Artificial Intelligence is driving the next generation of jobs in the UK – Information Age

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The UK job market will drastically change in the coming years, with 133 million new jobs expected to be created globally, as industries adopt AI

The next generation of jobs in the UK will be determined by artificial intelligence.

As artificial intelligence continues to pervade a range of industries, the next generation of jobs is on the horizon.

In the UK alone, up to a third of jobs will be automated or likely to change as a result of the emergence of AI impacting 10.5 million workers, according to the latest report from global recruiter Robert Walters and market analysis experts Vacancy Soft.

As businesses become ever more reliant on AI, there is an increasing amount of pressure on the processes of data capture and integration. As a result, we have seen an unprecedented number of roles being created with data skill-set at their core, said Ollie Sexton, principal at Robert Walters.

Our job force cannot afford to not get to grips with data and digitalisation. Since 2015 the volume of data created worldwide has more than doubled increasing (on average) by 28% year-on-year.

Now is the perfect time to start honing UK talent for the next generation of AI-influenced jobs. If you look at the statistics in this report we can see that demand is already rife, what we are at risk of is a shortage of talent and skills.

The chorus of voices claiming that AI wont destroy jobs is getting louder. Read here

IT professionals dedicated to data management appeared to be the fastest growing area within large or global entities, with volumes increasing ten-fold in three years an increase in vacancies of 160% since 2015. And in general, data roles across businesses have increased by 80% since 2015 with key areas of growth including data scientists and engineers.

The emergence of the data scientist as a mainstream profession is perhaps the most interesting development, with job vacancies increasing by a staggering 110% year-on-year. The same trend can be seen with data engineers, averaging 86% year-on-year job growth.

Data scientists are in high demand, as companies look to take advantage of their data. But what exactly does the role entail? Read here

The rise of cybercrime has resulted in professional services particularly within banking and financial services hiring aggressively for information security professionals since 2016. Since then, however, volumes have held steady.

Within professional services, vacancies for data analysts (+19.5%), data managers (+64.2%), data scientists (+28.8) and data engineers (+62%) have all increased year-on-year.

1. Agriculture2. Business Support3. Customer Experience4. Energy5. Healthcare6. Intellectual Property7. IT Service Management8. Manufacturing9. Technical Support10. Retail11. Software Development

Tom Chambers, manager Advanced Analytics and Engineering at Robert Walters, explained that this uptake of AI across multiple industries is bringing about rapid change, but with that opportunity.

He said: Particularly, we are seeing retail, professional services and technology industries strive to develop digital products and services that are digitally engaging, secure and instantaneous for the customer leading to huge waves of recruitment of professionals who are skilled in implementing, monitoring and gaining the desired output from facial recognition, check-out free retail and computer vision, among other automation technologies.

Similarly, experimental AI is making huge breakthroughs in the healthcare industry, with the power to replace the need for human, expert diagnoses.

What we are seeing is from those businesses that are prepared to invest heavily in AI and data analytics, is they are already outperforming their competitors and so demand for talent in this area shows no signs of wavering.

Finding talent for those hard-to-fill AI jobs

AI will drive productivity not threaten workers jobs

CTOs must be clear that AI doesnt replace jobs, it makes them more strategic

The jobs artificial intelligence will take over first

UK tech sector leads Europe in AI but what about the rest of the world?

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Artificial Intelligence is driving the next generation of jobs in the UK - Information Age

Pope Francis on artificial intelligence: Does it really risk barbarism? – Verdict

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At The Common Good in the Digital Age conference last weekend, Pope Francis warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could, if unchecked by ethics, become an enemy of the common good.

But is his assessment of AI as a potential new barbarism a fair one?

The Common Good in the Digital Age was a three-day conference held at the end of September in the Vatican, which saw academics and religious authorities discuss the social, ethical and political implications of recent technological developments.

As part of the conference, Pope Francis addressed diplomats, financiers and tech company executives, warning that the rush to develop artificial intelligence must also be accompanied with ethical evaluations of the common good to mitigate the risk of increasing social inequality.

In his speech, Pope Francis said:

If technological advancement became the cause of increasingly evident inequalities, it would not be true and real progress.

If mankinds so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest.

But is that a fair assessment? According to Tech Nation applied AI lead Harry Davies, to some extent, yes.

Pope Francis is right to raise concerns about the social implications of technology, particularly AI, he said.

Whenever we utilise any new technology, there is a spectrum of possible outcomes some good, some bad but the potentially vast impact of AI upon society coupled with an exponential rate of changemean that we must endeavour to treat developments in AI with real responsibility.

Artificial intelligence has a great deal of potential to work toward the common good Pope Francis mentioned, mitigating human error and making everyday operations safer across a number of sectors.

AI has applications in multiple financial infrastructures, ranging from mundane interactions to multinational industries. In March 2019 the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) launched the UKs first National Data Repository, which uses AI to interpret over 130TB of reservoir and infrastructure data to support the UKs energy transition efforts.

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The medical sector could also benefit greatly from AI. Artificial intelligence algorithms have the potential to detect useful patterns based on millions of data points to help detect signs of disease early, and could assist in the development of new technologies and cures through analysing data faster than any human could.

The development of AI has raised concerns about job loss and redundancy, but recent data suggests that the rise of AI could create jobs. The demand for AI comes with a demand for data scientists and engineers, and vacancies for these jobs have increased considerably in recent years.

The Harnessing the Power of AI: The Demand for Future Skillsreport, produced by global recruitment agency Robert Walters and market analysis company Vacancy Soft, predicts that the uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to create 133 million new jobs globally and drastically change the UK job market.

Popular fear of AI and its algorithms reflects not only concerns about job loss, but also widespread anxiety that simply being human will lose value as our lives become patterned according to programs that tell us what we like and what to do, and over which we have no control, says Guido Joure, CDO of Swedish technology multinational ABB.

I see things in a far more positive light. I work with AI every day, sometimes in the lab but more often in factories, the high seas, remote mines, the ocean floor, aircraft aloft, city transit systems, wilderness power stations and ordinary offices.

Rather than a menace to humanity, I believe artificial intelligence represents a potential path to an upgrade that could be called HumAIn.

This view is echoed by Davies.

Though meant as a warning, not a proclamation of where we aretoday, it is premature to suggest that we are entering a new age of barbarism, he says.

For every opportunist, there are well-intentioned people building AI products that powerfully make the world a better place, be it diagnosing cancer earlier, combatting misinformation and fake news, or using AI to solve climate change. We must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Equally, the oft floated criticism of huge job losses and mass inequality is not a forgone conclusion, though to avoid this scenario will require thorough thinking, reasoned debate, and creative ways of rethinking our approach to education and the economy.

Despite the potential of AI to work for the common good, the technology still has its limitations as well as the ability to reinforce existing social inequalities without careful scrutiny and supervision.

Like so many of the great challenges of our time climate change, ageing, and others this feels an inherently political one. Supranational and global cooperation will be paramount to avoid the race to the bottom that Pope Francis highlights, where countries and corporations cut corners to stay ahead, says Davies.

This is not just theoretical. We already see the effects of malevolent technology where implemented in our society, be it the deep fakes he highlights, pernicious uses of facial technology, and we all know the story of Cambridge Analytica.

Artificial intelligence algorithms can cause problems through lacking human context. In June 2019 Ubers AI algorithm sparked outrage by increasing trip prices during the terror attack on London Bridge, and YouTubes content algorithms have been the subject of much debate for their propensity to recommend provocative and extremist content.

As well as problems caused by a lack of human insight, AI created by humans can in turn reflect human biases.

Artificial intelligence being deployed in sectors such as employment, the justice system or even medicine could internalise and reinforce prejudices from their human programmers, with these biased calculations being given additional weight through preconceptions of AI as more objective than their human counterparts.

Increasing the influence of AI on society could also make a number of financial and social infrastructures vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and putting machine-learning algorithms in charge of important administrative duties could pose a threat to the common good if the AIs learning process is exploited.

Ethics in Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic, but its not necessarily a new topic, since AI can trace its roots back to 1956, says Simon Driscoll, dataand intelligence practice lead at IT services provider NTT Data UK.

As the use of AI becomes more prevalent, and in order to ensure that it is accepted in society, its important that the decision-making process is open, moral and explainable if it is to be trusted and accepted by humans.

Artificial Intelligence is founded on data it can only learn from the data its given, and it can only keep on learning if the data it receives continues to be good.

If an AI-enabled machine makes a decision, there has to be a reason that can be rationalised by the person who created it and if any bias has seeped into this process, it is the human who is to blame, rather than the AI itself. Reliable and trustworthy data, validated by a human, is therefore a key requirement to ensure AI remains morally correct and useful in the future.

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Pope Francis on artificial intelligence: Does it really risk barbarism? - Verdict

New Artificial Intelligence Tool Will Show Nonprofits What’s Working and What’s Not – PRNewswire

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HEALDSBURG, Calif., Oct. 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --TheGlobal Center of Nonprofit Excellence announced today the release of an innovative tool for nonprofits called OpX360. Combining nonprofit best practices and artificial intelligence, this online tool will measure and offer improvements to operational competency in less than 60 minutes.

OpX360 is like a $50,000+ consulting engagement without the cost or the weeks of discovery involved. Instead the program is comprised of six AI modules; one for each of the areas of operations of a nonprofit organization. Each OpX360 module has 60 Best Practice statements based on proven industry standards to help nonprofit organizations determine their current level of competence in any of the six operational areas of their organization.

The tool will also help nonprofits understand the consequences for non-performance and what they can immediately do to improve any areas that are underperforming.

"As former nonprofit executives, we understand that when it comes to knowing how well a nonprofit is performing, most nonprofit executives and their board members are simply too close to be objective and few know where to start," say OpX360 inventors Bob Lipps and Marc Stein. "Assessing competence against prescribed industry standards takes all the guesswork out."

