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      in Elections

      Biden and Trudeau agree to cooperate on Covid and climate change

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      In phone call, US and Canadian leaders discuss collaboration on vaccines and plan to meet next monthCanada’s Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden plan to meet next month, the prime minister’s office said, following a call between the two leaders in which they agreed to join forces to combat coronavirus in North America.The White House said in a statement that the two leaders highlighted the “strategic importance of the US-Canada relationship” and discussed cooperation on a wide-ranging agenda including combating the Covid-19 pandemic and addressing the climate crisis. Continue reading… More

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      in Elections

      Biden official involved in removal of DoJ lawyer concerned by family separations

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      The Biden administration’s acting attorney general, a longtime career official named Monty Wilkinson, took part in a controversial 2017 decision to remove a justice department (DoJ) lawyer in Texas who had raised concerns about migrant children who were being separated from their parents.Emails seen by the Guardian show that Wilkinson, who is expected to serve as acting attorney general until Judge Merrick Garland is formally confirmed by the Senate, worked with another longtime career official, Iris Lan, in reviewing complaints about Joshua Stern, a prosecutor who had told colleagues he was “disturbed” by the Trump administration’s separation policy.The policy ultimately led to the separation of about 1,550 children from their parents, hundreds of whom have still not been reunited, although Joe Biden has said he would make that one of his top priorities.Stern, who is no longer employed by the DoJ, was ultimately removed from his post as a temporary detailee, two weeks after senior officials in Texas raised concerns about him to officials in Washington DC, including Wilkinson.Wilkinson, who Biden chose to serve as acting attorney general until Garland is confirmed, had been overseeing human resources, security planning and the library at the justice department before he was elevated to serve as acting attorney general.A recent report in the New York Times suggested that Wilkinson was a trusted longtime official, and that his “low profile” all but guaranteed that he was not involved in any of the myriad scandals that defined the justice department under Donald Trump and the former attorney general Bill Barr.But a report published by the Guardian in September 2020 revealed that Wilkinson was one of several career officials who reviewed complaints that ultimately led to the removal of Stern from the western district of Texas in 2017.The report was focused on the role a senior justice department official, Iris Lan, played in reviewing those complaints. Lan had been nominated to serve in a lifetime appointment as a federal judge, but the nomination was never taken up in the Senate after a number of immigrant rights groups raised concerns about Lan following publication of the Guardian’s article.It is not clear whether Wilkinson or Lan privately supported or criticized the administration’s child separation policy when they heard about Stern’s concerns.At the time of the controversy, Wilkinson was working as director of the executive office for US attorneys, a role that he had been appointed to by Eric Holder, the former attorney general for Bill Clinton.Emails seen by the Guardian show that a DoJ official in Texas named Jose Gonzalez sent a memo to the then acting US attorney for the western district, Richard Durbin, in September 2017 in which he outlined concerns about Stern, including complaints that Stern was “particularly disturbed” by cases in which defendants could not locate their children.The western district, in El Paso, was at the time involved in a pilot program to criminally prosecute migrants who were entering the country illegally, which in turn led to people being separated from their children, sometimes indefinitely.The policy was later expanded to include all border states, but was ended following an outcry in Congress and in the press, when stories about migrant children being separated began to become known.Stern had been sent to Texas to help deal with a significant influx in migrant cases. But emails show that he was deeply concerned and alarmed about the children who were separated, and told prosecutors that the parents who were being prosecuted were “often fleeing violence in their home countries”.He also told superiors in Texas that he had been contacting agencies to try to help locate missing children. The memo detailing what was seen as Stern’s insubordination was forwarded by Durbin to Lan, who told Lan that he did not believe Stern was “fully committed to the program”. Durbin was seeking to release Stern from the detailee program early.Lan, in turn, said she was not sure about the usual protocol, and said she wanted to share the memo with Wilkinson to get his “take” before “we proceed”. Wilkinson then responded to Lan and Durbin saying that he and Durbin had talked and that Durbin was going to send more “specific examples”.Stern was sent a termination letter that ended his posting on 20 September 2017, two weeks after concerns were first raised with Lan and, later, Wilkinson.Stern has not responded to questions by the Guardian.A spokesperson for the DoJ said in a statement: “The department cannot comment on specific personnel matters. Regarding the process for detail assignments from components to US Attorneys Offices, the decision on whether to continue a detail is between the lending and receiving components. EOUSA plays an administrative role related to the associated paperwork but does not make decisions on assignments.”It did not provide further comment on who did make the decision.A DoJ spokeswoman under the Trump administration said, in response to questions for the previous Guardian article on the matter, that Lan had received the memo about Stern because of her role as a liaison to US attorneys and did not handle personnel matters.“She routed it, consistent with her role,” she said.A recent report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Justice closely examined the role some officials at the department played in Trump’s separation policy.It said department leadership knew the policy would result in children being separated from their families and that the former US attorney general Jeff Sessions “demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children”.“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the report said. More

