Trump reverses course on flavored vape ban; documents detail the disappearing of China’s Muslims.
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The swift reversal is reportedly prompted by Trump’s concern about a ban impacting the jobs of thousands of his potential voters ahead of the 2020 election. [Vox / Julia Belluz]
“We’re waiting to see what our president puts out. Until then, we’re biting our fingernails and praying,” said Christian Liriano, a vape shop owner since 2014. [CNBC / Angelica LaVito]
Trump is also likely concerned about the protests and social media campaigns against banning flavored vapes. [Slate / Elliot Hannon]
In September, his administration moved to ban the product after a study exposed the large increase in the use of e-cigarettes by young people and a health crisis that unfolded in October. [USA Today / Jayne O’Donnell]
More than 2,000 cases of vaping-linked illnesses, with at least 12 deaths, are confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists and health officials have tentatively pointed to chemicals found in e-cigarettes. [Newsweek / Kashmira Gander]
Several states have passed their own bans on vaping, and, somewhat unexpectedly, some teens are leading the charge. [The Guardian / Jessica Glenza]
Rolling Stone explores if the ban would really have a significant impact for Trump in the upcoming election. [Rolling Stone / EJ Dickson]
What’s happening to China’s Uighurs
Leaked papers published by the New York Times show how China’s repression and detention of the minority Uighur Muslim population began, with harsh rhetoric and surveillance as early as 2014. [New York Times / Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley]
When students started returning to their Uighur families in the western province of Xinjiang, they were met by officials who said their family and friends were in points-based “schools” for their reeducation — free of charge and well-provided for. [Independent / Zoe Tidman]
In 403 pages of internal documents, the Chinese government details efforts to control and reeducate the Uighurs. There were also directives informing family members outside of the camps that release of their imprisoned relatives would depend on their behavior. [New York Times / Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley]
Despite the Uighur population not being a threat to the Chinese government, Chinese President Xi Jinping primed his country for the “reeducation” programs with speeches that spoke to the need for “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” that implied the danger of the minority population. [Axios / Rashaan Ayesh]
Miscellaneous
Chicago’s teachers union voted to accept a new contract created after the nearly two-week strike.
Immigrants aren’t looking for states that will provide them health insurance, according to a new study. [Vox / Nicole Narea]
After Google set out to purchase Fitbit, users are becoming wary of the company’s privacy practices. Some are even getting rid of their fitness smart devices. [CNBC / Jennifer Elias]
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Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, onstage at the 2019 Code Media conference in Los Angeles. | Tori Stolper for Vox Media
Facebook is not getting better at answering questions about its political ads policy — or a lot of other political matters.
Facebook has come under heavy scrutiny in recent months over its political ads policy that allows politicians to lie in ads. On Monday, one of Facebook’s top marketers again defended the policy and said the company has no plans to change it, insisting that it’s up to voters to decide what messages resonate and are true, even if they’re false.
“That’s not a role that Facebook should be playing and interfering with democracy,” said said Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, in an interview with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2019 Code Media conference in Los Angeles on Monday. But critics have argued that Facebook’s policy allows political campaigns to do that very thing.
Since the 2016 election, Facebook has been forced to reckon with the ways its platform can be weaponized to spread disinformation, undermine democracy, and influence politics. The company insists it’s trying to do better, largely by promising to be more transparent. (Everson declared that Facebook is “the most transparent ad platform in the world”).
But when it comes to substantive changes, the social media giant keeps saying it’s government regulators’ responsibility to figure out what to do. Facebook knows that Washington, DC, moves slowly; it will be a long time, if ever, before US lawmakers pass regulations on issues such as privacy, data collection, and ads for social media platforms. And so in the meantime, Facebook gets to keep calling the shots — and avoiding responsibility when it doesn’t.
Everson pointed out that when Warren’s team put out a fake ad claiming that Zuckerberg had endorsed Trump’s reelection bid as a way to exemplify the implications of the policy, Facebook let the ad stay up. “We stuck to the principle,” she said. Of course, the ad acknowledged it was a lie — that was the point.
And Facebook has bent its rules on this one already: When progressive marketer Adriel Hampton filed to run for California governor earlier this year so he could run fake ads on Facebook, the company shut him down because they said it was a ploy.
Some have floated the idea that one potential solution would be for Facebook to consider limiting political ad targeting, which Twitter recently said it plans to do with regard to issue ads. (At the end of the week, Twitter will ban political ads entirely.) When asked by Kafka for updates on that front, Everson said that’s actually not on the table. “We are not talking about changing the targeting,” she said.
When Kafka asked whether Facebook would consider a political ad blackout ahead of elections, Everson responded, yet again, that the company is working on more transparency.
At least one of the reasons why Facebook is so reticent to more carefully regulate political content on its platform is that it’s platform is so big that it would struggle to effectively do so. When making this point, Everson reminded the audience of a scandal that unfolded earlier this year around a doctored video that spread online that misleadingly made House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear to be drunk. Despite the video being obviously fake, the company refused to take it down, and it’s been viewed millions of times on Facebook.
“If you’re going to take the Pelosi video down, then why not take down the millions of videos that have been doctored about Trump, about Bush, about Obama, about celebrities? We haven’t,” Everson told Kafka.
Facebook’s politics problem isn’t going away
Although Everson’s appearance at Code Media touched on many points about the company and its ad business, the audience kept focusing on Facebook’s decisions on politics and news coverage during the question segment of the interview.
When pressed on Facebook’s refusal to fact-check political ads, Everson tried to defend the company’s stance by referencing the rules that govern how broadcasters must handle political advertisements. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission has extensive guidelines for television and radio broadcasters around political advertising that bar broadcasters from censoring ads or from taking down ones that make false claims. Those guidelines don’t apply to online platforms, including Facebook, but the company has consistently tried to hide behind them.
“We have no ability, legally, to tell a political candidate that they are not allowed to run their ad,” Everson said. That’s not true.
An audience member also asked Everson why Facebook has decided to allow right-wing website Breitbart to be listed in its new News tab, which is ostensibly an indication that Breitbart offers trusted news, despite being a known source of propaganda. “We’re treating them as a news source; I wouldn’t use the term ‘trusted news,’” Everson said, pointing out that Facebook will also include “far-left” publications. That raises questions about Facebook’s standards for determining the “integrity” of the news sources it includes in its tab, which Facebook touted when it launched the feature in October.
Although Facebook’s missteps have continued in the aftermath of the 2016 election, including security breaches and more disinformation campaigns, Everson says she believes the company really has changed and is not the same company it was three years ago.
