adds a layer of seeming corroboration to at least some of the accusations made against the rapper. Ventura’s case, settled one day after it was filed, set off a torrent of similar lawsuits, several of which include brutal and disturbing details. Plaintiffs state that Diddy — whose birth name is Sean Combs and who has also publicly gone by Puff Daddy, Puffy, and Love — raped them and, in some cases, trafficked them by coercing them to engage in sex with other men. Together, the cases have redirected public attention toward longstanding allegations of violence against Combs, leading some brands to cut ties with him and Hulu to scrap his upcoming reality show. Speculation around the accusations escalated as homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach linked to Diddy were raided by federal authorities, who revealed that the raids were linked to an ongoing investigation into sex trafficking allegations. Combs has denied the allegations, saying in a December statement, “I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.” After the February suit, a lawyer for Combs called Jones “nothing more than a liar who filed a $30 million lawsuit shamelessly looking for an undeserved payday.” Especially in the 1990s and 2000s, Diddy was a figure of enormous power, not just in hip-hop but in the business and entertainment worlds writ large. In recent months, however, multiple people have sued him, saying he used that influence and wealth to sexually victimize and, in some cases, traffic them, while avoiding consequences for decades. The cases have captured the public’s attention in part because Combs was such an influential executive and gatekeeper in music and fashion, yet one who had long been the subject of allegations of violence, including arrests. They are among the first major allegations in years against a major figure in the music industry, which many feel has failed to reckon with abuses of power, even at the height of the Me Too movement. Combs is just one of many powerful men who have evaded scrutiny but whose alleged past conduct is being revisited with fresh and more critical eyes — in some cases thanks to the landmark New York laws that have allowed people alleging sexual abuse to file civil lawsuits past the time period specified by the statute of limitations. Indeed, Combs is now drawing comparisons to R. Kelly, with frequent critic 50 Cent announcing that he will produce a series about Combs in the style of the bombshell docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, with the proceeds going to assault survivors. Dream Hampton, producer of Surviving R. Kelly, told the Times late last year that an accounting was arriving for the Bad Boy founder. “Puff is done,” she said. The suits against Combs also show that despite recent backlash, the Me Too movement and the legal and cultural changes that came with it have had an enduring impact. Even if allegations of sexual assault and harassment do not make daily headlines the way they did in 2017, the reckoning is ongoing — and no industry is likely to remain immune forever. Diddy built an empire across multiple businesses Combs is a producer and rapper who rose to be an influential figure across music, media, and fashion. He started Bad Boy Records in New York in 1993, when he was in his early 20s, and soon signed Notorious B.I.G., whose two albums helped define New York hip-hop in that era. Bad Boy grew into a multimillion-dollar business, and Combs produced iconic ’90s acts from Jodeci to Mary J. Blige. When Biggie was killed in 1997, Combs released a Grammy-winning tribute, “I’ll Be Missing You,” which “helped inaugurate a commercial boom in hip-hop that lasted until the end of the nineties,” according to Michael Specter of the New Yorker. Combs was also one of the first to blend the worlds of hip-hop, business, and luxury. His fashion label, Sean John, founded in 1998, became known for high-end menswear. He promoted brands of vodka and tequila and hosted exclusive white parties in the Hamptons with guests like Martha Stewart. Though no longer as central a figure as he was in the ’90s, Combs remains a rich and well-connected celebrity: Within a span of weeks last fall, he held a joint album release and birthday party attended by stars such as Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson, performed for a sold-out crowd in London, and appeared at the homecoming celebration for his alma mater, Howard University, where he made a surprise $1 million donation. Samir Hussein/Getty Images for Sean “Diddy” Combs Diddy pictured at a performance in London in November. As Combs built his empire, however, he was accused of multiple acts of violence. In 1999, he was arrested for beating another executive with a chair, a phone, and a champagne bottle; he had to pay a fine and take an anger management class, according to the New Yorker. The same year, he was involved in a shooting at a club in Manhattan, where he was attending a party with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez; witnesses said they saw him with a gun, but he was ultimately acquitted after a public, much-watched trial. He has also been accused of threats and violence against women. In a 2019 interview, for example, his ex-girlfriend Gina Huynh said he had thrown a shoe at her and dragged her by the hair. But these reports have not received mainstream public attention — until now. Singer Cassie filed suit against Diddy in November In November, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, sued Combs, alleging sexual assault and sex trafficking. In the suit, first reported by the New York Times, Ventura said she had experienced years of abuse from Combs, starting soon after she met him in 2005, when she was 19. She said that he beat her repeatedly, at one point kicking her in the face, and that later, in 2018, he raped her. She also said he trafficked her by coercing her to have sex with sex workers in different cities while he filmed and masturbated. She tried to delete the photos and videos afterward, but Combs retained access, she said in the suit, at one point making her watch a video she thought she had deleted. Ventura’s suit also said that Combs and his associates used his power and wealth to intimidate her into silence and compliance, with his employees threatening to damage her music career if she spoke out against him. In one particularly shocking detail, Ventura said Combs threatened to blow up the rapper Kid Cudi’s car because Cudi and Ventura were dating; the car later exploded. “This is all true,” a spokesperson for Kid Cudi told the Times of the car exploding. Leon Bennett/Getty Images Singer Cassie, pictured in 2018 in Los Angeles, sued Combs in a case made possible by New York laws including the Adult Survivors Act, which opened a one-year window to file civil lawsuits in cases of sexual abuse, even if the statute of limitations had expired. Through his lawyer, Ben Brafman, Combs accused Ventura of blackmail. “For the past six months, Mr. Combs has been subjected to Ms. Ventura’s persistent demand of $30 million, under the threat of writing a damaging book about their relationship,” Brafman said in the statement, which also accused Ventura of lying in her lawsuit to seek a “payday.” Ventura’s lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, said Combs had actually offered Ventura money for her silence, which she had declined. Ventura’s suit was settled for an undisclosed amount within a single day. The singer stated that she had “decided to resolve this matter amicably on terms that I have some level of control.” But Ventura’s decision to come forward publicly opened the floodgates, and more reports of assault and abuse began pouring out. Other people say Diddy harmed them Three other women soon filed suit against Combs. In the second suit, Joi Dickerson-Neal says he drugged and raped her in 1991. In the third, Liza Gardner says