A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

 



By Nellie Bowles

SAN FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.

“Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”

Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.

Recently she has softened this approach. Every Friday evening the family watches one movie. 

There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not.

“We’ll cross that when we come to it,” said Ms. Stecher, who is due soon with a boy.

Some of the people who built video programs are now horrified by how many places a child can now watch a video.

Asked about limiting screen time for children, Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist who for years directed product for YouTube at Google, sent a photo of a potty training toilet with an iPad attached and wrote: “Hashtag ‘products we didn’t buy.

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Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer in Menlo Park, Calif., said their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens.CreditPeter Prato for The New York Times

Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”

Ms. Chavarria did not let her children have cellphones until high school, and even now bans phone use in the car and severely limits it at home.

She said she lives by the mantra that the last child in the class to get a phone wins. Her daughter did not get a phone until she started ninth grade.

“Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’” Ms. Chavarria said. “And I’m like, ‘No, I do not need to know where my kids are every second of the day.’”

For longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work.

Among those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company. He is also the founder of GeekDad.com.

“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” Mr. Anderson said of screens.

Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.

“We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”

He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The chil

d goes offline for 24 hours.

“I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences,” Mr. Anderson said. 

“This is scar tissue talking. We’ve made every mistake in the book, and I think we got it wrong with some of my kids,” Mr. Anderson said. “We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about.”
His children attended private elementary school, where he saw the administration introduce iPads and smart whiteboards, only to “descend into chaos and then pull back from it all.”
This idea that Silicon Valley parents are wary about tech is not new. The godfathers of tech expressed these concerns years ago, and concern has been loudest from the top.
Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said earlier this year that he would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates banned cellphones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates wrote that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads.
But in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts.
Those who have exposed their children to screens try to talk them out of addiction by explaining how the tech works.



John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.
“I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
And there are those in tech who disagree that screens are dangerous. Jason Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”
“One reaction I got just yesterday was, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that all the major tech execs are limiting screen time?’” Mr. Toff said. “And I was like, ‘Maybe it should, but I guess I’ve always been skeptical of norms.’ People are just scared of the unknown.”
“It’s contrarian,” Mr. Toff said. “But I feel like I’m speaking for a lot of parents that are afraid of speaking out loud for fear of judgment.”
He said he thinks back to his own childhood growing up watching a lot of TV. “I think I turned out O.K.,” Mr. Toff said.



Other Silicon Valley parents say there are ways to make some limited screen time slightly less toxic.
Renee DiResta, a security researcher on the board of the Center for Humane Tech, won’t allow passive screen time, but will allow short amounts of time on challenging games.
She wants her 2- and 4-year-old children to learn how to code young, so she embraces their awareness of gadgets. But she distinguishes between these types of screen use. Playing a building game is allowed, but watching a YouTube video is not, unless it is as a family.
And Frank Barbieri, a San Francisco-based executive at the start-up PebblePost that tracks online activity to send direct mail advertising, tries to limit his 5-year-old daughter’s screen time to Italian language content.
“We have friends who are screen abolitionists, and we have friends who are screen liberalists,” Mr
. Barbieri said.
He had read studies on how learning a second language at a young age is good for the developing mind, so his daughter watches Italian-language movies and TV shows.
“For us, honestly, me and my wife were like, ‘Where would we like to visit?’” Mr. Barbieri said.





Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nelliebowles


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Bolsonaro se apresenta como o homem comum que triunfou

Angela Alonso

 Propaganda do presidente eleito investe na estética do improviso; é gente como a gente 

O Brasil elegeu um capitão para a Presidência. Chocante, mas não inusitado.

Militar costuma chegar ao poder pelas armas. Deodoro da Fonseca inaugurou a série junto com o regime republicano; Castelo Branco se perfilou, em 1964, abrindo infausta trilha, que acabou no presidente que amava os cavalos.

Mas não é só golpe que joga o Estado em mãos armadas. Há o voto. O sobrinho de Deodoro, Hermes da Fonseca, marechal como o tio, bateu Rui Barbosa nas urnas.

A rinha célebre opôs casaca e farda. Era 1910 e o país já esquecera que o "civilista" Rui fora golpista em 1889 e ministro do primeiro governo militar. Rui ganhou prestígio, mas foi Hermes quem levou a eleição.

Em 1945, a escolha foi de Sofia: o Exército, com o general Dutra, ou a aeronáutica, com Eduardo Gomes. Sem WhatsApp, o perdedor apostou na culinária: inventou um chocolatinho de propaganda, o "brigadeiro". Gomes fez história também com seu revólver, nas revoltas de 1922, 1924, 1932 e na Revolução de 1930. E viveu para participar do golpe de 1964.

Mas nenhum desses se assemelha tanto ao novo presidente como o primeiro militar eleito da República. Floriano Peixoto começou como vice, mas logo tratorou o titular, com armas e o voto indireto dos deputados.

Adversários viram nele o típico caudilho sul-americano. Nem por isso impopular. Muitos o idolatraram como demolidor de privilégios e garantia de retidão moral.

Apresentava-se como homem comum. Costumes simples combinados à parca leitura. Falava o indispensável.

Quando Deodoro pediu apoio para o golpe de 1889, foi telegráfico: "Lá tenho minha espingarda velha". O que faltava em elegância sobrava em pragmatismo. Foi chefe pelo exemplo, não pela palavra. Comia de cócoras, como um soldado raso.

O novo presidente ecoa esses traços. "Bolsonaro é gente como a gente", diz o anúncio de um vídeo com a chamada "Sr. Mito". Depois da imagem do próprio, surge a varanda de tijolinho típica dos lares de classe média. O capitão está civil, em camisa de futebol que, a despeito de vermelha, estampa o número dez.

A câmera aguarda enquanto o protagonista investe em atiçar fogo no carvão da churrasqueira. Tudo meio improvisado e muito masculino. No desarranjo da pia, convivem óleo de soja, vasos de flor e uma mochila. Ao lado, um exemplar de jornal largado sobre um banquinho branco, provavelmente de plástico.

O despojamento reaparece na segunda cena. O presidente está à mesa de madeira ripada, sem toalha, com dois comensais, um ostenta a bandeira do Brasil na manga. A refeição é carne e pão francês —ainda no saco da padaria.

Os pratos ao centro são inúteis: come-se da travessa. Nada de álcool, só água e Coca-Cola a consumir em copos de boteco, dispostos de boca para baixo. Completam o quadro tipos bombados, uma rede e o cartaz do "mito".

A propaganda de Bolsonaro, antes e depois da eleição, investiu nessa estética do improviso e na exaltação do homem comum.

A primeira organiza seus vídeos: bandeira torta na parede, ostensiva fita adesiva, locações caseiras —até a área de serviço—, displicência no cenário, no qual se vislumbram à vezes um balde, às vezes migalhas.