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      in US Politics

      Pittsburgh official goes viral by rebuking Ted Cruz – and looking like Jeff Daniels

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      Rich Fitzgerald, the elected executive of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, has achieved viral internet fame – for rebuking the Republican senator Ted Cruz but also for looking remarkably like the Emmy-winning actor Jeff Daniels.
      When Joe Biden took the US back into the Paris climate accord this week, Cruz, from Texas, repeated a familiar rightwing complaint, saying the new Democratic president was “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh”.
      Such barbs have been deflected before – not least by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, who reacted to Trump’s Paris withdrawal in 2017 by committing the city to the accord’s ambitious climate-related goals.
      Fitzgerald, a Democrat who attended Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, told local TV Cruz’s tweet was “outrageous”.
      “You know,” he said, “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a climate denier. He was a Covid denier. We believe in science round here, and why Senator Cruz thinks he could tell Pittsburgh … we’re doing just fine.”
      Fitzgerald also pointed out Cruz’s role in encouraging Trump’s baseless claims that the presidential election was stolen, and his objections to electoral college results even after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, leaving five dead. Cruz nurtures presidential ambitions of his own but now faces calls for expulsion from the Senate.
      “This is a guy who was really part of the insurrection,” Fitzgerald said, “part of the denial of elections. So I don’t think this guy has any credibility. So, we’ll run what we need to do here, senator, and keep your nose out of our business.”
      Fitzgerald’s words reached a huge audience but, such are the ways of the internet, perhaps more for his distinct resemblance to the star of The Newsroom and To Kill a Mockingbird than for his appropriately Aaron Sorkin-esque decision to face down a rightwing bully.

      Jason Stapley
      (@jstaples01)
      He does have a Jeff Daniels vibe, should have ended the interview yelling this: https://t.co/sojkSlnyRL pic.twitter.com/ZcHEvtckvb

      January 22, 2021

      “Some days just shine down,” wrote Ryan Deto, a news editor for the Pittsburgh City Paper. “Rich Fitzgerald went viral for criticising Ted Cruz … then everyone on Twitter called him Jeff Daniels, and Daniels started to trend. #blessed.”
      Writing for the City Paper, Deto praised Fitzgerald’s “yinzer accent” and asked: “With his floppy mop of red hair and dad-like demeanour, who can fault anyone from making the comparison?”
      He also recounted another “humorous celebrity story” about the county executive, revealing: “A fun fact about Fitzgerald is that he once sang on stage with John Cougar Mellencamp at the Star Lake Amphitheater, just outside of Pittsburgh.
      “Jeff Daniels will never have that much yinzer cred.”
      Helpfully, in April 2019 the same paper offered readers a guide to “the yinzer vocabulary”. “Yinz”, it explained, is Pittsburgh for “y’all”. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump impeachment article to be sent to Senate on Monday, setting up trial

