In today’s blog post, I’m going to be talking about the different types of mods there are on the market. There are literally hundreds of different units out there and we cannot cover them all but generally speaking there are 3 styles of mods. The 3 most common styles of mods are Pen, Regulated Mods and Mech Mods. I will go over the key difference between each style and who these styles would suit.
The first mod we’ll cover is the Pen Style mod. The Pen Style mod is the simplest and most basic style of mod available in the vape world. Most people who are looking to quit smoking will find themselves at their local tobacconist and see plenty of these style of vapes available on the shelf. The key advantages of these mods are their price point and their ease of use. These kits can usually be picked up for under $50. They look great, they fit well in the pocket, they’re simple to use and for the most part will do everything your average smoker looking to quit smoking needs.
The Pen Style mod is also seen as a “vape starter kit”. The batteries for these mods are usually built in and non-replaceable. They’ll usually come with a spare coil and a charging cable which generally plugs right into your USB port. The power of these mods is usually kept low and is regulated (we’ll touch on regulated mods next). As the battery power begins to drop, so does the vape power. Pen Style mods usually do not consume a lot of e-juice in comparison to Regulated or Mech mods.
The next style of mod in our list is the Regulated Mod, another name these mods could fall under is a Box Mod. The Regulated Mod/Box Mod is given its name due to its shape and the way it functions. Regulated means it will control and keep output power consistent. The key difference with the Regulated Mod vs the Pen Style mod is that the Regulated Mod/Box Mod will allow you to change the power output on the fly and are capable of supporting a wide range of tanks. The fitting on the top of a Regulated Mod is known as a 510 adapter. Any 510 tank will fit any 510 compatible mod.
Key benefits of the Regulated Mod are power output, which in turn provides more vapour, ability to use any compatible tank, replaceable batteries and adjustability. Most vapers who are new to the scene will not immediately find themselves using a Regulated style mod but those who turn vaping into a hobby will find themselves down this route.
Now onto the last style of mod, the Mech Mod. Short for Mechanical Mod, the Mech Mod does not have any regulation. Put it simply, the only bridge there is between the positive terminal and the negative terminal (apart from the activation switch) is the coil itself. If you’ve ever read the horror stories of vapes exploding, it’s usually a Mech Mod involved. This is because the Pen Style and Regulated Mod are both regulated whereas the Mech Mod is not. When the button is pressed, all the power is drawn by the coil to heat it up. The critical points to safely using a Mech Mod are ensuring the batteries you plan to use suitable for the coils and resistance you plan to use. If a battery depletes too quickly, it will become unstable and overheat. If the battery becomes too hot, it could be extremely dangerous. The Mech Mod world is only recommended to those who seek the knowledge of how to do it and how to do it safely.
Are there benefits to Mech Mods? To the average user, I would have to say no. The only real people who would benefit from a Mech Mod are those chasing the custom builds for the purpose they need. These are mostly users who run big coils who want to make big vape clouds with their vapes.
In summary, the key differences between the Pen Style, Regulated Mod and Mech Mod are the abilities to change settings, use different mods, or draw big power. I would recommend to most beginners, those on a budget or those who want something easy to start with the Pen Style mod. Those who want more power and flexibility would definitely go Regulated Mod/Box Mod. Leave the Mech Mod to the experts!
Happy Vaping!
All these types of starter kits are available at iVape.Sydney. Call us NOW at (02) 9597 4080 or click this button “shop”
*Vaping may be as harmful to your health as tobacco cigarettes, please conduct your own research & vape at your own risk.
Vape Store Brisbane | Call us Now (02) 9597 4080 iVape Sydney is a vape and eLiquid / eJuice supplier to both public and wholesale customers. For more information, visit our website - https://ivape.sydney/ . We service to the following areas: Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth & Sydney.
When buying vape devices from E-liquid Suppliers in Sydney NSW, it is always best to make sure that you are dealing with the legitimate ones. For sure, there are authentic sellers but always be wary for there are still many who would like to take advantage and sell fake devices. You may want to find cheap enjoyment but it will be at the cost of something much greater than your money spent.
Vendors on the streets can be very good at imitating objects that are “in”. These include sunglasses, bags, and even vaping products. If fake Prada, Versace, and Louis Vuitton have poor quality then fake vaping devices would be no different. These sellers are professional con artists, replicating or creating new brands that sell at very cheap prices, and they target those who want to be trendy yet would rather not buy from legitimate stores due to monetary reasons.
The Cardinal Rules in Purchasing Authentic Devices by E-Liquid Suppliers
Always check the price first. If it is too cheap then it could be too good to be true. Yes, there are good deals out there but always be mindful that there could be a catch.
Look for vendors who are authorized and reliable. Find sellers showing off their certificate of authenticity. That is one way of verifying that you are dealing with someone legit. You can also do a bit of research on the shop before going to them.
Be upfront, ask the seller if they are selling legitimate devices. Will they give a refund if anything goes wrong? If they answer with less than 100% do not take the risk. Authentic sellers will not shy away from you when you talk to them.
How to Deal With Counterfeit Devices
So you have gotten a vape device but notice that, as you check the package and all, there are some typos or a mismatched colouring, or anything off, you may need to think twice about continuing to use that certain product.
There is something called the authenticity code. You may be able to check with the manufacturers if your e-cigarette is legitimate or not for this has a unique identity. If the product you have received does not match with the manufacturer’s findings, the e-cig is a fake. Be careful still, for the packaging and authenticity code may be directly copied. Those are called clones and you will see the effects in the next paragraph. If you do buy a clone, the price may be the best indicator whether it is real or not.
Some vapers do not mind fake e-cigs all because it is cheap even though it does not last. A very low price should not be the determinant of why you should use imitations. In fact, there is no reason as to why you should start using them at all.
Once you realize that you have a fake device, instead of using it because you feel bad about your money going to waste, it is most wise to just throw it away. Do not risk your life for a small amount of money. You would not want to be blown up or caught on fire, some may even lead to metal gas inhalation because of its cheap components, or release toxins in the body due to quick burning of the e-juice. Never mind asking for a refund, you will just be going down a long and terrible ride.
This may seem scary to you but there are hundreds of thousands of fake e-cigarettes that are being manufactured around the globe. This is alarming because of the potential dangers it poses to the vaping community. Unfortunately, at this rate, the exact amount of e-cigarettes that are fake in the world cannot be determined.
Be Safe, Be Secure with the E-Liquid Suppliers Devices
Spot the difference between an authentic vape device and a fake one. The performance of the fake vape product will definitely take a toll on the experience you will be getting. You do not feel good while vaping? Most probably, you are not getting the right materials from the right shop.
One of the surest ways of securing only authentic products is to buy from stores that already have an established name. And one of those is iVape.Sydney the best vape shop in Sydney NSW!
Our devices are of high quality and are very legitimate. We cannot stress enough that our products are only made by the best for the best. Our endless supply of vaping products and e-liquids will keep you happy.
So hurry! Click on that “shop now” button or call us at (02) 9597 4080 and enjoy the vaping experience!