A segunda está na celebração —como é usual no Facebook— do corriqueiro: ir à igreja, ao banco, ao barbeiro. Sua fala coloquial combina autoridade e emoção —pulso firme, coração mole. Assim se produz a persona de caseiro, religioso, humilde. É "um de nós". Pessoa sem frescuras, que encara o arroz-com-feijão da vida —e um leite condensado.

tônica no homem comum carrega um antielitismo. O presidente se afasta do cosmopolita, embora tenha viajado o seu tanto. Apresenta-se como provinciano, algo que vai melhor com seu nacionalismo. É membro da elite política —está na carreira há anos—, mas se diz outsider.

Como a maioria dos brasileiros, lê pouco, com preferência pela Bíblia. Em seu primeiro vídeo depois de eleito, lá está a Mensagem, o texto sagrado do cristianismo adaptado ao gosto médio contemporâneo.

Este ethos do homem comum não se ancora no carisma do líder excepcional, ao contrário, se enraíza na representatividade. Sua força emana do compartilhamento de hábitos com a média dos brasileiros.
Floriano Peixoto era homem de pouca lábia e muito pólvora.Foi amado até o sacrifício, quando opositores abriram guerra civil. Seus fiéis esmagaram a resistência, com apoio norte-americano e força bruta. Tomara que o novo presidente, que não oculta a simpatia por armas e ianques, gaste mais saliva e menos chumbo.

 

 

 

O grande bedel

A escolha do filósofo Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez para chefiar o Ministério da Educação assusta mais que a do diplomata trumpista Ernesto Araújo para o Itamaraty. Ambos foram indicador pelo guru intelectual da direita, o também filósofo Olavo de Carvalho. Ambos foram escolhidos por suas convicções ideológicas e não pela experiência ou pela capacidade técnica ou operacional em suas áreas, acentuando o aparelhamento ideológico do Estado de que o PT era acusado. 

Velez também é um direitista fundamentalista, antiglobalista, antipetista ardoroso, defensor da ditadura e dos valores morais tradicionais. Mas, diferentemente de Araújo, vai dirigir a política interna mais crucial para o desenvolvimento nacional e com a mais poderosa influência sobre a formação da mentalidade brasileira. 

Seus escritos sugerem que ele está muito mais preocupado com a moralidade e a doutrinação, em nome de uma suposta desideologização do ensino, do que com a qualidade da educação. E que, à frente do MEC, ele será uma espécie de bedel nacional, encarregado de fazer valer os compromissos de Bolsonaro com os setores mais reacionários e conservadores que apoiaram sua eleição.
 
Uma das propostas mais assustadoras que ele defende em seu blog “Rocinante” é a da criação de Conselhos de Ética. “Todas as escolas deveriam ter os Conselhos de Ética, que zelassem pela reta educação moral dos alunos. Não se trata de comitês de moralismo, nem de juntas de censura. Trata-se de institucionalizar a reflexão sobre matérias éticas e acerca da forma com que cada escola está correspondendo a essa exigência.” Mas quem definirá o que seja a “reta educação moral” dos alunos? O MEC, que sob seu comando pode tornar-se perigoso aparelho do Estado bolsonarista. Depois reclamam dos que apontam as afinidades do novo regime com o fascismo.

A bênção da bancada evangélica a Vélez, depois do veto à escolha do respeitado educador Mozart Ramos para o MEC, informa que o ensino público laico, pautado pela atitude crítica diante do conhecimento, está ameaçado. 

No blog do futuro ministro sobram ataques ideológicos – a Lula, ao PT, ao Mais Médicos, à esquerda em geral – e faltam menções ao problema central da educação no Brasil, que é a melhora da qualidade. Apesar da polarização política entre PSDB e PT, desde os anos 90 há um consenso entre os dois partidos e as demais forças políticas sobre a centralidade da educação para o desenvolvimento nacional. 

Sob FHC, na gestão do ministro Paulo Renato, foi criado o Fundeb, que garantiu mais recursos e a melhor distribuição deles entre os entes da federação. Nos governos petistas, na gestão de Fernando Haddad, principalmente, foram criadas dezenas de novas universidades públicas e centenas de escolas técnicas, o Enem e os programas de democratização ao ensino superior, como o Prouni e o novo Fies. O ensino infantil começou a ser implantado. Em 2014, sob Dilma, o Congresso aprovou o Plano Nacional de Educação, com 20 metas para os dez anos seguintes. Não foi tirado do bolso do colete petista. Sua elaboração foi objeto de amplo debate público, envolveu os estados, os municípios, as empresas e os profissionais do setor na produção do diagnóstico e das propostas para os diferentes níveis de ensino. Em 2017, sob Temer, na gestão de Mendonça Filho, foi concluída a aprovação da Base Nacional Comum Curricular e aprovada a reforma do ensino médio. Há uma linha de continuidade neste esforço, que agora corre o risco de ser interrompida, com a mudança de foco e de prioridades. 

The Plague of Pointless Work

• By Michael Robbins, www.thenation.com
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•  Let’s just get this out of the way: All jobs are bullshit jobs. Even if you’re a public defender or work for Médecins Sans Frontières, insofar as your labor is determined by a system of abstract compulsion—insofar, that is, as it exists within capitalism—it’s bullshit. You know this.
  In his new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber is interested in a particular variety of bullshit and work. In 2013, the anthropologist and anarchist (he hates to be called “the anarchist anthropologist”) published an essay slamming the proliferation of “pointless jobs” that seem to exist “just for the sake of keeping us all working.” The response was tremendous: It turns out that many people have jobs that they believe require them to do nothing of value (or to do nothing whatsoever while trying to appear to be doing something).
  Graeber sifted through the responses and solicited additional input on Twitter in a quest to categorize the “five basic types of bullshit jobs” and document the absurdist travails of those who hold them. From such data, he constructed a working definition of the subject at hand:
  

  [A] bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
  

  Graeber distinguishes these bullshit jobs from “shit jobs,” which serve a purpose but suck. Which is not to say that bullshit jobs don’t suck as well, but they suck precisely because they don’t serve a purpose. Much of the stress they produce—the “spiritual violence,” as Graeber terms it—results from the contortionist maneuvers that employees are forced to perform in order to pretend to be working when they have nothing to do. And as Graeber notes, this sense of purposelessness is widespread: To give just two examples, 37 percent of the UK respondents to a poll on the subject, and 40 percent of the Dutch ones, insisted that their work is utterly useless.
  In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by the end of the century, technology would have become so far advanced that developed economies would have a 15-hour workweek. So how did we get to our current state, almost two decades into the 21st century? It turns out that Keynes was only half right—technology has advanced spectacularly, but we are far from a 15-hour workweek. Keynes thought that the developed economies would adjust to a growth in productivity by decreasing workers’ hours. Instead, capital absorbed those gains but did not free up the now-superfluous human labor—a tendency that Karl Marx noticed long ago.
  For Marx, this pattern is intrinsic to capital, whose constant expansion of its own value requires the reproduction of existing social relations. For Graeber, however, this pattern has less to do with capital’s prerogatives than with human agency; the problem “clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political,” he writes. Yet it would be truer to say that the problem is not merely economic, but also moral and political, and even truer to relate these spheres to one another, a point that Graeber himself makes later: “[E]very day it’s more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered ‘economic’ and what is ‘political.’” But despite a muddled sense of causes and effects, Graeber’s book offers us an engaging—albeit at the same time tremendously disheartening—portrait of labor in 21st-century capitalism.
  