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      Democratic leaders announced on Friday that the article of impeachment against Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection would be transferred from the House to the Senate on Monday, setting up a trial of the former president.“The Senate will conduct a trial on the impeachment of Donald Trump,” the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said. “It will be a fair trial. But make no mistake, there will be a trial.”The move was a stunning rebuke of a proposal a day earlier by the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to delay transfer of the article and push the trial into February, to make “additional time for both sides to assemble their arguments”.Trump is the only president in history to be impeached twice. Conviction in the Senate, which would require a two-thirds majority vote, could prevent him from ever again holding public office.But in rejecting McConnell’s offer, Democrats did more than press the case against Trump. They also staked out a tough stance in an internal Senate power struggle, as the newly installed Joe Biden administration prepares to ask Republicans for support on initiatives including pandemic policy, economic relief and immigration reform.McConnell and Republicans lost control of the Senate with a double loss in runoff elections in Georgia earlier this month. But McConnell has been fighting for advantage, refusing to approve a basic power-sharing agreement in a body now split 50-50, unless Schumer promised to retain a Senate filibuster rule that enables the minority party to block legislation with only 41 votes.Schumer rejected that pitch by McConnell on Friday, too, demanding that Republicans approve the organizing agreement, which would for example grant the parties an equal number of members on each committee, with no strings attached.“Leader McConnell’s proposal is unacceptable – and it won’t be accepted,” Schumer said.The pair of forceful moves by the Democratic leadership signaled an intention to deliver on a mandate they feel they won last November and displayed an unaccustomed assertiveness after four years of Trump and McConnell.But the power plays also called more deeply into question whether Biden would benefit from any measure of Republican support as he attempts to answer multiple national crises.The most fierce Trump supporters in the Senate have threatened to hold hostage every ounce of Biden’s agenda, including cabinet appointments, unless Democrats called off the impeachment trial.“Democrats can’t have it both ways: an unconstitutional impeachment trial & Senate confirmation of the Biden administration’s national security team,” tweeted the Republican senator Ron Johnson, who until this week was chair of the homeland security committee. “They need to choose between being vindictive or staffing the administration to keep the nation safe. What will it be: revenge or security?”Johnson’s explicit threat to hold national security hostage to a political agenda was not echoed by most colleagues, and the Senate proceeded with key Biden confirmations on Friday. The body overwhelmingly confirmed Lloyd Austin as the first African American defense secretary in history by a bipartisan vote of 93-2, and the Senate finance committee unanimously advanced the nomination of Janet Yellen to be treasury secretary.While McConnell and others have expressed an openness to the charges facing Trump in his second impeachment trial, expectations are low that Democrats will find the 17 Republican votes they probably need to convict him.While the transmission of the article triggers the launching of trial proceedings, the schedule ahead remains uncertain, and is subject to negotiations. After the article of impeachment is transmitted, lawyers for Trump would be called on to submit a response from the president, and prosecutors from the House, known as impeachment managers, would submit pre-trial briefs.“I’ve been speaking to the Republican leader about the time and the duration of the trial,” Schumer said.Lawyers defending Trump will include Butch Bowers, a former justice department official recommended by Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator announced on Thursday. No lawyers from Trump’s impeachment trial last year were expected to return to his defense team.When Trump was first impeached in December 2019, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, delayed the transfer of the case to the Senate in an effort to prolong Trump’s political pain and to win concessions on how Trump’s trial would be conducted.But this time Pelosi moved quickly, her decision linked to an unusual number of moving parts with deep significance for the Biden administration and the future of the country.Democrats might have concluded that it would be a mistake to bargain for Republican support for Biden’s agenda, the top item of which is a $1.9tn Covid relief and economic recovery package.The Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine, a potential swing vote for Democrats, told reporters on Thursday that Biden’s plan was “premature”.The government watchdog group Fix Our Senate on Friday blasted McConnell for linking support for an organizing agreement in the Senate to the filibuster.“By threatening to filibuster a routine resolution that simply affirms that Democrats won the majority and can now lead committees,” said group spokesman Eli Zupnick, “Senator McConnell has made it crystal clear, to anyone with any remaining doubts, that his only goal is to undermine, delay and block the Biden agenda that the American people just voted for.” More

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      in World Politics

      The Science of Rebuilding Trust

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      During his inauguration, President Joe Biden appealed to us, American citizens, repeatedly and emphatically, to defend unity and truth against corrosion from power and profit. Fortunately, the bedrock tensions between unity, truth, power and profit have newly-discovered mathematical definitions, so their formerly mysterious interactions can now be quantified, predicted and addressed. So in strictly (deeply) scientific terms, Biden described our core problem exactly right.

      Can We Build Social Trust in an Online World?

      READ MORE

      I applaud and validate President Biden’s distillation of the problem of finding and keeping the truth, and of trusting it together. Human trust is based on high-speed neuromechanical interaction between living creatures. Other kinds of trust not based on that are fake to some degree. Lies created for money and power damage trust most of all.