“I wouldn’t have stayed at Facebook” if the company hadn’t changed, Everson insisted. “If I didn’t see those cultural shifts, it would have been really hard for me to look people in the eye and have the confidence to stay at the company.”
Tom and Greg scheme to get rid of incriminating evidence on HBO’s Succession. | HBO
That’s what John Stankey, CEO of HBO parent company WarnerMedia, said today at Recode’s Code Media conference in Los Angeles.
If the guy leading HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia has his way, the new HBO Max streaming video service won’t just be a Netflix competitor for cord cutters, it’ll be a new kind of cable bundle.
In an interview at Recode’s Code Media conference on Monday in Los Angeles, California, CEO John Stankey said the vision for HBO Max is to create a bundle of content that includes movies and shows not owned by WarnerMedia in addition to those it creates and licenses on its own.
“We’re basically unbundling to rebundle,” he said of the current streaming wars, where content companies are pulling shows from Netflix and launching streaming services like Disney+ and HBO Max. “At some point there will be platforms that re-aggregate and rebuild. … We’d like [HBO Max] ultimately to be a place where re-aggregation occurs,” he added.
This is the opposite of the direction the industry has been heading, with Netflix, Disney, HBO, and other media giants splintering off to create their own subscription services. But Stankey alluded to “the frustration” among consumers with this “fragmentation” and said ultimately a winning move will be to create a new version of a TV bundle.
Today, HBO Max is a $15-a-month streaming video service that offers HBO’s library of content, plus a selection of older hits like Friends and South Park. At some point in the future, Stankey hopes that it can secure content from other media companies, too, because his company is never “going to have a lock or monopoly on creativity,” he said.
Beyond his WarnerMedia role, Stankey is also the president of AT&T, the phone giant that purchased HBO parent Time Warner for $85 billion. Stankey said he won’t hold both roles indefinitely and will hire a new WarnerMedia CEO when the company gets through the current transition period. But he would not put a timetable on that.
To jumpstart HBO Max, AT&T is going to spend $4 billion on the service, the company previously said. It is giving it away to its phone subscribers and it’s trying to convince current HBO subscribers to switch to the streaming service instead.
But cable distributors, who are the current retailers of HBO subscriptions, could stand in the way, and WarnerMedia hasn’t yet cut deals with any of the big cable companies to promote the service.
Still, AT&T and WarnerMedia are projecting HBO Max will turn a $1 billion profit by 2025 and will hit 50 million subscribers. It will likely need to beef up its content library so it more closely resembles a cable bundle to get there by then.
Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, speaks at CPAC 2019 in February. | Ricky Carioti/Washington Post/Getty Images
Trump expressed hope that the Senate would confirm one of his nominees. Days later, the RNC came calling for cash.
Wealthy donors being rewarded with cushy ambassador gigs is not a new development in American politics, nor is it a uniquely Republican form of pay-to-play. But as with many things pertaining to the current occupant of the White House, President Donald Trump and his Republican backers have taken things in this realm to a whole new level of unseemliness.
According to a new CBS investigation, while Trump’s nomination of San Diego billionaire/campaign donor Doug Manchester to be the ambassador to the Bahamas was held up in the Senate in early September, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel sent Manchester an email that alluded to what seems to be a corrupt quid pro quo.
“Would you consider putting together $500,000 worth of contributions from your family to ensure we hit our ambitious fundraising goal?” McDaniel wrote.
McDaniel’s plea for cash came just three days after Trump expressed hope on Twitter that the Senate could confirm Manchester’s nomination. (Manchester owns a home in the Bahamas and assisted with the Hurricane Dorian relief effort.)
….I would also like to thank “Papa” Doug Manchester, hopefully the next Ambassador to the Bahamas, for the incredible amount of time, money and passion he has spent on helping to bring safety to the Bahamas. Much work to be done by the Bahamian Government. We will help! @OANN
An RNC spokesperson told CBS that McDaniel “did not suggest to Mr. Manchester in any way that it would more quickly advance his confirmation if members of his family made a political contribution.” But the timing of her personalized email pitch to Manchester — coming as it did just days after Trump expressed hope that he would be approved as ambassador to the Bahamas — is a terrible look at best, and appallingly corrupt at worse. And suffice it to say that Manchester’s response did not help matters.
In an email sent to McDaniel that also copied staffers working for two Republican senators who sit on the Foreign Relations Committee that controlled his nomination — Rand Paul (KY) and Jim Risch (ID) — Manchester replied to McDaniel by saying his wife was donating $100,000 immediately, and he promised more if approved for the ambassadorship.
“As you know I am not supposed to do any, but my wife is sending a contribution for $100,000. Assuming I get voted out of the [Foreign Relations Committee] on Wednesday to the floor we need you to have the majority leader bring it to a majority vote … Once confirmed, I our [sic] family will respond!” he wrote, according to emails obtained by CBS. (The RNC spokesperson told CBS that Manchester’s “decision to link future contributions to an official action was totally inappropriate” and claimed the donation made by his wife was returned.)
Alas, Manchester’s nomination did not make it out of committee. According to CBS, the Risch staffer who was copied on Manchester’s email alerted the White House about the apparent pay-to-play scheme. Manchester, perhaps feeling pressure to do so, officially said he was no longer interested in becoming ambassador to the Bahamas last month.
Given that the whole episode unfolded in writing, both Manchester and the White House may have felt like there was little choice but to pull the plug. Not only is the sort of pay-to-play outlined in the emails unethical, but it’s also arguably illegal, as soliciting or receiving payments for public offices violates federal law.
Manchester isn’t the first wealthy Trump donor to land himself in hot water after donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Gordon Sondland, who became Trump ambassador to the European Union after donating the same amount, has become a key witness in the impeachment inquiry about Trump’s dealings in Ukraine. Sondland even put himself at risk of perjury by revising his original testimony to congressional impeachment investigators in a manner that suggests he had been trying to protect the president until testimony from other witnesses made his position untenable.
Sondland made his fortune as a hotel magnate. Manchester made his in real estate. Neither had any diplomatic experience before they were nominated to ambassador positions by Trump. Both now find themselves at the center of scandals. It’s no wonder that Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made no longer allowing campaign donors to become ambassadors a centerpiece of her plan to revamp the State Department.