"The premise is simple: Nonprofits need more funding. Funders need more confidence. More confidence comes from demonstrated operational competence. Funders with more confidence give nonprofits more funding. Operational competence can be measured and improved with OpX360," says Lipps.

CPA & Nonprofit Leader Jim McKee said, "We've paid consultants many thousands of dollars in recent years. For a fraction of the cost, OpX360 provided us with more focused feedback, recommendations, and actionable steps for improvement than our consultants ever have."

Within one hour of completing any of the six modules, the nonprofit will receive an Executive Briefing designed to be shared with their executives or board and a 70+ page Detailed Report addressing all 60 Best Practice statements for the person or team responsible for the specific area of operations.

Any of these assessments can be taken individually or together, depending on the needs of the organization.

The six areas of nonprofit operations are:

To receive a 20% discount throughout 2019, visit https://www.opx360.comand use code "LAUNCH" upon checkout.

About The Global Center of Nonprofit Excellence

The Global Center for Nonprofit Excellence (https:///www.theglobalcenter.net) is an orchestrated network helping nonprofits, funders and industry experts work better together for the greatest impact. OpX360 (https://www.opx360.com) was invented by co-founders Bob Lipps and Marc Stein and is a proprietary product of The Global Center of Nonprofit Excellence.

Contact:Marc SteinCo-Founder of The Global Center for Nonprofit Excellence, Co-Inventor of OpX360 805-469-8123223931@email4pr.com https:///www.theglobalcenter.net

SOURCE The Global Center for Nonprofit Excellence

https:///www.theglobalcenter.net

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New Artificial Intelligence Tool Will Show Nonprofits What's Working and What's Not - PRNewswire

On-Demand Concierge & Life-Saving Artificial Intelligence Now Available to 5.3M California Medicare Recipients Through Alignment Health Plan -…

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ORANGE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alignment Health Plan, a Southern Calif.-based Medicare Advantage plan, is expanding its coverage into eight greater Sacramento and Bay Area counties, where more than 862,000 Medicare recipients live1: Marin, Placer, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sonoma and Yolo. This means that the more than 5.3 million Medicare-eligible individuals who live in Alignments full service area will have the option to select one of its plans with exclusive access to a concierge-level member services team and health care black card during Medicares annual election period, Oct. 15 through Dec. 7, 2019.

Available only to Alignment Health Plan members, the ACCESS On-Demand Concierge program provides round-the-clock access to a board-certified doctor by phone or video; a dedicated concierge team; and a special black card that can be used as a debit card to buy eligible items at more than 50,000 retailers across the country.

The company today revealed its 2020 portfolio of health plans, featuring benefits2 designed to provide better care, service and value than traditional Medicare, including:

Alignments ACCESS On-Demand Concierge is evolving as health care consumers expectations become more sophisticated. We purposely built Alignment to provide seniors the care and service they deserve, and we are delighted to be able to give them peace of mind that all their health care needs will be taken care of, said John Kao, CEO of Alignment Healthcare, which owns and operates Alignment Health Plan.

Expanded ACCESS On-Demand Concierge Includes Groceries, Grandkids On-Demand

With new flexibility from federal regulators to provide supplemental benefits that address social determinants of health, Alignment has added both grocery and companion care benefits to certain plans in 2020 for members who have qualifying chronic diseases. The grocery benefit provides a monthly allowance of $10 to $20 per month depending on the plan, automatically loaded onto the members black card to buy eligible groceries at participating stores like CVS, Walmart and Walgreens. The companion care benefit connects college students with members who need assistance with non-medical services such as light house chores, technology lessons and general companionship. These grandkids on-demand are available to meet with qualified members for up to two hours per day, 12 hours per quarter and 48 hours per year. Medical records will be used to establish qualification and, once qualified, the member will qualify for the remainder of the plan year.

Expanded Coverage Options Now Available in Northern California

During this years annual election period, Alignment is offering new Medicare Advantage options that give Northern California members access to the Sutter Health network: Sutter Advantage (HMO) and My Choice (PPO). The six new HMO plans are available in eight counties3 and the four new PPO plans are available in seven counties.4 Depending on their plan, effective Jan. 1, 2020, members will be able to seek in-network care with the high-quality doctors, hospitals, medical foundations and other health care services affiliated with Sutter Health, a not-for-profit integrated health care system. The network also includes some providers associated with Sutter Independent Physicians and Mills-Peninsula Medical Group, two physician organizations aligned with Sutter.

In Marin County, Alignment is introducing its CalPlus (HMO) and Platinum (HMO) plans, with access starting Jan. 1, 2020 to in-network care from Brown & Toland Physicians, a network of more than 2,700 Bay Area doctors.

Alignment Healthcare is powered by AVA, the companys proprietary command center, an artificial intelligence-based platform that provides real-time analytics on every Alignment member, empowering clinicians with medical insights that lead to life-saving care, sometimes predicting care before its even needed. In addition to its expansion in Northern California, Alignment serves Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Joaquin, Santa Clara and Stanislaus counties in California. For more information, visit alignmenthealthplan.com.

About Alignment Healthcare

Alignment Healthcare is redefining the business of health care by shifting the focus from payments to people. Weve created a new model for health care delivery that cuts costs and improves lives by unraveling the inefficiencies of the current system to drive patients, providers and payers toward a common goal of wellness. Harnessing best practices from Medicare Advantage, our innovative data-management technology allows us to commit to caring for seniors and those who need it most: the chronically ill and frail. With offices and care centers across the country, Alignment Healthcare provides partners and patients with customized care and service where they need it and when they need it, including clinical coordination, risk management and technology facilitation. Alignment Healthcare offers health plan options to California residents through Alignment Health Plan, and partners with select health plans in North Carolina and Florida to help deliver better benefits at lower costs. For more information, please visit http://www.alignmenthealthcare.com.

1 Medicare enrollment as of July 2019, https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/CMSProgramStatistics/Dashboard.html

2 Benefits vary by plan. Copays and certain restrictions may apply.

3 Placer, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Sonoma and Yolo

4 Placer, Sacramento, San Mateo, San Joaquin, Sonoma, Stanislaus and Yolo

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On-Demand Concierge & Life-Saving Artificial Intelligence Now Available to 5.3M California Medicare Recipients Through Alignment Health Plan -...

Spending on Artificial Intelligence systems in the Middle East & Africa to top $374 million in 2020 – TelecomTV

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Spending on artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) is expected to maintain its strong growth trajectory as businesses continue to invest in projects that utilize the capabilities of AI software and platforms. That's according to the latest forecast from global technology research and consulting firm International Data Corporation (IDC), with a recent update to the firm's Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide showing that spending on AI systems in MEA is expected to reach $374.2 million next year, up from $261.8 million in 2018 and an anticipated $310.3 million in 2019. Over the longer term, IDC expects spending in the region to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19% for the 2018-2023 period.

"The AI software applications and AI platforms markets continue to show steady growth in the MEA region, and we expect this momentum to continue over the forecast period," says Manish Ranjan, IDC's program manager for software and cloud in the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. "The use of AI and machine learning (ML) is on the rise in a wide variety of business applications from ERP and CRM to analytics, content management, and collaboration solutions. Many global vendors have started embedding AI, ML, and cognitive applications to provide ultimate business benefits to their users."

Spending on AI systems in the region will be led by the banking and retail industries. Together, these verticals will account for more than 33% of spending in 2020, followed by federal/central governments and telecommunication industry. Investments in AI systems across MEA will continue to be driven by a wide range of use cases. The three largest use cases automated customer service agents, IT automation, and automated threat intelligence and prevention systems will account for around 30% of total AI spending in 2020.

"With the growing adoption of various use cases across all industries, organizations are continuing to invest significantly in optimizing their business processes, automating their operations and enhancing their products and services offerings in order to maximize the overall customer experience," says Ranjan.

Looking at individual countries, IDC's forecast shows South Africa accounting for 20.5% of AI spending in MEA during 2020, followed by the UAE on 19.7%. Saudi Arabia will be the region's third-biggest spender next year with 15.7% share. Turkey will rank fourth, accounting for 11.1% of regional AI spending.

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Spending on Artificial Intelligence systems in the Middle East & Africa to top $374 million in 2020 - TelecomTV

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Landscape Of Digital Marketing – Inc42 Media

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All digital marketing operations are now affected by AI-powered tools

Digital marketers are trying hard to leverage AI for strategic planning and campaign decision making

A roadmap is required to stay ahead from the crowd, few tips to prepare for that

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is now a big thing now in digital marketing. All digital marketing operations are now affected by AI-powered tools. From startups to large firms are opting for AI-powered digital marketing tools to enhance campaign planning & decision making.

AI-based tools are now a flourishing market, with a drastic change in demand. According to most of the digital marketers AI enhancing all the areas where the predictive analysis, decision making & automation efforts required.

Digital marketers are trying hard to leverage AI for strategic planning and campaign decision making. Most of them found AI helpful and enhancing their productivity and reducing their efforts. AI-powered analytics tools provide better insights for campaign management, budget planning, & ROI analysis. AI can gather the insights from a truckload of unstructured and structured data sources in a fraction of sec.

All the human interactions with a business affect the digital marketing strategy and business revenue.

Reportedly, brands who have recently adopted AI for marketing strategy, predict a 37 percent reduction in costs along with a 39 percent increase in revenue figures on an average by the end of 2020 alone.

Artificial intelligence tools help digital marketers to understand customer behavior and make the right recommendation at the right time. A tool with the millions of predefined conditions knows how customer react to a particular situation, ad copy, videos or any other touchpoint. While human cant assess the large set of data better than a machine in a limited timeframe.

You can collect the insights on your fingertips with the help of AI. Where to find an audience? how to interact with them? What to send them? How to send them? What is the right time to connect? When to send a follow-up? All these answers lie in the AI-powered digital marketing platforms.

With a smart analysis pattern AI, tools can make better suggestions and help in decision making. A personalized content recommendation to the right audience at the right time guarantees the success of any campaign.