  Current Issue

  

  
  
  In his previous books, especially 2009’s Direct Action: An Ethnography and 2011’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber’s ear for anecdote lent his activism the air of folktale. Debt’s opening vignette, for example, set at a garden party at Westminster Abbey, offers a charming little parable about our tacit beliefs and assumptions. At the party, Graeber suggests to an attorney he meets that the developing world’s debt should be abolished. “But,” she objects, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”
  In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber similarly employs anecdote in order to illustrate just how much insanity we take for granted. Liberally drawing from the respondents to his original essay, he recounts stories that read like Philip K. Dick at his least plausible. Some are sad, others infuriating, and many are both. A number verge on the absurd: One woman’s job was to go around demanding IDs and proof of income from temporarily sheltered homeless people so that “the temporary homeless unit could claim back [the] housing benefit.” If homeless people couldn’t provide the necessary paperwork—as often happened—their caseworkers would kick them out. In another instance, a “subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor for the German military” describes driving for hours and filling out pages of paperwork simply to prevent a soldier from carrying his computer about 16 and a half feet down a hallway to his new office.
  Most of the stories involve jobs that are also nightmarish in their unrelenting tedium. My favorite is the museum guard whose job was to protect an empty room, apparently to make sure no one started a fire in it. To ensure his vigilance, he was forbidden to read a book or even look at his phone.
  All of these jobs sound terrible, but are they also bullshit? The people who have to do them think so. But Graeber’s reliance on subjective impressions of whether work produces value is the book’s major weakness. He brings up Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive labor—between workers who produce surplus value and those who do not—simply to brush it off. And it is telling that he focuses on “information work” and what he calls “salaried paper pushers.” While he claims that these kinds of positions, rather than “waiters, barbers, salesclerks and the like,” account for “the bulk” of service jobs added to the economy since 1990, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics could have set him straight on this score. As Jason E. Smith pointed out in his review of Graeber’s book in The Brooklyn Rail, the bureau’s table of “occupations with the most job growth” actually does include waiters and retail salespeople, not to mention nurses, customer-service representatives, janitors, health aides, fast-food workers, cooks, and construction workers. Most service workers, in other words, are indeed providing valuable services—caring for others and feeding people.
  
  Graeber’s picture of a Dickensian bureaucratization run amok has other problems as well. He correctly notes that our economic system has undergone profound transformations since the 1970s, with declining manufacturing and wages and a rising service and financial sector. But according to Graeber, these changes mean that the existing system isn’t exactly capitalism anymore, but rather a kind of “managerial feudalism”—one that involves “hierarchies,” “class loyalty,” and “moral envy”—that is the result of political will rather than structural determination. However, while one can surely find such attributes at work in the global economy, the system remains capitalist: predicated on the extraction of profit from the labor of others (even when such profit is mediated by financial markets). “Class loyalty” and “moral envy” are the products of such a system.
  In his work, the Marxist theorist Moishe Postone (who died earlier this year) explored “the domination of people by time” under capitalism in ways that bolster some of Graeber’s claims. Postone’s discussion of the shift from the “variable” time of the Middle Ages, which was determined by the different kinds of human activity, to the clock time of the modern period, an invariable standard that dictates the workday, parallels Graeber’s own.
  Yet there are important differences as well. In his discussion of value, Graeber (like some Marxists, it must be said) attributes to Marx a “labor theory of value” akin to David Ricardo’s, according to which the value of a given commodity is equal to the amount of labor that went into its production. But the point of Marx’s theory, as Postone makes clear, is precisely to refute this: Value for Marx is not a market mechanism focused on exchange relations, but a social mediation. It is that which compels workers to reproduce capitalism. For Marx, capitalism’s alienated social relations are not by-products of capital’s expansion of value—they are how capital gets valorized.
  Also, capitalism—like feudalism—is a system of domination. But in comparison, feudal domination was overt and easy to comprehend—no peasant had to wonder what he was working for. This is why Marx’s theory can indeed help to explain the situation that Graeber rightly decries: because it is a theory about how social relations get reproduced, including those that seem irrational and unnecessary.
  Despite Graeber’s focus on surface phenomena like hierarchy and envy, he is correct to conclude that the only thing keeping capitalism going is our refusal to stop it in its tracks through collective action. One of his respondents, whom he calls Lilian, captures the pathos of our continued submission to our own domination: “I get most of the meaning in my life from my job,” she writes. But the “meaning” of most jobs is meaninglessness itself.
  Here we find Graeber exploring what is perhaps his true subject: not jobs that seem unnecessary, but the unnecessary compulsion of wage labor. In a free society—one in which your time and work are your own rather than commodities—Lilian’s sentiment would not necessarily be pathological. Work doesn’t need to be drudgery; we can find meaning in our jobs. But a society based on the production of value is by definition unfree, since we don’t really have a choice about whether to participate in it, and because work often becomes merely a tedious means of survival.
  We have all experienced the truth of this. After college, I worked briefly as a temp doing data entry for a corporate law firm. I sat in a windowless room with a bunch of other temps, all of us squeezed together at a long table like students in a computer lab. We earned a little over the minimum wage. As often as I could, I would shirk my duties and surf the then-nascent Web. I had my spreadsheets minimized in a corner, ready to click should a paralegal come in to pick up something from the printer. But it was a fellow temp, who sat on my left, who objected to my wretched rebellion. “You’re not getting paid to surf the Web,” he informed me. I was just trying to reclaim a little of my time from those who were stealing it. And it wasn’t even a very effective protest, since I still had to sit in that depressing room and fill out enough spreadsheets to keep from getting fired. But my co-worker was simply expressing an assumption so commonplace that it hardly ever needs to be articulated: Your time does not belong to you.
  Some of the first factories in London went bankrupt because laborers refused to work all day, every day. To the factory owners, this proved the workers were indolent loafers, so they reduced wages to the point that workers were forced to put in even more hours to survive. But this was really doing the workers a favor, the owners insisted, because otherwise they’d just get drunk and lie about. “Productive activity,” as André Gorz noted, began to be “cut off from its meaning, its motivations and its object and became simply a means of earning a wage.” Now we’ve all internalized this view of work.
  Graeber doesn’t mention a project I recently learned about from Franco Berardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, but it represents the ne plus ultra of bullshit work. Berardi reprints an article—one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read—that describes Candelia, a job-training center in France:
  

  Sabine de Buyzer, working in the accounting department, leaned into her computer and scanned a row of numbers. Candelia was doing well. Its revenue that week was outpacing expenses, even counting taxes and salaries. “We have to be profitable,” Ms. de Buyzer said. “Everyone’s working all out to make sure we succeed.”
  This was a sentiment any boss would like to hear, but in this case the entire business is fake. So are Candelia’s customers and suppliers, from the companies ordering the furniture to the trucking operators that make deliveries. Even the bank where Candelia gets its loans is not real.
  