But the Manchester scandal isn’t just one about pay-to-play gone wrong — it’s also one about the ongoing shadiness of the RNC. Already this year the committee has come under fire for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from casino mogul Steve Wynn, who last year resigned from his position as finance chairman of the RNC amid a string of allegations of sexual misconduct. That McDaniel was willing to brazenly hit up Manchester for half a million bucks while his ambassadorial nomination hung in the balance indicates that for her committee, the ends continue to justify the means.
Mike Pompeo making the settlement announcement. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
What he said and why it matters.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that he is reversing a longstanding State Department legal opinion labeling Israel’s settlements in the West Bank at odds with international law. This new position sharply contradicts mainstream interpretations of the law, the historic US approach to the conflict, and the broader international community’s view of the situation.
While the announcement has no immediate policy implications, it does send a pretty clear message to Israeli settlers and its government: go ahead and keep moving en masse into land that the Palestinians might want as a home for their future state. It’s part of a distinctively Trump administration approach to the conflict that I’ve termed a “blank check”: essentially letting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies on the Israeli right get away with virtually whatever they want when it comes to the Palestinians.
The decision comes at a particularly fraught time in both US and Israeli politics. The Trump administration has been fighting back against impeachment charges fueled by the testimony of State Department officials; Netanyahu’s hold on power is extremely tenuous, as he’s trying to scuttle an opposition party’s ongoing attempt to form a new government without him. It’s hardly a big leap to see this as an attempt by Pompeo to both distract from the Ukraine situation and give the administration’s buddy in Jerusalem an accomplishment he can use to shore up political support.
Whatever the reason behind the move, the result is the same: the US is providing support for the most radical factions of Israel’s right and making the already-monumental task of negotiating a peace agreement even harder.
What Pompeo actually did — and why it matters
On its face, the legal situation seems simple. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention says that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Israel took control of the heavily Palestinian West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War, has not formally annexed it, and yet maintains military control over the territory. If you visit the West Bank, as I did last week, you’ll see Israeli-populated settlements built after the war dotting the landscape, ranging in size from tiny outposts to reasonably sized cities.
That description sure makes it seem like Israel is transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In 1978, the Carter administration’s State Department issued a memo saying that the settlement enterprise is “inconsistent with international law.” The next president, Ronald Reagan, said he disagreed with that decision — called the Hansell Memorandum — but didn’t formally reverse it. So the memo has stayed on the books since then, even though public US statements would often carefully refer to the settlements as “illegitimate” rather than “illegal.”
On Monday afternoon, Pompeo essentially took Israel’s side, announcing a formal repudiation of the Hansell Memorandum. He billed this as both the result of a review of the law and an important step towards a peace agreement.
“Calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law has not advanced the cause of peace,” he said. “The hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace.”
This argument is exceedingly strange. No one seriously believes in a “judicial resolution” to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, that the simple act of declaring the settlements “illegal” would magically get rid of them and bring peace. Rather, the argument is that the settlements are major barriers to peace — a fact which every US administration has recognized at one point or another — and that the US ought to put diplomatic pressure on Israel to limit their growth.
If you spend significant time in the West Bank, it’s easy to understand the reasoning here. The security bubble Israel maintains around settlements cuts off Palestinian communities from each other and makes a meaningful, economically viable existence for some of them impossible. The very existence of settlements creates an Israeli constituency that opposes any peace deal that involves creating a viable Palestinian state, as this would require the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from their homes.
Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty ImagesA Palestinian woman collecting olives near a settlement.
Pompeo’s substantive arguments are not serious. It’s better to understand this is part of a broader set of diplomatic policies, ranging from the administration’s pick of a hardline anti-Palestinian ideologue as ambassador to its decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, that seem designed to boost Netanyahu’s political fortunes and encourage the expansion of the settlement project with a wink and a nudge. It’s an approach that indulges Israel’s worst instincts, pushing it to cement the worst elements of the occupation and undermine its long-term prospects for survival.
“We are strong enough to deter and defeat enemies,” Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the pro-two state Israel Policy Forum, said in an emailed statement. “What we don’t have is [a] system to defend us from friends who threaten to end the Zionist vision.”
Marketing images for ThirdLove feature models of many shapes and races. | Sarah Lawrence for Vox
How a woke brand is made.
Convincing 100 women to show up at a warehouse and take photos of their chests is no easy feat. Convincing them through a Craigslist ad is nearly impossible. But that’s what lingerie company ThirdLove did in 2013 while developing a proprietary app that was designed to predict better bra sizes.
“The app was problematic, to say the least,” said a former engineer we’ll call Ben. “It basically only worked if the photos were good.” When people tried out the at-home instructions exactly — take two pictures in front of a full-length mirror in good lighting while wearing a tight tank top, making sure the phone is at waist-height — the results were reliably accurate. But getting people to do that was difficult.
Then there was the matter of data security. Co-CEO David Spector told Inc the company never “recorded” people’s images, but no one was clear on what that meant. Once the photos were submitted via the app, where did they go?
After securing $8 million in funding, ThirdLove stopped developing the app. The technology was complicated, the data difficult to get right. In its wake, the founders doubled down on a narrative that would help set them apart in the competitive but old-school lingerie market: diversity and female empowerment.
To co-CEO Heidi Zak, these tenets had been there all along. “We set out to build a brand for all women of all sizes,” she told Vox. “Look at what we’ve done in the past year or two” — the company has featured diverse models in almost all of its recent marketing campaigns — “We wouldn’t do all these things if that wasn’t core to who we are.”
Many employees aren’t buying it. “It’s all about the money,” said a member of the marketing team we’ll call Liz. Interviews with 10 current and former employees, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, paint a picture of ThirdLove’s transformation, from a data-driven bra brand to a bastion of diversity and inclusion, as one of keen opportunism. The gap between their viewpoint and the founders’ suggests that while the company has succeeded in pushing the lingerie industry to be more inclusive on multiple fronts, it has a long way to go to convince the workers who helped build the brand of its motives.
David Spector and Heidi Zak founded ThirdLove (then called MeCommerce) in 2012 to improve the bra shopping experience. Both came from big tech backgrounds — Zak worked at Google, Spector at the investment firm Sequoia Capital. Early documents list Spector as the CEO and Zak as the president, although today, they co-lead the company and ThirdLove is touted as “female-run.” Their first hire, Ra’el Cohen, continues to head up the design team.
The initial concept was to use computer vision technology to predict more accurate bra sizes. People took photos of themselves using ThirdLove’s proprietary app; computer vision technology then processed the images, and suggested a personalized fit.
To alleviate privacy concerns, Spector was careful to highlight the company’s data sharing policy in interviews, noting privacy was of the “utmost importance” and leading reporters to say the images were “processed without ever being recorded by ThirdLove.”
