📈 first Derivative [98]
📈 first Derivative [98]
Atrocities in Israel — new cities — death of a philanthropist — grand strategy — A24 offroad
Last issue, I wrote a bit about the nature of celebrity and specifically about how MrBeast monetizes his audience. Now you can see his Feastable logo as a sponsored jersey patch for the Charlotte Hornets, something usually reserved for large corporate sponsors (thanks Roger C. for sending my way).
Good reading,
-Teddy
🇮🇱🇵🇸 Hard to know where to start on Hamas’ attack on Israel left weekend that killed over 1,300 Israelis and wounded over 3,300 with an estimated 150 Israelis now taken hostage, an action that will likely “change the Middle East”. Some selected reading:
Here’s an X thread of some early footage of the attack. Mainly videos of Hamas infiltrating Israel, not as much graphic carnage fyi.
An ongoing archive of testimonies from survivors of the attack.
Accounts from the massacre at an Israeli music festival near the Gaza border:
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
A notable account from the kibbutz of Be’eri:
The kibbutz of Be’eri came under fire from rockets around dawn on Saturday. Local resident Golan Abitbol grabbed his handgun and told his wife and four children to get inside the fortified shelter room of their house. His wife, Hagit, pleaded with him to join them. “I can’t, it is my duty,” she said he told her.
The family spent 20 agonizing hours in the shelter, not knowing how Abitbol, a pharmaceutical consultant who had served in the army, was faring outside. They knew through mobile-phone chat groups that Hamas militants had entered their community and begun a house-to-house killing rampage. Only at 2 a.m. the next day, when Israeli soldiers arrived at their house, was the family reunited.
Eric Levitz wrote a powerful piece in New York magazine in reaction to displays of sympathy towards the Hamas attack among many left-leaning groups:
Meanwhile, although many aspects of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians can be justifiably described as neocolonial, analogies between the conflict and paradigmatic anti-colonial struggles can be misleading. This is not Algeria, and the Israelis aren’t the pied-noirs. Much of Israel’s Jewish population descends from people who were expelled from other Middle Eastern countries; which is to say, people who suffered the same sort of dispossession endured by the Palestinians. These people did not have anywhere else to seek refuge. And their grandchildren do not have any metropole to return to. The idea that they deserve to be shot to death while dancing because they were born in Israel, or for the crimes of a government many actively opposed, is hateful.
In the present context, pointedly refusing to condemn Hamas’s atrocities might help a leftist to perform a more radical solidarity than squishy liberals can muster and thus win some points in a subcultural status game. But doing so will make it harder for them to actually advance their ostensible aims.
The Israeli government will not honor the legal and moral rights of Palestinians absent concerted international pressure. And mounting such pressure requires a progressive movement with the moral authority to challenge popular narratives about the conflict that elide the crimes of the Israeli state.
There’s been conflicting reports about Iran’s complicity in planning this attack, although their ongoing support for Hamas has been long-documented.
A profile on Hamas’ secretive military commander, Mohammed Deif.
Born in Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, between 1963 and 1965, according to the U.S. government, Deif was one of the early members of the militant wing of Hamas, which emerged in the 1980s as an offshoot of the Egyptian political movement Muslim Brotherhood. The brigade is named for Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian-born Muslim preacher who fought French and British colonial rule at the start of the last century and later against the establishment of a home for Jews in Palestine, dying at the hands of British forces in 1935.
Reporting on the attack as a colossal failure of Israeli intelligence and military planning, and contested reports of early warnings from Egyptian intelligence.
On the public reaction in Israel towards the government (given the attack happened when Israel was already experience a critical moment of civil division):
Four out of five Jewish Israelis believe the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are to blame for the mass infiltration of Hamas terrorists into Israel and the massacre that followed…
Furthermore, almost all the respondents (94%) believe the government must bear some responsibility for the lack of security preparedness that led to the assault, with over 75% saying the government holds most of the responsibility. The survey, which polled 620 Israeli Jews from across the country, also found that a majority of respondents believed Netanyahu should resign following the conclusion of Operation Swords of Iron.
A slim majority of 56% said Netanyahu must resign at the end of the war, with 28% of coalition voters agreeing with this view, and 52% of respondents also expect Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to resign.
Controversial initial actions in Israel’s response that have been criticized as unlawful and immoral collective punishment on the entire Gazan population:
As fighting raged on, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said he had ordered Gaza’s “complete siege”.
He added: “There will be no electricity, food or fuel [delivered to Gaza]. We are fighting barbaric [terrorists] and will respond accordingly.”
The Israeli government said it had ordered the cut-off of water to Gaza, a densely populated, hemmed-in strip of land that is home to 2.3mn people.
The UN estimates that 423,000 people in Gaza have already been displaced by the retaliatory Israeli missile strikes that have killed an estimated 1,500 Gazans and wounded 6,000 (including militants). Israel has ordered civilians to evacuate the northern section of the Gaza Strip, home to 1.1 million people, likely ahead of a long and ugly ground war.
An X thread of some videos of the destruction in Gaza.
Early reporting from Gaza amidst the ongoing strikes:
“We all came out, my sister, my brother, my mother and me. We were all here on the ground and we were all injured. We called for an ambulance and when it came, they struck the ambulance,” he said, describing how his family fled an airstrike the night before.
“Forget human rights, we don’t even have animal rights,” he said.
On the border situation and options left for Gazan refugees fleeing the renewed conflict:
But that journey is perilous and may be pointless. Not only do the Palestinians fleeing south run the gauntlet of Israeli bombs, but they also risk the wrath of Hamas. The terrorist group has closed the border in the past, and although it handed over control of the crossing to the Palestinian Authority five years ago, its gunmen keep an eye on comings and goings —and are not above exemplary executions to frighten the populace.