Digital marketers are really getting pushed harder to demonstrate the success of content and campaigns. With AI tools utilization of potential data is very easy and effective.

According to a2019 studyby Forrester and Albert, only 26% of marketers are making use of autonomous AI, while 74% take a more manual approach with assistance from AI.

AI technology evolving every aspect of digital marketing to name a few audience targeting, audience interest analysis, web optimization, smart content writing and recommendation, advanced tracking and reporting and more.

AI in digital marketing is poised to reach a global market of $21 Bn by 2023, growing at a steady Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26%.

Digital marketing technology platforms are evolving with great pace and it needs some specific set of skills. If you want to opt for smart marketing technology you should start using AI-powered tools from a small scale and increase the limits as you grow. A roadmap is required to stay ahead from the crowd, few tips to prepare for that:

AI has a remarkable impact on all the areas of digital marketing and will keep growing in the future. The future of digital marketing is here, the fast you learn the faster you grow. The days are gone when digital marketers run the data and find the insight and other team works on the campaign based on the insights. Things are moving with great pace in digital marketing space. The early adopters will win the game!

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How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Landscape Of Digital Marketing - Inc42 Media

Researchers Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Reconstruct Ancient Games – Atlas Obscura

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Games are a serious matter, and they have been for thousands of years. Fun is fun, but games need rules. Before the dawn of proprietary gamesthe ones in boxesmost board games didnt come with instructions, though. The rules were passed on orally, and thats one of the reasons that ancient games still played today, such as mancala or backgammon, have murky origins. Now, an interdisciplinary team of software engineers, game historians, and archaeologists is attempting to piece together the lineage and rules of ancient board gameswith modern technology.

Board games are one of the oldest documented forms of leisure. It is hard to tell when hide-and-seek or chopsticks came along, because they dont leave any material evidence, but game boards and playing tokens have given archaeologists a lot to work with. They were etched on the landscape, left or lost in habitation sites, and even buried with the dead (for playing in the afterlife). They occur all over the world, from Viking hnefatafl to Chinese liubo to a mancala variant in Borneo, and involve a range of boards, dice, and pieces. And games spanned social divisions, from the general public, some of whom played on game boards incised into surfaces in temples, to ancient royalty, who had suitably luxurious game paraphernalia.

Tutankhamun had four senet sets in his tomb, says Cameron Browne, a computer scientist at Maastricht University, referring to an ancient Egyptian game about the passage to the afterlife. Browne is the head of the Digital Ludeme Project (lude from the Latin, to play), which is using archaeological evidence and modern game rules to figure out how hundreds of ancient games and their variants were played, and changed over time and by location.

As far as the archaeological record goes, board gaming began with senet, nearly 1,800 years before Tut was even born. About 700 years later, in ancient Sumer, the Royal Game of Ur was important enough that its rules were written downactually incised on a cuneiform tablet. (Otherwise, rules were almost never set in stone.) The names of many ancient games have slipped through the cracks of history, so researchers identify them by what remains. Theres 33 Circles from Egypt, 10-Ring from Bronze Age Crete, and the Middle Eastern 58 Holes. Since the rules have been lost over time, the way many ancient games were played is based on speculation. With so many games, and so many variations, Brownes work isnt merely an archaeological-meets-ludological project. Its genealogical, too.

Were really dealing with families of games, Browne says. The mancala games, the chess-like games, the tafl games, card games. Each of these probably have their own distinct family.

Like the humans that invented them, games evolved over time. Board sizes have changed, pieces have shifted shape, and rules have mutated as games have been passed along and slowly fanned out across the map.

The Silk Road is a perfect example for how the games spread, Browne says. Many of these games started in the Fertile Crescent and progressed through Europe and Asia.

And as they spread they left behind a convoluted lineage of adaptions and local flavor. For example, according to Ulrich Schdler, a games historian at the Swiss Museum of the Game and an editor of the journal Board Game Studies, the aristocrats at Versailles in the 17th century played a languid form of trictrac, a backgammon variant. When the game got to the banking Brits across the channel, with a sense of economy of time, it was compressed into 15-minute bouts.

This all adds up to a complex, poorly documented, and global family tree, and that makes defining any given, long-forgotten rule set a challenge. Games changed hands across cultures, over the course of millennia. Many games fell out of style, disappeared altogether, or evolved into something unrecognizable. The archaeological record is fragmentary at best, and game compendiasuch as Alfonso X of Castiles 1284 Libro de los Juegosare few and far between. What games did leave, in some cases, were boards and spare pieces, which in turn has led to a lot of guesswork among amateurs, enthusiasts, and interested insiders. The same Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon who opened Tuts tomb proposed what is now a common play style for 58 Holes. Modern game experts can only pick up the pieces.

Lost rules are made in a very superficial way by people who dont really know games. From archaeologists, philologists, Ive read so many, Schdler says. Theyre made up by people who have never played a game, or dont know their mechanics very well. Bringing some order to this complicated history might take something more than speculation.

At the Fourth Annual Board Game Symposium in New York in September 2019, Walter Crist, an anthropologist with the Digital Ludeme Project, briefly described how their project is dealing with thisby going from we cant know what the rules of the game are to figuring out what the rules must have been, using artificial intelligence.

To do this, the researchers model each game using ludemes (literally, game memes) to digitally reconstruct the games based on their fundamental conceptual information. The ludeme idea breaks down the games formits physical components and any known rule setand separates it from function, or how those components are employed in reality. Ludemes are game genes, and once the genetic information is mapped, the Digital Ludeme Project can calculate the ludemic distance between games, or the number of steps necessary for one game to evolve into another. The ludeme concept makes all game information more manageable pieces of a much larger puzzle. By adding or removing any one component, a game might be a step closer to another one, and then with historical and archaeological data, the researchers can tell whether one game borrowed from another. Then, in a crucial step, the ludemes are loaded into a game system made specially for the projectLUDII game softwareand the computers go to work by playing every game thousands upon thousands of times in different variations.

In a game of Boggleproprietary, invented in 1972players shake an enclosed box of 16 cubes, each inscribed with a different letter on each side. Once the cubes settle, players try and make as many words as they can by connecting the face-up letters. This is precisely what the LUDII software is doing, with game simulations in the place of letters, and functional games in the place of words.

Schdler has long worked on reconstructing ancient games without the assistance of artificial intelligence, and says that to find out if a set of rules works, you need to play it a lot of times to find glitches where the rules break down and leave the game unplayable, unevenly matched, or impossible to win. A veteran of many, many of these playthroughs, Schdler is excited about the Digital Ludeme Project.

If we have a large number of ludemes, elements that make up a rule set, we can perhaps see that certain ludemes go together, he says. You can simply let the computer play 10,000 times and this will give you a result as to whether or not these rules work.

With so many ludemes involved with each game, what would have taken a lifetime of playtesting can be done in hours, says Eddie Duggan, a games historian at the University of Suffolk. Once the game has been programmed using the LUDII game system to model, play, and analyze the games, it will be possible to determine a games interestingness or game quality. The more test runs a given game gets in the machine learning system, the better the Digital Ludeme Project team can understand how the game would most optimally operate.

Our reconstructions will also, crucially, provide confidence scores for our reconstructions, says Crist, the teams anthropologist, to communicate our conclusions about the likelihood that these rule sets could reflect the reality of the past.

The game family tree operates like an evolutionary tree, and can be tracked through a method called computational phylogenetics. After each game is boggled, and thousands of different rule sets are tested, the Digital Ludeme Project determines how the game fits in with others, and can track their changes like in a game of telephone. Between points A and B, Duggan notes, there are many small steps, so the project provides opportunities to both interpolate new games and optimize existing ones.

As well as revealing something about ancient games, he says, it is likely that new games will be discovered that were not known or played in the ancient world.

The Digital Ludeme Projects ultimate goal is to make hundreds of reconstructed and optimized ancient games available online for everyone to learn about and enjoy.

Games without rulesplayis something all animals do, says Duggan. But one day somebody used a stick to scratch a line in the dirt and started to arrange pebbles or seeds along the line according to rules and invented a game. That is when we became human.

As the project continues, Browne says theyll pay special mind to quality and historical authenticity. The compendium of fun is set to officially publish in January 2020, though some of the games are playable now. To, Duggan it all illustrates our collective adaptabilitywhen applied to the task of fun.

Whether we are modern board game players, Vikings, ancient Romans, ancient Egyptians, ancient Babylonians, he says, we are all Homo ludens, the species that plays games.

Whats the oldest game youve ever played? Let us know, and share any other thoughts and feelings you might have about the story in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums!

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Researchers Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Reconstruct Ancient Games - Atlas Obscura

Is your bank frightened by the ecosystem? – The Banker

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Openbanking is spreading around the world. Banks need to do more than just tick compliance boxes if they are going to stay relevant, writes Brian Caplen.

In the latest World Payments Report from Capgemini, 90% of banks surveyed said that being involved in an ecosystem-based business model is the key to long-term success in the challenging new payments market. But the report also found that only 48% of banks globally are considering launching APIs beyond what is required for compliance withopen banking regulations.

This begs the question as to whether banks will be leaders or followers in the transition to the ecosystem and rekindles concerns that they could lose out to the 'big tech' players. If banks do not become facilitators of platforms and aggregators, they risk ending up as service providers to third parties which control the interface with the customer. This is the infamous back-end role that banks have always feared might be theirs in the digital payments revolution.

If they are to avoid this fate, banks will need to be a lot more proactive. They need to be the orchestrators of greenfield ecosystems as well as participating in systems run by other players. In doing this they face another tough question as to how much the ecosystems they orchestrate should be open to competitors. Only if they are sure of their competitive advantage in all products can they feel secure about this approach.

These are scary times for banks but the problems will not disappear by only doing the minimum required for compliance reasons. Every bank needs a bold digital strategy that takes its products and services to the competition and not the other way round.