that in 1990, he coerced her into sex and choked her, causing her to lose consciousness. Jonathan Davis, a lawyer for Combs, said in a statement to the Times that Combs denied these allegations as well: “Because of Mr. Combs’s fame and success, he is an easy target for accusers who attempt to smear him.” In the fourth suit, the woman identified as Jane Doe says she was a junior in high school when she met then-Bad Boy president Harve Pierre and another Combs associate in Detroit. They convinced her to fly on their jet to New York, the suit says, where they and the rapper gave her drugs and alcohol and then violently raped her. “Ms. Doe has lived with her memories of this fateful night for 20 years, during which time she has suffered extreme emotional distress that has impacted nearly every aspect of her life and personal relationships,” the suit says. “Given the brave women who have come forward against Ms. Combs and Mr. Pierre in recent weeks, Ms. Doe is doing the same.” In response to that suit, Combs released a statement denying all reports of violence, calling them “sickening allegations” made “by individuals looking for a quick payday.” Pierre has also denied the allegations, saying in a statement to TMZ, “I have never participated in, witnessed, nor heard of anything like this, ever.” The women came forward last year because two New York laws — one of which paved the way for E. Jean Carroll’s successful lawsuit against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation — opened limited windows of time in which people can file civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse, even if the statute of limitations has passed. One of those windows closed in late November, explaining the flurry of complaints. While the suits mostly describe behavior the plaintiffs say happened years ago, the February filing by Rodney Jones Jr., known as Lil Rod, says that Combs subjected him to unwanted touching and attempted to “groom” him when they worked together on The Love Album: Off the Grid in 2022 and 2023. Jones says that at a party in 2023, he was forced to drink tequila mixed with drugs, then woke up “naked with a sex worker sleeping next to him.” He says that Combs offered money and threatened violence to get him to solicit sex workers and perform sex acts with them. Combs has denied Jones’s allegations. In a statement, Shawn Holley, a lawyer for Combs, said, “We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies.” In the wake of these civil lawsuits, raids in Los Angeles and Miami Beach in March have pointed to an apparent criminal investigation. According to the Times, the raids on homes connected to the rapper were part of an inquiry by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and agents with the Department of Homeland Security. Few details were available in the immediate aftermath, and lawyers for Combs have not yet responded to requests for comment from Vox or the Times. However, the raids suggest a potential new level in the Combs case, with law enforcement sources also telling the Los Angeles Times they were linked to sex trafficking allegations. Combs was rumored to have left the country on Monday after his private plane traveled to Antigua, but he was later spotted in the Miami-Opa Locka airport. Regardless of his whereabouts, the investigations in Los Angeles and Miami Beach have once again placed the rapper under intense public scrutiny. Is this the music industry’s Me Too moment? The growing number of reports, and their chilling details, have led companies and influential people in media and business to distance themselves from the rapper. Diageo, the beverage brand with which Combs partnered on vodka and tequila, removed his image from its website. Capital Preparatory Schools, a New York charter school network Combs helped expand, posted a statement on the school’s website saying it was cutting ties with him (though the statement was later removed). Combs also stepped aside as chair of Revolt, a TV network he helped start in 2013. The cases against Combs are coming to light against a backdrop of other accusations against major figures in music. In November, a woman sued Neil Portnow, former head of the Grammy Awards, saying he had drugged and raped her in 2018. The same month, a former employee sued music executive L.A. “Babyface” Reid, saying he sexually assaulted and harassed her, leading to irrevocable damage to her career in the music industry. They also occur at a time when Ye, a music and fashion mogul whose career has parallels with Diddy’s, has lost many of his brand partnerships after public antisemitic and racist statements as well as what many say was a years-long pattern of verbal abuse and harassment, which may have been kept quiet in part because partnering with him was so lucrative for brands. While the Me Too movement forced reckonings around sexual assault and harassment in industries from film to other media to restaurants in 2017 and 2018, many in the music business felt that its biggest players were relatively unscathed. R. Kelly, for example, faced few consequences until Hampton’s widely watched 2019 docuseries drew renewed attention to the accusations — despite repeated allegations that he’d had sexual contact with underage girls, several lawsuits, and even a 2008 criminal trial over child sexual abuse material. Many argued that the reason Kelly was given a pass for so long was that the women coming forward to report abuse by him were Black. In 2021, he was convicted of sex trafficking and sentenced to 30 years in prison; a second 20-year sentence was added the following year, with all but one year to be served concurrently with the first sentence. Three women stated publicly in 2017 that another influential music industry figure, Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons, had raped them. Like Kelly, he was the subject of a documentary focusing on the allegations, though he has not faced charges. Now, Ventura and the other people filing suit are reporting violent rape, intimidation, and abuse by one of the biggest names in music, someone who symbolized the movement of hip-hop into both mainstream and high-end culture. Combs in his heyday was an icon of power and influence in music, fashion, and business, and the lawsuits represent a new willingness to call that power to account. They also serve as a reminder that the Me Too movement has made enduring changes, including influencing law and policy and creating a road map for survivors of assault to come forward and share their stories. Update, May 17, 3:05 pm ET: This story, originally published on December 20, 2023, has been updated to reflect recent developments, including the publication of a video appearing to show Sean “Diddy” Combs kicking and dragging singer Cassie Ventura.vox.com
-
ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t Sam Altman (left), CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, and the company’s co-founder and then-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, speak together at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv on June 5, 2023. | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Why is OpenAI’s superintelligence team imploding? On Monday, OpenAI announced exciting new product news: ChatGPT can now talk like a human. It has a cheery, slightly ingratiating feminine voice that sounds impressively non-robotic, and a bit familiar if you’ve seen a certain 2013 Spike Jonze film. “Her,” tweeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, referencing the movie in which a man falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. But the product release of ChatGPT 4o was quickly overshadowed by much bigger news out of OpenAI: the resignation of the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who also led its superalignment team, as well as that of his co-team leader Jan Leike (who we put on the Future Perfect 50 list last year). The resignations didn’t come as a total surprise. Sutskever had been involved in the boardroom revolt that led to Altman’s temporary firing last year, before the CEO quickly returned to his perch. Sutskever publicly regretted his actions and backed Altman’s return, but he’s been mostly absent from the company since, even as other members of OpenAI’s policy, alignment, and safety teams have departed. But what has really stirred speculation was the radio silence from former employees. Sutskever posted a pretty typical resignation message, saying “I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial…I am excited for what comes next.” Leike ... didn’t. His resignation message was simply: “I resigned.” After several days of fervent speculation, he expanded on this on Friday morning, explaining that he was worried OpenAI had shifted away from a safety-focused culture. Questions arose immediately: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void because no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking. It turns out there’s a very clear reason for that. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it. If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document. While nondisclosure agreements aren’t unusual in highly competitive Silicon Valley, putting an employee’s already-vested equity at risk for declining or violating one is. For workers at startups like OpenAI, equity is a vital form of compensation, one that can dwarf the salary they make. Threatening that potentially life-changing money is a very effective way to keep former employees quiet. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.) All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI — that is, as committed in its mission statements to building powerful systems in a transparent and accountable manner. OpenAI long ago abandoned the idea of open-sourcing its models, citing safety concerns. But now it has shed the most senior and respected members of its safety team, which should inspire some skepticism about whether safety is really the reason why OpenAI has become so closed. The tech company to end all tech companies OpenAI has spent a long time occupying an unusual position in tech and policy circles. Their releases, from DALL-E to ChatGPT, are often very cool, but by themselves they would hardly attract the near-religious fervor with which the company is often discussed. What sets OpenAI apart is the ambition of its mission: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are generally smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity.” Many of its employees believe that this aim is within reach; that with perhaps one more decade (or even less) — and a few trillion dollars — the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete. Which, as the company itself has long said, is as risky as it is exciting. “Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems,” a recruitment page for Leike and Sutskever’s team at OpenAI states. “But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade.” Naturally, if artificial superintelligence in our lifetimes is possible (and experts are divided), it would have enormous implications for humanity. OpenAI has historically positioned itself as a responsible actor trying to transcend mere commercial incentives and bring AGI about for the benefit of all. And they’ve said they are willing to do that even if that requires slowing down development, missing out on profit opportunities, or allowing external oversight. “We don’t think that AGI should be just a Silicon Valley thing,” OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman told me in 2019, in the much calmer pre-ChatGPT days. “We’re talking about world-altering technology. And so how do you get the right representation and governance in there? This is actually a really important focus for us and something we really want broad input on.” OpenAI’s unique corporate structure — a capped-profit company ultimately controlled by a nonprofit — was supposed to increase accountability. “No one person should be trusted here. I don’t have super-voting shares. I don’t want them,” Altman assured Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in 2023. “The board can fire me. I think that’s important.” (As the board found out last November, it could fire Altman, but it couldn’t make the move stick. After his firing, Altman made a deal to effectively take the company to Microsoft, before being ultimately reinstated with most of the board resigning.) But there was no stronger sign of OpenAI’s commitment to its mission than the prominent roles of people like Sutskever and Leike, technologists with a long history of commitment to safety and an apparently genuine willingness to ask OpenAI to change course if needed. When I said to Brockman in that 2019 interview, “You guys are saying, ‘We’re going to build a general artificial intelligence,’” Sutskever cut in. “We’re going to do everything that can be done in that direction while also making sure that we do it in a way that’s safe,” he told me. Their departure doesn’t herald a change in OpenAI’s mission of building artificial general intelligence — that remains the goal. But it almost certainly heralds a change in OpenAI’s interest in safety work; the company hasn’t announced who, if anyone, will lead the superalignment team. And it makes it clear that OpenAI’s concern with external oversight and transparency couldn’t have run all that deep. If you want external oversight and opportunities for the rest of the world to play a role in what you’re doing, making former employees sign extremely restrictive NDAs doesn’t exactly follow. Changing the world behind closed doors This contradiction is at the heart of what makes OpenAI profoundly frustrating for those of us who care deeply about ensuring that AI really does go well and benefits humanity. Is OpenAI a buzzy, if midsize tech company that makes a chatty personal assistant, or a trillion-dollar effort to create an AI god? The company’s leadership says they want to transform the world, that they want to be accountable when they do so, and that they welcome the world’s input into how to do it justly and wisely. But when there’s real money at stake — and there are astounding sums of real money at stake in the race to dominate AI — it becomes clear that they probably never intended for the world to get all that much input. Their process ensures former employees — those who know the most about what’s happening inside OpenAI — can’t tell the rest of the world what’s going on. The website may have high-minded ideals, but their termination agreements are full of hard-nosed legalese. It’s hard to exercise accountability over a company whose former employees are restricted to saying “I resigned.” ChatGPT’s new cute voice may be charming, but I’m not feeling especially enamored. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!vox.com
-