      A Moment of Silence

      As Biden showed in his first act in office, the first step toward rebuilding is a moment of silence. Avoiding words, slowing down, taking time, breathing, acknowledging common grievances and recognizing a common purpose are not just human needs, but necessary algorithmic steps as well. Those are essential to setting up our common strategy and gathering the starting data that we need to make things right.

      The next step, as Biden also said, is to recognize corrupting forces such as money and power — and I would also add recognition. The third step, as I propose below, is to counter those three forces explicitly in our quest for public truth, to do the exact opposite of what money, power and careerism do, and to counter and reverse every information-processing step at which money, power and recognition might get a hold.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Instead of using one panel of famous, well-funded experts deliberating a few hours in public, employ a dozen groups of anonymous lone geniuses, each group working separately in secret for months on the same common question. Have them release their reports simultaneously in multiple media. That way, the unplanned overlap shows most of what matters and a path to resolving the rest — an idea so crazy it just might work.

      Since I’m describing how to restore democracy algorithmically, I might as well provide an example of legislation in the algorithmic language too. To convey data-processing ideas clearly, and thereby to avoid wasting time and money building a system that won’t work, technologists display our proposals using oversimplified examples that software architects like myself call “reference implementations” and which narrative architects like my partner call “tutor texts.”

      These examples are not meant to actually work, but to unambiguously show off crucial principles. In the spirit of reference implementations, I present the following legislative proposal, written to get to the truth about one particular subject but easily rewritten to find the truth about other subjects such as global warming or fake news: The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act.

      The Defend Act

      Over centuries, humankind has defended its children against physical extremes, dangerous chemicals and infectious organisms by resolute, rational application of the laws of nature via technology and medical science. Now is the time to use those same tools to defend our children’s growing nervous systems against the informational damage that presently undermines their trust in themselves, their families and their communities. Therefore, we here apply information science in order to understand how man-made communication helps and hurts the humans whom God made.

      The human race has discovered elemental universal laws governing processes from combustion to gravitation and from them created great and terrible technologies from fire and weapons to electricity grids and thermonuclear reactions. But no laws are more elemental than the laws of data and mathematics, and no technologies more universal and fast-growing than the mathematically-grounded technologies of information capture, processing and dissemination. Information science is changing the world we live in and, therefore, changing us as living, breathing human beings. How?

      The human race has dealt with challenges from its own technologies before. Slash-and-burn tactics eroded farmland; lead pipes poisoned water; city wells spread cholera; radioactivity caused cancer; refrigerants depleted ozone. And we have dealt with epidemics that propagated in weird and novel ways — both communicable diseases spread by touch, by body fluids, by insects, by behaviors, by drinking water, by food, and debilitating diseases of chemical imbalance, genetic dysregulation, immune collapse and misfolded proteins. Our science has both created and solved monumental problems.

      But just as no technology is more powerful than the information sciences, when deployed against an immature, growing, still-learning human nervous system, no toxin is more insidious than extractive or exploitive artificial information.

      The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act aims to understand first and foremost the depth and texture of the threat to growing human nervous systems in order to communicate the problem to the public at large (not to solve the problem yet). This act’s approach is based on five premises about the newly-discovered sciences of information.

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      First of all, there is an urgent global mental-health crisis tightly correlated over decades with consuming unnatural sensory inputs (such as from TV screens) and interacting in unnatural ways (such as using wireless devices). These technologies seem to undermine trust in one’s own senses and in one’s connections to others, with the youngest brains bearing the greatest hurt.

      Second, computer science understands information flowing in the real world. Numerical simulations faithfully replicate the laws of physics — of combustion, explosions, weather and gravitation — inside computers, thereby confirming we understand how nature works. Autonomous vehicles such as ocean gliders, autonomous drones, self-driving cars and walking robots, select and process signals from the outside to make trustworthy models, in order to move through the world. This neutral, technological understanding might illuminate the information flows that mature humans also use to do those same things and which growing humans use to learn how to do them.

      Third, the science of epidemiology understands the information flows of medical research. Research has discovered and countered countless dangerous chemical and biological influences through concepts like clinical trials, randomization, viral spread, dose-response curves and false positive/negative risks. These potent yet neutral medical lenses might identify the most damaging aspects of artificial sensory interactions, in preparation for countering them in the same way they have already done for lead, tar, nicotine, sugar, endocrine disruptors and so on. The specific approach will extend the existing understanding of micro-toxins and micro-injuries to include the new micro-deceptions and micro-behavioral manipulations that undermine trust.