Happy vaping!
“Vaping may be as harmful to your health as tobacco cigarettes. Please conduct your own research and vape at your own risk”
Vape Juice Canberra | Call us Now (02) 9597 4080 iVape Sydney is a vape and eLiquid / eJuice supplier to both public and wholesale customers. For more information, visit our website - https://ivape.sydney/ . We service to the following areas: Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth & Sydney.
PG&E waffles on California blackouts, fueling confusion; six die as Bolivian protests continue.
Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for theVox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view theVox Sentences archivefor past editions.
The blackouts that never came
A portion of the areas Pacific Gas and Electric Company scheduled for a wildfire-prevention blackout never had the lights go out on Wednesday. [San Francisco Chronicle / Carolyn Said]
In a fourth round of blackouts scheduled by PG&E, only around 48,000 customers of the notified 300,000 were without power beginning Wednesday morning. The majority of the power outages occur within Napa and Sonoma counties. [Wall Street Journal / Talal Ansari and Jim Carlton]
Many residents were angered by the blackouts, as well as cancellations. “Ultimately, PG&E is putting the responsibility for their infrastructure on their customers,” said Troy Steinbach, a parent who stayed home with his child as he was unable to find childcare with many temporary school closures during the planned blackout. [Sacramento Bee / Michael McGough and Ryan Sabalow]
Throughout the series of blackouts, around 1,600 cell towers shut down and one county alone suffered up to $70 million in economic losses during the October blackouts. [Mother Jones / Marisa Endicott]
The fire prevention techniques often didn’t work. New brushfires were still sparked, and older ones raged on in the darkness. [Vox / Umair Irfan]
PG&E isn’t the only player at fault for the bungled attempts to control the fires. AP reports that California’s wildfire management infrastructure has built a system that fails to address causes or create a safer power supply network. [AP News / Jonathan J. Cooper]
Other Western states might soon face similar problems as California looks to export its energy infrastructure to its neighbors. [Forbes / Chuck DeVore]
Vox’s David Roberts writes that a rapid and deep reworking of California’s energy network is needed, before it’s too late. [Vox / David Roberts]
Unrest continues in Bolivia
Protesters are not satisfied by Bolivia’s interim president’s promises for a new election, amid deadly clashes with military forces. [BBC]
After protests initially broke out amid accusations of vote fixing in the most recent presidential election, President Evo Morales stepped down on November 10 and shortly thereafter fled to Mexico. [Vox / Riley Beggin]
Just a little over a week after Morales’s resignation, at least six people were killed in violence related to demonstrations. In the protests before Morales departed for Mexico, the death toll was thought to be around 30. [NPR / Laurel Wamsley]
Interim President Jeanine Áñez, a political rival to the right of Morales, is seen by many of his supporters as having deposed him in a coup. [NPR / Laurel Wamsley]
NPR’s international podcast Rough Translation takes a look at what it’s like to be in Ukraine during the impeachment scandal and the global misunderstanding of corruption. [NPR]
Massachusetts passed a strict ban on the sale of flavored tobacco and vape products, as well as requiring insurance to cover treatments to stop smoking. [Boston Globe / Matt Stout and Victoria McGrane]
2019 celebrated an abundance of incredible female rappers. Hardly any of them are up for Grammys. [Billboard / J’na Jefferson]
Israel’s Justice Ministry announced it will indict Prime Minister Netanyahu on fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. It’s an unprecedented move. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
Watch this: The destruction of the Amazon rainforest
This year, international media outlets ran headlines about the imminent danger of the Amazon fires. That was only the beginning of it. [YouTube / Sam Ellis and Ana Terra Athayde]
E Cigarette Adelaide | Call us Now (02) 9597 4080 iVape Sydney is a vape and eLiquid / eJuice supplier to both public and wholesale customers. For more information, visit our website - https://ivape.sydney/ . We service to the following areas: Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth & Sydney.
Iran imposed a nationwide internet outage after citizens flooded the streets to protest the government’s hike in oil prices. At least five people were killed in the demonstrations, which show no sign of subsiding. | ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
After protesters railed against increased fuel prices, connectivity fell to just 5 percent. The Reset podcast investigates.
Iran’s government announced on November 15, 2019, that it had plans to increase the price of fuel by at least 50 percent. The next day, Iranians took to the streets in protest. And the Iranian government reacted to its citizens organizing by shutting down the internet for the whole country.
The shutdown persisted for five days with practically every Iranian citizen lacking internet access or wireless data service. Finally, on the fifth day, Iran began restoring access in Tehran as well as in a number of provinces.
Lily Hay Newman, a senior security reporter at Wired magazine, explains on this episode of the Reset podcast that in order to get the internet to go down in the first place, the government had to get around a number of fail-safes.
“With this Iranian shutdown, which is so far beyond anything the government had done before, they likely grappled with these protective mechanisms. They would take down a portion of the network and then the network would automatically reroute around that dead portion to keep providing service. And then they would have to kind of do a whack-a-mole type situation to get it all under control.”
The “whack-a-mole situation,” as Newman describes to host Arielle Duhaime-Ross, “involves the government coordinating with internet service providers, telecoms, and infrastructure providers to actually make all of this happen.”
What this means for Iranians is that their government didn’t face a lot of resistance when it asked private companies to turn off internet access for their paying customers.
Alp Toker, the executive director of Netblocks, an NGO that monitors the governance of the internet, tells Duhaime-Ross quite frankly that he’s never seen such a “complex shutdown” before.
“We’ve been tracking a lot of shutdowns, and they are done for a lot of different reasons around the world. We always try to take the governments on good faith [and] see what they’ve done, whether there might be a justification. But, to be honest, in each case, it’s caused more harm than [good]. If it’s a protest or even a riot, switching off the Internet makes people more angry.”
Another alarming fact is that Iran might further isolate its citizens from the rest of the world through its own intranet, which the government has been developing in order to give the regime more control over what content and services people can access in the country.
According to Toker, a sovereign internet — like the one Russia was planning on building — leads to parallel internets and the loss of global connectivity.
But Newman argues that there might be an unintended benefit to the oppressive government’s total blackout. “Perhaps it could fuel even more people in the streets, going outside and saying, ‘The only way I can get information is to go talk to my neighbors [and] going to a protest.’”
So the internet’s out in Iran. And that means reporting on what’s going on within the country is a lot harder.
It’s actually in these moments that I personally realize how screwed journalists around the world would be without the web.
But there are some people out there who devote themselves to keeping track of these kinds of shutdowns — and they are a little bit more accustomed to navigating these communication obstacles and interpreting them.
One of those people is Alp Toker, the executive director of Netblocks, an NGO that monitors the governance of the internet. He’s based in London, and I asked him if he’s seen an internet shutdown like this before.
Alp Toker
Well, in short, we haven’t.
It’s been extraordinary. It’s been a complex shutdown. It’s had many facets to it. It’s also impacted a lot of people at a time of crisis in various ways. It’s just unique.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
This shutdown was actually sort of gradual. The government initially just slowed down the internet for tons of people and then actually spent 24 hours just systematically trying to shut down the internet. What does that tell us about how the government is viewing these protests? Because this was a response to the protests.