Brian Caplen will be chairing a session on the World Payments Report 2019 at Sibos on September 24.

Brian Caplen is the editor ofThe Banker. Follow him on Twitter@BrianCaplen

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Is your bank frightened by the ecosystem? - The Banker

Journey Of A Track: Navigating The Playlist Ecosystem – hypebot.com

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Artists and their teams understandably have many playlist performance questions:

Given the current status of my track, what are the best playlists to target?

Given that my track got added toBreaking R&Bon Apple Music, what other playlists usually happens to tracks onBreaking R&Baround the same time?

Given that my track is currently onHits of the Momenton Deezer, what are the odds of it getting onLes titres du moment?

So in an effort to meet these needs, we built two main playlist analytics tools: thePre-Playlist AnalyzerandPost-Playlist Analyzer, which both look at a time-based concept well call a songs Track Journey. Both Analyzers look at the Track Journey of all songs on a target playlist, visualize the tracks commonly occurring playlists and display the percentage overlap between the playlists.

The Pre-Playlist Analyzer looks at the playlist databefore each track gets on the target playlist, whereas the Post-Playlist Analyzer looks at what happened to each trackafter it got added.

We are capable of analyzing any playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon, and YouTube, but for now, we will focus on a few of the patterns we discovered onSpotify,Apple MusicandDeezer.

Lets start with a Spotifyfrontlineplaylist from the Pop genre that constantly updates:Pop Rising.

What kind of journey did tracks take before arriving on this target playlist? To answer this question, we analyzed the historical data of 175 tracks that went throughPop Risingbetween a 30-day period (20190614 to 20190714), and identified the playlists that added those tracks in the past.

A few definitions: A co-occurring playlist is one that has one or more tracks in common with the target playlist. The average_timegap column denotes the average number of days between the date that a track got added to a co-occurring playlist, and date the track got added on the target playlist. The percent_overlap corresponds to the percentage of tracks onPop Risingthat appeared on each co-occurring playlist.

The obvious takeaway is the remarkableoverlap between officialNew Music Friday(or new release-based) playlists, which orients us to the fact thatPop Risingis highly correlated with new music. It conceivably could have been a playlist that listed viral pop songs that got big on social media, but were not necessarily new releases.

We can also see thatroughly 1 in every 3 tracks (31%) that made it toPop Risingwere added toPop n Fresh(orange box) 3 days earlier (on average). Now that we know a little of what feeds intoPop Rising, lets look at what happens to these tracks afterPop Rising.

The above plot shows the Post-Playlist journeys of tracks that got added toPop Rising. Note that day 0 is the day the tracks got added to the target playlist. Tracks may have gotten added to the target playlist on different dates, so we time-shifted all tracks added date to align at day 0 for comprehensibility purposes.

The y-axis (labelled Percent Overlap) represents a percentage of how many tracks get added to a particular co-occurring playlist after getting on our target playlist. For example, the top line of the plot shows that about33% of the tracks that made it toPop Rising, later made it toIts a Hit!

There aremultiple data pointsto observe in this interactive chart: if you hover over each bubble, youll seebasic playlist informationas well as thenumber of tracksthat were added at each Time Gap, or number of days after they got added to the target playlist (negative values are leading to the current target playlist, while positive values show Track Journeys after the target playlist). Theopacityof each bubble represents how much track overlap happens at a specific Time Gap (darker = more overlap, relative to each co-occurring playlist). Thesizeof the bubbles represent the number of followers each playlist has.

Notice that17% ofPop Risingstracks end up on Spotifys most followed playlist,Todays Top Hits (TTH), at some point after. More specifically, most of this sequence happenswithin a weekafter the tracks were added toPop Rising.

So while its certainly debatable if Spotify curators vet a certain track for likability before including it on a more popular playlist, if it does, it seems to happen quite quicklyeven a matter of days.

Next, lets switch genres and apply the Playlist Analyzers to the top Country music playlist on Spotify:Hot Country.

We naturally spot some genre-dependent co-occurring playlists likeNext from Nashville,All About Country,New Boots,Wild Country,Breakout Country, but additionally find the genre-agnosticNew Music Fridayhaving significant track overlap withHot Country.

This time however, we performed deeper Pre-Playlist Analysis on some of these co-occurring playlists themselves, and visualized the track flow between any two of them having at least 10% overlap.

Even starting with the two of the most highly followed of the bunch, it still seems there is a relatively low chance of getting on Hot Country even if a track managed to get onWild Country(787K followers, 10% chance) orNew Boots(654K followers, 13% chance). Nevertheless,New Music Nashville(blue) seems to be a decent bet to get on either these six-digit follower playlists (popular playlists themselves), whileNext From Nashville(green) is an even better one.

DespiteNext From Nashville(NFN) having only 80K followers, roughly 1 out of every 5 tracks added toNFNmade it toWild CountryorNew Boots.Given thatWild CountryandNew Bootshave more than half a million followers each,NFNseems to work well as a gateway to bigger country playlists.

We also see that1 out of every 3 songs featured onNFNended up onBreakout Country(123K followers),which itself is a great place for mid-tier playlist exposure.Its certainly a sweet bonus thatBreakout Countrys tracks themselves had almost a 20% chance of getting onHot Countrywith its whopping 5.5M followers.

So if youre an emerging country artist looking for lower-profile playlist within placement reachwhy not try a playlist likeNext from Nashville?

Another type of playlist thats interesting to dissect arecontext-based playlists. These playlists tend to offer back catalog tracks more spins in the long run and focus on the users life context (e.g., going for a run, having a romantic dinner), rather than the music itself (e.g., rock music, Spanish-language music).

Lets take a look at Spotifys 3rd most-followed contextual playlist at the time of writing,Songs to Sing in the Showerat 5.1M followers. 🙂

From the above journey plot, youll see that there is a~70% chance that if a track has already featured onSongs to Sing in the Shower(SSS)it may be placed on it again later! While this may seem like an odd thing to point out, remember that tracks are constantly being added and removed from playlists.

So especially for a context-based, catalog-focused one likeSSSthat is frequently refreshed,music can find its way on and off at various times, which is great motivation for artists to get placed here for random (and welcomed) spikes of unexpected long-tail streaming revenue down the road.

Our Analyzer Tools differentiate theseadded/then removed/then added againevent sequences from simply being on that playlist continuously. (Note thatSSSis a personalized Spotify playlist which shuffles a larger list of tracks for each individual user, so we are using the default,public URL playlistversion at all times.)

Whats also interesting is that there seems to be quite a fewcircular relationships between multiple Spotify contextual/mood playlists.This means that once a track places onSSS, it has a chance of bouncing from playlist to playlist and enjoy long term success.

Among the list of playlists thatSSShas a tight relationship with, there are a couple that unsurprisingly stood out:Canta Sotto La DocciaandCanta en la Ducha, the Italian and Spanish translations ofSongs to Sing in the Shower.

This would make sense, as Spotify has historically shown (at least in theirTop 200 charts) that it does a great job of globalizing and keeping A-list English-speaking artist content front and center, as opposed to other platforms like Deezer thatexcel at showcasing domestic market content.

Despite bothSSSandSongs to Sing in the Car (SSCat 8.6M followers)being highly-followed contextual playlists, the tracks landing on these playlists show very different journeys: for example, asignificant amount of tracks seem to have appeared on many non-editorial playlists(such asCleaning the Houseby curator Dancing Playlists at 87K followers)before ending up onSSC.

In contrary,tracks onSSSseem to have gone through mostly editorial playlists(such as SpotifysGuilty PleasuresorSing Through the Decades) before ending up onSSS.

For this reason, even thoughSSChas ~3.5M more followers thanSSS, placing your music onSSCmay well be the easier effort if you were to first pursue pitching to some of its feeder playlists likeMost Popular Songs of All Timethat are not controlled by Spotify itself.

As forSSS, if you are connected to Spotifys curators, first pursuing smaller editorial playlists such asHappy PoporGuilty Pleasurescould potentially be an easier sell than getting your track onSSSdirectly.

Lets say were now interested in how to get a track on Apple Musics top R&B playlist,TheA-List: R&B.

Using the Post-Playlist Analyzer, we looked at all co-occurring playlists with higher than 10% overlap. Note that we did not include major-label owned playlists in the analysis (Digster, Filtr and Topsify), though we did include Apple editorial playlists. For example, one of the playlists we analyzed was ApplesBreaking R&B.

Notice that about14% of the tracks that went throughBreaking R&Bgot added toThe A-List: R&Bat some point later. Most co-occurrences happenedwithin 10 daysafter the tracks appeared onBreaking R&B. By running the the same type of analysis on the rest of the co-occurring playlists described earlier, we compiled the results into the flow diagram below that summarizes the Post-Playlist journeys of all tracks on these co-occurring playlists (over 1000 tracks analyzed).

Roughly14% and 16% of the tracks onBreaking R&BandMe and Baegot onThe A-List R&Bsometime later. Most of the co-occurrences happenwithin 7 daysafter tracks got added on these two playlists. More interestingly, the playlist adds onBreaking R&BandMe and Baehappened around the same time as other popular playlists such asBeats of the Week,Brown SugarandMoodand#OnRepeat. For this reason, these playlists make good candidates for additional targets once your track made it toBreaking R&BandMe and Bae.

Additionally,Me and Baeand#OnRepeathave their own sets of playlists they co-occurred with frequently. As we saw earlier in the playlist analysis on Spotify, contextual playlists offer tracks continuing success by recycling them within the contextual playlists ecosystem. From this Apple diagram,#OnRepeatalso has decent flows to contextual playlists such as Summer Heat and Gym Flow.So if Apples contextual playlists also draw lots of user consumption, getting on#OnRepeatcan help establish a long-tail of streaming revenue for any artist lucky enough to get on it.

Lets say your ultimate goal is to reachLes titres du moment(LTDM), the most highly-followed playlist on Deezer (9.9M fans).