“I lost trust”: Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded Sam Altman is the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which has been losing its most safety-focused researchers. | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images Company insiders explain why safety-conscious employees are leaving. For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity. They’re not the only ones who’ve left. Since last November — when OpenAI’s board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman only to see him quickly claw his way back to power — at least five more of the company’s most safety-conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out. What’s going on here? If you’ve been following the saga on social media, you might think OpenAI secretly made a huge technological breakthrough. The meme “What did Ilya see?” speculates that Sutskever, the former chief scientist, left because he saw something horrifying, like an AI system that could destroy humanity. But the real answer may have less to do with pessimism about technology and more to do with pessimism about humans — and one human in particular: Altman. According to sources familiar with the company, safety-minded employees have lost faith in him. “It’s a process of trust collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one,” a person with inside knowledge of the company told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. Not many employees are willing to speak about this publicly. That’s partly because OpenAI is known for getting its workers to sign offboarding agreements with non-disparagement provisions upon leaving. If you refuse to sign one, you give up your equity in the company, which means you potentially lose out on millions of dollars. One former employee, however, refused to sign the offboarding agreement so that he would be free to criticize the company. Daniel Kokotajlo, who joined OpenAI in 2022 with hopes of steering it toward safe deployment of AI, worked on the governance team — until he quit last month. “OpenAI is training ever-more-powerful AI systems with the goal of eventually surpassing human intelligence across the board. This could be the best thing that has ever happened to humanity, but it could also be the worst if we don’t proceed with care,” Kokotajlo told me this week. OpenAI says it wants to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical system that can perform at human or superhuman levels across many domains. “I joined with substantial hope that OpenAI would rise to the occasion and behave more responsibly as they got closer to achieving AGI. It slowly became clear to many of us that this would not happen,” Kokotajlo told me. “I gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle AGI, so I quit.” And Leike, explaining in a thread on X why he quit as co-leader of the superalignment team, painted a very similar picture Friday. “I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point,” he wrote. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Why OpenAI’s safety team grew to distrust Sam Altman To get a handle on what happened, we need to rewind to last November. That’s when Sutskever, working together with the OpenAI board, tried to fire Altman. The board said Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications.” Translation: We don’t trust him. The ouster failed spectacularly. Altman and his ally, company president Greg Brockman, threatened to take OpenAI’s top talent to Microsoft — effectively destroying OpenAI — unless Altman was reinstated. Faced with that threat, the board gave in. Altman came back more powerful than ever, with new, more supportive board members and a freer hand to run the company. When you shoot at the king and miss, things tend to get awkward. Publicly, Sutskever and Altman gave the appearance of a continuing friendship. And when Sutskever announced his departure this week, he said he was heading off to pursue “a project that is very personally meaningful to me.” Altman posted on X two minutes later, saying that “this is very sad to me; Ilya is … a dear friend.” Yet Sutskever has not been seen at the OpenAI office in about six months — ever since the attempted coup. He has been remotely co-leading the superalignment team, tasked with making sure a future AGI would be aligned with the goals of humanity rather than going rogue. It’s a nice enough ambition, but one that’s divorced from the daily operations of the company, which has been racing to commercialize products under Altman’s leadership. And then there was this tweet, posted shortly after Altman’s reinstatement and quickly deleted: So, despite the public-facing camaraderie, there’s reason to be skeptical that Sutskever and Altman were friends after the former attempted to oust the latter. And Altman’s reaction to being fired had revealed something about his character: His threat to hollow out OpenAI unless the board rehired him, and his insistence on stacking the board with new members skewed in his favor, showed a determination to hold onto power and avoid future checks on it. Former colleagues and employees came forward to describe him as a manipulator who speaks out of both sides of his mouth — someone who claims, for instance, that he wants to prioritize safety, but contradicts that in his behaviors. For example, Altman was fundraising with autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company, which would give him a huge supply of the coveted resources needed to build cutting-edge AI. That was alarming to safety-minded employees. If Altman truly cared about building and deploying AI in the safest way possible, why did he seem to be in a mad dash to accumulate as many chips as possible, which would only accelerate the technology? For that matter, why was he taking the safety risk of working with regimes that might use AI to supercharge digital surveillance or human rights abuses? For employees, all this led to a gradual “loss of belief that when OpenAI says it’s going to do something or says that it values something, that that is actually true,” a source with inside knowledge of the company told me. That gradual process crescendoed this week. The superalignment team’s co-leader, Jan Leike, did not bother to play nice. “I resigned,” he posted on X, mere hours after Sutskever announced his departure. No warm goodbyes. No vote of confidence in the company’s leadership. Other safety-minded former employees quote-tweeted Leike’s blunt resignation, appending heart emojis. One of them was Leopold Aschenbrenner, a Sutskever ally and superalignment team member who was fired from OpenAI last month. Media reports noted that he and Pavel Izmailov, another researcher on the same team, were allegedly fired for leaking information. But OpenAI has offered no evidence of a leak. And given the strict confidentiality agreement everyone signs when they first join OpenAI, it would be easy for Altman — a deeply networked Silicon Valley veteran who is an expert at working the press — to portray sharing even the most innocuous of information as “leaking,” if he was keen to get rid of Sutskever’s allies. The same month that Aschenbrenner and Izmailov were forced out, another safety researcher, Cullen O’Keefe, also departed the company. And two weeks ago, yet another safety researcher, William Saunders, wrote a cryptic post on the EA Forum, an online gathering place for members of the effective altruism movement, who have been heavily involved in the cause of AI safety. Saunders summarized the work he’s done at OpenAI as part of the superalignment team. Then he wrote: “I resigned from OpenAI on February 15, 2024.” A commenter asked the obvious question: Why was Saunders posting this? “No comment,” Saunders replied. Commenters concluded that he is probably bound by a non-disparagement agreement. Putting all of this together with my conversations with company insiders, what we get is a picture of at least seven people who tried to push OpenAI to greater safety from within, but ultimately lost so much faith in its charismatic leader that their position became untenable. “I think a lot of people in the company who take safety and social impact seriously think of it as an open question: is working for a company like OpenAI a good thing to do?” said the person with inside knowledge of the company. “And the answer is only ‘yes’ to the extent that OpenAI is really going to be thoughtful and responsible about what it’s doing.” With the safety team gutted, who will make sure OpenAI’s work is safe? With Leike no longer there to run the superalignment team, OpenAI has replaced him with company co-founder John Schulman. But the team has been hollowed out. And Schulman already has his hands full with his preexisting full-time job ensuring the safety of OpenAI’s current products. How much serious, forward-looking safety work can we hope for at OpenAI going forward? Probably not much. “The whole point of setting up the superalignment team was that there’s actually different kinds of safety issues that arise if the company is successful in building AGI,” the person with inside knowledge told me. “So, this was a dedicated investment in that future.” Even when the team was functioning at full capacity, that “dedicated investment” was home to a tiny fraction of OpenAI’s researchers and was promised only 20 percent of its computing power — perhaps the most important resource at an AI company. Now, that computing power may be siphoned off to other OpenAI teams, and it’s unclear if there’ll be much focus on avoiding catastrophic risk from future AI models. To be clear, this does not mean the products OpenAI is releasing now — like the new version of ChatGPT, dubbed GPT-4o, which can have a natural-sounding dialogue with users — are going to destroy humanity. But what’s coming down the pike? “It’s important to distinguish between ‘Are they currently building and deploying AI systems that are unsafe?’ versus ‘Are they on track to build and deploy AGI or superintelligence safely?’” the source with inside knowledge said. “I think the answer to the second question is no.” Leike expressed that same concern in his Friday thread on X. He noted that his team had been struggling to get enough computing power to do its work and generally “sailing against the wind.” Most strikingly, Leike said, “I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics. These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.” When one of the world’s leading minds in AI safety says the world’s leading AI company isn’t on the right trajectory, we all have reason to be concerned.vox.com
-
When TikTok therapy is more lucrative than seeing clients Getty Images Why juggle 25 people a week when you can make 30-second videos instead? Dr. Julie Smith is sitting behind a rainbow of five Post-it notes, each meant to represent one of the “Top Five Signs of High-Functioning Depression.” Said signs will be familiar to anyone who has spent time scrolling through the part of social media devoted to improving one’s mental health: “You do everything the world asks of you, so no one would ever know you feel empty inside,” you don’t find pleasure in the same things anymore, social events are tiring. Perhaps you relate to No. 3: “You find yourself scrolling on social, watching hours of TV, and eating junk food to numb those feelings.” The British psychologist and author is an inescapable presence on TherapyTok, where psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed therapists — along with a swarm of “coaches” with varying levels of credibility — make short, digestible videos educating the public about how to decode their own brains. She’s amassed a following of 4.7 million not just by distilling mental health into 60-second spoken-word listicles but by using intensely colorful gimmicks to draw in viewers who might otherwise think they’re about to watch an object being crushed in a satisfying way. Before explaining “3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present” or “5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person,” Dr. Julie will use a visual hook — she’ll pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that “high-functioning depression” and “highly sensitive person” aren’t actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dr Julie Smith | Psychologist (@drjulie) That’s because these clips have less in common with actual mental-health treatment than they do with your average “get ready with me” video. At a time when people may be getting fatigued with therapy, it seems like some therapists don’t want to do it anymore, either. Hence the sheer number of them who are spending less time seeing clients and more time producing content in the hopes that millions of people will see it. While most full-time therapists whose rates are set by insurance companies max out at around $100,000 per year, therapists who are full- or part-time content creators can make much, much more. @TherapyJeff, real name Jeff Guenther, an individual and couples therapist in Portland, Oregon, says he can make eight or nine times that amount on social media in the form of brand deals, merch, and direct subscriptions. When I clarify whether he’s making nearly a million dollars, he says, “It’s been an especially good year.” Though he still sees about eight to 10 clients on Mondays and Tuesdays (a full-time therapist would see about 20 to 25 clients a week, he says), Guenther is best known for his straight-talking TikToks about dating and relationships where he’ll refer to his audience as “anxiously attached babes” or “relationship girlies” who are “still in their healing phase but horny AF.” With 2.8 million followers and a dating-advice book coming out this summer, he is perhaps the best example of how to become a therapist influencer by making people feel as though he’s on their side. Therapists have always been influencers, in a way — they may write books, do speaking gigs, or promote products — but in order to get famous on TikTok, they must play by its rules. What works on the app is simple, visually arresting videos that make you feel like they landed in your lap with a kind of cosmic destiny (the comments on these videos often repeat some version of “my For You page really said ‘FOR YOU.’”) Therapists do cute little dances next to cute little graphics about what it’s like to have both ADHD and PMDD; they’ll lip sync to trending songs in videos about how to spot a depressed client who might have made a suicide plan; they’ll hop onto memes as a way to criticize parents who haven’t gone to therapy. The most successful TikTok counselors don’t typically advertise their one-on-one therapy services; instead, they’ll sell products that establish themselves as mental-health experts but have the potential to net influencer-size salaries. Many offer digital courses similar to those of other educational influencers; they’ll promote their books, merchandise, or in the case of Dr. Kojo Sarfo, his comedy tour, where he sometimes asks the audience about their mental health diagnoses. Tracy The Truth Doctor also offers special mental-health coaching to fellow influencers. And then there’s the validating relationship they cultivate with viewers: Guenther has referred to people who call others “too sensitive” as “emotionless turds” and says he wishes he could write “psychologically lethal” texts on behalf of his clients (while acknowledging that this would be considered unprofessional). “I have been accused of being a toxic validator,” he admits. “Like, imagine that your ex-boyfriend is watching my content. Somebody might be coming across, like, a piece of my content that they can use in order to feel better about themselves, even when they should probably actually be doing some work and taking accountability.” But ultimately, who TikTok shows his videos to isn’t in his control. @therapyjeff You’re a relationship girlie but still in your healing phase but horny AF. Listen to my new podcasts: BIG DATING ENERGY & Problem Solved. Pre-order my book today! Join me on the new platform, Passes, for extended commentary on this topic! #therapy #mentalhealth #therapytiktok #datingadvice #relationshiptips #dating ♬ original sound - TherapyJeff Like many therapists on TikTok, Guenther is also extremely forthcoming about his own personal struggles in a way that previous generations of therapists might look down upon. He speaks about going no-contact with his mother, also a therapist, and his experience as the “scapegoat of the family.” (His tips for fellow scapegoats: Wear a T-shirt with the words “Official Family Scapegoat” on it; tell your mother she’s “constantly hijacked by shame” before asking her to pass the potatoes.) Elsewhere, the counselor KC Davis of “Struggle Care” recently confessed to a bout of