Alp Toker
Well, it stands to reason that the authorities are worried, given how extreme this measure is. It’s not something that Iran does. This is about severing connectivity at the core.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Is there a link between the intranet project Iran is reportedly working on and the protests?
Please note: This is a developing situation, so I want to be clear here that while other news organizations have reported on what Alp is about to say, it’s still really hard to know exactly what’s going on in Iran.
Alp Toker
So researchers knew that some kind of national intranet was coming. But there was no clear timeline. Would it be next year or a decade from now? And what wasn’t expected was that we might start seeing signs of the intranet during an internet shutdown that’s targeting protests.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Are we actually seeing signs of it being booted up now?
Alp Toker
All indications are that this system has been booted up. And that’s what we see from the data, from the reports, from all sources. What’s happened is: first this shutdown, but then you’ve got this network coming back online. But without the rest of the world there. So you’ve got a parallel intranet being formed in front of our eyes, where the people want to reach out but they can’t.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
This feels like big news, that Iran’s intranet is essentially its mode of communication. What we think of as the internet is essentially changing completely. That’s what you’re telling me?
Alp Toker
Right. Because now you’ve got to ask, which is a real internet? What if you have one of these or two of these? Is it the one inside Iran? Is it the one outside? What if Russia also does the same thing? Russia’s had some plans to [create] a sovereign internet and then you start developing parallel internets and you lose this global connectivity, this achievement of humanity, which has brought good but has also brought some perhaps less desirable things to the world. But that’s something we’ve all taken for granted until now. It looks like that’s changing.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Do you think the government planned things this way? Was this premeditated?
Alp Toker
It’s difficult to believe that this could be orchestrated. These protests were organic. They were caused by a specific trigger as the fuel prices rose.
A very cynical look at it might say that there was some planning. But honestly, it looks like the internet was cut. And then there was the realization that this is not good for the economy, this is not good for the situation of the country.
And [separately] there was this intranet that was being developed and it looks like that might have been switched ahead of schedule and might have enabled at scale.
So it remains to be seen how and why this is happening now. But it’s happened.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Has this happened before in a country? Is there a country that has this kind of an intranet in operation and countrywide?
Alp Toker
The only similar high-profile country that has a system like this is North Korea.
Not much is known about the network that North Korea operates, but it doesn’t have many users. It’s specifically for those privileged [few] who can access this kind of network. And it isn’t connected to the global internet. Because it’s so isolated, it’s difficult to say how similar it is to what’s happening now.
But you can look at Russia, which has been making plans for it but hasn’t activated this kind of system on a national scale.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Have other countries in other parts of the world been affected by a government-controlled internet shutdown and communications blackout like this before?
Alp Toker
A recent case is Iraq that has been cut off. First they switch off social media, then they switch off the internet completely.
And the human rights organizations are still stumped as to how many people have lost their lives. It’s created an information black hole that’s going to take years and there may not be an answer for. So that’s just one example.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Is there ever an instance where shutting down the internet is acceptable?
Back in April when Sri Lanka suffered some terrorist attacks, the government decided to shut down its internet to stop the spread of misinformation. And actually the country got a lot of praise for that.
So is it ever okay to do this kind of thing and shut down the internet?
Alp Toker
We’ve been tracking a lot of extended shutdowns, and they are done for a lot of different reasons around the world. We always try to take the governments on good faith to begin with. We try to see what they’ve done, whether there might be a justification. But to be honest, in each case, it’s caused more harm than any problem it’s aimed to solve. If it’s a protest or even a riot, switching off the internet makes people more angry.
Let’s look at the situation in Sri Lanka. There you have these devastating terror attacks. Massive loss of life. And in the aftermath, there are disputes, groups that are blaming each other. And authorities introduce a blackout. They say it will prevent these attacks. They say it will stop these attacks. The problem is there is no evidence at all that it actually stops these attacks, because at the end of the day, people still know where to go if they want to attack a group of the minority. The problem is, it just stops the reporting. So nobody knows that it’s happening. And the problem is when you need it, when that press is really there when people are dying, then you’ve already lost the only recourse you have.
Before we set up Netblocks, there were efforts to track internet shutdowns by hand or using various data sources. But a lot of this was missing — the information about how long it has lasted, what kind of disruption it’s been.
The truth is, we don’t know. We read stories, we read claims in archives that there was an internet cut. But that could have affected one city. It could have affected one street. And because the data wasn’t there. And that is lost to history.
Because you think if a country is shut down, the whole country, the world would know. But by its nature, there’s no way to record it. You don’t know if your neighbor’s offline. You don’t know if the next city is offline. You’re just out of information.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
This is actually the situation of if there’s a tree that falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Alp Toker
Absolutely. This is the technical implementation of the falling tree in the woods.
Barack Obama raised millions of dollars for the Democratic Party. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
“I don’t care” if it’s not “your perfect candidate.”
Barack Obama exhorted some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest Democratic donors to “chill” in their debate over the party’s candidates, seeking to ease the tensions among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and — most surprisingly — Elizabeth Warren.
Even if the nominee is not “your perfect candidate,” Obama said, “I don’t care.”
At a high-dollar fundraiser on Thursday nestled across the street from hiking trails winding through the Los Altos Hills in California, the former US president downplayed 2020 candidates’ differences as merely disagreements over “tactics” — even as he reiterated concerns about his party possibly going too far to the left.
“Everybody needs to chill out about the candidates,” Obama said. “But gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process and making sure that we’re hitting the ground running.”
Obama’s remarks were some of his most direct and candid of the entire Democratic campaign so far. Over hors d’oeuvres that included tea-smoked duck and red curry cornbread, Obama told about 100 donors — some of whom paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend — to put to rest any internecine party battles once the primary concluded.
“The choice is so stark and the stakes are so high that you cannot afford to be ambivalent in this race,” he said.
Obama has gingerly handled the 2020 race up until recently, when he has seemed to offer some veiled criticism of the further-left candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Obama said last week that most voters don’t want to “tear down the system.”
And though he was calling for unity, Obama reiterated some of that message on Thursday.
“When you listen to the average voter — even ones who are stalwart Democrats, are more independent or low-information voters — they don’t feel that things are working well but they’re also nervous about changes that might take away what little they have,” he said. “So there’s always a balance in politics between hope and fear.”
The event — which featured a top-ticket price of $355,000 — is expected to raise over $3 million for the Democratic National Committee. The event was hosted at the home of Karla Jurvetson, an ascendant Democratic megadonor in Silicon Valley politics. Other key fundraisers for the event included former Twitter executive Katie Jacobs Stanton and former Obama ambassador Denise Bauer.
Stephen Curry, the star point guard of the Golden State Warriors, also attended alongside his wife Ayesha, who spoke at the event.
Obama’s speech followed a call to arms by Democratic powerhouse fundraiser Amy Rao, who called on the 100 donors gathered in a cavernous living room to “give so much that it hurts.”