True to its reputation as a domestic-market first platform,most of the tracks onLTDMhave gone through one of the editorial, market-based Deezer Chart playlists first. One exception would be the Track Journey throughHits of the Momentat 1.2M fans, one of the platforms top playlists. Like before, we used the Playlist Analyzer tools and identified interesting Track Journeys leading toLTDM.

Before ending up onHits of the Moment, the tracks have usually gone through one of the market-based Deezer Chart playlists, with the exceptions ofTodays Best Pop(600K fans), Hits du Moment(485K fans) and a few others.

Looking back further,Pop Fresh(blue node),This is pop(150K fans) andRadar Weekly(146K fans) seem to feedTodays Best Pop(600K fans). So with only 9.6K fans,Pop Freshis certainly worth investigating as low-hanging playlist fruit.

Given that 1827% of tracks onPop Freshend up on bigger feeder playlists such asThis is PopandTodays Best Pop, we may find here a few lower-profile gateway playlists that could lead your music to higher-profile ones.

The interesting patterns we discussed here are only the tip of the playlist iceberg! There is so much more to explore and we cant wait to see what findings you will discover with these Playlist Analyzer tools.

Coming soonChartmetricsPlaylist Analyzertools!

We will be making these tools live asPremium features onChartmetricvery soon. Stay tuned!

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SmartNews’ head of product on how the news discovery app wants to free readers from filter bubbles – TechCrunch

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Since launching in the United States five years ago, SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn status, has quietly built a reputation for presenting reliable information from a wide range of publishers. The company straddles two very different markets: the U.S. and its home country of Japan, where it is one of the leading news apps.

SmartNews wants readers to see it as a way to break out of their filter bubbles, says Jeannie Yang, its senior vice president of product, especially as the American presidential election heats up. For example, it recently launched a feature, called News From All Sides, that lets people see how media outlets from across the political spectrum are covering a specific topic.

The app is driven by machine-learning algorithms, but it also has an editorial team led by Rich Jaroslovsky, the first managing editor of WSJ.com and founder of the Online News Association. One of SmartNews goal is to surface news that its users might not seek out on their own, but it must balance that with audience retention in a market that is crowded with many ways to consume content online, including competing news aggregation apps, Facebook and Google Search.

In a wide-ranging interview with Extra Crunch, Yang talked about SmartNews place in the media ecosystem, creating recommendation algorithms that dont reinforce biases, the difference between its Japanese and American users and the challenges of presenting political news in a highly polarized environment.

Catherine Shu: One of the reasons why SmartNews is interesting is because there are a lot of news aggregation apps in America, but there hasnt been one huge breakout app like SmartNews is in Japan or Toutiao in China. But at the same time, there are obviously a lot of issues in the publishing and news industry in the United States that a good dominant news app might be able to help, ranging from monetization to fake news.

Jeannie Yang: I think thats definitely a challenge for everybody in the U.S. With SmartNews, we really want to see how we can help create a healthier media ecosystem and actually have publishers thrive as well. SmartNews has such respect for the publishers and the industry and we want to be good partners, but also really understand the challenges of the business model, as well as the challenges for users and thinking of how we can create a healthier ecosystem.

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Short Circuit Podcast on the First Amendment and Student Newspaper Funding, – Reason

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I much enjoyed participating in this podcast, which was taped in front of a student audience Wednesday here at UCLA; here is IJ's summary of the three cases my UCLA colleague Richard Re, Robert Everett Johnson (Jones Day), and I discussed:

After a student newspaper at the University of California, San Diego published a piece satirizing safe spaces and trigger warning, the student government pulled funding for all print media. A First Amendment violation? And

When doling out federal grant money for community policing efforts, the DOJ gives preference to local departments that promise to cooperate with federal immigration efforts. Which, says Los Angeles, would actually undermine community trust in police. Did the DOJ exceed the powers delegated to it by Congress? And

Religious organizations need not comply with some aspects of the Americans with Disabilities Act. But does the so-called "ministerial exception" extend to a Catholic school that fired a fifth grade teacher who needed time off for chemotherapy?

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Short Circuit Podcast on the First Amendment and Student Newspaper Funding, - Reason

South Carolina GOP governor accused of violating First Amendment by leading prayers before press conferences | TheHill – The Hill

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South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R)was reportedly accused of violating the U.S. Constitution by holding prayers before press conferences.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national nonprofit that promotes the separation of church and state, sent a letter to McMasters office in response to two prayers that he led earlier this month before speaking to reporters about the threat of Hurricane Dorian, which made its way up the coast of the state, The Associated Press reports.

Ryan Jayne, an attorney for the foundation, allegedhis prayers violate the First Amendment and its clause barring the government from showing preference to one religion over another, according to the AP.

The foundation also mailed a letter to McMaster in January about prayers he gave before press conferences about Hurricane Florence in September 2018, the AP reported.

A spokesman in the governors office, Brian Symmes, toldThe Hill in a statementthat there will be a chaplain saying prayers before press conferences for as long as McMaster is the states chief executive and the state has to prepare for major storms.

"For as long as Henry McMaster is the governor of South Carolina, and we have to prepare for these dangerous storms, there will be a chaplain saying a prayer before each of those press conferences," Symmes said. "For every person who may get offended, countless South Carolinians likely gain strength, guidance, and comfort from these prayers."

Updated: 2:55 p.m.

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South Carolina GOP governor accused of violating First Amendment by leading prayers before press conferences | TheHill - The Hill

Observer Editorial: An ode to the First Amendment – Observer Online

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In January, the Newseum tweeted that its creator, the Freedom Forum, had sold its building to Johns Hopkins University and the museum would be closing at the end of 2019.

The Newseum, a monument to the First Amendment, opened its doors on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 2008. On the buildings facade, a stone engraving reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We want to recognize the significance of this statement before its no longer a monument in our nations capital.

As journalists, we rely on the First Amendment for everything we do. As an independent, student-run newspaper, we are free to operate outside administrative purview and employ the rights it outlines every day.

The First Amendment gives us permission to ask questions to which our readers need answers, whether its Why cant I find former Saint Marys President Jan Cervelli anywhere? or Why cant I swipe into my best friends dorm for a late night study session? or Its 12:30 a.m. and Im at the Grotto wheres the Midnight Express?

Our reporting is built upon the foundational freedoms detailed in the First Amendment. But these rights extend far beyond those of journalists.

Members of the tri-campus community, and citizens beyond South Bend, celebrate life as it is today because of every freedom granted by the First Amendment.

Freedom of speech set the stage for 20,000 pro-life supporters to gather on the steps of the Capitol Building in the very first March for Life on January 22, 1974; for Colin Kapernick to kneel during the national anthem at a preseason game on Aug. 26, 2016; and for more than four million people to assemble in public spaces (including our campus) in over 163 countries just last week, urging leaders to take action in the Global Climate Strike.

These movements would not have been possible in America if not for the freedoms of the First Amendment. Having the ability to openly engage in any conversation, assemble in any capacity, find faith in any religion and ask questions of the government keeps the wheels of democracy turning.

As The Washington Posts slogan makes clear, democracy dies in darkness. Freedom of speech sheds light on issues that matter.

Dont let your chance to flex your First Amendment rights go to waste.

Speak up in class discussion. Tweet a hot take. Write a letter to the editor. Sign up for the school-provided New York Times subscription. Stay up-to-date with the happenings of the world.

Find your passion and pursue it. Share your thoughts on our campus climate through Show Some Skin at Notre Dame. Learn more about interfaith dialogue with Better Together Club at Saint Marys. Get involved with student governments social concerns committee at Holy Cross.

If none of these suggestions sound appealing, start your own campus group. Theres no better way to honor the First Amendment.

The Newseum might be closing its building, but the First Amendment still stands. No matter the words carved into the side of 555 Pennsylvania Avenue after this year, our commitment to upholding these freedoms must carry on.

We will continue to ask questions, uncover the truth and report it accurately. Hopefully, you will continue to exercise your rights, too.

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Observer Editorial: An ode to the First Amendment - Observer Online

National Right to Work Foundation Praises Alaska Governor’s Order to Protect Employees’ First Amendment Rights Under Janus – National Right to Work…

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New rule ensures state employees give affirmative and knowing consent before dues are collected from their paychecks

Juneau, AK (September 27, 2019) Yesterday Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy announced an executive order to help protect the First Amendment rights of all state employees under the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision. Under the new rule, the State of Alaska will deduct union fees only from the paychecks of employees who have filed a waiver with the state acknowledging their wishes to have union dues taken from their paychecks despite their right under Janus not to fund any union activities.

In Janus, the Supreme Court ruled that government workers cannot be required to pay union dues or fees and further recognized that the First Amendment is violated when any such payments are collected absent a workers clear and knowing voluntary consent.

National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix lauded Alaskas defense of state workers First Amendment rights:

Every American employee deserves the right to choose, free of coercion or manipulation, who will be his or her voice in the workplace. The Supreme Court in Janus extended this freedom to all public sector employees, and Alaska took a major step forward yesterday in protecting the First Amendment rights of state employees recognized in Janus.

Alaska is proactively ensuring workers are not relinquishing their First Amendment rights absent the clear and knowing voluntary waiver required by the Janus precedent. We urge other states to follow Alaskas lead and prioritize the constitutional rights of state employees under the Janus precedent.

Janus was argued and won by Foundation staff attorneys in 2018. Days after the ruling came down, Foundation Legal Director Raymond J. LaJeunesse sent a letter to then-Alaska Department of Administration Commissioner Leslie Ridle and 20 other payroll managers in states with forced union dues for government employees urging them to fully comply with the decision by stopping payments unless employees have given a knowing waiver of their First Amendment right not to fund union activities. The letter points out that the Supreme Courts decision specifically held that a waiver of such rights cannot be presumed[, r]ather, to be effective, the waiver must be freely given and shown by clear and compelling evidence.