  The wages are imaginary, too. Nothing is produced in this “job” except the illusion of waged labor, but de Buyzer “welcomes the regular routine.” France has more than 100 of these “staged companies.”
  This is the world we’ve inherited—one in which we reflexively inquire of strangers, “What do you do?” which means, of course, “How do you earn a living?” And this is so even when there’s no social need for everyone to be working all the time. Bullshit jobs are only one idiotic facet of this larger decoupling of work from meaningful activity. If the problem were managers and bureaucracy, then we would simply need to eliminate them. But if the problem is capitalism, then we need to change the world. The familiar slogan of Occupy Wall Street and the global justice movement of the early 2000s, both of which Graeber was involved in, was “Another world is possible.” We’re told this is idealistic and naive. But it’s not bullshit.

A Week After the Midterms, Trump Seems to Forget the Caravan

• By Mark Landler, Maggie Haberman, www.nytimes.com
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  WASHINGTON — For weeks before the midterm elections, President Trump warned ominously about the threat from a caravan of migrants streaming from Central America toward Mexico’s border with the United States. It was a fearsome mix of criminals and “unknown Middle Easterners,” Mr. Trump claimed darkly, one that constituted a genuine national emergency.

  But since the election last week, Mr. Trump has tweeted about the caravan exactly once — to issue a proclamation preventing those who cross the border illegally from applying for asylum in the United States. Fox News, which faithfully amplified Mr. Trump’s warnings about the migrants, has gone similarly quiet on the subject.

  There was little dispute, even before Election Day, that Mr. Trump was exploiting the caravan for political purposes. But analysts, historians and veterans of previous administrations said there were few comparable instances of a commander in chief warning about what he called a looming threat, only to drop it as soon as people voted.

  While the caravan has faded from television screens, the costs of Mr. Trump’s response to it have not. Nearly 6,000 active-duty troops remain deployed from the Gulf Coast to Southern California, where they are putting up tents and stringing concertina wire to face a ragtag band that is still not near the border.

  “Now that the political utility of troops on the southern border to face a fictitious caravan invasion threat is over,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, a former commander of the military’s Southern Command, “let’s hope the president will stand down the troops so they can be with their families — especially over the holidays.”

  But some officials in the Defense Department worry that Mr. Trump could do the opposite — seek an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law that prohibits the government from using active-duty troops to enforce laws inside the country’s borders.

  As pure political calculation, analysts from both parties said that seizing on the caravan mobilized Republican voters, dramatizing immigration in a way that resonated with Mr. Trump’s political base. But it is far less clear that the dire warnings helped Republican candidates with independents or other late-deciding voters.

  In some places like Arizona, where the Democratic Senate candidate, Kyrsten Sinema, narrowly beat her Republican opponent, Martha McSally, analysts said the caravan might actually have backfired. Ms. McSally echoed Mr. Trump’s language about the coming wave of migrants, calling it a “public safety and national security issue.”

  

  Since the election last week, Mr. Trump has tweeted about the caravan exactly once.Foto de: Doug Mills/The New York Times

  David Axelrod, a former aide to President Barack Obama, said on Twitter, “The president’s calculated histrionics about the caravan, about which we have heard very little since Election Day, may have sunk the @GOP in AZ.”

  In exit polls, voters who made up their minds in the last three days before the election said they voted for Democrats over Republicans 53 percent to 41 percent. That coincides with the period in which Mr. Trump redoubled his focus on the caravan, rejecting the advice of aides who wanted to air a commercial promoting the healthy economy.

  Exit polls did not contain a specific question about the caravan. But they did show that voters who made up their minds in the final week of the campaign, before Mr. Trump’s last-minute push, chose Democrats over Republicans by a narrower tally: 49 percent to 48 percent.

  Privately, Republican pollsters pointed to the fact that their party had picked up just three of 10 Senate seats held by Democrats as evidence of the ambiguous effect the caravan crusade had on Republicans.

  At one campaign rally after another, Mr. Trump said the election came down to “the caravan, law and order, and common sense.” In Mesa, Ariz., on Oct. 19, he said: “You got some bad people in those groups. You got some tough people in those groups. And I’ll tell you what — this country doesn’t want them. O.K.? We don’t want them.”

  A day earlier, he tweeted about the “assault on our country at our Southern Border, including the Criminal elements and DRUGS pouring in.”

  Mr. Trump posted footage of an undocumented immigrant on trial for killing a police officer, and his campaign organization produced an ad featuring migrants trying to scale a wall to dramatize the stakes of the election.

  “I’ve never before seen an American president, after going all over the country about this national crisis, then the day after an election shrug,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.

  The closest parallel that Mr. Brinkley drew was to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who seized on — and mischaracterized — two murky encounters between American and North Vietnamese warships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as a pretext to accelerate America’s engagement in the Vietnam War. Still, he said, Mr. Trump’s response was of a different order.

  
  

  

  If all 15,000 troops that Mr. Trump pledged are ultimately deployed to the border, budget officials believe the cost could reach $200 million.Foto de: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

  “It was a dangerous form of xenophobia, aimed solely for electoral purposes and had nothing to do in the end with real national security,” Mr. Brinkley said.

  For the troops, so far, it has mostly been an expensive field trip. The cost of the deployment is not known, but budget officials believe it could reach $200 million if all 15,000 troops that Mr. Trump pledged are ultimately sent.

  Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Tuesday that the Pentagon was “capturing” the expenses daily and would update the public when he knew the total cost. On Wednesday, Mr. Mattis plans to meet with soldiers at Base Camp Donna, the forward operating base built over the last month near the Rio Grande.

  Mr. Mattis said there had been no change to the mission; the troops were not receiving extra combat or hostile-fire pay. His visit, a defense official said, is meant to be low key and reminiscent of his days as a Marine general, when he could meet front-line troops with little fanfare.

  Living conditions at Base Camp Donna are spare, but since its construction this month, the Army has added showers and a larger living area aside from the initial allotment of tents.

  Defenders of Mr. Trump said the troops would take little notice of his sudden lack of emphasis on the caravan.

  “Knowing the troops, knowing how busy they are, they’re not focused on him,” said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who is a former vice chief of staff of the Army. “They’ve got a job to do.”

