This week, we’re tracking folk songs, counting bank tellers, studying astrophysics in a gulag, and taking our eyes off the screen.
MUSIC
Rising sun
Who wrote “House of the Rising Sun”? James Taylor Foreman follows the song from New Orleans through the American South, a region that seems to exist 45 minutes outside every major city.
When I lived in California and I told people I grew up in Louisiana, most of the time they would say, “Oh, like New Orleans!” and then tell me they would love to visit one day.
I smile and nod, happy we have a touchstone, but think, No, not like New Orleans, actually. Los Angeles feels closer to New Orleans than where I grew up. But that would start a conversation that ended with glassy eyes, so I go ahead and let them think I’m a NOLA boy.
When I was growing up, though, New Orleans didn’t feel like it was down the road. It felt like the end of the road; about as far away as you could get. It was both the center of the world, being the biggest city in my state, and also the very edge: a liminal zone full of voodoo dream totems and pushy mediums in layers of purple linen. You went there to get drunker than your parents ever need to know about or hear a fortune about a future wife who lives across a body of water with two sons from a previous marriage.
That slightly hokey and wispy spookiness of the Crescent City solidified into downright dread the day I heard that my brother died in a house in New Orleans. He was working as a line cook someplace and trying to recover from his heroin addiction. So, naturally, the radio hit “House of the Rising Sun,” which is set in a sort of mythical New Orleans, began to stick out of the background chatter of chain restaurants. I am the young brother that the singer warns to not “do what I have done.”
I always assumed The Animals (the version you probably know) wrote the song. But no. Bob Dylan? No. Woody Guthrie? No. How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec? Still no.
Who wrote The Rising Sun?
I can tell you the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It emerged like a singing ghost from the hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern and Appalachian folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains started striping the woods.
My first job out of college was a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals all across the country, mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. You just had to drive about 45 minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.
I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing (I especially liked the Alt-J version at the time), thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and a McDonald’s lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled to think we all live the same sort of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up. An older one, and one that is probably fading from memory. You can still hear it, if you have the ear for it, through the haunted chords of that song, its first singers’ voices still echoing above the burning pines, the heat beneath its wings.
A few months ago, J. D. Vance, sitting vice president of the United States, gave an interview to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. During that interview, Vance and Douthat had an interesting exchange:
Douthat: How much do you worry about the potential downsides of AI? Not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the scale of the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence? These kinds of things.
Vance: So, one, on the obsolescence point, I think the history of tech and innovation is that while it does cause job disruptions, it more often facilitates human productivity as opposed to replacing human workers. And the example I always give is the bank teller in the 1970s. There were very stark predictions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bank tellers going out of a job. Poverty and commiseration.
What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created, but they’re doing slightly different work. More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy.
I tend to think that is how this innovation happens.
There are two interesting things about what Vance said, both relating to the example that he chose about bank tellers and ATMs.
The first thing is what it tells us about who J. D. Vance is. The bank teller story—how ATMs were predicted to increase bank teller unemployment, but in fact did not—isn’t a story you’ll hear from politicians; in fact, for a long time, Barack Obama would claim, incorrectly, that ATMs had decreased the number of bank tellers, in order to suggest that the elevated unemployment rate during his presidency was due to productivity gains from technology. I’ve never heard a politician cite the bank teller story before: but I have seen the bank teller story cited in a lot of blogs. I’ve seen it cited, for example, by Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias and Freddie deBoer; and I’ve heard it, upstream of the humble bloggers, from such fine economists as Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. The story of how ATMs didn’t automate bank tellers is, indeed, something of a minor parable of the economics profession. You can see it encapsulated in this wonderful graph from the economist James Bessen:
So Vance’s choice of example tells us the same thing that his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience did, which is that J. D. Vance—however much he might like to hide it—really, really loves reading blogs.
But the other thing about the bank teller story that Vance cites is that it’s wrong. We do not, contrary to what Vance claims, have “more bank tellers today than we did when the ATM was created”: we in fact have far fewer. The story he tells Douthat might have been true in 2000 or 2005, but it hasn’t been true for years. Bank teller employment has fallen off a cliff. Here is a graph of bank teller employment since 2000:
So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible.
But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did?
A belly button mole named Boris, a college boyfriend killed on the West Side Highway, and an astrophysicist who spent a decade in the gulag convinced that time could power the stars.
My great-grandfather was a Russian Jew named Maurice, and when I was a kid, I really liked that I was a little bit Russian, but I didn’t like the name Maurice, so I named the mole in my belly button “Boris.” I’d show it off to everyone in middle school and tell them “this is the Russian part of me.”