LaJeunesses letter also asserted that, if state comptrollers did not comply with Janus, Foundation staff attorneys will bring a civil rights action seeking class-wide injunctive relief. To date, Foundation staff attorneys have filed over 30 lawsuits seeking to enforce workers rights under the Janus precedent.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in more than 250 cases nationwide per year.

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EDITORIAL: A proposed vaping ban in San Francisco and the First Amendment – Las Vegas Review-Journal

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Doctors and health professionals continue to investigate the recent epidemic of vaping-related illnesses. The outbreak, which has hospitalized more than 525 people and led to eight deaths, is believed to be related to chemical exposure to the lungs. Most of the victims, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, were vaping a marijuana ingredient called THC, while some were vaping only nicotine products.

Despite the health benefits associated with a large decrease in smoking among young people, thanks in part to the recent rise of vaping, anti-tobacco zealots have been looking for an opening to cripple the nascent e-cigarette industry. And some of these activists are willing to dismantle the First Amendment to implement their agenda.

Take San Francisco. The once-beautiful City by the Bay is fast becoming synonymous with homelessness, junkies and streets covered with human waste and drug needles. Rather than deal with those issues, the citys progressive braintrust has moved to ban e-cigarettes all while sanctioning the use of marijuana, no doubt. But not only do San Francisco supervisors want to outlaw vaping, they seek to silence those who would disagree.

The e-cigarette giant Juul is attempting to overturn the pending ban through Proposition C, a November ballot question. But Supervisor Shamann Walton arguing that the campaign violates federal restrictions on commercial claims about vaping has written the FDA urging the agency to take action against issue ads supporting the proposition. Among other things, Mr. Walton complains that one of the ads features a Proposition C advocate arguing that vaping offers a legitimate off-ramp for smokers trying to kick the habit.

As Reasons Jacob Sullum points out, never mind that the statement is true. Several studies have found vaping to be less toxic to health than traditional cigarettes. Some experts have also acknowledged that e-cigarettes could be a godsend in terms of public health by potentially reducing the massive costs associated with smoking-related illnesses.

Beyond that, however, Mr. Walton is urging the federal government to censor statements by his political opponents, Mr. Sullum notes.

Indeed, the speech to which Mr. Walton objects was delivered in the context of a political campaign involving a ballot measure. Proponents of Proposition C have an obvious constitutional right to make their case to the voters. To advocate that the state act to suppress arguments in favor of an important public policy question is to show a deep disdain for the democratic process and for free speech protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Mr. Walton is free to make the case that vaping is a scourge and must be stopped. But it says plenty about the legitimacy of his arguments that he would simultaneously ask federal regulators to muzzle his opponents.

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UGA School of Law to create First Amendment Clinic – Red and Black

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The University of Georgia School of Law announced it will create a First Amendment Clinic funded by a $900,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation in a news release on Sept. 23.

The clinic aims to support First Amendment rights by regional cases involving free speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and petition, as well as enhance law students understanding of the First Amendment.

School of Law Dean Peter B. Bo Rutledge said the Stanton Foundation partnership will provide UGA law students the chance to protect the rights of individuals and to raise civic awareness in communities throughout the Southeast in the release.

UGA is currently undergoing a nationwide search to find a director for the clinic.

The Stanton Foundation was founded by longtime CBS president Frank Stanton, who provided funds for the foundation upon his death in 2006 to support the First Amendment, policy research in international and nuclear security and canine welfare.

The creation of the First Amendment Clinic adds to the School of Laws robust clinical and experiential learning opportunities and furthers our mission to educate the next generation of lawyers so they can become leaders in their communities, Rutledge said in the release.

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UGA School of Law to create First Amendment Clinic - Red and Black

We can’t allow presidents and public opinion to further diminish the work of the press | TheHill – The Hill

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Just as the 2020 presidential election has begun with Democratic candidate debates and the nation more polarized than ever, we add to the mix the impeachment proceedings against President TrumpDonald John TrumpAmash calls McCarthy incompetent, dishonest after '60 Minutes' interview GOP lawmaker blasts Trump for quoting pastor warning of civil war over impeachment '60 Minutes' correspondent presses McCarthy on impeachment inquiry MORE. Just when we need excellent journalism the most, the nation's news media are more incapable of informing and enlightening the public than at any time in modern history. It is a sad and in many respects tragic time for the nation's news media, marginalized by the economics of the digital age as well as by government, politics, and even the biases of the American people.

The economic calamity that has befallen news media, especially newspapers, has been well documented. The Pew Research Center reports that, in 2008, there were 114,000 journalists working in U.S. newsrooms including print, broadcast, and digital. In 2018, that number was 86,000, a decline of 25 percent. That change was particularly harsh for newspapers, with the number of newsroom employees declining to 38,000 from 71,000, a decline of 47 percent. Once-great metro newspapers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Denver, Dallas and Atlanta have experienced dramatic decreases in circulation and news staffs. And frequently when news media have been forced to lay off employees, older and more experienced journalists are the ones out the door. Younger, less experienced and cheaper journalists fill the gaps.

In generations past, we had feisty secondary newspapers in major markets. Today, most are closed. In the few markets where secondary newspapers exist, they are just hanging on with barebones news staffs.

The University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism reported last year that almost 1,800 newspapers 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies have closed in the last 14 years. Many of the closures occurred in small towns and rural areas creating what university researchers call "news deserts," areas where people had no access to information about local and civic news.

Local television news has become more trivialized as viewership continues to decline. Network morning news programs are more devoted to breezy and brief news coverage with more emphasis on celebrity news and promotion of the prime-time lineup, especially programs such as The Bachelorette and Love Island.

The political damage that has been done to news media can't be underestimated. Trump has consistent applause lines in referring to journalists as "enemies of the people" and noting "fake news."

Both Trump and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders criticizes Pompeo for meeting with 'destructive' Kissinger Where's my Roy Cohn? Impeachment shakes up Democratic White House race MORE made changes to the First Amendment part of their campaigns in 2016. Trump proposed making it easier for public figures to sue media for damages, presumably eliminating the historic protections in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Times v. Sullivan in 1964. Clinton bought into the notion of changes that might overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Neither proposal had any chance of becoming reality, of course, but playing to the political base is now more important than discussions of substantive issues.

The fact that major political candidates and the dominant political parties are even discussing First Amendment changes shows how little regard exists for the protections and rights considered a foundation of our liberty. Not to mention a lack of respect for the role of the press as a check on government.

But the threats to the free flow of information and access to government didn't begin in 2016. We shouldn't forget that the Justice Department under Eric HolderEric Himpton HolderDemocrats sue over North Carolina's congressional maps Meet the Trump-appointed IG at center of whistleblower drama Eric Holder says Trump is subject to prosecution after leaving office MORE in the Obama administration seized telephone records of the Associated Press in a leak investigation in 2014. It apparently escaped administration notice that the action violated agreements protecting journalists published by the Justice Department in the 1970s.

Even earlier, the USA Patriot Act, passed within weeks of the terrorist attacks in 2001, closed off thousands of documents that had customarily been accessible, including many online. The act also provided government with a major loophole for "national security" that made it acceptable for government agencies to deny open records requests. Many state legislatures followed suit in creating new exemptions for security.

All of us appreciate government actions to keep us safe. But many journalists and First Amendment advocates found that the federal Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, became virtually useless. The Associated Press reported that the Obama administration set records for refusals to the media and the public for information and also set records in tax money spent defending lawsuits over the refusals.

The track record for the Trump administration is no better and, in many cases, worse. Trump has even broken with tradition in refusing to release his tax returns. Transparency in the Trump White House seems more or less limited to opinions expressed on Twitter.

Overall trust in the nation's news media remains low, according to recent Gallup polling thathas tracked the confidence level since 1972. Only 41 percent of people surveyed have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence in news media to report events fairly and accurately. When political views are considered, the data are even more troubling. Among Democrats, 69 percent have confidence in the news media; among Republicans, only 15 percent have confidence.

The "echo chamber" effect of news consumption has also been made clear in polling by various organizations. Conservatives have their news sources, and liberals have theirs. Watching the same story on Fox News and CNN is often like watching news from two different planets. We seem to want only news that confirms what we believe.

Congress fares even worse than the news media in polling of confidence levels. As the impeachment process focuses on the House, Americans are sure to have even more sharply divided opinions about government and the news media. The charges that Trump asked a foreign government to investigate a political opponent are serious and deserve serious consideration from the Congress and serious, factual reporting from the nation's news media. Don't count on the public having much confidence in either.

TonyPedersonis professor of journalism and holds The Belo Foundation Endowed Distinguished Chair in Journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is the former executive editor of the Houston Chronicle.

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We can't allow presidents and public opinion to further diminish the work of the press | TheHill - The Hill

Hate, Harassment, And The Right To Report – WUNC

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The internet has a hate problem. Trolls, white supremacists, and other hate groups spew vitriol and harass users on social media. The First Amendment protects hate speech, but the internet further blurred the line between speech and crime.

The State of Things partnered with the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media for a special broadcast about the First Amendment recorded in front of a live audience at The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill.

To unravel the web of rules and laws concerning hate speech, The State of Things partnered with the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media for a special broadcast recorded in front of a live audience at The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill. Stasio starts the conversation with Mary-Rose Papandrea and Rachel Glickhouse who explain how a criminal act must be committed for vitriolic speech to be treated as a crime. Papandrea is a professor of constitutional law and associate dean of academic affairs at the UNC School of Law and Glickhouse is a journalist and the partner manager for ProPublica's Documenting Hate project.

They continue the conversation by homing in on the experience of female journalists who experience heightened levels of harassment online. Allen Johnson and Elisa Lees Muoz analyze the shifting job of journalism and how online hate and harassment presents new challenges. Johnson is the executive editorial page editor of the Greensboro News & Record and the Winston-Salem Journal, and Muoz is the executive director of the International Women's Media Foundation. Plus, Wendy Scott joins the conversation to talk about how speech is regulated differently in private and public venues. Scott is an associate dean for academic success and a professor at Elon Law. Host Frank Stasio talks with the panel to understand the limits of the law when it comes to hate speech and how that speech affects those on the receiving end of hate.