  But other former military officers said the soldiers were well aware of the political motivation behind their mission. Lacking much else to do, they will quickly pick up on Mr. Trump’s loss of interest in the caravan, and it will add to their already depleted morale.

  “Having spent months in the desert with nothing to do, at least we had scorpions to have scorpion fights with,” said John A. Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Operation Desert Shield in 1990 and 1991.

  “But we had a real mission,” he said. “These guys don’t have that.”
  

A carapuça serviu

Antonia Pellegrino e Manoela Miklos

 Há uma década a TV Globo exibe "Amor e Sexo", mas desde 2013 o programa apresentado por Fernanda Lima foi se tornando mais politizado, sob a batuta do show runner Antonio Amancio. A atração chamou para si o protagonismo das pautas progressistas no momento em que a sociedade brasileira se polarizou.

 ]Numa síntese única, o programa de variedades faz jus ao que há de melhor na tradição inventiva da televisão brasileira, ao apresentar as lutas humanitárias com estética exuberante, sem medo de ser feliz.

No conteúdo, a equipe do programa não busca uma isenção que não existe. "Amor e Sexo" tem posição clara: está na disputa por uma sociedade menos opressora, que trate todas e todos como iguais, e tenha respeito pelas diferenças. Valores éticos fundamentais em qualquer país democrático, mas que no Brasil de hoje estão sob a alcunha de "ideologia comunista".
Na última semana, Fernanda Lima causou polêmica ao fechar o programa sobre mulheres dizendo: "vamos sabotar as engrenagens deste sistema de opressão. Vamos sabotar as engrenagens deste sistema homofóbico, racista, patriarcal, machista e misógino. Vamos jogar na fogueira as camisas de força da submissão, da tirania e da repressão. Vamos libertar todas nós e todos vocês. Nossa luta está apenas começando. Prepare-se porque esta revolução não tem volta. Bora sabotar tudo isso!"
O programa foi gravado em julho, portanto foi escrito no começo do ano. Em momento algum a apresentadora falou o nome do presidente eleito. Sua fala se insurge contra o que há de pior na sociedade brasileira: o passado colonial. Seu discurso é ético-político, e não ideológico-partidário. Mas para os bolsominions Fernanda Lima quer boicotar o país e o governo. Ou seja, a carapuça serviu.
O post mais raivoso contra Lima foi escrito por um cantor sertanejo, que diz: "a corda sempre arrebenta pro lado mais fraco e o lado mais fraco é onde ela está". Depois de pedir que sabotem Fernanda, o sujeito escreve: "Sergio Moro vai ajuda a sabotar, pode esperar kkkk".
Ao decretarem o ataque e boicote à Fernanda Lima, os eleitores de Bolsonaro reconhecem que o que eles desejam é justamente acabar com os avanços que conquistamos no combate às desigualdades estruturais de nossa sociedade —a corda sempre arrebenta pro lado mais fraco (sic).
Assumem que identificam na plataforma do presidente eleito um projeto de manutenção disso tudo que sempre esteve aí: racismo, machismo, homofobia, misoginia, submissão da mulher, enfim, a tirania da casa grande.
E identificam no ex-juiz e futuro ministro Sergio Moro alguém capaz de usar o Estado como máquina de perseguição para realizar este projeto. Diante desta ideia, surge um kkkk de quem goza com a ideia fascista.
Durante as eleições vários Tribunais Regionais Eleitorais determinaram que faixas com dizeres como "Ditadura nunca mais" e "Fascismo Não" fossem retiradas de universidades. A alegação era de que se tratava de propaganda política, mesmo sem haver o número ou o nome de qualquer candidato. O Supremo Tribunal Federal se posicionou contra a decisão, e a Justiça eleitoral voltou atrás. Mas permanece o fato: os TREs consideraram que havia um candidato cuja plataforma política era fascista e que fazia apologia da ditadura.
Pouco se falou naquelas semanas que fascismo é crime. Se havia um candidato que representava a pauta do fascismo, era ele quem deveria ser criminalizado. Este crime, nenhum TRE entendeu ser passível de penalidade. Os passíveis de prisão eram aqueles que protestavam democraticamente.
Alguma coisa está profundamente fora da ordem no Brasil. Aqui, racismo e homofobia são crimes. Um país que entende a sabotagem pregada por Fernanda como crime ou gesto passível de condenação moral está sabotando a si próprio.

 

 

Vitórias, derrotas e resistência democrática

JOSÉ MAURICIO DOMINGUES

Há vitórias eleitorais que se configuram, simultaneamente, como derrotas políticas. Este foi o resultado da eleição de Dilma Rousseff em 2014, infelizmente não foi isso o que ocorreu com a eleição de Jair Bolsonaro no domingo de 28 de outubro de 2018. Há derrotas eleitorais que constituem, por outro lado, vitórias políticas. Não conseguimos reverter a vantagem de Bolsonaro, mas não sabemos quantos mais votos teria tido se não houvesse uma grande mobilização democrática. Talvez parasse de crescer de todo modo, é verdade, mas as forças democráticas tiveram uma vitória: começar a se organizar para a luta que pode durar mais ou menos tempo, a qual será dura, de todas as maneiras. E evidenciaram para todos, inclusive seus eleitores, seu caráter autoritário e intolerante, embora, defensivamente, ele tenha buscado mesclar intimidação com palavras de conciliação para evitar que o estigma se grudasse à sua imagem.

É preciso entender que foi a própria sociedade que deu essa resposta democrática às ameaças que a cercam. O sistema político e partidário continua em frangalhos e terá de ser aos poucos reconstruído. Quem não entendeu isso não entendeu nada. Há um processo extremamente complexo pela frente. Haddad parece tê-lo percebido e buscou abrir-se em parte a essa dinâmica, mas dificilmente a oligarquia do PT lhe deixará mover-se com autonomia, recusando-se a encarar a ojeriza da maioria da população a este e a todos os outros partidos neste momento. Muito da política, no plano federal, assim como no estadual, permanece ademais prisioneiro de malandragens e manobras, hegemonismos e disputas, que nada têm que ver com os desejos da população. Juntamente com a corrupção e a limitação das políticas sociais, foi isso que a sociedade brasileira – inclusive grande parte dos eleitores de Bolsonaro – recusou nesta eleição. É preciso, com seriedade, humildade e compromisso, reconstruir um sistema democrático robusto, mais aberto e menos cínico.

