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PS: Yeah. Maybe before you’ve even done anything, or even had a chance to do anything. And we do see a number of very smart people in fine art, who are very good at accounting for themselves. Sometimes they’re better at accounting for themselves than perhaps even producing. And oddly, in the applied arts, really nobody ever asked why. They want to know what you’re going to do, but they’re not really interested in why. And particularly with the communications design and graphics, it’s very about what, because it’s for them. Predominately, it is for them. It’s not for you. I mean, in my case, I am an exception to that, which is very unusual. That’s the work with Factory [Records]. But nobody even asked why then. I mean, Tony Wilson sometimes would ask me why, but simply out of interest. So I never had to explain myself in the early decades, even. For twenty years, I never had to explain myself. It was not until I began to reflect on what I had done, and ask myself, “Why did I do that?” And increasingly have to do interviews, or be questioned about the work, that I began to think about what I was doing. And then you begin to see who you are. And you’re right. The transposition of ideas from sector to sector, from like you said, the industrial to the cultural, that interests me. The transposition across time. These are all things that I did do.

Now, I cannot resist pointing out that two weeks ago Musk filed a Schedule 13G indicating that he had bought 9% of Twitter’s stock as a passive investment with no intention to cause a change in control. If he bought the stock to make management changes, he would have had to file a different, more detailed form, Schedule 13D. People can change their minds! But if Twitter is not now a good investment without radical changes, then why did he buy it as a passive investment two weeks ago? What changed? (Also the 13G was late.) Musk is not even gesturing in the direction of minimal compliance with securities laws at this point. This doesn’t have much to do with whether or not his bid will succeed, and I do not expect that the Securities and Exchange Commission can or will do much about it. But it is annoying!

If there was a sound to Swift’s music, it was the same sound repealing the Estate Tax makes.

Climbing to an even higher altitude, though, we might ask another question about Damore’s appeal to science: So what? Which is to say, what are we to do with not just the conclusions of the memo but also its implications? Damore is hardly the first person to use science to justify social norms or political preferences. Science has, too often in human history, been a tool for literal dehumanization as a rationale for oppression. It happened to people of African descent in America; to the poor of the Victorian era; to women in the years leading up to suffrage; and to Jews, people of nonbinary gender, Roma, people with disabilities, and so on in Nazi Germany. Historians try to wall off those ideas now—eugenics, phrenology, social Darwinism—but each, in its day, was just science. With hindsight you can see that those pursuits weren’t science, and you can aim those 20/20 lenses at Damore too. What he’s advocating is scientism—using undercooked research as coverage for answering oppression with a shrug

Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing, of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios. It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored, whether summoned by art or by the accidental enchantment of a painted advertisement for Sen-Sen, say, or Bromo-Seltzer, hidden for decades, then suddenly revealed on a brick wall when a neighboring building is torn down. In that moment, you are connected; you have placed a phone call directly into the past and heard an answering voice.