Obama echoed that sentiment at the conclusion of his remarks.
“If you’ve got a lot of money, give some more money. You can afford it. I know because I can afford it,” Obama said. “I see what’s happening with your companies. You can do more.”
The fifth Democratic presidential primary debate took place in Atlanta, Georgia on November 20, 2019. | Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Vox’s Today, Explained podcast covers what we learned from the November Democratic debate.
The fifth Democratic debate in the 2020 election cycle came after multiple days of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry. So, naturally, the moderators kicked off the night with the topic. Beyond impeachment, the debate didn’t feature too many robust policy conversations. But we did learn more about some of the candidates through questions about income inequality, the environment, and race. Vox’s Ella Nilsen joins host Sean Rameswaram on this episode of Today, Explained, Vox’s daily explainer podcast, to break it down.
To understand what’s behind the Pete Buttigieg surge, here’s a lightly edited transcript of Matthew Yglesias’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram.
A lot of the other main candidates in this race, they were sort of very well-known before the primaries started. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden. Those were sort of big heavyweight celebrities. Pete has really sort of had to bootstrap a campaign, like literally nobody knew who he was when he started. It seemed like a joke candidacy.
But he was incredibly available to the media, he went on all kinds of podcasts everywhere. He went on The Weeds. Then he became quite popular with donors. He raised a ton of money. And now he is running TV ads strategically in the early states. And the ads seem to be working. You know, he’s still behind, obviously, but it’s been a real kind of success story out of a very big field.
Sean Rameswaram
What’s Mayor Pete’s appeal?
Matthew Yglesias
I think something that Pete appeals to is people who like the idea of a more moderate Democrat, somebody who will not frighten the voters with radical positions, but who is still something of an outsider, something of a fresh face, right? That, you know, there’s a sense that you need somebody who is not part of this system and not part of the establishment, but also isn’t a frightening radical. At the same time, you hear incredible hostility to him from, like, members of Congress, right? Democratic Party elected officials really see him as a guy who’s like jumping in line. It offends their sensibilities as professional politicians to see somebody that young with that thin a resumé. Something on top of the polls for Iowa caucuses.
Sean Rameswaram
Is his resumé that thin? I mean, he’s a veteran. He is an elected official. He speaks more languages than your average American. Is he unqualified?
Matthew Yglesias
It’s an impressive resume, right? I mean, if you were talking about a candidate for statewide run, right? If you were talking about governor or senator, you’d say this is great. This is a young guy with a great resume. For somebody in his mid 30s, right?
But as a resumé for a president, it’s very unusual. I mean, South Bend, Indiana, is a small city, right? It’s the fourth-largest city in Indiana. And the idea of making the leap from there to the presidency with nothing in between is very unusual. Trump has obviously changed the rules of the game, but to people who have made careers in politics, right, Amy Klobuchar was district attorney and now she’s been a senator for a long time and now she’s running for president. And there’s this guy who has been mayor of a city of 100,000 people. And now he’s like, “I’m going to be president.” And it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
Sean Rameswaram
What is he actually running on?
Matthew Yglesias
He early on made a big deal out of political reform. He talked a lot about the importance of changing the filibuster, of looking at changing how the judicial system works and really emphasizing the need to democratize the political process.
Then on policy substance. You know, he’s offering what would have been considered a very progressive agenda 10 years ago but looks moderate today. And that’s a big sort of public option plan. He calls it Medicare For All Who Want It, some increased funding for college and other educational subsidies. He’s got a sort of what he calls a Douglass plan for black America. I’d say it addresses redlining, a lot of issues like that. It’s not shocking stuff, right? He’s very much from the center of the Democratic Party today. What was distinctive about him in his early presentation was really that emphasis on political reform, which he has emphasized a little bit less more recently and instead has drawn the contrast on health care with Sanders and Warren.
Sean Rameswaram
And just for the fun of it, how do you think someone like Mayor Pete matches up against Trump in a potential general election?
Matthew Yglesias
In some ways he cuts an appealing contrast with Trump, right? He’s young. He actually served in the military. He’s like a physically vigorous guy against this oldster. He’s very good, very quick on his feet. You know, good at answering extemporaneous questions. He seems knowledgeable in a way that Trump isn’t. At the same time, you know, if you’re thinking about Trump’s key electoral wins with white working-class voters in the northern Midwest, Buttigieg, you know, he will emphasize his Midwestern ties and the fact that South Bend is a post-industrial city.
But really, he’s the mayor of a college town, right? And his whole biography is in sort of elite professional circles. Right. Harvard, McKinsey. He goes back to his hometown. But he didn’t grow up there because his dad was a retired auto worker. His dad was a college professor. And you’ve got to wonder, right, does Pete have the connection with the right kind of voters to come and win? He’s he’s very weak in the primary with African Americans. And he doesn’t seem to have the persona to sort of get those white working class Obama-to-Trump switchers. At least, that would be my concern about him, more than, you know, can he go toe to toe verbally with Donald Trump? I think absolutely.
Sean Rameswaram
That being said, he is doing well in Iowa with a lot of middle-class voters.
Matthew Yglesias
In the early states where he’s advertised, he’s doing very, very well. In national polls, you know, he does well with sort of white college graduates, right. That’s sort of his core base of support. So, you know, that works in an Iowa caucus. It works potentially in a New Hampshire primary. And the question for him is going to be, can he broaden that base of support, right? If he wins in Iowa, he will get a surge of positive coverage that should give him a boost elsewhere. But how big of a boost and, in particular, can he make any kind of headway with African American voters? Because you see polls like of South Carolina where he’s getting zero percent of the black vote. And that’s not a winning strategy in a Democratic primary.
Sean Rameswaram
That being said, he’s come a long way. He’s doing well in Iowa, which is like, what, two-and-a-half months away at this point. Is there a chance that, you know, a surge in Iowa could mean that Mayor Pete’s gonna be a lot more prominent player in this race?
Matthew Yglesias
You never want to discount the guy who’s leading in the early states. That’s a big deal. It means something. It means other candidates will go after him. You know, at the same time, to keep it in perspective, right? What you really have here is a fascinating story. This guy nobody had heard of, this small city mayor getting into the conversation is much more interesting than the former Vice President kind of hanging out at 30 percent for months, but still 8 percent is not 30 percent.
Joe Biden is the guy who’s in first place. He’s been in first place. Warren and Sanders are nipping at his heels. Pete is way behind, right. The odds of him winning still seem pretty low to me. But it is the most interesting political story; how has this guy gone from nowhere to somewhere? But then the question is, can he go from somewhere to actually winning? That’s still a very uphill battle.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | Amir Levy/Getty Images
This is a huge, huge deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges relating to corruption and bribery on Thursday, according to multiple reports in the Israeli and international press.
The official announcement will come from Avichai Mandelblit, Israel’s attorney general, on Thursday afternoon. The charges are serious, relating to three cases of financial and political misconduct, and carry the possibility of jail time. This is not an idle threat: Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert got caught in a bribery scandal during his time in office in the late 2000s, and eventually served over a year in prison.