This was 2013, so a computer vision underwear app was revolutionary. “Want a bra that fits perfect? This billionaire-backed app helps with just your iPhone,” wrote Forbes. “How a NASA scientist helped size my bra,” added Fast Company.
ThirdLove did have a scientist helping them develop the technology. Ara Nefian, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon who contracted at NASA, worked on the apps and nights and weekends, and even he said the technology presented difficulties. “It relied heavily on accurately following the directions and that was a bit complicated,” he explained.
Regardless of the complications, when a woman we’ll call Natalie joined the company in 2014, she was immediately blown away by the technology. “The story was that the app could size you better than a sales rep in a store, which seemed pretty innovative,” she said. “I was really excited about the idea of working at a startup.”
Three months into her tenure, however, she was told they were abandoning the app. Computer vision “was just a buzzword,” she realized, even though the tech stayed on the App Store. When she began to ask questions (How would they know people’s sizes? What was going to happen to all the data?), she was told not to worry — the company had stopped using data from the photos anyway.
The reality was slightly more complicated. By late 2014, Nefian had stopped working on the app, and the technology quickly went defunct. It had been finicky when he was involved. Without him, it was almost unusable.
Privacy was also a concern. Women were writing in asking where their photos were going, especially since some had included their faces in the pictures. Employees didn’t know how to respond, but it was clear the app was “freaking people out,” Ben said. Were the photos stored by ThirdLove? The employees themselves still aren’t sure today; the company vehemently denies the photos “were ever stored on any kind of server of any kind,” or even on a “camera roll.”
Nevertheless, ThirdLove began asking users questions about people’s current bra size and fit to get a more reliable read. It was a method that ultimately led to the fit finder quiz they now use.
Thirdlove via The Daily MailScreenshot of Thirdlove’s AI App
Thirdlove via The Daily MailA screenshot of Thirdlove’s AI App.
ThirdLove’s 2014 marketing bears little resemblance to that of the company people know and love today. Their initial brand persona — the fictional customer they designed their products for — was a heterosexual white woman in her mid-thirties living in Brooklyn, according to three former employees. “She’d meet her co-workers at rooftop bars for drinks after work. It was like Sex and the City,” Liz said. “That’s how ThirdLove started — it wasn’t about being inclusive.”
These employees also recall getting pushback when they tried to use diverse models. “We liked to feature models of color in emails and on the homepage, and they [Spector and Cohen] would just ask us to change them. Sometimes they would say it was because white models sell better,” Liz said.
Four recent employees echoed these claims, saying they have had to reshoot entire campaigns — including one titled “to each her own” that celebrated women’s uniqueness — because there were “too many” models of color. “You’d hear comments from Ra’el Cohen that a model of color ‘looked tough’ or that ‘she looks like she’s going to slap a b,’” a member of the marketing team told us. Zak, who said she has been at every photoshoot produced by the brand, said this was untrue.
Tensions around race and identity are still running high inside ThirdLove. Last month, leaked audio obtained by Vox revealed Zak apologized at a company meeting after she and Spector appeared in traditional Mongolian wedding garb on Halloween, offending employees. “As a few of you know, Dave and I were so fortunate this summer to go to Mongolia,” she explained. “We really just wanted to highlight something we felt was really beautiful.” She then asked people to “assume positive intent,” and moved on.
Other aspects of the brand have evolved, employees say. While Natalie remembers Cohen originally not being enthusiastic about offering larger bra sizes — saying “we will never be a plus-size company” on multiple occasions, when asked why ThirdLove didn’t carry larger bra sizes — more recent employees say she has become a strong advocate for bigger bodies. The company now carries over 80 sizes — far more than the typical bra brand — and Zak attributes this in large part to Cohen.
Undisputed is the fact that Spector championed this change. “This is where Dave can be a fascinating human,” Natalie said. While many employees report feeling bullied by his behavior, when he was on their side in an argument, his intensity could be an asset. “Like, he only wanted us to have hot models on our website but then he could be such a pitbull like, ‘This is low-hanging fruit. We have all these women who want this size, we should start carrying it. When are we going to start?’”
This pitbull quality also came out in less than ideal ways. In 2015, when the company launched a free trial program to allow customers to try on bras at home and send them back if they didn’t like the fit, he realized people’s credit cards were getting declined. Some were simply expired, but if customers kept the product, the company didn’t have a good way to recoup the funds, regardless if it was negligence or fraud.
Three employees remember Spector emailing people under a fake name in order to recover the money, claiming that if they didn’t pay up, the company would report them to an agency of online retailers. (No such agency exists.) “If you got too many strikes, you wouldn’t be able to shop online,” Emily recalls Spector telling customers. “It was my first job and I was like, this isn’t normal, right?” In response to this claim, ThirdLove said, “This is a twisted allegation trying to paint something negative which is simply normal business practice.”
Perhaps the company was suffering from the same difficulties as many early-stage startups: things were moving fast, people said things off the cuff, and the founders were zealous in their drive. But employee perception suggests the founders didn’t always take the time to bring the organization’s mission to life inside the company walls, which led to a growing chasm between how executives and their staff saw the brand.
It was around this time that Scott Nathan, a fashion photographer in Los Angeles, was approached about shooting a campaign for a different underwear company, Naja, which had launched in 2014. Naja partnered with women in need to design “underwear with a purpose.” It was founded by the actress Gina Rodriguez and Stanford MBA Catalina Girald.
Naja’s new line was called “Nude for All,” and it boasted an array of bras and underwear for a wide variety of different skin tones. In the photoshoot, Nathan framed 10 “real” women — all with unique jobs and backstories — against a neutral background. The campaign launched in 2016 in subway stations in New York.
Catalina Girard BehanceNaja’s Nude for All campaign in the New York subway.
Nathan was proud of how the campaign turned out. The images were fresh and showcased Naja’s inclusive values.
Goodbye “nude”, hello Naked. Introducing: The New Nakeds Collection from ThirdLove. Meet the five Naked shades inspired by YOU and find your Naked shade! #FindYourNaked
Fashion brands often borrow each other’s concepts and draw inspiration from one another. But to Nathan, ThirdLove’s images were too close to his own. “They completely jacked Naja’s campaign,” he opined. “They basically just copied the whole concept.”
Naja was hardly the first company to sell bras for different skin tones; still, ThirdLove employees felt the brand was jumping on a bandwagon in order to beat out a competitor. “It’s strange because originally it was really hard to get them to commit to an authentic image,” recalled Emily. “It was all very skinny neutral women — none of that girl power feeling they are preaching today.”
