The California Sunday Magazine: She Didn't Say Yes, She Didn't Say No

DEBATE OVER the definitions of sexual consent and assault has been raging nationally for the better part of a decade. In 2014, California became the first state to mandate that universities receiving public funding use the “affirmative consent” standard in sexual misconduct hearings. Sometimes called “yes means yes,” it requires a sexual partner to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” agreement at each stage of an intimate encounter. That is a dramatic break from the past, when until a person said stop (and sometimes not even then), anything was fair game. In separate legislation, any California school district with a health class is now required to include consent education. [...]

Men who receive some form of consent education from their colleges do understand the concept, at least in theory, according to Nicole Badera, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. In interviews for a paper she presented earlier this year to the American Sociology Association, nearly all of her subjects could offer at least a rudimentary definition: both partners wanting to be doing what they’re doing. Yet when asked to describe their most recent sexual experiences in both a hookup and a relationship, they would expand their definition to encompass their behavior rather than acknowledge misconduct. Not a single student admitted to rape, not even the one whose girlfriend cried and begged for him to stop. [...]

FEW OF THE BOYS I met had ever had a substantive talk with their parents about sex, relationships, or consent. That’s typical, according to a survey of more than 3,000 high school students and young adults published earlier this year by the Making Caring Common project, which is part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. More than 60 percent of respondents had never had a single conversation with their parents about how to be sure in advance that your partner wants to be — and is comfortable — having sex with you. A similar share had never been told about “the importance of not pressuring someone to have sex with you.” Other research has found that parents are vastly more likely to talk to their daughters about sexual readiness, contraception, and disease protection, perhaps because they believe girls are more vulnerable — emotionally as well as physically — to negative consequences. But that leaves boys to learn their behavior from one another.

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The California Sunday Magazine: The Political Awakening of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley’s leaders were experiencing a rare and remarkable paroxysm of self-doubt. It wasn’t just their sense that they’d poorly deployed their wealth or that, cloistered on the West Coast, they’d misjudged the electorate. They were also coming to wonder if they’d helped create the circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook’s role in polarizing citizens by surfacing articles that reinforced their worldviews. Faced with accusations that Twitter had helped Trump set up a one-man propaganda machine, Ev Williams, the company’s co-founder, told The New York Times, “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.” As it became clearer that Silicon Valley’s incessant disruption of older industries contributed to the numbers of underemployed, underpaid Rust Belters who’d helped put Trump in office, Altman posted on Facebook, asking his friends for introductions to Trump supporters who might help him understand what had happened. He then interviewed a hundred of them. On his blog, he offered a pithy Altmanism to summarize their perspectives: “You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out. It’s Republicans, not Democrats, who will take Trump down.”

In the past, there’d been a dutiful bent to Silicon Valley’s involvement in politics. Those with means had given to the Clinton and Obama campaigns and had even lent some strategic advice — enough to make Silicon Valley a crucial fundraising stop. But besides supporting a liberal (and in some cases, libertarian) agenda, they’d left the policy details to the politicians. They lobbied for their corporate interests, of course, which sometimes intersected with mainstream issues like immigration reform. But for the most part, they thought they could fix the world’s problems better, faster outside the messy, internecine fighting of Washington, D.C. By early summer, that had changed. The CEOs of the biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google, censured Trump for his policies on immigration and climate change. Musk and Travis Kalanick, then the CEO of Uber, quit a Trump advisory council; later in the summer, after Trump’s controversial comments about violence between white nationalists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, other high-profile CEOs would do the same. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, brought on several high-profile political operators, including Obama strategist David Plouffe, George W. Bush adviser Ken Mehlman, and the research firm of Democratic pollster Joel Benenson. Zuckerberg also embarked on his own listening tour covering all 50 states. (This inspired speculation that he was eyeing a run for office, which he denied.) Zynga’s Mark Pincus announced that he and Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, had committed to invest in a project called Win the Future, for which they hoped to crowdsource an agenda through the internet, and Hoffman told the audience at a tech conference that, over time, his political spending could reach into the hundreds of millions. [...]