Of course I never met Maurice, and I never had any desire to see Russia, but something in me has always tweaked in a beautiful way when I listen to traditional Russian music, and I like to think it’s Boris in my belly button rearing his head to listen. I miss it I need it I want to be inside it. Right now in my community orchestra we’re playing Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.” It’s deeply Russian so therefore I love it to the point of hyperfixation: I’m listening to it all the time, in and out of rehearsal, and even when I’m not, it’s running in the background of my head. A conductor in Florida once called the second movement a “waltz for ghosts” but it may be more true to say all waltzes are for ghosts, simply because they are music and music itself is a ghost. You can’t touch it or see it but you can feel it and you can measure those feelings in vibrations and these vibrations continue after the music stops, echoing and reverberating, reminding you: remember me.
In addition to the ghost that lives in my belly button, there’s another ghost in my life. My college boyfriend would have turned thirty-six today. His death was thirteen years ago, plus twoish weeks. He died the year after college, hit by a car on the West Side Highway. I’ve honored his death every year. For the first five years, on the day of his death, I would go up to New York City to visit the site and see his friends and family. For the next five years, I decided I didn’t need to make that trip anymore—his friends and I had fallen out of touch—so I would take the day off work and walk around the Arlington National Cemetery instead, surrounded by thousands of surrogate graves. Now I live in Wisconsin and neither option is available to me, so I walk in the woods instead. To me this day is sacred; it feels like my duty to honor him once a year, not because I’m hung up on a former lover, but because here I am, living, while someone who once meant the world to me is not. Why should it be me alive and not him? Doesn’t this mean I have no choice but to feel happy and make the most of it? Usually, by thinking of the dead, I end the day feeling lucky and grateful to be alive. But this year was different. The doctors called me on the morning of the deathiversary with some bad news.
For complicated reasons, they told me they were putting me on two aggressive forms of antibiotics simultaneously. These medicines came with a slew of precautions. Don’t run or you’ll snap a tendon. Don’t eat dairy with dinner. Don’t drink alcohol, of course, but also no soda or caffeine either. Beware the sun: You’ll break out in boils!
So I called the day a bust and told myself that was fine. Life gets in the way. I was grumpy about not running and yearned for sunshine, but a multi-day storm moved in, and I couldn’t miss a sun that wasn’t there. It was good weather to stay inside and read Russian literature (which Boris occasionally commands of me). I read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a detailed account of the brutality of the Soviet labor camp system. This is a good book to read when you’re sad. Sometimes it helps to read about things that are much sadder. Millions of people died. Millions more suffered intensely and had to live through it. At one point I wondered: what about menstruation? What would women do in those camps when they bled? But they were all so starved, there was no menstruation. Any possible terrible thing you can imagine is in this book, and worse. You put it down and realize life isn’t so bad.
The Gulag Archipelago tells many, many stories. One of these stories is of an astrophysicist named Nikolai Kozyrev. He worked at an observatory with a disgruntled grad student. For reasons unrecorded, this grad student accused everyone at the observatory of counterrevolutionary activities. Most of his colleagues died. But Kozyrev got off easy: he was sent to prison for ten years instead.
Kozyrev tried to continue his astrophysics work in isolation. But he was limited. He had no materials, no books, no ways to make experiments. He had only his thoughts and his memories. This was not enough. He was “blocked by forgotten figures,” Solzhenitsyn writes. So he prayed for help, and by a stroke of luck, he soon received a book called “A Course in Astrophysics.” (He received one book at random every ten days.) He memorized everything he could before the book was taken away, then continued theorizing the universe. Solzhenitsyn writes that he “saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the Universe—and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the passing of Time really are.”
Yes, he thought about all these things. And he was wrong.
Kozyrev came up with an idea that time creates energy, a theory he called “causal mechanics.” He believed that time’s energy was so powerful that it created stars. Yet while he was trapped in a prison cell, scientists around the world were discovering nuclear fusion, the true engine of the stars. When he was released, he refused to believe that stars were powered by fusion, and continued promoting his causal mechanics theory instead. Time not only created stars, he believed, it could be manipulated to make matter disappear; a gyroscope, for instance, would be reduced in matter as it rotated because it absorbed energy from the flow of time. He also created a set of spiral mirrors that he said could concentrate time and allow whoever was inside them to access information from the distant past or future.
He also did good work, especially earlier in his career, about the heat balance and atmosphere of nearby planets. And he maybe saw a volcano on the moon. But no one took his causal-mechanics time-as-energy theory seriously. So ultimately he was marginalized.
Yet time does have energy. Ten years in a prison has a clear, degrading power. For many prisoners, ten years could turn into twenty at the drop of a hat, and the threat of such was sufficient to keep the rest in line. There were many atrocities in the camps, interrogations and starvation and hard work and so on, but the biggest foe was time itself. It makes sense one would reach the other side and see this enemy as powerful enough to charge the sun.
Julia Hobbs, the fashion features director at British Vogue, has started The Vault, a Substack where she’ll be sharing “the secrets I would tell you if we sat next to each other in the office.”
British writer, director, and television presenter Dawn O’Porter has started a Substack where she’ll chronicle her love of “cats, cooking, caftans, books,” and more.
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
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RJ Hamster