To ThirdLove’s early employees, watching the company transform from a tech-focused brand to an industry leader in female empowerment has been surreal. Many feel validated that the company now uses diverse models and offers a wide range of sizes, but the change also feels inauthentic. “They’re just opportunistic,” Liz said.
Zak remains steadfast in her belief that the narrative shared by these employees is wrong. “We’ve always been a brand that’s been for all women,” she said, “from the very beginning of the company.”
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President Donald Trump talks to reporters before boarding Marine One and departing the White House November 08, 2019 in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
What happened over the weekend will impact this week’s impeachment hearings.
This past weekend served as a fitting cap to a dramatic week of public impeachmenthearings — and set up this week’s sessions in riveting style.
On Saturday, the House Intelligence Committee, which leads the impeachment process, released a transcript of the closed-door deposition of Tim Morrison, formerly the top Ukraine official on the National Security Council. He revealed that President Donald Trump ordered his staff to withhold military aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigations into Joe Biden’s family and Democrats.
Further, Morrison testified that Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 was so concerning, it merited storing the transcript on a secret server to avoid its potential leak from damaging the White House. However, Morrison maintained the president did nothing illegal.
The committee also released the transcript of the testimony of Jennifer Williams, a special adviser to Vice President Mike Pence for Russian and European affairs. Though not as dramatic as Morrison’s testimony, Williams’s corroborated what’s already known about the scheme and also filled in some details of Pence’s involvement.
Those releases came hours before leaks of a rare Saturday closed-door deposition with Mark Sandy, the deputy associate director for national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget. He told lawmakers that his boss, Trump appointee Michael Duffey, took a special interest in the process by which the US distributes funds to other nations. Sandy testified he had never before seen a political official take control of such a portfolio.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, kept Trump administration officials aware of his efforts to pressure Ukraine to launch the desired investigations. Sondland will testify in an open hearing this week, and lawmakers will surely ask him about the coordinated effort.
Also on Sunday, Trump specifically called out Williams for her cooperation with the impeachment inquiry. She and other so-called “Never Trumpers” should “work out a better presidential attack,” Trump tweeted. That message came just days before Williams is scheduled to appear in a public impeachment hearing, leading some to say the president is attempting to intimidate a witness.
Tell Jennifer Williams, whoever that is, to read BOTH transcripts of the presidential calls, & see the just released ststement from Ukraine. Then she should meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don’t know & mostly never even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!
If you missed any of this because you wanted to enjoy your weekend, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.
Tim Morrison told leaders of the impeachment inquiry that Trump directed a Ukraine scheme
Last month, reports indicated that Morrison told Congress behind closed doors that there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine. In testimony designed to avoid making Trump look bad, the former White House official confirmed what other witnesses already told investigators: Trump wanted aid to Kyiv withheld to place pressure on Zelensky to open probes into Democrats and Biden’s family.
But based on the full transcript of his deposition, Morrison told lawmakers a whole lot more.
First, Morrison noted two instances in which Sondland relayed the plot to him.
Morrison said Sondland gave him a quick readout of a September 1 conversation the envoy to the EU had with a top Ukrainian official. “He told me that in his — that what he communicated was that he believed the — what could help them move the aid was if the prosecutor general would to go the mic and announce that he was opening the Burisma investigation,” the former NSC official said, referencing the name of a Ukrainian gas company of which Hunter Biden — Joe Biden’s son — sat on the board.
That discussion came on the heels of a meeting between Pence and Zelensky in Warsaw, Poland.
Six days later, Sondland and Morrison spoke again, that time about a call the ambassador just had with Trump.
“He told me he had just gotten off the phone with the president,” Morrison said. “He told me … that there was no quid pro quo, but President Zelensky must announce the opening of the investigations and he should want to do it.”
Put together, the testimony showed that not only was there a plan to get Ukraine to investigate Trump’s potential 2020 rival, but that the president was also involved.
Second, Morrison admitted he worried about the potential aftermath of Trump’s troublesome July 25 call with Zelensky, in part because White House lawyers weren’t aware of what was said during the conversation.
“I was concerned about whether or not they would agree that it would be damaging for the reasons I outlined in my statement of the caII package — if the call [memorandum of conversation] on its contents leaked,” Morrison told investigators.
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesTim Morrison, the former National Security Council director for Russia and Europe, escorted to a closed-door deposition October 31, 2019 in Washington, DC.
It was already known the summary of the call was stored in an ultra-secret server designed to hold information about the most sensitive intelligence. But Morrison was effectively admitting that one reason he pushed for its placement in the server was to keep its contents hidden. It corroborates the whistleblower’s charge that there was a White House effort to “lock down” access to the transcript.
This was very damaging testimony for Trump — and it came from inside the White House.
Jennifer Williams backs known evidence and adds color about Pence’s role
Morrison’s testimony is the main one to read, but the near-simultaneous release of Williams’s deposition is also worth your time. A State Department staffer assigned to Pence’s office, Williams provided investigators with more information about the administration’s Ukraine policy as well as Pence’s role in it.
About the Trump-Zelensky call on July 25, she said, “I certainly noted that the mention of those specific investigations” — meaning into Burisma and Democrats — “seemed unusual as compared to other discussions with foreign leaders.” She also said she “believed those references to be more political in nature,” that they served the president’s “personal political agenda” instead of “a broader foreign policy objective of the United States.”
That’s quite damning, as she corroborated the substance of the call and explained how it might benefit Trump more than the country he leads. She also noted that before that conversation, she had not heard anything about the Bidens, Burisma, or the Democrats, implying that the focus came from the president and his inner Ukraine circle.
Perhaps the greatest value of her commentary, though, is what she said about Pence.
The vice president fielded a question from Zelensky about the military aid during their September 1 meeting in Warsaw. Per Williams, Pence gave a canned, traditional response to the Ukrainian’s comments. “The VP responded by really expressing our ongoing support for Ukraine, but wanting to hear from President Zelensky, you know, what the status of his reform efforts were that he could then convey back to the president.”
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesJennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, arrives at the Capitol on November 7, 2019, for a deposition related to the House’s impeachment inquiry.
It has long been US policy to push Ukraine to solve its myriad corruption issues, and American support for the country has been conditioned, in part, on Kyiv making serious strides to curb that problem. The issue, though, is it doesn’t appear that Trump cared about corruption — he cared about probes into the Bidens.
That’s not foreign policy. That’s personal interest.