This indictment had been expected since nearly the beginning of the year. But now that it’s finally happening, the implications are absolutely massive. Netanyahu has been in office since 2009, taking over shortly after Olmert resigned in disgrace, and has become an increasingly authoritarian figure as time has gone on.
Two of the cases against him involve attempts to corruptly court the media, using policy favors to get more favorable coverage. The formal indictments represent the Israeli legal system striking back against his anti-democratic tendencies.
The announcement also came at crucial time in Israeli politics: the aftermath of an inconclusive election. Neither Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party nor its chief rival, the centrist Blue and White party, have been able to form a governing coalition. The parties had been in talks to ally with each other and form a national unity coalition, but one of the key sticking points has been Netanyahu himself. He wants to keep the top job in some capacity, while Blue and White leaders have adamantly refused to allow him to do so while an indictment is still on the table.
Now, with the indictment formally filed, it will be easier for Netanyahu’s rivals within the Likud to dump him and then join in coalition with Blue and White. So this announcement could very well spell double doom for Netanyahu: first losing his job, then losing his freedom.
Why the formal indictment is such a big deal
The indictment against Netanyahu covers three different cases.
The first, called Case 1000, involves Netanyahu and his wife Sara receiving inappropriately valuable personal gifts from Israeli-American billionaire Arnon Milchan and Australian businessman James Packer. It’s pretty garden-variety political corruption and bribery.
The second and third, Cases 2000 and 4000, involve some more insidious stuff: the abuse of the powers of office for political gain. In this respect, they’re similar to the Ukraine scandal in the US — except the quid-pro-quo is with domestic media rather than a foreign power.
In Case 2000, Netanyahu allegedly attempted to strike a deal with the owner of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper: He would pass a law limiting circulation of one of its rivals, the already pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom, in exchange for more favorable coverage in the Netanyahu-skeptical Yedioth. This scheme apparently never entered force.
In Case 4000, Netanyahu allegedly manipulated regulatory powers in order to benefit Bezeq, a major Israeli company. In exchange, the Bezeq-owned news organization Walla gave the prime minister more favorable coverage. Unlike Case 2000, this allegedly went beyond the conspiracy stage, with Netanyahu trading regulations for good press over a five-year period.
The technical charges are bribery, fraud, and breach of public trust — the former the most serious under Israeli law, and the most damaging to Netanyahu.
In full context, these allegations are even more troubling than they may appear. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel passed a law declaring that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people” — an exclusive vision of national identity that excludes Arabs and other non-Jewish minorities. It passed a law aimed at silencing NGOs that monitored the Israeli military’s human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, and attacked the independence of the judiciary.
So the media manipulation isn’t an isolated offense. It’s part of a broader pattern of authoritarian drift that has made Israeli observers quite concerned about the health of their country’s political system.
“What many of the allegations against Netanyahu point to is a systematic attempt to skew media coverage of the prime minister in his favor. And this is no piffling matter,” writes eminent Israeli journalist David Horovitz. “If a leader can line up most or even many of the ostensibly competing media organizations that cover national events reliably on his side, he can subvert their role as independent watchdog, misdirect the reading and watching public, and advance a long way toward cementing his position as prime minister — his non-term-limited position as prime minister in Israel.”
This indictment, then, represents the guardrails of Israeli democracy working as they’re supposed to: stepping in at a key time to protect the system from venal leadership.
And indeed, the timing really is vital. On Wednesday, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz announced that he had been unable to form a coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, during the time allotted to his party alone (Netanyahu’s repeated racist attacks against the leading Arab political faction, which could have joined with Gantz, did not help matters). It seems like Israel is close to having yet another election, the third in less than a year.
Amir Levy/Getty Images
Benny Gantz.
Yet there’s still a three week period in which any faction, not only Gantz’s, can attempt to form a coalition. And now the indictment might well put enough pressure on an anti-Netanyahu fashion within Likud to finally dump the long-serving prime minister. It’s kind of a natural coalition: Blue and White is more of a center-right than purely centrist party, with the biggest dividing line between it and Likud centering on Netanyahu personally and his attacks on the democratic system. Some analysts believe that the indictment might just remove the key sticking point to this solution.
“It could shuffle the cards by giving Likud cover to break with Bibi [Netanyahu],” writes Natan Sachs, the Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, adding that there’s “already a public challenge to Netanyahu in his party” from Likud MK Gideon Saar.
This is not to say Israeli democracy is out of the woods. The reason for democratic backsliding in the country are, at root, linked to its occupation of Palestinian land. Israel administers a military dictatorship in the West Bank that imposes its whim on Palestinians with little accountability, a kind of unlawfulness that corrupted democratic institutions inside legally recognized Israel territory. If it annexes part of the West Bank, as Netanyahu promised to do, then this occupation would likely become permanent — and turn into formal apartheid.
Blue and White doesn’t have a plan to end the occupation, and it seems unlikely that it even wants to put one together. It has even signaled willingness to conduct a partial annexation., revealing just how seriously we need to take the threat facing both Palestinians and Israeli liberalism. But if Netanyahu is forced out, it’s at least a rare victory for democracy.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks during a campaign stop at the Rex Theater in Manchester, New Hampshire, on November 8, 2019. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Buttigieg’s surge could to hit a major obstacle in South Carolina.
The South Bend, Indiana, mayor enjoyed an unexpectedly good start to his campaign — thanks in no small part to a wave of breathlessmedia coverage — but then faded out of the top-tier contenders. Until now.
The picture is starkly different in national polls, where Buttigieg hasn’t yet cracked double digits in the RealClearPolitics average. This discrepancy drives home a key point: Buttigieg is gaining popularity in the first two, overwhelmingly white early voting states, but he has yet to gain traction in more diverse states where Biden, Warren, and Sen. Bernie Sanders are still leading. He’s still at single digits in Nevada and South Carolina polling averages, and a recent Quinnipiac poll of South Carolina shows him at zero percent among black voters there.
Buttigieg’s campaign chalks the numbers gap up to the fact that his time spent in Iowa and New Hampshire has made his name recognition go up, and the campaign believes more time on the ground in other states will have the same effect.
“Pete has spent a lot of time in these places,” campaign spokesperson Chris Meagher told Vox. “One of the things we’ve found is the more people know Pete, the more they like him, so it’s continuing to introduce him to folks. He wasn’t a national figure. ... Pete hasn’t spent the last 20 years marinating in Washington.”
Iowa and New Hampshire are key momentum drivers, but their demographics aren’t reflective of the US as a whole. Winning the Democratic nomination rests on winning over nonwhite voters. And so far, Buttigieg has had more thana fewstumbles in his outreach attempts.
“I think it’s a trust issue, I think it’s a connectivity issue,” Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic consultant, told Vox. “He’s had continual missteps from a campaign standpoint.”