Isso começa com o fortalecimento e ampliação da frente democrática que se formou nesta eleição. No cerne dos planos fundamentais de Bolsonaro e seu grupo se encontram a restrição da democracia e a repressão à esquerda. A autorreforma que o regime militar sonhou em inícios dos anos 1980 poderia agora se consolidar. A ameaça de violência, legal e física, está no ar. Precisamos manter viva a reorganização do sistema político societário que se agigantou neste momento dramático e estreitar os laços entre seus diversos setores, bem como com aqueles que, no sistema político centrado no estado, se comprometem com a democracia. É hora de cada um avaliar onde errou e onde pode contribuir. Talvez seja mesmo o caso de construirmos uma associação civil formal que responda, Brasil afora, pela resistência democrática. O direito nesse sentido será fundamental, da defesa cotidiana das liberdades daqueles que serão atacados e assediados às decisões das mais altas esferas, como o STF. Evitar cair em provocações e medir nossas forças, construindo a unidade a cada momento, será fundamental, incluindo as próximas eleições municipais, que podem consistir num plebiscito sobre o governo de Bolsonaro e a democracia.

O Brasil, como qualquer país, somente tem futuro quando pode imaginar-se e imaginá-lo. Bolsonaro nos imaginou um futuro triste, de afetos pesados, rancoroso e passadista. Nas ruas, nas instituições e nas mídias, na semana que passou as forças democráticas do país começaram, na esteira de mobilizações que vêm de 2013 e mais uma vez com a decisiva participação da juventude, a reimaginá-lo com os afetos da alegria e da esperança, com os valores da liberdade, da igualdade, da solidariedade e da colaboração. Isso não nos garantiu ainda a vitória, mas nos indicou, sem dúvida, o caminho.

* Sociólogo, professor do Iesp/Uerj

Stan Lee Is Dead at 95; Superhero of Marvel Comics

By Jonathan Kandell and Andy Webster

If Stan Lee revolutionized the comic book world in the 1960s, which he did, he left as big a stamp — maybe bigger — on the even wider pop culture landscape of today.

Think of “Spider-Man,” the blockbuster movie franchise and Broadway spectacle. Think of “Iron Man,” another Hollywood gold-mine series personified by its star, Robert Downey Jr. Think of “Black Panther,” the box-office superhero smash that shattered big screen racial barriers in the process.

And that is to say nothing of the Hulk, the X-Men, Thor and other film and television juggernauts that have stirred the popular imagination and made many people very rich.

If all that entertainment product can be traced to one person, it would be Stan Lee, who died in Los Angeles on Monday at 95. From a cluttered office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in the 1960s, he helped conjure a lineup of pulp-fiction heroes that has come to define much of popular culture in the early 21st century.

Mr. Lee was a central player in the creation of those characters and more, all properties of Marvel Comics. Indeed, he was for many the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general, overseeing the company’s emergence as an international media behemoth. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium’s silver age.

Many believe that Marvel, under his leadership and infused with his colorful voice, crystallized that era, one of exploding sales, increasingly complex characters and stories, and growing cultural legitimacy for the medium. (Marvel’s chief competitor at the time, National Periodical Publications, now known as DC — the home of Superman and Batman, among other characters — augured this period, with its 1956 update of its superhero the Flash, but did not define it.)

Under Mr. Lee, Marvel transformed the comic book world by imbuing its characters with the self-doubts and neuroses of average people, as well an awareness of trends and social causes and, often, a sense of humor.

In humanizing his heroes, giving them character flaws and insecurities that belied their supernatural strengths, Mr. Lee tried “to make them real flesh-and-blood characters with personality,” he told The Washington Post in 1992.

“That’s what any story should have, but comics didn’t have until that point,” he said. “They were all cardboard figures.”

Energetic, gregarious, optimistic and alternately grandiose and self-effacing, Mr. Lee was an effective salesman, employing a Barnumesque syntax in print (“Face front, true believer!” “Make mine Marvel!”) to market Marvel’s products to a rabid following.

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Associated Press

He charmed readers with jokey, conspiratorial comments and asterisked asides in narrative panels, often referring them to previous issues. In 2003 he told The Los Angeles Times, “I wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn’t aware of.”

Though Mr. Lee was often criticized for his role in denying rights and royalties to his artistic collaborators , his involvement in the conception of many of Marvel’s best-known characters is indisputable.

Reading Shakespeare at 10

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan, the older of two sons born to Jack Lieber, an occasionally employed dress cutter, and Celia (Solomon) Lieber, both immigrants from Romania. The family moved to the Bronx.

Stanley began reading Shakespeare at 10 while also devouring pulp magazines, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, and the swashbuckler movies of Errol Flynn.

He graduated at 17 from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and aspired to be a writer of serious literature. He was set on the path to becoming a different kind of writer when, after a few false starts at other jobs, he was hired at Timely Publications, a company owned by Martin Goodman, a relative who had made his name in pulp magazines and was entering the comics field.

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Mr. Lee was initially paid $8 a week as an office gofer. Eventually he was writing and editing stories, many in the superhero genre.

At Timely he worked with the artist Jack Kirby (1917-94), who, with a writing partner, Joe Simon, had created the hit character Captain America, and who would eventually play a vital role in Mr. Lee’s career. When Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, Timely’s hottest stars, were lured away by a rival company, Mr. Lee was appointed chief editor.

As a writer, Mr. Lee could be startlingly prolific. “Almost everything I’ve ever written I could finish at one sitting,” he once said. “I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.”

Mr. Lee used several pseudonyms to give the impression that Marvel had a large stable of writers; the name that stuck was simply his first name split in two. (In the 1970s, he legally changed Lieber to Lee.)

During World War II, Mr. Lee wrote training manuals stateside in the Army Signal Corps while moonlighting as a comics writer. In 1947, he married Joan Boocock, a former model who had moved to New York from her native England.

His daughter Joan Celia Lee, who is known as J. C., was born in 1950; another daughter, Jan, died three days after birth in 1953. Mr. Lee’s wife died in 2017.

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Mr. Lee at his office in Manhattan in 1980. As chief writer and editor of Marvel Comics, Mr. Lee was, for many, the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general.CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times

A lawyer for Ms. Lee, Kirk Schenck, confirmed Mr. Lee’s death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by Ms. Lee and his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who drew the “Amazing Spider-Man” syndicated newspaper strip for years.

In the mid-1940s, the peak of the golden age of comic books, sales boomed. But later, as plots and characters turned increasingly lurid (especially at EC, a Marvel competitor that published titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), many adults clamored for censorship. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee led by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver held hearings investigating allegations that comics promoted immorality and juvenile delinquency.

Feeding the senator’s crusade was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-comics jeremiad, “Seduction of the Innocent.” Among other claims, the book contended that DC’s “Batman stories” — featuring the team of Batman and Robin — were “psychologically homosexual.”

Opting to police itself rather than accept legislation, the comics industry established the Comics Code Authority to ensure wholesome content. Graphic gore and moral ambiguity were out, but so largely were wit, literary influences and attention to social issues. Innocuous cookie-cutter exercises in genre were in.

Many found the sanitized comics boring, and — with the new medium of television providing competition — readership, which at one point had reached 600 million sales annually, declined by almost three-quarters within a few years.