Mark Sandy, top OMB official, sheds light on the Ukraine aid freeze
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which helps compile and assess the administration’s spending, doesn’t usually get a lot of attention. But the little-known office is now at the center of the impeachment hearings.
The OMB was told during the summer to hold on to nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine, and that order — according to witness testimony and US officials — went from Trump to acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to the OMB. Some analysts say that violates the law, since the White House decided to withhold the money for non-budgetary reasons without informing Congress, which had already authorized the disbursement of funds.
It was no surprise, then, that House investigators wanted to speak to someone inside the OMB to get a clearer picture of what was going on at the time. Thanks to Sandy’s testimony on Saturday, we now have just that.
According to the Washington Post, Sandy told lawmakers that he signed the first of many letters required to freeze the aid. The letter Sandy signed is dated July 25, the same day as the troublesome Trump-Zelensky call. Sandy and others, however, weren’t given an explanation for why there was a hold in the first place.
What’s more, Sandy said that Michael Duffey — his boss and a Trump appointee — asked to learn more about the apportionment process by which the US provides aid to other countries. That was highly irregular, per Sandy, who said he never saw a political appointee care about the process during his time at the OMB.
Sandy didn’t provide any new information on the reasons for withholding the aid, but he did highlight that the decision and process to do so wasn’t routine. It’s not necessarily damning testimony, but it is curious. At a minimum, it undercuts assertions by Trump officials, especially Mulvaney, that this kind of thing happens “all the time.”
Sondland kept US officials abreast of the Ukraine scheme before the Trump-Zelensky call
In the weeks leading up to the July 25 Trump-Zelensky call, US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland kept top US officials aware of the plan to have Ukraine open investigations into the Bidens.
That’s the major takeaway from a Wall Street Journal story published Sunday. The newspaper got ahold of emails that Sondland sent to people like Mulvaney and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, in which he made them aware of what he was up to.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesGordon Sondland, US ambassador to the European Union, arrives at the Capitol on October 17, 2019, for his deposition as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry.
One July 13 email, for example, showed Sondland trying to organize a Trump-Zelensky meeting before Ukraine’s parliamentary elections eight days later. “Sole purpose is for Zelensky to give Potus assurances of ‘new sheriff’ in town,” the ambassador wrote to Morrison. “Corruption ending, unbundling moving forward, and any hampered investigations will be allowed to move forward transparently.” Morrison simply responded that he was “tracking.”
Then on July 19 — the day before the originally scheduled Trump-Zelensky call — Sondland relayed the message he had just heard from the Ukrainian leader. “I talked to Zelensky just now. He is prepared to receive Potus’ call,” wrote Sondland. “Will assure him that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone.’”
David Holmes, a staffer at the US embassy in Ukraine, overheard Sondland and Trump discussing similar things, according to testimony he gave Congress last week.
The emails add only more flame to the fire engulfing the ambassador. Sondland is a central player in the ploy to get Ukraine to open up probes to help Trump, which text messages, these emails, and his own written testimony make clear.
Sondland’s public appearance Wednesday will no doubt be the inquiry’s main event to date.
Trump is trying to intimidate Williams before her public hearing
Williams will testify openly in the impeachment inquiry on Tuesday morning — and Trump is keenly aware of this.
“Tell Jennifer Williams, whoever that is, to read BOTH transcripts of the presidential calls, & see the just released ststement [sic] from Ukraine,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “Then she should meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don’t know & mostly never even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!”
It’s unclear why Trump singled out Williams, especially since he claims he doesn’t know who she is. But there are likely two reasons why.
First, per her closed-door testimony discussed above, Williams said Trump’s comments during the July 25 call with Zelensky were “unusual” and beneficial to his political aspirations. The president doesn’t like it when someone calls him out for misbehavior, especially when the person is a woman.
Second, Williams works for Pence. Any damaging comments she might make on Tuesday carry more weight because of that. It’s one thing for a NSC staffer to say something, it’s another for the vice president’s own staff to denigrate the commander-in-chief’s case.
As of now, there are no signs that Williams is rethinking testifying on Tuesday, but it’s possible she may be even more careful with her words now that Trump is openly attacking her. That possibility alone adds some heft to the argument that Trump is tampering with a witness, especially since he also tweeted an attack during Friday’s testimony by Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted US ambassador to Ukraine.
At this rate, expect Democrats to file an “obstruction of justice” article of impeachment against the president, if that moment ever comes.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump talks to reporters November 8, 2019, before boarding Marine One and departing the White House.
Trump wants to make health care prices more transparent. How much good will it do?
The Trump administration has grand plans to make health care prices more transparent, hoping a little bit of sunlight will help disinfect the high costs of US health care.
In new regulations, the administration is requiring hospitals to disclose for the first time the prices they negotiated with health insurers for a wide range of services, as well as the prices they charge patients who are paying with their own money. The hospitals will also be asked to create a list of 300 so-called “shoppable” services that patients can use, targeted to more elective services where customers might actually shop around.
At the same time, under another related new rule, health insurers will be required to specifically detail how much patients could be asked to pay out of pocket for various medical services. Combined, the regulations are a salvo against the often opaque and labyrinthine world of health care prices.
But is it going to make any difference? I asked a few health policy experts for their best-case scenario under the new price transparency regimes (assuming it survives the coming lawsuits from the industry), their more realistic scenario, and their worst fears.
Everyone I talked to was pretty skeptical price transparency would have a meaningful effect on consumer behavior or prices. Health care is simply a difficult thing to shop for (especially in an emergency); arguments could be made that transparency might actually increase prices.
So there’s a wide range of possible outcomes. Let’s start off with the optimistic before we get to the cynical takes.
The best-case scenario
The sunniest take on health care price transparency, the one that dominates the Trump administration’s point of view, is that consumers are empowered with all this information to seek out more cost-effective care, spending less money and lowering costs.
This would be arguably unprecedented in American health care.
“App developers will go crazy developing shopping tools for patients, and patients will use those tools to search for the best deals,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, summing up that best-case scenario. “The public availability of prices will shame high-priced hospitals into lowering their prices because they’ll be so embarrassed.”
There is at least some evidence that price transparency can be effective in lowering costs. Zach Brown, a researcher at the University of Michigan, used the debut of a new price transparency website that listed the costs for MRIs. He found, compared to an alternative scenario without price transparency, prices were significantly lower (about 22 percent). Patients were able to shop for lower-cost options, and insurers were able to negotiate lower rates from providers.