Interview Highlights

Mary-Rose Papandrea on the tension between protected hate speech and its impact on marginalized communities:

There's a growing concern that hate speech does cause real harm to marginalized communities, in particular, that it's silent speech. So if you're thinking more holistically about our marketplace of ideas, which is the hallmark of the Supreme Court's jurisprudencebetter to let all speech thrive and compete then you're actually silencing some important speakers in this marketplace who don't feel comfortable speaking because they are targeted because of their race or ethnicity or gender.

Rachel Glickhouse on the variance in hate crime laws nationwide:

Not all police are trained in how to investigate hate crimes or what the hate crime law is in that state. Those rules about what police should be trained in varies by state. For example, some don't get any training [on hate crime] in the police academy. Some cities have a dedicated bias crime unit, many don't. How the individual police department will treat these types of crimes and the gravity to which they assign them can vary widely.

Elisa Lees Muoz on the impact of online attacks on journalists:

What we have found through our studies is that it causes similar impacts to PTSD, to being physically attacked. So these are really serious attacks. And they've often been called online harassment, and I don't call them harassment on purpose, because they are attack. They impact journalism tremendously. They impact the way that women journalists approach their stories, and they impact the stories that they're willing to take on. And they drive younger people, mostly younger women, out of the news profession, which just exacerbates the gender inequity that already exists in the news media.

Allen Johnson on the lack of diversity in newsrooms:

I've gone through this over my career and talking about diversifying the staff and hearing very flimsy excuses for why staffs aren't more diverse: We can't find one We can't find one who's qualified enough. Or: We had one one time, and it didn't work out. I just have never bought that I've seen too many people of color who are really good and who have done wonderful work in this profession to know that that's not true.

But the other thing that's happened with the economics is we've downsized. We don't hire as much. Staffs are smaller. And when we started downsizing, a lot of journalists of color were casualties. And so a bad situation didn't become worse, it became terrible.

Wendy Scott on using the first amendment to guide private speech regulation:

That gives me pause...to say we need to jump in and regulate and say who can't say what. On the other hand, it takes us back to hate speech and the fact that there are words that cross the line. Even though the court has only carved out a few exceptions, those exceptions can give us guidance in how we regulate speech online. So if you were, for instance, to think about Alex Jones and the things that he has said, could we apply the First Amendment test? Is he falsely shouting fire? Is he inciting imminent lawlessness? Maybe that standard could be applied. That could be a guide to self regulation [or] private regulation.

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Hate, Harassment, And The Right To Report - WUNC

US Department of Justice supports Indianapolis Archdiocese in firing of gay teacher – USA TODAY

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The Justice Department on Friday issued a statement of interest in support of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis in its ongoing dispute with a former Catholic school teacher who alleges he was wrongfully terminated because he was in a same-sex marriage.The United States has a "substantial interest in religious liberty," the Justice Department says.

Joshua Payne-Elliott is suing the archdiocese, alleging that it illegally interfered with his contractual and employment relationship with Cathedral High School, causing Cathedral to terminate him.

But in itsstatement, the DOJ said that the First Amendment protects the right of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis to interpret and apply Catholic doctrine.

It was not immediately clear how binding the DOJ's statement is, or what impact it will have on Payne-Elliott's suit.

If the First Amendments Religion Clauses stand for anything, it is that secular courts cannot entangle themselves in questions of religious law, United States Attorney Josh Minkler said.

Background: Vatican pauses decree revoking school's Catholic status for refusing to fire a gay teacher

From July: An Indiana Catholic school fired a gay teacher for same-sex marriage. Now, a settlement

Payne-Elliott filed his suit in Marion County in July, saying in a news release that he hoped "this case will put a stop to the targeting of LGBTQ employees and their families." He was one of the three gay, married Catholic school employees fired at the direction of the archdiocese.

Two guidance counselors were fired from Roncalli High School. Payne-Elliott's husband, Layton Payne-Elliott, is a teacher at Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School. The archdiocese stripped Brebeuf of its Catholic identity after it refused to fire Payne-Elliott, though the Vatican recently suspended that ruling pending an appeal from the school.

Joshua Payne-Elliott (right), pictured with his husband Layton Payne-Elliott, is suing the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.(Photo: Photo provided by Kathleen DeLaney)

Officials with Cathedral said the archdiocese threatened to do the same if Joshua Payne-Elliott'semployment continued.

But Indianapolis Archbishop Charles C. Thompson has maintained that the church is not targeting anyone.

Rather, Thompson said, the archdiocese has a right toset whatever rules it wants for its schools and employees, includingthat they must live according to Catholic Church doctrine. The archdiocese began requiringa morality clause in teacher, administrator and counselor contracts at some of its schools four years ago, and at all Catholic schools two years ago.

"Religious liberty, which is a hallmark of the U.S. constitution and has been tested in the U.S. Supreme Court, acknowledges that religious organizations may define what conduct is acceptable and contrary to the teachings of its religion, for its school leaders, guidance counselors, teachers and other ministers of faith," the archdiocese said.

A statement of interest is described in court documents as a statement that speaks to the interests of the United States in a pending suit. It is not a ruling.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right of religious institutions and people to decide what their beliefs are, to teach their faith, and to associate with others who share their faith, Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney generalfor the civil rights division, said in a statement. The First Amendment rightly protects the free exercise of religion.

The statement of interest saysthe First Amendment prevents courts from impairing the constitutional rights of religious institutions. The former teachers lawsuit attempts to penalize the archdiocese for determining that schools within its diocese cannot employ teachers in public, same-sex marriages, and simultaneously identify as Catholic, the statement says.

Supreme Court precedent holds that the First Amendment protects the archdioceses right to this form of expressive association, and courts cannot interfere with that right, according to the news release.

The statement of interest also says that courts cannot second-guess how religious institutions interpret and apply their own religious laws. Supreme Court precedent holdsthat the First Amendment forbids courts from engaging in quintessentially religious controversies.

Instead, the statement of interest says, the legitimacy of the Archdioceses decision as a matter of Catholic law is committed exclusively to the judgment of the Archdiocese.

Follow Justin L. Mackon Twitter: @justinlmack.

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A Mix of Malcolm and Milton: On Corey Robin’s The Enigma of Clarence Thomas – lareviewofbooks

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SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

THAT CLARENCE THOMAS is now the longest-serving justice on the US Supreme Court, as Corey Robin tells us at the outset of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, inspires me to start doing the math on my own age. Anita Hill, jade-suited, sitting alone before the Senate, is among my earliest memories of American politics and what is now called the news cycle.

Since his 52-48 confirmation in October 1991, Thomas has exerted quiet influence on American jurisprudence and politics. The majority of justices now share Thomass politics, if not his unique perspective and reasoning. Neil Gorsuch and freshman Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose own confirmation hearing was a Thomas-like affair, are lockstep with their judicial elder. Among Thomass former clerks are 11 nominees to the federal bench, including seven on the court of appeals, and 10 who are either administration officials or members of the Office of US Attorneys, helping to craft current US immigration and deregulation policy. Just as importantly, Thomas has written more than seven hundred opinions, staking out controversial positions on gun rights, campaign finance, and other issues that have come to command Supreme Court majorities.

But he remains an enigma, particularly to liberal White America whose knowledge of him is often limited to the Anita Hill hearing, his silence during oral arguments, and the mistaken belief that Thomas was merely Antonin Scalias puppet. As a longtime reader of the right from the left, Robin writes, I know how tempting it is for people on one side of the spectrum to dismiss those on the other as unthinking defenders of partisan advantage. To his great credit, Robins aim is to avoid facile critiques from the left of Thomass political and legal philosophies.

He also aims for something other than a biography of the justice who filled the seat of Thurgood Marshall, who was himself too easily dismissed by liberal heavyweights like Archibald Cox and Bob Woodward. He writes,

Because the temptation to dismiss is even greater in Thomass case perversely mimicking the dismissal of Marshall and because its sufficiently difficult to get people to believe that Thomas has a jurisprudence, much less to hear it, the imperative to let him speak without the interruption of easy criticisms is that much more acute.

Instead, Robin engages in a close reading of Thomass writings in the hopes of providing a coherent description of Thomass political and legal philosophies as well as their historical and personal contexts.

Throughout, Robin demonstrates that Thomass worldview is complex, contradictory, and, at times, has plenty in common with far more progressive modes of thought than liberals might think. For one thing, Thomas is a Black nationalist. He can quote Malcolm X, chapter and verse. As the child of Jim Crow, he remains deeply skeptical of the conciliatory, post-racial politics of liberal America. His jurisprudence is almost universally informed by a race-consciousness that stands in stark contrast to the thinking of almost all of his fellow Justices.

Moreover, despite his conservatism, many of his arguments have, over the years, utilized a type of structural analysis of race and class in American society that could rest, if uneasily, next to that of radical left thinkers. Whats most fascinating about the book is watching Thomass thoughts evolve, seeing him move to the right in real time; from the Black Student Union treasurer at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, who chanted, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh during a rally in Cambridge to free Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins; to the law student at Yale who argued for government regulation with a young John Bolton; to the head of Reagans EEOC who was still relying on the theory of disparate impact when considering affirmative action policies; to the nominee who claimed that the Anita Hill hearings were a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks; to the Justice who has staked out the most conservative position on the Supreme Court.

Robin splits the book into three parts Race, Capitalism, and Constitution, the primary categories of Clarence Thomass jurisprudence and their development corresponds, roughly, to Thomass biography. The parts build off one another as we get closer to the present. His early experiences in Jim Crow Savannah and his chastening experiences as a Yale Law student flow into his post-law-school drift toward political and economic conservatism, thanks in large part to encounters with explicitly pro-capitalist Black thinkers in the mid-to-late 1970s. By the 1980s, with Thomas heading the EEOC under Reagan, there appeared a real chance of being named to the bench; only then did he start thinking seriously about developing a constitutional jurisprudence, of which, as a career politician, he had had little need. Thomas was on the federal bench a mere 16 months before his nomination by George H. W. Bush.