hyperfixation with romantasy novels so intense it led her to forgo showering and basic care tasks; Therapy Jessa has filmed herself crying, while Courtney Tracy, better known as Courtney the Truth Doctor, makes intimate “get ready with me” videos and speaks about what it’s like to have borderline-personality disorder and autism as a therapist. Despite his gangbusters year as a content creator, Guenther says his career as it stands now isn’t sustainable. Spending so much time on TikTok, he tells me, has affected his own mental health. “It’s exhausting. There’s burnout. It’s a gross place to be,” he says, pointing to the endless demands of the algorithm, hate comments, and the bizarre parasocial relationships that form among audiences who feel that because they watch his content they have direct access to him. “I want to get out of here because Daddy Algorithm is my boss and I get a performance review every single day based on an algorithm that’s mysterious and doesn’t make any sense.” If the content is a little trite, and the therapists don’t enjoy making it, what good is any of it doing? You can make the case that by turning mental health into TikTok engagement bait, influencer-therapists are lowering the stigma of mental illness and encouraging people to seek treatment, or at least to provide a stopgap for those who can’t access direct care. But what it also seems to be is a stopgap for therapists who are burned out by the daily grind of seeing clients one-on-one with little opportunity for career growth, whose salaries are mostly outside their own control. And who can blame them? Even if viewers know watching therapy content isn’t the same thing as actually going to therapy, when a professional therapist comes up on your feed to tell you exactly what you most want to hear at a time when you’re most in need of hearing it — that you are good, that you will be okay, and also here’s a cute little visual hook — you’ll keep watching.vox.com
-
The unionization fight is coming to the South Volkswagen workers and labor organizers at a United Auto Workers vote watch party on April 19, 2024, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images Workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama are on their last day of voting for a UAW union. Here’s why it matters. It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today. It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement. What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama? Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members. Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant. The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant. Mercedes is also not the only auto plant in the state. Other foreign car manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, Mazda, and Hyundai also have factories in Alabama, and the UAW plans to unionize them too. What happens at the Mercedes plant in Vance will likely influence what happens at the other auto plants — win or lose. Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going? The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members. The direct election came after several high-ranking members of UAW leadership were investigated for corruption in 2017 and were later convicted. Fain was a part of a slate called “Members United” that ran on a “no corruption, no concessions, no tiers” platform, supported by the reform caucus within the UAW. By a slim margin of 483 votes, Fain ousted the incumbent in a run-off election. This new prioritization of democracy in the UAW can even be seen in its campaign to unionize Southern auto workers. In an article from Labor Notes, Mercedes workers at the Vance, Alabama, plant said that past unionization drives with the UAW failed partly because union organizers interfered too much with worker-to-worker organizing. This time, the workers say they are leading the union campaign, while the UAW supports as needed. Today’s election may seem difficult to win, considering the South’s past and present. But the UAW’s recent success shows that difficult is not impossible. Fain and his reform slate taking over the UAW, the historic contracts from striking at the Big Three, and the win in Chattanooga — all of those things seemed impossible a little over a year ago. This week, they might defy the odds again. Even if they don’t, there’s a lesson here for reviving unions in the US: be bold, and let workers lead the way. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.vox.com
-
Why movies and albums both got so long Getty Images Records and films are longer, but songs and scenes are shorter. What happened? When Taylor Swift’s new album dropped last month, it was greeted with one almost universal complaint. With the surprise “double album” edition clocking in at 31 tracks and a cool 122 minutes, critics lamented, the whole thing was way too lengthy. “Too long,” said the New Yorker. “Sprawling and often self-indulgent,” said the New York Times. “Its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level,” said Pitchfork. Swift is not alone in being dinged for lack of brevity. Lately, it’s come to seem as though everything, all of pop culture, is too long. Albums. Movies. It all just goes on and on forever, the complaint goes, and we don’t have the time for it. These criticisms are mostly true, with some caveats. Movie lengths on average have plateaued since the introduction of the talkie 60 years ago, but the length of the average top 10 movie is up from two hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023. Albums, meanwhile, have been trending longer for decades, ever since the CD boom of the 1990s put an end to the space constraints of vinyl. That means they’re longer now, albeit not that much longer than they were a few years ago — an average of 80 minutes in 2022 compared to 73 in 2008. It’s normal for critics to worry that formats have been corrupted and that while art was perfectly figured out a little while ago, before our time, it’s now on the verge of ruin. That’s a familiar argument. Yet there’s a particular vehemence to the concern about how long runtimes have gotten that suggests this conversation reflects our fears about all the ways the world is changing. Albums and films used to be shorter because they had to be; the technology they existed on demanded it. With those constraints gone, they exist in a free, wide-open space — and all the rest of us are there too. What, we worry, are we going to do there? How albums got long and songs got short Albums used to be confined to the length of a vinyl record: about 45 minutes, counting both sides. Likewise, songs were about three to four minutes long because that was the length that a radio station was willing to go without an ad break. For your album to go longer than that meant that you were making a statement; you were doing something that could not be contained by the physical limitations of your form. For your single to go longer meant that you were so popular and dominant and high-minded that you could simply dare the radio stations not to play your song. You were the Beatles with The White Album, making a double record. You were Don McLean with “American Pie,” making an eight-minute single and charting at No. 1. You were a very big deal. Then CDs came, and albums started to meander. There’s a limit to how much music you can cram onto a CD, but they’re a lot more expansive than vinyl is, and the new lack of restraints showed. You were free to explore, to be playful, to experiment. Going long didn’t mean you were making some kind of genre-defining statement so much as it meant you were feeling out a way forward in the new world. Pitchfork reports that by the 2000s, at the end of the CD era, the average hip-hop album was 17 tracks and 67 minutes long. As MP3s took over, the physical constraints that kept albums short vanished completely. In their place came new, less obvious constraints. The post-Napster music industry of the 2010s was a winner-take-all economy in which it was vital to chart on Billboard if you wanted a sustainable career. Starting in 2007, Billboard incorporated streams into its ratings process, and artists quickly figured out the best way to chart was to give fans as many songs as possible to stream. The thinking went that the shorter the song, the more times people would stream it. Albums kept getting longer, but songs started to contract, from four minutes and 14 seconds in 2008 to three minutes and 8 seconds in 2022. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went to No. 1 in 2019, was just one minute and 53 seconds long. These days, platforms like Spotify and TikTok are also putting their mark on the shape of a song. The Washington Post reports that on Spotify, a stream only counts if the listener stays for at least 30 seconds. That means that there are incentives to grab your listener immediately instead of drawing things out with a long intro. Meanwhile, the possibility of your sound going viral on TikTok places more emphasis on a quick, grabby hook. “Shorter intros, sing the chorus upfront, don’t have long, boring bits when not much happens — these are now the keys for success,” concludes the Post. How blockbuster movies got long Movies, too, have been reshaped by their technology, but in different ways than music. Movie length used to be limited to the size of a film reel, which plays about 11 minutes of footage. The standard length of a film is still, to this day, nine reels, or about 90 to 110 minutes long. Even now, when we can shoot movies on digital film and not have to worry about how much it weighs, that average length tends to hold. As a 2023 Slate article by Sam Adams shows, the outliers in film are the ones that perform well at the box office. Movies on average may be more or less the same length they always were, but it’s easy to see how it doesn’t feel that way when you’re trying to sit through Avengers: Endgame (182 minutes), Oppenheimer (180 minutes), or Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes). In 1989, The Little Mermaid was 83 minutes long; the 2023 remake was 135 minutes. Adams attributes these new lengths to a combination of digital film and the rise of the multiplex. “There’s no obvious penalty for making a movie that runs a little over,” he writes. “The physical constraints that used to make the exhibition and distribution of longer movies more expensive no longer apply: fewer showtimes on a given day mean fewer tickets, but that’s less of an issue when the movie is playing on multiple screens and you no longer have to factor in the cost of manufacturing and shipping larger and heavier film prints.” The other big factor is the rise of the streaming platforms. Big-time directors now always have the option to jump ship to Netflix and its fellows, where they are promised more creative freedom than ever before. As Vanity Fair reported last year, the time-slashing producers of old are less powerful, and the name-brand directors who can deliver hits for streamers are more so. That means they no longer have to kill their darlings if they don’t want to. More and more often, they don’t. Even as popular movies swell, though, they are being fed to audiences in increasingly bite-sized portions. On TikTok, accounts dedicated to sharing two-minute movie clips have hundreds of thousands of followers. Last fall, in a marketing push for the musical remake, Paramount put the full run of the original Mean Girls on TikTok in 23 separate clips. We worry about whether art is the right length because we’re worried that we don’t know how to pay attention anymore The paradox of it all is that as movies and albums swell, they are shared and sampled in ever smaller chunks. Songs are optimized for Spotify and scenes are optimized for TikTok. Art has somehow become too long and too short at once. The biggest artists and auteurs in this ecosystem are given free rein to be as self-indulgent as they want, the thinking goes, while audiences’ attention spans get even more fragmented. At the root of both these concerns is that technology has degraded the quality of our art and our consumption habits. The concern about what technology has done to our minds can become, in this system, an argument in favor of long albums and films rather than against them. When entertainment is increasingly sliced and diced to the length of a TikTok video, we have all the more reason to luxuriate in a long movie or album. They will focus our attention once again. “Movie theaters are one of the few remaining places where it’s possible, at least under ideal circumstances, to do one thing and one thing only for hours at a time,” wrote Adams in his Slate article. “It’s worth crossing your legs to keep it that way.” Popular art has always been shaped by the technology we use to distribute it; as the saying goes, the medium is the message. As the medium shifts and changes in our new era, we become more anxious and afraid. What if we simply don’t know how to pay attention any longer? How will we experience good art then? What if some artists desperately need editors, while others just need a little bit more of our time? In music, some artists are intentionally adopting shorter and more curated formats as they explore this brave new era, to the point that there are some plausible trend pieces complaining that albums are too short these days. In 2018, Pitchfork reported that the 15 albums that had reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart by and large hovered around 30 to 40 minutes long. More recently, Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine was 13 tracks and 35 minutes long. In Cosmo UK, the writer Lydia Venn was perturbed by Eternal Sunshine’s comparative brevity, suspecting that studio interference forced Grande to drop her record too early, before she had generated enough material to fill a record. Eventually, though, Venn comes around to the side of the short album. “Eternal Sunshine was written primarily by Ariana, has no skips, and is some of her best work to date,” she concludes. “So maybe shorter albums can be the future if they’re done primarily because of the artists’ own creativity and authenticity, not to suit a label’s own agenda.” To make a short album now becomes an inverse of the Beatles making The White Album. You’re making a statement, bucking the trends. Venn’s argument in favor of Grande’s short album is similar to an argument Adams makes in favor of Scorsese’s decision to make Killers of the Flower Moon 206 minutes long without intermission. “The reason there’s no intermission in Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t because Scorsese wants to try his audience’s patience,” Adams writes. “It’s because the movie concerns a string of brutal, racist murders, and the violence needs to feel both mundane and unrelenting. An intermission is an escape valve, and you shouldn’t be able to escape.” In other words, it’s that long because that’s the length that it’s supposed to be. Or, more simply, it’s that long because that’s the length where it gets good. One of the ambivalences of our moment is that it can be hard to tell when art is long because that’s the length when it gets good, when it’s long because that’s how you make money now, and when it’s long simply because no one said no. We’re in a moment in which the rules around popular art are changing rapidly. There are very few physical constraints left, only the constraints of the marketplace, which fluctuate wildly with every new hit app. Is there a scenario in which we leave this era to enter one in which a work of art is only as long or as short as it has to be? If we ever make it there, will we recognize it when it happens?vox.com
-