Not every service is comparable to an MRI. But if you wanted a reason to be optimistic about the market using this price data to better self-regulate, that’s a good place to start.
The newly available public data on health care prices could also motivate lawmakers to take more direct action to regulate prices. That probably isn’t what the Trump administration has in mind, preferring to let the market take the wheel, but a Democratic White House and/or Congress could do a lot with the kind of information the administration wants disclosed.
“The most optimistic scenarios are ones where shining a brighter light on health care prices spurs policymakers to implement other policies designed to reduce prices,” Matthew Fiedler, a fellow with the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, told me. “I’m not sure I think that’s likely, but I also don’t think it’s completely implausible.”
The more realistic scenarios for price transparency
But nobody I talked to believed very strongly that we would see such significant benefits from more health care price data being available. In fact, they didn’t expect much effect at all.
“We have a reasonable amount of experience in the commercial market that suggests most people do not shop for lower-cost health care services, even when pricing information is made available to them,” Caroline Pearson, senior fellow at NORC-University of Chicago, says.
She ticked through a few reasons why:
It’s hard to shop for health care. Patients aren’t medical experts and a lot of care is unplanned. You’re not shopping for a cardiologist on the way to the ER while you think you’re having a heart attack.
The way insurance works doesn’t encourage customers to shop. The service would need to cost enough that you’d get value out of shopping, but not be so expensive you’d hit your deductible or out-of-pocket limit. MRIs are one of the few services that qualify.
There is more to health care than cost. Relationships matter. Patients have doctors they like, and some clinics have stronger reputations than others, which matters to patients. For specialists, patients are usually referred by their primary care doctor, which might limit the desire to shop around.
“So, to make cost information actionable, it requires a sophisticated, easy-to-understand consumer interface combined with an insurance benefit design that creates incentives for people to choose lower-cost providers,” Pearson says. “We haven’t seen many examples where transparent pricing combines with nuanced insurance benefit designs to change consumer behavior.”
There is also the possibility hospitals will decide just not to comply with the Trump rule and pay a penalty instead, which would dampen the impact of the policy. The fine for noncompliance is $300 a day, peanuts for hospitals with nine-figure budgets (or higher).
Then again, hospitals might not want to purposefully violate a federal regulation. Let’s assume hospitals provide the data. What’s the worst that can happen?
The worst-case scenarios for price transparency
The worst fear for the Trump plan is that making more information to patients could end up actually raising costs.
Craig Garthwaite, research professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, described one nightmare scenario: Patients assume more expensive doctors provide higher-quality care.
“My gut reaction is when you have little information on quality, and you see other people purchasing the same good, you infer quality because they can maintain that price,” Garthwaite says. “If they don’t have some financial reason to go to one provider or another based on price, they will substitute price for quality.”
More systematically, David Cutler and Leemore Dafny laid out another cost concern back in 2011: hospitals would raise their prices. Right now, a hospital might offer one insurer a lower price than another because Insurer A has more patients than Insurer B and could send them elsewhere. But if Insurer B now knows what the hospital pays Insurer A, they might demand the same price or send their patients elsewhere. So if the hospital now must publicly disclose its prices, it will raise the price for Insurer A, rather than risk having to reduce the price for Insurer B.
“Complete transparency of prices negotiated between payers and providers could raise costs instead of lowering them, especially in markets where there is some degree of pricing power and where consumers are imperfect decision makers,” they wrote.
This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inboxalong with more health care stats and news.
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Strange Negotiations follows musician David Bazan on a solo tour — and during the 2016 election. | Brandon Vedder/Aspiration Entertainment
The provocative Pedro the Lion frontman is the subject of the new documentary Strange Negotiations.
David Bazan’s straightforward and bluntly honest brand of indie rock won him secular and Christian accolades alike starting in the mid-’90s, especially as songwriter and frontman for the influential band Pedro the Lion. Bazan was raised in a Pentecostal church, and always assumed he’d be a music minister; as part of Pedro the Lion, he became a success story for a different breed of Christian music, one that was musically and lyrically adventurous as well as blunt about the struggles of faith, which set it apart from the more predictable inspirational pop that drenched the Christian radio airwaves.
But Bazan shocked many of his Christian fans in 2006, when he dissolved Pedro the Lion and began a solo career — a move that coincided with a shift in his religious beliefs, away from Christianity.
As a solo artist, Bazan has since recorded five solo albums. He no longer identifies as a Christian. But he speaks freely and passionately about his loss of faith and his love for his family and friends who are still part of that world.
In the new documentary Strange Negotiations, which shares its title with Bazan’s 2011 album, filmmaker Brandon Vedder follows Bazan beginning shortly before the 2016 election and continuing into 2017. That period spans a tour in which Bazan plays house concerts, confesses his difficulties with fatherhood, talks with fans — many of whom are navigating their own challenging relationship with faith — and grapples, especially, with the mounting evidence during the 2016 presidential election that assumptions he still held about American evangelical Christians were wrong. It concludes with his decision, in 2017, to re-form Pedro the Lion, in hopes of rediscovering a sense of community he’d lost in years spent touring alone.
Strange Negotiations is an absorbing and painfully honest movie; Bazan has no interest in presenting a façade. Instead, he’s honest about his pain and his struggles and his hope.
I recently spoke with Bazan by phone about trying to understand how to move forward in light of the 2016 election, his goals as a musician, and how he writes his raw, honest music.
Alissa Wilkinson
About two-thirds of the way through Strange Negotiations, the 2016 election is happening, and you’re driving down the road. You say something really striking: “The people who taught me to be a decent person are losing their minds.”
That sentiment is really familiar to me, and to others who felt during the election and the years since like they were watching their elders betray what they taught us. Have you found that sentiment continuing to affect your work in the years since?
David Bazan
For me, it’s heartbreaking over and over again. You just think, “Surely now they can see. Surely now they can see.” What do I do with that? Knowing that certain people that I love deeply, and depended on, are just going to go to their graves being stooges for fascism and authoritarianism? That’s still something I’m trying to make sense of.
The big project that I’m working on now is trying to show the path by which people who have the capacity to be good, and can recognize good, get co-opted by authoritarianism and by conformity and by violence. I think that everybody has the capacity to be in balance and to do good.
But I want to show that this can happen to anybody, and it has to do with what you do with your hurt. It has to do with what you do with your secrets. It has to do with what you do with your shame. It’s a scramble for all of us to understand how this is happening and why it continues to happen and what’s the difference between me and a person who can’t see the harm that this is doing. I’m trying to find the hopeful way of describing it, so that even if people are kind of lost to [those ideologies], are not ever going to be found, at least the rest of us can figure out how to interact and how to be kind and loving.