      Fourth, the mathematics of management and communication understands the information flows of businesses. The economic spreadsheets and prediction models that presently micromanage business and market decisions worldwide can, when provided with these new metrics of human health and damage, calculate two new things. First, the most cost-effective ways to prevent and reduce damage. Second, such spreadsheets can quantify the degree to which well-accepted and legal practices of monetized influence — advertising, branding, lobbying, incentivizing, media campaigns and even threats — potentially make the information they touch untrustworthy and thereby undermine human trust.

      America has risen to great challenges before. At its inception, even before Alexis De Tocqueville praised the American communitarian can-do spirit, this country gathered its most brilliant thinkers in a Constitutional Convention. In war, it gathered them to invent and create a monster weapon. In peace, it gathered them to land on the Moon. Over time, Americans have understood and made inroads against lead poisoning, ozone destruction, polluted water, smog, acid rain, nicotine and trans-fats. Now, we need to assemble our clearest thinkers to combat the deepest damage of all: the damage to how we talk and think.

      Finally, we humans are spiritual and soulful beings. Our experiences and affections could never be captured in data or equations, whether of calorie consumption, body temperature, chemical balance or information flow. But just as we use such equations to defend our bodies against hunger, hypothermia or vitamin deficiency, we might also use them to defend against confusion, mistrust and loneliness, without in the process finding our own real lives replaced or eclipsed. In fact, if the human nervous system and soul are indeed damaged when mathematically-synthesized inputs replace real ones, then they will be freed from that unreality and that damage only when we understand which inputs help and hurt us most.

      Informational Threat

      The Defend Act tasks its teams to treat the human nervous system as an information-processing system with the same quantitative, scientific neutrality as medicine already treats us as heat-generating, oxygen-consuming, blood-pumping, self-cleaning systems. Specifically, teams are to examine human informational processing in the same computational terms used for self-driving vehicles that are also self-training and to examine our informational environments, whether man-made or God-made, in the same terms used for the “training data” consumed by such artificial foraging machines.

      An informational threat such as the present one must be met in new ways. In particular, the current threat differs from historic ones by undermining communication itself, making unbiased discussion of the problem nearly impossible in public or in subsidized scientific discourse. Thus, the first concern of the Defend Act is to insulate the process of scientific discovery from the institutional, traditional and commercial pressures that might otherwise contaminate its answers. Thus, the act aims to maximize scientific reliability and minimize commercial, traditional and political interference as follows.

      The investigation will proceed not by a single dream team of famous, respected and politically-vetted experts but by 10 separate teams of anonymous polymaths, living and working together in undisclosed locations, assembled from international scientists under international auspices; for example, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collaborate with the World Health Organization.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Each team will be tasked with producing its best version of the long-term scientific truth, that is of the same truth each other team ought to also obtain based on accepted universal principles. Teams pursuing actual scientific coherence thus ought to converge in their answers. Any team tempted to replace the law of nature with incentivized convenience would then find its results laughably out of step with the common, coherent consensus reported by the other teams.

      Choosing individual team members for intellectual flexibility and independence, rather than for fame or institutional influence, will ensure they can grasp the scope of the problem, articulate it fearlessly and transmit in their results no latent bias toward their home colleagues, institution, technology or discipline.

      Each team will contain at least two experts from each of the three information-science fields, each able to approximately understand the technical language of the others and thus collectively to understand all aspects of human informational functionality and dysfunctionality. To ensure the conclusions apply to humans everywhere, at least one-third of each team will consider themselves culturally non-American.

      Each team will operate according to the best practices of deliberative decision-making, such as those used by “deliberative democracy”: live nearby, meet in person a few hours a day over months in a quiet place and enjoy access to whatever experts and sources of information they choose to use. Their budget (about $4 million per team) will be sufficient for each to produce its report in one year, through a variety of public-facing communications media: written reports, slide decks, video recordings, private meetings and public speeches. Between the multiple team members, multiple teams and multiple media, it will be difficult for entrenched powers to downplay inconvenient truths.

      Released simultaneously, all public reports will cover four topics with a broad brush:

      1. Summarizing the informational distractions and damage one would expect in advance, based only on the mathematical principles of autonomous navigation mentioned above, including not only sensory distractions but also the cognitive load of attending to interruptions and following rules, including rules intended to improve the situation.