To Altman’s mind, the most urgent problem we’re facing — one that Trump exploited to become president — is a widening gap between the rich and the poor and, by extension, a profound feeling of disenfranchisement. He believes we should extend Medicare to people of all ages. We should make college free in exchange for civic service. He also predicts that in the future, artificial intelligence will make blue-collar jobs even scarcer and worsen inequality, at which point he thinks the government could enact a universal basic income — a regular, no-strings-attached payment to every American. The concept has become popular in Silicon Valley, both in progressive and libertarian circles, and YC Research is in the middle of a secretive pilot project in Oakland to test its potential. Altman believes that a universal basic income might be the most equitable, efficient method of expanding the social safety net “when the AI comes.” [...]

“The thing a lot of people forget is that we’ve been losing jobs at the same rate for, like, 300 years,” Altman said. He didn’t expect that rate to accelerate, at least not anytime soon, and when AI does replace some jobs, he said, people will invent new ones. But then he equivocated: Another case, he acknowledged, could be made. People used horses to transport us from place to place until cars came along. “For a while, horses found slightly different jobs,” he said, “and today there are no more jobs for horses.” For a moment, he and the entrepreneurs considered this in gloomy silence. Then he moved on. “All right,” he said. “How can I help?”

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The California Sunday Magazine: Urban Dreams

The officials wanted me to imagine this land replaced by a futuristic megacity called Amaravati. By 2035, they projected, it would be home to 11 million people and cover 3,322 square miles — ten times the area of New York City. The government had already acquired 90 percent of the land they’d need for the first major phase of the project, and as we drove farther, the fields were increasingly brown and fallow, because the government had already started paying the farmers to cease farming. [...]

Gandhi is losing this argument badly. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company has estimated that at its current rate of urbanization, India will need to build the equivalent of “a new Chicago every year.” Most of those Chicagos will materialize by expanding already existing cities. A handful will be built from scratch, and Amaravati is one of them. So why this particular Chicago, at this particular time, in this particular place? The short answer is that in 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh split in two, and the new state, called Telangana, got the capital. So what’s left of Andhra Pradesh needs a new capital city ASAP. [...]

Many have asked why Vijayawada couldn’t just have been refurbished to serve as the capital. The advantages of a “greenfield” project, as cities from scratch are called, are huge. “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness of laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasília,” the American megabuilder Robert Moses once said. “But when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Many Indian cities are currently struggling with the logistical agony of adding critical new metro lines to narrow old streets. [...]

A greenfield plan, though, also comes with no shortage of risks. Critics have pointed out that Amaravati’s chosen site is prone to flooding, unbearably hot for much of the year, and susceptible to earthquakes. These are technical problems with technical solutions. But there are much bigger risks.First is that planned cities often fail to come to life the way their planners hope. They are always a gamble — with the exception of war and space exploration, they are the costliest gamble humans make. South Korea hasn’t even finished building a $40 billion planned city called Songdo — which, like Amaravati, was conceived as a model “smart city” — and it’s already been dismissed, even by some techno-optimists, as a failure. China, despite an urbanization rate faster than India’s, has built several planned cities that are ghost towns. The danger with a planned capital is that it will be strictly administrative, without the spontaneity that makes a city thrive — an accusation that is often levied against the planned capitals India has already built.

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The California Sunday Magazine: Postcards from America

When the photo agency Magnum embarked on its Postcards from America project in 2011, it was evoking a tradition that goes back at least to the 1930s, when the Farm Security Administration hired photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks to wander back roads and big cities and document what they found. The Farm Security Administration’s aim was to chronicle the Great Depression, and it believed that the lone photographer — solitary, almost invisible — was the best instrument to portray a nation coming apart.

Magnum was responding to another economic catastrophe, one that saw, among other things, the collapse of many of the commercial outlets that once proudly assigned and published photography. But rather than dispatching photographers on their own, Magnum sent them in groups, as if they were rock bands barnstorming the country. The first group, a quintet, bought an RV and started out on May 11, 2011, from San Antonio, Texas, and arrived in Oakland two weeks later, where they mounted a pop-up show at the Starline Social Club.

Since then there have been five more excursions, and the number of photographers rotating in and out of the band has expanded to 14. The most recent project took place in the Inland Empire, the vast expanse of desert, mountains, and sprawl east of Los Angeles that encompasses the third-largest metropolitan area of California. Instead of buying an RV, Jim Goldberg, Mark Power, Moises Saman, and Alessandra Sanguinetti rented a house in San Bernardino, overlapping with one another for two weeks. As with the previous projects, they employed students from local colleges as their assistants. Then they set out to look for what Evans, Lange, and Parks were in search of 80 years ago: images of hope and desolation, beauty and despair, that might help explain what kind of country we are and might become.

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