Buttigieg’s surge, briefly explained
Over the past few weeks, Buttigieg slowly and surely has been gaining polling ground in Iowa, a state he’s spending a lot of time and resources on. His campaign has 100 staffers and 20 offices in the state, and his campaign is depending on a good result there. That’s about on par with the number of Iowa staffers Warren and Biden has, and fewer than Sanders.
“I think we plan on winning Iowa,” a Buttigieg campaign staffer told Vox. “Iowa can definitely be a jumping-off point to success down the road.”
The candidate’s real polling breakthrough in Iowa came last weekend, when the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll conducted by veteran Iowa pollster Ann Selzer’s firm showed Buttigieg leading the pack at 25 percent, with Warren at 16 percent and Sanders and Biden each with 15 percent. An early November Monmouth University poll of Iowa also found him on top, albeit with a narrower lead.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Pete Buttigieg arrives at a campaign event in Dubuque, Iowa, on September 23, 2019.
Then on Tuesday, a New Hampshire poll by Saint Anselm College Survey Center showed Buttigieg suddenly in the lead in the Granite State. The New Hampshire poll had obvious caveats; it sampled 255 likely Democratic voters, and overrepresented voters who were college educated or had gone to graduate school — a demographic Buttigieg performs well with.
This is Buttigieg’s second surge since he launched his campaign, and it comes at a time when the top tier of candidates is very fluid. Buttigieg has sat in this group for the last few weeks along with Warren, Biden, and Sanders. But Biden was the frontrunner in September, Warren was the frontrunner in October, and now Buttigieg is fighting for that mantle — at least in the earliest states.
It’s worth pointing out the Buttigieg surge isn’t quite on par with Warren’s last month. He’s still in fourth place nationally, and has significant ground to make up in states that aren’t Iowa or New Hampshire.
Selzer’s main takeaway about why the top tier is constantly fluctuating is that voters are still uneasy about who can beat President Donald Trump in the general election. While Selzer’s Iowa poll showed Buttigieg is the most well-liked candidate right now, there are still concerns in the state about his general election viability.
“There’s a skittishness about the chances of these top four candidates,” she told Vox.
Buttigieg’s campaign has been building out an impressive organization in all four early states, pollsters and political experts told Vox. He’s been fundraising at a rapid clip and using that money to build out large teams in each states to be ready to capitalize on momentum if and when the dominoes start to fall.
“It’s not an apples to apples analogy, but it’s the same strategy Obama used in 2008 which is hope to do well in Iowa and then change the dynamic suddenly he’s the frontrunner, then does well in New Hampshire, and has the infrastructure to do well in Nevada,” said Jon Ralston, a Nevada political journalist and the dean of that state’s press corps.
Buttigieg is struggling with black voters
As well as Buttigieg might be doing in Iowa and New Hampshire this month, he still has a big problem: persuading black voters in South Carolina.
Multiple polls, including ones from Quinnipiac and Winthrop University, have shown Buttigieg at zero percent with South Carolina’s African American voters, who make up 60 percent of the state’s overall electorate.
Black political experts in the state told Vox that despite the Buttigieg campaign’s outreach to the community, voters are looking to black surrogates to vouch for Buttigieg personally. And so far, they’re not seeing much.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Pete Buttigieg listens to the Sunday service at the Kenneth Moore Transformation Center in Rock Hill, South Carolina on October 27, 2019.
“The questions I continue to get asked is, ‘show me some other African Americans somewhere else in America who have Pete Buttigieg’s back,’” said Anton Gunn, Obama’s 2008 South Carolina political director, who is not affiliated with any current campaign. “Where are the other leaders in South Bend? If they’re not down here regularly, then that speaks volumes.”
South Carolina state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, who has not endorsed any candidate yet, told Vox he agrees that not a lot of people have heard of Buttigieg. And what they’ve heard isn’t necessarily positive, Kimpson added. Buttigieg has apologized for how he handled race relations as mayor of South Bend, including firing the city’s black police chief, and later criticized over an officer-involved shooting of a black man named Eric Logan.
“People don’t know him, and what they do know about him is not impressive in terms of his history on African American issues,” Kimpson said. “It did not help him having to spend weeks handling a racial incident in his own city, and the media exposing his record with respect to the lack of diversity with his chief positions in his own city.”
Buttigieg’s campaign has had more stumbles in its attempt to do outreach to black voters, including using a stock photo of a woman from Kenya on its plan to address racial inequality.
Furthermore, Kimpson said momentum in Iowa and New Hampshire likely won’t move the needle much for black voters in South Carolina, unless that momentum belongs to a black candidate like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris.
“I don’t think African Americans will be swayed by what happens in New Hampshire or Iowa,” he said. “Pete Buttigieg is not Barack Obama.”
Air France CEO Anne Rigail said that flying shame has taken root in her own home. | Pascal Pavani/AFP/Getty Images
Leaders of two major airlines said this week they need to do more to fight against climate change.
Airline executives are feeling the headwinds of the growing alarm among travelers about the climate consequences of air travel — and acknowledging their industry isn’t doing enough to curb emissions.
Air France CEO Anne Rigail told the audience of the Fortune Global Forum on Monday that flying shame had taken root in her own household among her husband and children. “It’s very good because I was not at all surprised by this whole thing about ‘flight shaming’,” she said. “I think it’s our biggest challenge.”
Flights account for about 2.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and some travelers, most notably Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who gave up flying, are cutting back on flying to reduce their personal carbon footprint. The Swedes have even coined a word for flying shame: flygskam. An October survey of 6,000 travelers in the US, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom found that one in five travelers had reduced the number of flights they took in the past year.
Rigail’s remarks were followed on Wednesday by praise from Tim Clark, the president of Emirates, of the attention environmental activists like Thunberg have drawn to the problem of airline emissions.
“[W]e [in the aviation industry] aren’t doing ourselves any favours by chucking billions of tons of carbon into the air. It’s got to be dealt with,” Clark told the BBC. “I quite like Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg for having brought a real focus to the issue; a focus on the fact that we are not doing enough at the speed we should be.”
These business leaders haven’t said what they’ll do about climate change, and this week Emirates announced a $16 billion order for new aircraft. But their comments show that flying shame isn’t just a fringe movement that the industry can ignore.
Shortly before its collapse in September, airline Thomas Cook said that the environmental movement against air travel was hurting its business. Scandinavian airline SAS and Sweden’s airport authority have also reported declines in air travelers that they blame on flight shame.
Over the summer, Dutch air carrier KLM launched an environmental campaign that obliquely acknowledged the flying shame movement, encouraging customers to “fly responsibly” and to be judicious about their air travel. KLM CEO Pieter Elbers also wrote in a letter that “we invite all air travellers to make responsible decisions about flying.”
However, environmental activists aren’t united behind the message of flight shaming. Some argue that the focus on personal habits like plane travel shifts the burden away from the larger institutional changes needed among businesses and governments to combat climate change.