      2. Summarizing, as meta-studies, the general (and generally true) conclusions of scientifically reputable experimental studies and separately the general (and generally misleading) conclusions of incentivized studies.

      3. Providing guideline formulae of damage and therapy, based on straightforward technical metrics of each specific information source such as timing delay, timing uncertainty, statistical pattern, information format, etc., with which to predict the nature, timescale, duration and severity of informational damage or recuperation from it.

      4. Providing guidelines for dissemination, discussion and regulatory approaches most likely not to be undermined by pressures toward the status quo.

      Within two years of passing this act, for under $100 million dollars, the world will understand far better the human stakes of artificial input, and the best means for making our children safe from it again.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      How Amanda Gorman became the voice of a new American era

      by

      On Wednesday in Washington DC, a striking young woman stood at a podium on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by the country’s leaders, who were masked against the pandemic. She was unmasked, at a safe distance, so she could speak with resonance and force, spreading her enthusiastic vision without danger. She radiated joy, conviction and purpose as she declaimed the poem she had written to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th president of the US: The Hill We Climb. Tears sprang from the eyes of many listeners, those weary and wary from four years of domestic discord, whether they sat on folding chairs at the Capitol, or on easy chairs in their homes. Hearing her words, they felt hope for the future.That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman. She is America’s first national youth poet laureate and, at 22, she also is the youngest poet accorded the honour of delivering the presidential inaugural poem. But despite her youth, Gorman’s assurance and bearing made her seem to stand outside time. Erect as a statue, her skin gleaming as if burnished, her hair cornrowed, banded with gold and drawn tightly back into a red satin Prada headband, worn high like a tiara, she evoked what poet Kae Tempest calls the “Brand New Ancients”: the divinity that walks among us in the present day. According to Greek mythology, nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, inspire creative endeavour, with five devoted to different kinds of poetry – epic, romantic, lyric, comic or pastoral and sacred. Gorman suggested a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.Gorman told the New York Times that she had not wanted to dwell on the rancour, racism and division of America’s four years under the Trump administration: she wanted to “use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal”. That way would require action, her poem declares: “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.”Gorman knows the importance of taking action to make the change you want to see. Raised in Los Angeles by a single mother, Joan Wicks, a middle-school English teacher, Gorman overcame daunting obstacles to forge her path. Amanda and her twin sister Gabrielle, an activist and filmmaker, were born prematurely. In kindergarten, the future poet was diagnosed with an auditory disorder that gave her a speech impediment. When she was in third grade, a teacher introduced her to poetry, and it was through writing and reciting poetry that she found her voice. She found a role model in the poet Maya Angelou, whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings reminded her of her own life, she remarked in one interview: “[Angelou] overcame years of not speaking up for herself, all for the love of poetry.”Gorman has presidential plans. ‘I am working on hashtags,’ she told the Harvard Gazette. ‘Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar’As Gorman struggled to improve her spoken fluency, she also strove for social justice. For her, it was clear from the start that expression was to be both poetic and political. In 2014, at the age of 16, she founded a non-profit organisation to support poetry workshops and youth advocacy leadership skills, called One Pen One Page. The following year, she published her first poetry book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, and went to Harvard to study sociology. (She graduated in 2020.) Her clarity of expression received a turbo boost from musical theatre while she was in college, with the arrival of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, whose lyrics she memorised and recited (the song Aaron Burr, Sir helped her pronounce her “R”s, she has said).In the spring of her sophomore year in 2017, she was named America’s first national youth poet laureate, an honour that took her and her poetry to public events across the country. At one of these, held at the Library of Congress, Dr Jill Biden heard her read a poem she had written in the wake of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, titled In This Place (An American Lyric). Three years later, Biden, as first lady-elect, suggested the young poet for the inaugural honour.In the first week of January, Gorman was halfway through writing The Hill We Climb when a mob of angry Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in an attempt to violently overturn the election result. She finished the poem in the hours after the melee, undeterred, with that jarring tumult as backdrop.On inauguration day, Gorman wore a ring depicting a caged bird, a gift from Oprah Winfrey that attests to the link the young poet represents between the past and the future. It not only summoned thoughts of the poet’s first inspiration, Angelou; it reminded anyone looking for portents that Angelou, as the US poet laureate, had also recited a poem to a new president on the Capitol steps: Bill Clinton, in 1993. One day, Gorman may be the audience, not the author, of such a poem: she has presidential plans. “I am working on hashtags,” she told the Harvard Gazette. “Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar.” The last lines of The Hill We Climb, containing an intended echo of Miranda’s Hamilton, constitute a poetic battle cry: “We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”Her words not only electrified Washington, they have prompted a surge of admiration in the public at large. That same day, her two forthcoming books were Amazon’s top two bestsellers. Instagram feeds flash continuously with images of her triumphal stand at the Capitol; op-eds across the country have called for poetry education programmes in schools, and television news broadcast highlights of her performance hour after hour – lyric adrenaline bursts to reanimate democracy.Gorman has appeared on many of these news programmes. On one, Good Morning America on ABC, Miranda made a surprise appearance to congratulate her. “The right words in the right order can change the world; and you proved that yesterday,” he told her. “Keep changing the world, one word at a time.”As if anyone could stop her. As she writes in her forthcoming book, Change Sings:
      I can hear change hummingIn its loudest, proudest song.I don’t fear change coming,And so I sing along. More