With the dimming of superhero comics’ golden age, Mr. Lee grew tired of grinding out generic humor, romance, western and monster stories for what had by then become Atlas Comics. Reaching a career impasse in his 30s, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics he wanted to, not merely what was considered marketable. And Mr. Goodman, his boss, spurred by the popularity of a rebooted Flash (and later Green Lantern) at DC, wanted him to revisit superheroes.

Mr. Lee took Mr. Goodman up on his suggestion, but he carried its implications much further.

Enter the Fantastic Four

In 1961, Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby — whom he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel — produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabbles and, in the orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.

Other Marvel titles — like the Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a decent man transformed by radiation into a monster — offered a similar template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.

A timid high school intellectual who gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was prone to soul-searching, leavened with wisecracks — a key to the character’s lasting popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a Broadway musical.

In 1961, Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby — whom he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel — produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabbles and, in the orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.

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Mr. Lee in 2012 at New York Comic Con. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium’s silver age.CreditMarion Curtis/STARPIX, via Associated Press

Other Marvel titles — like the Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a decent man transformed by radiation into a monster — offered a similar template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.

A timid high school intellectual who gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was prone to soul-searching, leavened with wisecracks — a key to the character’s lasting popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a Broadway musical.

Mr. Lee’s dialogue encompassed Catskills shtick, like Spider-Man’s patter in battle; Elizabethan idioms, like Thor’s; and working-class Lower East Side swagger, like the Thing’s. It could also include dime-store poetry, as in this eco-oratory about humans, uttered by the Silver Surfer, a space alien:

“And yet — in their uncontrollable insanity — in their unforgivable blindness — they seek to destroy this shining jewel — this softly spinning gem — this tiny blessed sphere — which men call Earth!”

Mr. Lee practiced what he called the Marvel method: Instead of handing artists scripts to illustrate, he summarized stories and let the artists draw them and fill in plot details as they chose. He then added sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes he would discover on penciled pages that new characters had been added to the narrative. Such surprises (like the Silver Surfer, a Kirby creation and a Lee favorite) would lead to questions of character ownership.

Mr. Lee was often faulted for not adequately acknowledging the contributions of his illustrators, especially Mr. Kirby. Spider-Man became Marvel’s best-known property, but Mr. Ditko, its co-creator, quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966. Mr. Kirby, who visually designed countless characters, left in 1969. Though he reunited with Mr. Lee for a Silver Surfer graphic novel in 1978, their heyday had ended.

Many comic fans believe that Mr. Kirby was wrongly deprived of royalties and original artwork in his lifetime, and for years the Kirby estate sought to acquire rights to characters that Mr. Kirby and Mr. Lee had created together. Mr. Kirby’s heirs were long rebuffed in court on the grounds that he had done “work for hire” — in other words, that he had essentially sold his art without expecting royalties.

In September 2014, Marvel and the Kirby estate reached a settlement. Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby now both receive credit on numerous screen productions based on their work.

Turning to Live Action

Mr. Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to develop Marvel properties, but most of his attempts at live-action television and movies were disappointing. (The series “The Incredible Hulk,” seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was an exception.)

Avi Arad, an executive at Toy Biz, a company in which Marvel had bought a controlling interest, began to revive the company’s Hollywood fortunes, particularly with an animated “X-Men” series on Fox, which ran from 1992 to 1997. (Its success helped pave the way for the live-action big-screen “X-Men” franchise, which has flourished since its first installment, in 2000.)

In the late 1990s, Mr. Lee was named chairman emeritus at Marvel and began to explore outside projects. While his personal appearances (including charging fans $120 for an autograph) were one source of income, later attempts to create wholly owned superhero properties foundered. Stan Lee Media, a digital content start-up, crashed in 2000 and landed his business partner, Peter F. Paul, in prison for securities fraud. (Mr. Lee was never charged.)

In 2001, Mr. Lee started POW! Entertainment (the initials stand for “purveyors of wonder”), but he received almost no income from Marvel movies and TV series until he won a court fight with Marvel Enterprises in 2005, leading to an undisclosed settlement costing Marvel $10 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel, announced that it had paid $2.5 million to increase its stake in POW!

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Chadwick Boseman, left, as T’Challa/Black Panther and Michael B. Jordan in “Black Panther.” It was the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starred an almost all-black cast.CreditMatt Kennedy/Marvel, Disney

In Mr. Lee’s final years, after the death of his wife, the circumstances of his business affairs and contentious financial relationship with his surviving daughter attracted attention in the news media. In 2018, Mr. Lee was embroiled in disputes with POW!, and The Daily Beast and The Hollywood Reporter ran accounts of fierce infighting among Mr. Lee’s daughter, household staff and business advisers. The Hollywood Reporter claimed “elder abuse.”

In February 2018, Mr. Lee signed a notarized document declaring that three men — a lawyer, a caretaker of Mr. Lee’s and a dealer in memorabilia — had “insinuated themselves into relationships with J. C. for an ulterior motive and purpose,” to “gain control over my assets, property and money.” He later withdrew his claim, but longtime aides of his — an assistant, an accountant and a housekeeper — were either dismissed or greatly limited in their contact with him.

In a profile in The New York Times in April, a cheerful Mr. Lee said, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” adding that “my daughter has been a great help to me” and that “life is pretty good” — although he admitted in that same interview, “I’ve been very careless with money.”

Marvel movies, however, have proved a cash cow for major studios, if not so much for Mr. Lee. With the blockbuster “Spider-Man” in 2002, Marvel superhero films hit their stride. Such movies (including franchises starring Iron Man, Thor and the superhero team the Avengers, to name but three) together had grossed more than $24 billion worldwide as of April.

“Black Panther,” the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starring an almost all-black cast, took in about $201.8 million domestically when it opened over the four-day Presidents’ Day weekend this year, the fifth-biggest opening of all time.

Many other film properties are in development, in addition to sequels in established franchises. Characters Mr. Lee had a hand in creating now enjoy a degree of cultural penetration they have never had before.

Mr. Lee wrote a slim memoir, “Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee,” with George Mair, published in 2002. His 2015 book, “Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir” (written with Peter David and illustrated in comic-book form by Colleen Doran), pays abundant credit to the artists many fans believed he had shortchanged years before.

Mr. Lee continued writing to the end. His first novel, “A Trick of Light,” written with Kat Rosenfield, is scheduled to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt next year.

Recent Marvel films and TV shows have also often credited Mr. Lee’s former collaborators; Mr. Lee himse

lf has almost always received an executive producer credit. His cameo appearances in them became something of a tradition. (Even “Teen Titans Go! to the Movies,” an animated feature in 2018 about a DC superteam, had more than one Lee cameo.) TV shows bearing his name or presence have included the reality series “Stan Lee’s Superhumans” and the competition show “Who Wants to Be a Superhero?”