Those who brave the risks to get to Rafah can’t be sure of any rewards. The Egyptian authorities have closed their side of the crossing to prevent the Palestinians from breaking out. Although the Biden administration is pressing for it to be reopened, the regime of General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi is loath to take on the responsibility of hosting thousands of refugees.
Interesting interview in The New Yorker, by Isaac Chotiner with Tareq Baconi on the future prospects of the Palestinian political project.
🏗🌇 A consortium of tech industry moguls have spent over $800 million to buy land in Solano County, California in a bid to build a new city in the Bay Area.
The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.
He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
In at time where we’re seeing more experimental thinking on human development, it’s refreshing to see commitment to just building new cities. Not surprisingly, Marc Andreessen is an investor. Time to build, indeed.
🪦 Charles Feeney, a self-made billionaire who anonymously gave away almost all of his $8 billion fortune while he was alive, dies at 92.
But his name appeared on none of the 1,000 buildings on five continents that he gave $2.7 billion to fund. Grants to institutions and individuals were paid by cashier’s checks to conceal the source. Beneficiaries were told that the money came from a generous “client” who wished to remain anonymous. Those who learned his identity were told not to reveal his involvement.
Feeney made his fortune setting up Duty Free Shoppers which I’m sure all of you have seen in most airports. And I’m pretty sure General Atlantic started out at as the vehicle for his venture investing.
Mr. Feeney’s was a life of remarkable contrasts. Raised in New Jersey by Roman Catholic working-class parents who struggled during the Depression, he served in the Air Force, studied hotel management in college and got into the duty-free shopping business by selling liquor, cigarettes and perfume to homeward-bound American servicemen in Europe in the 1950s.
The business went global. Profits were enormous. By the early 1980s he was plowing tax-free annual dividends of $35 million into hotels, land deals, retail shops and clothing companies. He later invested in tech start-ups and multiplied his income exponentially. By age 50, he had palatial homes in New York, London, Paris, Honolulu, San Francisco and Aspen, Colo., and on the French Riviera.
A very Patrick Leigh Fermor-ish anecdote, of another era:
Unsure where he wanted to work after graduating from Cornell in 1956, he sailed on a Cunard liner to France and took courses at the Sorbonne in Paris and at a university in Grenoble. Noticing that it was hard to hitch rides in southern Europe, he began holding up a sign reading “English conversations offered.” Cars started stopping for him.
🌎 A sweeping interview with Edward Luttwak on American grand strategy touching on China, Russia, America’s domestic cultural conflicts, Mexico, etc.
🇨🇳 On China:
You have India, which has all kinds of shortcomings, but practically speaking, it is the only ally we have that ties down PLA forces. There are at least 80,000 PLA troops active on the Indian border. India was trying desperately hard to stay neutral in this conflict, but the Chinese had to kick the Indians in the face until they became our allies. So China gave us India.
Japan wavered briefly, but at the worst possible moment the Chinese chose to raise the Senkaku issue. The Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan, are basically uninhabited – just about a mile and a half across. But China chose to dispute Japan’s control of the islands, precisely when the Japanese government was wavering for the first time since 1945. And so we got Japan.
🇷🇺 On Russia:
In fact, if the Russian Federation were to break down, we would immediately lose Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. They would all go to China. China would then become a country that has every known mineral and huge amounts of space. It would become dramatically more self-sufficient rather than be dependent on the importation of food and fuel.
Russia, on the other hand, is a power that is constrained. But we cannot have them win, even though Ukraine cannot win, either. We must find a way to a compromise. My suggestion would be to have plebiscites in the two contested regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, based on 1919 plebiscites.
🎬🍿 Recently valued at $2.5 billion, A24 is looking to expand into “action and big IP projects” and is “deemphasizing the traditional character/auteur driven dramas”.
A24 wouldn’t be the first indie-driven/auteur studio to pivot to more commercial fare. Miramax, The Weinstein Company, Annapurna and Paramount Vantage all attempted to shift their focus after successful runs of auteur fare. Although Paramount Vantage achieved critical acclaim, the studio consistently fell short of the financial expectations set by parent company Paramount Pictures. Only “No Country for Old Men,” a co-production between Paramount Vantage and Miramax, managed to turn a profit. Several other films, which many believed had the potential for substantial returns, failed to do so due to ineffective or excessive marketing strategies, according to the Los Angeles Times…
Not entirely surprising news, and reminds me a bit of what I wrote about last issue on the Michelin Guide. A24 has for a while been on the trajectory toward something more like the “mass luxury” of film with moves like its Euphoria-inspired makeup line and it’s fan membership club. It’s been a while since the Elara hat replaced the A24 hat as cinephile shibboleth and companies like Neon have moved in on the rarified haute indie space A24 once dominated. But as a business decision, it makes a lot of sense to be Ralph Lauren instead of Brunello Cucinelli.
Still, one of A24’s biggest assets is that when you sit down to watch a movie and its logo comes on, you have a good idea of what you’re going to get. It’s probably why you decided to watch in the first place. For the average consumer, you can’t say that about really any other label except maybe Blumhouse. Even though A24 plans to continue making its traditional indie fare, the question is if that A24 brand will still mean something specific enough or whether that invaluable brand asset will be diluted by the company’s expansion.
There is, for better or worse, a sense that A24 is a stepping stone. It’s where some filmmakers begin but never return — Greta Gerwig made “Lady Bird” there before moving to Sony for “Little Women” and Warner Bros. for “Barbie.” Eggers, too, has decamped for Universal, where he made “The Northman” and his upcoming “Nosferatu” remake.
What will be key, in this next era of A24, is to retain more of the cutting-edge filmmakers, give them bigger budgets and support them in a way that encourages a more commercial approach.