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      in Elections

      Inauguration week: tears, rage and a brief feeling of fondness for George W Bush | Emma Brockes

      by

      Monday
      It’s a subdued Martin Luther King Day in the US, and we take a bus across town to visit MoMA. I haven’t been to the modern art museum in New York since before my children were born and this feels like the week for it. Everyone is jittery about the inauguration on Wednesday, about news of the Covid death count hitting 400,000 in the US and about American democracy under strain. Perhaps art will lift us.
      It is odd to get cabin fever in a city of 8.5 million people, but that is how New York feels right now; stagnant, airless, expectant. A friend recently flew to LA for work, something I used to hate and now regard with intense jealousy. I turn to my sluggish children, complaining their legs hurt before we’ve even reached the museum, and give them a version of the pep talk about New York from the end of Meet Me in St Louis: “Everybody dreams of going there, but we’re luckier than lots of families because we’re really going!” Or in our case, we’re already here. “Aren’t we lucky?” I trill. Flat looks of contempt all round and a refusal to go up the stairs to look at the impressionists.
      There are other things to enjoy at MoMA. The half-tyre thing embedded in the floor with bottles on top of it. The shiny prism things hanging off the ceiling. The rock things in a heap. The fibreglass mermaid. We stop in front of a large screen and too late I remember the effect of video installation on my wellbeing. This one features a two-second clip of Wonder Woman – Linda Carter’s original from the 80s TV show – stepping forward and back, over and over on a loop. My children stop, excited, before getting the measure of the thing and turning to me in baffled rage. “What is this?” they demand. I shrug. Things repeat; the fictions we tell ourselves doom us to endless circularity; even superheroes get stuck in a rut. “What can I tell you, it’s art.”
      Tuesday
      It’s a week of renewal, hope, regeneration and moving on, by which, of course, I refer not to the inauguration of Joe Biden but to Ben Affleck throwing out a lifesize cardboard cutout of his ex-girlfriend, Ana de Armas. As the Daily Mail reports on Tuesday, after happening upon the event via long lens, the cardboard figure is so awkward a shape for general rubbish disposal that it takes “two grown men” – neither of them Affleck, although for a short, heady period there is speculation one might be his brother Casey (it isn’t) – to get rid of it.
      It is the second story of the week to feature a middle-aged male movie star gone to seed, the other, of course, being Russell Crowe, who became tetchy with a fan on Twitter after he criticised Crowe’s almost 20-year-old movie Master and Commander. It’s a great movie and I’m 100% Team Crowe, who when photographed in Sydney, heaving himself about the tennis court, has – forgive me – a vague look of Steffi Graff about him that I’ve never quite been able to resist. If not entirely in on the joke, Crowe is at least self-mocking enough to absorb it.
      Affleck, on the other hand, seems a man not remotely in touch with his preposterousness. Mocked for looking unhappy in trunks or carrying a tray of iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts with insufficient dignity, he is condemned to serve out his days as the butt of endless dopey memes. You could, if you tried hard, probably work up some observations about the American soul via Affleck, but perhaps that’s one to park for less feverish times. More