Mr. Lee’s unwavering energy suggested that he possessed superpowers himself. (In his 90s he had a Twitter account, @TheRealStanlee.) And the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged as much when it awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2008. But he was frustrated, like all humans, by mortality.

“I want to do more movies, I want to do more television, more DVDs, more multi-sodes, I want to do more lecturing, I want to do more of everything I’m doing,” he said in “With Great Power …: The Stan Lee Story,” a 2010 television documentary. “The only problem is time. I just wish there were more time.”

In Cave in Borneo Jungle, Scientists Find Oldest Figurative Painting in the World

A cave drawing in Borneo is at least 40,000 years old, raising intriguing questions about creativity in ancient societies




By Carl Zimmer

On the wall of a cave deep in the jungles of Borneo, there is an image of a thick-bodied, spindly-legged animal, drawn in reddish ocher.
It may be a crude image. But it also is more than 40,000 years old, scientists reported on Wednesday, making this the oldest figurative art in the world.
Until now, the oldest known human-made figures were ivory sculptures found in Germany. Scientists have estimated that those figurines — of horses, birds and people — were at most 40,000 years old.
Researchers have found older man-made images, but these were abstract patterns, such as crisscrossing lines. The switch to figurative art represented an important shift in how people thought about the world around them — and possibly themselves.

The finding also demonstrates that ancient humans somehow made the creative transition at roughly the same time, in places thousands of miles apart.

“It’s essentially happening at the same time at the opposite ends of the world,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and a co-author of the report, published in the journal Nature.

Archaeologists have been discovering cave paintings and ancient sculptures for centuries, but it was only in the mid twentieth century that it became possible to precisely determine their age.

Traces of radioactive carbon are present in some types of art, and scientists gauge their age by measuring how long the carbon has been breaking down.

In the 1950s, radiocarbon dating on paintings in the Lascaux Cave in southern France showed that the images — of horses and other animals — were made 15,500 years ago.

On further investigation, the Lascaux paintings were shown to be 18,000 years old, making them the oldest artwork known at the time.

Eventually even older art came to light. Another French cave, called Chauvet, is decorated with drawings of animals that researchers estimate date back as far as 37,000 years.

In 2003, Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany discovered the ivory figurines, which turned out to be far older: up to 40,000 years old.

For years, those sculptures stood out as the oldest figurative artworks on the planet. “It was very lonely for a long time,” said Dr. Conard.

Limestone karsts in East Kalimantan, an Indonesian province of Borneo, where the cave drawings were found. CreditPindi Setiawan

Scientists suspected that still older art was out there, but radiocarbon dating has limits. Many cave paintings lack the carbon required to date them.

Moreover, the half-life of radioactive carbon is only 5,730 years. In a sample that’s 40,000 years old or older, all of the carbon required to date it may be long gone.

In recent years, scientists have developed a new dating method.

When water trickles down cave walls, it can leave behind a translucent curtain of minerals called a flowstone. If a flowstone contains uranium, it will decay steadily — and at a predictable rate — into thorium.

In 2014, Dr. Aubert and his colleagues dated the age of a flowstone that covered a picture of a pig-like animal called a babirusa in a cave in Sulawesi. They discovered that the image was at least 35,400 years old.

That ancient age stunned Dr. Aubert and his colleagues, and they grew eager to use their method on other cave art. Pindi Setiawan, an archaeologist at Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, invited Dr. Aubert and his colleagues to try it in Borneo.

Dr. Setiawan and Adhi Agus Oktaviana, of the Indonesian National Center for Archaeological Research, had spent years studying drawings in remote mountain caves there.

Getting to the site was not easy. The team had to travel upriver by boat into the rain forest, then to backpack up mountains for days, hacking a path with machetes.

Over the course of two field seasons, the researchers visited six caves. They removed bits of flowstone overlying paintings and used the samples to date the minimum age of the artwork underneath.

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The scientists discovered flowstones underneath some images, as well; these samples allowed them to determine a maximum age.

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The earliest art in the caves, the researchers found, were reddish-orange hand outlines and drawings of animals. The oldest of all was covered by a flowstone that formed 40,000 years ago.

That drawing depicts a four-legged animal that Dr. Aubert suspected was a species of wild cattle called a banteng.

Since the 40,000-year-old flowstone covers the banteng image, the artwork must be older than that — and thus the oldest known figurative art on the planet.

It’s hard to say when people first began to make these cave drawings, but one intriguing clue comes from a hand stencil. A flowstone atop it is 23,600 years old, while another underneath is 51,800 years old.

Combining the evidence from this stencil and the banteng image, it’s possible that people started making art in the Borneo caves sometime between 52,000 years ago and 40,000 years ago.

The new discovery indicates that people in Borneo were already making figurative images at the same time as people in Europe — or perhaps even thousands of years beforehand.

Now Dr. Aubert and other researchers are puzzling over what triggered these bursts of creativity.

Hand stencils, similar in style to those found with the cattle drawing, in another Indonesian cave.CreditKinez Riza

One thing is clear: Figurative art came late in the history of our species.

The oldest fossils of Homo sapiens, found in Morocco, are 300,000 years old. A study last year of genetic diversity among people today indicates that populations began diverging from one another in Africa between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago.

Today, every culture makes art of some sort, and it is likely that humans in Africa over 200,000 years ago had the capacity to create it.

But for thousands of generations, there’s no evidence that people actually made figurative art. The closest thing to it are abstract engravings etched on shells or pieces of ocher.

Only much later did our species expand out of Africa. They arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia perhaps as early as 70,000 years ago. Modern humans didn’t get to Europe until much later, about 45,000 years ago, researchers suspect.

Dr. Aubert speculated that over thousands of years, certain societies of hunter-gatherers found places with good food supplies, or developed new kinds of tools, and thus attained denser populations.

In those societies, people may have begun communicating with symbolic images and pictures.

“When they arrive at a certain place and there’s an increase in population, they make rock art,” said Dr. Aubert.

The early images and figures might have illustrated stories contained vital information for how to survive in hard times, Dr. Conard said.

Or perhaps the drawings helped joined people as a group, encouraging them to cooperate — “a kind of glue to hold these social units together,” he said.

If that’s the case, then ancient figurative art may yet turn up in other places where early humans reached dense populations, including Africa, Asia or Australia.

There are many examples of early cave art that have yet to be dated with the latest flowstone method. “They’re just everywhere,” Dr. Aubert said.

For now, however, he just wants to go back to the caves of Borneo and figure out how ancient humans made those remarkable images. Aside from their artwork, no one has found a trace of the people who once lived there.

“We want to go there and dig,” said Dr. Aubert. “We want to know who those people were. We want to know how they lived. We want to know everything.”

A researcher on Dr. Aubert's team inspecting the paintings in the caveCreditPindi Setiawan