And while some air carriers are reporting a slowdown in ticket sales, others don’t seem to be affected at all. Finnair, for example, reported an increase in passengers this year. The overall market for air travel is poised to grow dramatically, particularly in regions like China, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Air travel is notoriously difficult to decarbonize. There are almost no alternatives to fossil-derived jet fuel that can deliver the energy density needed to cross oceans by air, at least at a price that passengers can afford. If a carbon-neutral jet existed, “we would immediately buy one”, Rigail said Monday.
The growing awareness of air travel’s impact on the environment has helped inspire a renewed push for cleaner air travel technologies — electrification, biofuels, electrofuels, and hydrogen — but these tactics may be decades away from making a dent in air travel emissions. That means there are few good options for the climate-conscious traveler in the meantime other than simply flying less.
This tension between rising air travel demand and mounting climate change concerns is creating more uncertainty for the airline industry. To help address this, the United Nations is working on setting up an emissions trading scheme for airlines to offset their contributions to climate change.
Thunberg, for her part, is currently sailing back from North America to Europe to attend the United Nations climate conference in Madrid, Spain, in December. At the meeting, groups like the European Union plan to press the airline industry to do more to limit their emissions.
Disney used to always be looking forward. These days, it increasingly only looks back.
Nobody was more nostalgic than Marcel Proust.
The French novelist’s six-volume masterwork In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a man who’s remembering his youth, and it explores how strange and unreliable memory can be. Throughout the series, the notion of “involuntary” memory is a recurring theme, but it’s particularly important in the famous “madeleine” scene.
The scene comes early in the first volume, Swann’s Way, when the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea immediately plunges the narrator into a vivid childhood memory. It’s so well-known that it remains a cultural reference point even today, more than a century after Swann’s Way was published: To say that something is your “madeleine” is shorthand for any sensory experience that brings back a flood of childhood memories (even though mounting evidence suggests that Proust’s version may have just been soggy toast).
That sensory experiences can trigger powerful memories, particularly of youth and childhood, was not a particularly earth-shattering insight on Proust’s part — lots of people have had similar episodes. And while not all of his narrator’s recollections are fond, a lot of them seem presented through a haze of affection — the reliability of which, as the narrator us himself, is a little suspect. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” he writes.
Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Marcel Proust famously wrote about madeleines as he explored the ways our memories are triggered.
Proust aptly describes the concept of nostalgia: a sentimental yearning for the past, which Merriam Webster defines, succinctly and evocatively, as “the state of being homesick.” And while we periodically recall certain moments as being worse than they actually were (I think of the 30 Rock episode in which Liz Lemon is shocked to discover that her memories of being bullied in high school are faulty, and she was the one doing the bullying), the past often takes on a rosy hue.
Time, distance, and the occasional dash of willful ignorance are effective modifiers. They’re why societies collectively hallucinate GoldenAges, and why so many people find the idea of making America “great again” appealing. It’s less about conserving the good of the past, and more about rejecting the present.
Nostalgia is not, as a mood, inherently bad. Sometimes, feeling a bit homesick is good. But when that feeling becomes our default posture, our guiding light, it starts to become ... troubling? Inhibiting, maybe? Stifling? If the past was when things were good, why bother to build a new future? Better to just keep reinventing the past.
Which brings us to Disney, and to Frozen 2.
Disney used to be a company that looked forward. These days, it seems more interested in looking back.
Disney now controls the lion’s share of the movie industry. In 2019 so far, five of the six highest-grossing films worldwide have been Disney properties; the sixth (Spider-Man: Far From Home) was a joint endeavor between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel. The company’s reach is staggering: It owns, among scores other entities, Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and as of earlier this year, the film and TV assets formerly held by 21st Century Fox — in addition to its own extensive and much-beloved back catalog, lots of which is now available to stream via the just-launched Disney+ service.
Disney is in the entertainment business. But what it’s selling isn’t entertainment, exactly — that’s just the vehicle for its real product, and that product has shifted and morphed over time. At one time, a big part of what Disney was selling was a vision of a utopian future, as you know, if you’ve been to Tomorrowland or Epcot at Walt Disney World.
In his speech at the opening day of Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney himself pointed to his vision of the park as a place where nostalgia and forward-looking inspiration could coexist: “Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”
Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
Walt Disney at the Disneyland grand opening in 1955.
But as we come to the end of this banner year for Disney, it’s clear that what the company wants to sell us, going forward, is a seemingly infinite heap of Proustian madeleines. Certainly the warm fuzzies have been one of Disney’s main exports for a long time, but some kind of tipping point was reached in 2019. Now, it seems evident that Disney sees provoking existential homesickness as its main job. Nostalgia is its real product.
Consider Toy Story 4, the fourth film in a series that debuted in November 1995. If you were 8 years old and saw Toy Story in theaters when it opened, you might have brought your own 8-year-old to see the new film earlier this year.
That’s a remarkable stretch of time, and the Toy Story series has stayed remarkably thematically coherent over that time. It’s a set of stories about the passage of time, about how nothing stays the same, about the fact that kids grow up and leave home — that’s why Toy Story 3 left parents bawling when Andy finally grew up and didn’t need his toys anymore. The toys, in a sense, are the parents’ stand-ins. And Toy Story 4, in which some of the toys opt to live a child-free life, feels an awful lot like a movie about being an empty nester, something that could render a parent munching popcorn with their third grader a bit verklempt, thinking about their own now-empty-nester parents who once took them to see Toy Story.
That’s the good kind of nostalgia. And the Toy Story series has successfully refreshed its basic premise over two decades — toys get lost, toys get found — in part through its willingness to surprise viewers, to crack jokes and be a little creepy and think outside the (toy) box with its narratives. So when we find ourselves feeling homesick, in a story about the passage of time, it works.
I think of this approach as generative nostalgia. It’s a way for Disney to use memory, to tap into the audience’s particular madeleines, to bolster the storytelling itself (and make an enormous wad of cash, too). Not every attempt lands, but when movie studios try to tap into nostalgia in order to generate fresh new stories with universal themes, to get creative with the familiar, it’s a good thing for art.
Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures
From Toy Story 4, we got Forky.
If Toy Story 4 was an example of Disney harnessing generative nostalgia, however, its so-called “live-action”remake of TheLion King was just the opposite. The film was never meant to be a standalone movie; its success was always fully dependent on the long-entrenched popularity of the 1994 animated film it recreates, in some cases shot for shot. It’s an entirely unnecessary movie — a way for Disney to test-drive high-end, lifelike CGI and get people to pay for it. And without the imaginative, sometimes visually wild artwork of the original, it falls very flat, with no new perspective on its source material.
Call it derivative nostalgia: For most audiences, The Lion King and Disney’s other live-action remakes (Aladdin was another huge hit this year) are interesting only insofar as they promise to deliver a (slightly) new spin on a beloved classic, without straying too far. We still get “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” but it’s Donald Glover and Beyoncé. A copy of the original with some of the details tweaked. That’s the appeal.
And while derivative nostalgia has its place — we rewatch our favorite movies for a reason, because we like the feelings and memories they provoke — Disney seems intent on adopting it as a modus operandi, judging from the number of remakes the company has announced. It will depend on the built-in audience of people who loved Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians to pony up for a ticket or subscribe to Disney+ and ensure these projects’ success.