The controversy over Harrison Butker’s misogynistic commencement speech, explained Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs arrives before Super Bowl LVIII at Allegiant Stadium on February 11, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. | Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images Butker’s address was a textbook case of conservative sexism and homophobia. NFL kicker Harrison Butker is facing widespread backlash after giving a college commencement speech that casually dabbled in misogyny and homophobia. Butker, who has won three Super Bowls with the Kansas City Chiefs in recent years, delivered the address at Benedictine College, a private Catholic institution in Kansas, on May 11. In it, he criticizes everything from women prioritizing professional careers to Pride Month to abortion access. An outspoken conservative who is close with leading right-wing figures including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Butker’s speech closely echoed Republican rhetoric and fixated on issues that have been popular fodder for conservatives as they try to mobilize their voters ahead of the 2024 election. “I think it is you, the women who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Butker said in his speech. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” The Chiefs have not commented on Butker’s remarks and the NFL league office distanced itself from them. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, told People. Butker’s speech advances the same agenda that the GOP has been pushing not only in its rhetoric but through policy. At least 21 Republican-led state legislatures have approved laws that ban or restrict abortion access and at least 20 have approved bills that curb access to gender-affirming care for minors. Butker’s remarks — which emphasized people “staying in [their] lane” — are the latest attempt to weaponize religion to achieve the same goals. The backlash to Butker’s speech, explained Butker joined the NFL in 2017, and is considered by some analysts to be one of the best kickers in the league. In recent years, he’s also been vocal about his support for conservative causes. On his Instagram page, Butker is pictured alongside Sen. Hawley, a darling of the religious right. He was previously photographed with Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white couple that pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. And during the Chiefs’ visit to the White House in 2023, he wore a tie expressing his opposition to abortion rights. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Harrison Butker (@buttkicker7) The Chiefs have been in the cultural spotlight not only for their on-field success but also thanks to tight end Travis Kelce’s relationship with pop star Taylor Swift. Butker referenced a Swift song lyric in his 20-minute speech and described Swift, a music mogul who is one of the most famous people on the planet as “my teammate’s girlfriend.” (For the curious, Butker cited the Swift lyric, “familiarity breeds contempt” in order to criticize priests who rely too much on parishioners for adulation and support.) In the rest of his remarks, Butker covered many of conservatives’ favorite culture war issues: from the idea that people get “silenced” for expressing unpopular opinions to the belief that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are oppressive. Below are some of the lowlights: On women’s careers: One of the sections getting the most attention is Butker’s comments about the importance of women’s roles in the home. Singling out the women in the audience, he argued that they’re likely more eager to become wives and mothers than to have successful careers. “I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” he said. In addition to speaking on women’s behalf, Butker also reduced the primary goal of their lives to one biological function. Being a homemaker is an important role that should be celebrated, but it’s far from the only one a woman can choose — a key reason his remarks spurred such backlash. Butker also described women’s roles very differently than he described men’s: While he touted the virtues of being a present father, he did not say that being a dad was likely the primary goal of a man’s life. On LGBTQ rights: Butker also criticized “dangerous gender ideologies” that politicians are pushing onto the “youth of America,” an oblique critique of trans rights. He lambasted LGBTQ rights more broadly, too, describing them as “the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.” Such comments are dangerous at a time when LGBTQ people are more likely to be victims of violence, which some experts attribute to the right’s dehumanizing rhetoric. On abortion rights: Butker also decried abortion access, birth control, and IVF as violations of Catholic teachings and practices that members of the Church should abstain from. “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for the degenerate cultural values and media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder,” he said. He criticized President Biden directly for claiming to be both a Catholic and a supporter of abortion rights. “Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” Butker said. “He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I’m sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice.” Butker’s statement explicitly argues that there’s a correct way to be Catholic, even though in reality, most Catholics are supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights. “Harrison Butker got a lot wrong in his commencement speech, but one thing he did get right is that Joe Biden and pro-choice Catholics are not alone — 63% of Catholics support legal abortion,” Catholics for Choice, a Catholic group that backs abortion rights, said in a statement on X. Fifty-seven percent of Catholics in the US also favor same-sex marriage, according to a Pew poll. Since the speech, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Chiefs to release Butker. “These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights,” the petition reads. Taylor Swift fans dubbed him “the smallest man who ever lived,” and a recent video by the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers featured a Sims avatar of Butker working in the kitchen. Although a video of the speech at Benedictine College showed many audience members giving Butker a standing ovation, an AP report found that reviews among students were mixed. “To point this out specifically that that’s what we’re looking forward to in life seems like our four years of hard work wasn’t really important,” student Kassidy Neuner said regarding Butker’s statements about women anticipating being a wife and a mother. Butker’s speech is part of broader conservative pushback to LGBTQ and women’s rights Butker’s remarks drew from the playbook used by the religious right to rail against recent advances in LGBTQ rights while promoting traditional roles for men and women. Conservative US Evangelicals and Catholics have been at the center of global efforts to spread anti-LGBTQ ideas, the Guardian reported. In some of its most extreme forms, white supremacists and Christian nationalists like Nick Fuentes have even argued against women’s ability to work and vote. Such statements are driven by concerns about the growing political power of these groups, a worry that also previously fueled bizarre GOP conspiracy theories about Swift and her presence at Chiefs’ football games earlier this year. Butker’s speech and forceful embrace of these ideas have also underscored which professional football players are allowed to be political without repercussions and which are not. Colin Kaepernick, for example, settled with the NFL in 2019, after accusing teams of blackballing him for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police violence against Black Americans. The Chiefs kicker’s outspoken conservative views, meanwhile, have drawn public criticism — but no consequences from his employers.vox.com