Because the hurt and the anger that I feel is kind of … yeah, I wish I could shut it off.
Brandon Vedder / Aspiration EntertainmentStrange Negotiations follows Bazan through a cross-marked American landscape.
Alissa Wilkinson
The only description I’ve really landed on is “mourning” — like I feel like things I assumed were true about the world, and about people I previously respected, have turned out, in many respects, to be built on sand. How they think about idolatry and compassion and fear and putting others’ needs ahead of your own. It’s really sad.
With that said, I still speak the “language” natively. And you do too. Do you feel like your work is translating or finding spaces for people who are stuck in that same place?
David Bazan
Having an expertise in something like Christian culture at this point is tough. I grew up feeling like the people who were elders were making a distinction between religion as faith and religion as a club. They would even say, “It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.” I took it to heart. I needed to sign onto it, as a kid. I needed to believe that [Christianity] was more than a club. I realize now that I was clinging to that.
The principles that I was collecting along the way were the foundation of my belief system, and I thought that’s what everybody was doing. I was on board to have to think about all those things and to have humility in the process. I think that there are still people who are motivated by those things, and who feel like Christianity is the only place to do that.
Now, I just want people to be free to follow their ethics, to know that the conformity that the system is built on is at odds with [those ethics], to give people the freedom to think their own thoughts about things.
That’s what I was fighting for in myself when I started this journey in 2005 of being more honest with myself about my faith. And I know that’s made me somebody that people in that [evangelical Christian] world don’t really want to listen to — and fair enough. But I want so badly for people to have the opportunity to meet themselves.
It’s really been a driver of what I have been doing with my life during this time. But now, I have a bit more focus than I did before. And a lot of people are trying to illuminate their little corner of the world, and help people. I just hope that more people can be set free from captivity.
Alissa Wilkinson
A lot of the documentary is about you trying to make a living in your particular career moment. The economic realities of making a living require you to do a lot, to be on the road all the time. There’s a sense in which the music business requires you to fit into a certain box and conform to a set of demands in order to survive.
David Bazan
From an early age, I was pretty scattered — really focused but also couldn’t really follow through with anything. In a way that’s why I chose music as a vocation, because I couldn’t change, as much as I tried. I wanted to be a disciplined person. I wanted to be all these things, but I just failed constantly at it. So music was a way for me to harness that, because with making records, it was deadline-driven, and that’s a social pressure. I was able to organize my actions and my behavior through making music in a way that I couldn’t do any other way.
I don’t really have a choice in how honest I am. I have a choice in what I write about, but this is the only way I know how to write about it. What comes up in the tunes is a creative process that leans heavily on my subconscious. When I do that, what comes out is what has to come out. In a way I can’t help but be my authentic self because my ADHD or whatever is just too extreme.
So, I’ve done 20 years at this grueling job, and I’m very faithful to it and I’m very committed to it, because it’s all I could do.
Brandon Vedder / Aspiration EntertainmentBazan in the studio.
Alissa Wilkinson
And do you sit down to write an album “about” issues, or does it come to you another way? What’s your songwriting process like?
David Bazan
With [2009’s] Curse Your Branches, I wanted to turn over a new leaf and make music and records that weren’t so obsessed with my internal lies, and with religion, and with addiction. But if I’m going to produce something that has creative depth, sonically, somatically, I just don’t have a choice about what happens. Your subconscious, it’s like dreaming. You don’t have a choice about what you dream. You dream what you need to dream. And so it’s the same thing with creativity. People who do make those choices apart from their subconscious, I don’t trust them.
Sometimes focusing on your pain so obsessively in art, I’m sure, can be unhelpful. But I’m doing what I can. I wanted to be allowed to do this. As I said in the movie, I wanted to be allowed to play in this particular sandbox and feel valid doing it. It’s really satisfying to come to that understanding with yourself, despite the ups and downs of how people respond to you or accept you or reject you.
Alissa Wilkinson
You’ve always challenged orthodoxies, whether it was within the Christian world or now outside of it. But do you find there are other orthodoxies you’re challenging, stuff that you see in the world that you find yourself butting up against?
David Bazan
Yeah. I have an internal desire to find some sort of unifying explanation for the different ways that people, myself included, wind up in trouble ethically, or holding ideas that turn out to be bad seeds. I never fancied myself a contrarian, because I always really thought that everybody was doing the same project — just trying to be better. That’s been the most disappointing part. When people say something about themselves to me, I think that they’re telling me the truth, or doing their best to. And if anybody’s ever misrepresenting themselves, I just am not prepared to deal with that. I mean, I eventually can figure it out and get past it. But in the moment I’m sort of primed to just believe what people tell me about themselves.
I saw someone talking about the new Pixar movie.
Alissa Wilkinson
Soul? [The film, about a jazz musician transported to a mysterious realm, will come out in 2020.]
David Bazan
Yes. I haven’t seen a trailer or anything, but I saw somebody commenting on it online from a Christian perspective, but sarcastically. They said, like, Oh yeah, that’s what everybody needs, to find their true selves and to follow their passion, ha ha. Then all the comments were like, it’s so freeing to have a safe identity in Christ because my identity changes all the time and blah blah blah.
I’m reading this stuff and just thinking, I can’t tell if they’re joking. Then I’ll realize, like, “Oh man, they’re deep into this captive mindset.” What I experienced [when I was a Christian] was feeling estrangement, reinforced by my family and Christianity, because of the notion that I can accept myself only if God accepts me first. That’s pretty fraught, because your idea of who God is depends on the culture you were brought up in. How kind you think God is depends on how people treat you — how kind they are, how punitive they are, how driven by shame they are.
Within evangelical Christianity, there’s always this talk of a kind of counterintuitive wisdom that is represented by Christianity. The world thinks that this is wisdom, but Christians know that it’s something else. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. But when you get down to it, it’s not [what they believe] at all. That’s how they trick you, I guess — by having this benevolent spin on it.
Part of my life now is just mumbling the f-word at everybody, figuring out how to protect myself from this cycle that happens over and over again, where I believe that people are good and have good intentions. Being disappointed by the way that things really are, over and over again.
And then just realizing, I’m hurting now, and when I get over this hurt, I’ll be able to have and own my ideas about things, and find peace with myself. That I’ll be able to have more kindness more easily for people who are still foot soldiers for authoritarianism.
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Cornelius Reign Allen 