But I’m convinced the urge to use your giant piles of money to endlessly replicate the past can’t be good for a culture. Certainly, human culture is cumulative; we’re always building on what came before. For millennia, storytellers have leaned on the same material, like myths and archetypes, to find new ways to tell stories. But derivative nostalgia stymies the creative impulse, miring us in the same thing over and over again and training audiences to demand the predictable. Vanilla pudding tastes good, but there’s a lot more to food than vanilla pudding.
You can witness the battle for Disney’s soul happening inside Frozen 2
These generative and derivative modes of nostalgia seem to be warring inside inside Frozen 2, which is pleasing and enjoyable even if it’s clearly designed to function as an ATM for Disney, with Frozen’s previously established fanbase acting as the bank account behind the screen. It is, thank God, no Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.
The Frozen films are aimed primarily at little girls and boys, of course — Disney’s long-running core constituency for stories about princesses and talking animals (or snowmen). But, given that the first movie came out six years ago, Frozen 2 is also for older kids. And one of the most notable things about the movie is that it’s also for their parents.
Perhaps following Pixar’s lead, the more traditional Disney Animation studio has caught onto the fact that if you want grown-ups to be happy when they take kids to the movie theater, you’ve got to make something they’ll enjoy, too. So Frozen 2 leans (more noticeably than its predecessor) into jokes the adults will appreciate, and one in particular: While the kids at my screening howled at Olaf’s slapsticky misadventures, the adults were the ones laughing as Princess Anna’s hunky boyfriend Kristoff crooned his very ’80s-sounding power ballad “Lost in the Woods.”
During a recent interview, Josh Gad (who voices Olaf) joked that the song “speaks to all of us that grew up in the ’80s.” And he’s totally right. The voice of Kristoff, Jonathan Groff, says he was surprised when the song was handed to him: “I couldn’t believe that they were going to go there,” he said, calling it “truly shocking” and later saying it has the energy of Michael Bolton. The song is about how much Kristoff needs Anna in his life; in the film, he sings it during a fantasy sequence of finding her, backed by a chorus of singing reindeer. (The official Frozen 2 soundtrack includes a version of the song by Weezer, which kind of says everything.)
As Gad pointed out, it’s definitely a sight gag for the olds in the room — the younger Gen X and older millennial parents who’ve come to see Frozen 2 with their kids, and are now being rewarded with their own extended musical joke. What’s funny about it is that the musical-style “Into the Woods” parodies was already ridiculous by the time most gen-Xers and millennials became adults; what we’re reminded of now is the sheer goofiness that was so prevalent back then, when romantic ballads were sung by guys with bad hair surrounded by unironic kitsch.
Kids born in the 21st century won’t get the joke. But Frozen 2 isn’t exclusively for them; it’s for 20th-century kids, too. In fact, though its action is set just three years after the end of Frozen, it is, like Toy Story, about the passage of time, and what it’s like to grow older. Olaf sings a song about how things don’t make sense to him now, but they will someday; Anna and Olaf reflect on how they hope everything will stay the same, even though — spoiler alert — of course, they won’t.
Walt Disney Pictures
The gang’s all back together in Frozen 2.
So Frozen 2 provokes all kinds of nostalgia. For kids who’ve already spent years dressing up as Anna and Elsa and driving their parents to distraction with “Let It Go,” the new film is a return to the happy land of Arendelle, where they’ve had many adventures. For teenagers who saw the original Frozen when they were 8 or so, but are now in high school, it’s a reminder of how far they’ve come. And for adults, it tugs on decades-old heartstrings — not just the chuckling memory of’ 80s power ballads, which might be the madeleine that reminds some of dancing at prom, but also the Disney princess stories so many of us grew up watching.
Whereas the original Frozen is a bit of an odd film — its plot structure feels a little out-of-sync with Disney’s usual storytelling, and its “true love’s kiss” comes not from a prince but a sister — Frozen 2 is much more conventional. Frozen retained some of the eerie strangeness of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale it was (very) loosely based on; Frozen 2 goes back to the usual adventure-and-return structure that has made so many classic Disney movies a success. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable.
By my lights, Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment. Disney, whatever its faults, has often been a pioneer in storytelling; now it’s resting firmly on its laurels, too often electing to spin the wheel again rather than try to reinvent it.
Nostalgia has its place. Remembering the feeling of homesickness reminds us where we came from, that we come from somewhere. But too much yearning for the past without a concomitant attempt to live in the present and push toward the future is a dangerous trap for a culture to fall into, both because it risks becoming stagnant in its art and because it may begin to to worship the past as the only place worth living in. Too much yearning for the past makes us incurious about the world. And if, as Proust wrote, the past we remember is not necessarily the one that existed, remaining stubbornly beholden to it can render us altogether incapable of dealing with the present.
The bigger Disney gets, the more it controls what most Americans — and people around the world — will see at the movies and on their TV screens, and thus it bears enormous responsibility for seeing into the future. Looking backward too much, recycling old content and relying on old formulas endlessly, becomes a snake eating its own tail.
As the endless stream of reboots and remakes and sequels and revivals that currently dominates entertainment attests, nostalgia sells. But it is also the thing most easily packaged to sell. Recycling content is the low-hanging fruit. And when Disney leans into the least creative sort of recycled content, live-action remakes — something nobody’s really asking for — it’s signaling how little it’s interested in originality.
Even when those remakes take a risk — for instance, by casting black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid— it’s worth noting how safe the “risk” really is. Being a creative leader who celebrates inclusivity means daring to build something new, and trusting the artists to draw audiences into a new story. It doesn’t mean casting new faces in old, well-trodden roles with guaranteed built-in audiences because you’re not sure audiences will turn up otherwise. It doesn’t mean defaulting to reviving your past.
Which, ironically, is something Walt Disney was determined to keep his company from doing. As quoted in the 2007 Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, he pushed for just the opposite: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Shutterstock
Iran imposed a nationwide internet outage after citizens flooded the streets to protest the government’s hike in oil prices. At least five people were killed in the demonstrations, which show no sign of subsiding. | ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images
Barack Obama raised millions of dollars for the Democratic Party. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
The fifth Democratic presidential primary debate took place in Atlanta, Georgia on November 20, 2019. | Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | Amir Levy/Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19396403/1183642285.jpg.jpg)
Amir Levy/Getty Images
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks during a campaign stop at the Rex Theater in Manchester, New Hampshire, on November 8, 2019. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19395364/GettyImages_1176693870.jpg)
Scott Olson/Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19395380/GettyImages_1178483790.jpg)
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Air France CEO Anne Rigail said that flying shame has taken root in her own home. | Pascal Pavani/AFP/Getty Images
Elsa’s back. | Walt Disney Pictures
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19396377/110141253.jpg.jpg)
Maurice Rougemont/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19396387/89541775.jpg.jpg)
Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16677350/p686_18b_cs.sel16.180.jpg)
Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19396396/frozen1.jpg)
Walt Disney Pictures