At Holy Cross, Thomas spoke the grammar of 1960s Black Power and was elected secretary-treasurer of the newly formed Black Student Union. The BSUs 11-point manifesto was steeped in the Black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Ture, and Malcolm X, whose Autobiography Thomas read as a freshman: 7. The Black man wants [] the right to perpetuate his race; 9. The Black man does not want or need the white woman. Thomas was one of the more radical members of the BSU, remembered for his edgy race consciousness.

But it wasnt all Little Red Books and hard left resistance to The Man, as Robin explains:

Like all ideologies, black nationalism is a contested tradition, whose exponents and analysts seldom agree on its basic tenets. While a stringent definition might entail a belief in the separate cultural identity of African Americans and a commitment to their gaining a sovereign state, black nationalists frequently have taken up one position without the other, larding both with a thick layer of pragmatism.

One evening Thomas might take a hard line on an issue, but by the next morning, he might soften his stance. He was a young man testing the limits of his politics during one of the more incendiary periods in American history.

Although Thomas has since denied being a Black nationalist, Robin points out that he has never completely disavowed the movements grammar as the formative base upon which he built his subsequent politics. Black nationalist theory continues to pepper his court opinions. Thomas is the only justice to frequently quote W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. Hes even lifted from James Baldwin, without attribution.

At Yale Law chosen because it had a more liberal reputation than Harvard Thomas first questioned the welfare states intervention on behalf of African Americans. He began to view such liberal political programs as both perpetuating and masking the deep racism at the heart of the American project. In Thomass mind, to a White student, a Black student at Yale Law could only ever be the result of White largesse, thereby undermining any sense of achievement the Black student might derive from having gained admission.

His position on the court, undermining affirmative action programs, was an irony lost on no one, with Rosa Parks once quipping, He had all the advantages of affirmative action and went against it. Yet, unlike fellow conservatives who decry affirmative action as simply reverse racism, Thomass beliefs rest on the notion that affirmative action further marks already marked bodies. For Thomas, Robin explains, the most important form that racism takes is the stigma or mark it puts on black people, designating them as less worthy or capable than white people. Thomas has said as much in the 1995 decision Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pea:

So called benign discrimination teaches many that because of chronic and apparently immutable handicaps, minorities cannot compete with them without their patronizing indulgence. Inevitably, such programs engender attitudes of superiority or, alternatively, provoke resentment among those who believe that they have been wronged by the governments use of race. These programs stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority and may cause them to develop dependencies or to adopt an attitude that they are entitled to preferences.

Yet Robin astutely notes that Thomass form of race-consciousness doesnt extend to all classes: The victim of racial stigmas Thomas has most in mind is not a poor black person racially profiled by the police but the ambitious black striver condescended to by liberal whites. The victim he has in mind is someone like him.

Thomass feelings about affirmative action were still inchoate in the early 1970s. And even several years into his appointment, Thomas was conflicted about completely giving up on such political measures. It makes sense that, as Thomas struggled with the racial politics of the welfare state, he became receptive to the radical free-market ideology that had started creeping into the mainstream from the fringes, while faith in Keynesianism on both the center right and left disintegrated under the weight of the Vietnam War and domestic civil unrest.

Free markets promised solutions to Black self-sufficiency in a still utterly racist landscape. After Yale, Thomas went west, where he found himself working in the Missouri Attorney Generals office, headed by the Republican John Danforth. At this point, according to Thomas, the most conservative thing hed done was vote for George McGovern in 1972, but philosophically he was in transit, writes Robin, moving away from a black left that disquieted him and white liberals who looked down on him.

In 1976, he had his first important encounter with conservative Black politics when a friend recommended the University of Chicagotrained economist Thomas Sowells Race and Economics, which Robin calls a mix of Malcolm and Milton. Through an analysis of urban and rural slavery and the varying economic experiences of immigrant groups in the United States, Sowell lays out an argument that politics is the domain of White power and that the market is the key to Black survival. Even in the antebellum South, argues Sowell, market logic constrained the masters cruelty more than morality. A slave was, after all, an investment and an asset; to harm a slave was to work against the goals of capital accumulation. This contention had an immense impact on Thomass politics and, later, his jurisprudence. He registered as an independent in 1976, voted for Gerald Ford, and became the most conservative attorney in an office that included John Ashcroft.

Though Thomas claims a Pauline conversion to conservatism, Robin is skeptical. Sowell may have been the final straw, but in the summer of 1971 Thomas read Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (he still requires all his clerks attend a judicial term-opening screening of King Vidors 1949 film version of The Fountainhead), and was increasingly disenchanted by his own participation in tear-gassy demonstrations as an undergraduate, which never seemed to put a dent in state power.

Thomass personal path in the 70s also reflected larger currents in Black politics at the time, which were increasingly shot through with pessimism and fatigue and the belief that, for all its achievements such as 1964s Civil Rights Act and 1965s Voting Rights Act the movement had done little to improve the daily life of African Americans and left a bloody trail in its wake. Black nationalism often gains traction, Robin writes, when conditions for African Americans are getting worse, as was the case with the Garvey movement in the 1920s, or when the movement for multiracial democracy comes up against the hard limits of white supremacy.

Under these conditions, Black leaders, like Thomas, turned to the markets, recalling Adam Clayton Powells initial use of the phrase Black Power to suggest Black business ownership. This is not to say that Black Power in the 70s was simply co-opted by capitalism, but there was significant discussion and disagreement within the movement about the direction in which it should head. And the discussion remains relevant today, as the recently slain Los Angeles rapper Nipsey Hussle is eulogized for encouraging Black business ownership and entrepreneurship as a means of empowerment.

Capitalism resonated with Thomas on a personal level as well. His own father, M. C. Thomas, or simply C, abandoned his family when Thomas was one, and the boy and his siblings were raised primarily by Myers Anderson, their grandfather, to whom Thomas refers as Daddy. In Thomass memory, Myers represented what capitalism could accomplish for African Americans. As a young man, Myers owned his own fuel oil business, supplied ice, and had several rental properties. In Myers, Thomas saw the archetype of a strong, independent Black man living on his own terms; he contrasted his grandfather with his mother and sisters, whom he viewed as weak and incapable of providing for their family. This valorization of Black masculinity, which was also deeply informed by the vernacular of Black Power, remains a core feature of Thomass worldview.

Memories of his grandfather and Sowells writing confirmed to Thomas that there was a surer route to Black emancipation than politics. On the court, he has gone out of his way to deemphasize, even discourage Black political participation, in the hope that African Americans would turn to the markets something of a rehash of Marcus Garveys declaration:

[The Negro] cannot resort to the government for protection for government will be in the hands of the majority of the people who are prejudiced against him, hence for the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone, will be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched, burned, jim-crowed, and segregated.

While Thomass jurisprudence regarding ballot access hews mainly to the conservative line on federalism, when it comes to the question of electoral power, or the ability of a group to elect representatives of its choosing, he diverges from the general consensus of the court as well as from conservative politics at large.

Since the 80s, when Thomas briefly tried to convince Blacks that they should be Republicans either to influence Republican politics or to signal to Democrats that the Black vote could not be taken for granted, Thomas has largely abandoned the belief that there is any constitutional solution for incorporating Blacks into a political process that Sowell and others argued was forever rigged against them. Thomas sees the Courts attempt to address Black disenfranchisement and voter dilution as just more liberal White paternalism, which allows Whites to maintain symbolic and real power over Blacks.

Robin identifies this as an argument of despair, which resembles the social theorist Albert O. Hirschmans futility thesis. According to Hirschman, futility is a common tool for conservatives, who argue that attempting broad political action results in largely superficial changes, leaving structural inequities in place. And Hirschman notes that thinkers on the left may also be daunted by the difficulty of structural change and fall into the trap of futility thinking. Futility arguments, along with the concomitant arguments of perversity (that a policy will have the opposite effect) or jeopardy (that a policy will undo some previous achievement), are convenient for Thomas; he uses them frequently to demonstrate the failure of state intervention and regulation.

Another important aspect of Thomass project to steer African Americans away from politics is his contention that they do not constitute a stable, collective political class. They may share a collective stigma and experiences vis--vis racism, but for Thomas that doesnt necessarily translate into a coherent collective Black politics. Its hard to argue with the notion that individuals hold wildly different perspectives on a great number of things, or that there is an obvious class hierarchy within Black life. Still, when Thomas argues for a Black capitalism at the expense of politics he fails to take into account how capitalism and race are inextricably tied. If American politics is rigged against Blacks, capitalism is doubly so. As Huey Newton warned on the pages of Ebony in 1969, Black capitalism would merely be trading one master for another. A small group of blacks with control our destiny if this development came to pass. People like Thomass grandfather entered the rentier class, extracting labor value and rents from the Black community.

While Thomass views on capitalism and race are unique among his peers on the court, they often fit, without too much effort, into the arc of contemporary conservative politics. His justifications may be different, but the result is the same. However, Thomass conception of the Constitution, to which Robin devotes the last third of his book, resides in a wholly different sphere. This section of Robins book may represent his most interesting break with the conventional reading of Thomass thought.

While many legal scholars brand him a constitutional literalist, often to fit the Scalias puppet narrative, Robin argues that Thomass originalism is at best episodic, and of greater import is his conception of two separate versions of the Constitution. This conception supports his belief that a strong moral authority is necessary for keeping African Americans on the straight and narrow. One version is the Constitution of Reconstruction, with its signal achievements, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, since undermined by liberal paternalism and a misapplication of their content. The other is the original Constitution of three-fifths and states rights, which, after the failure of Reconstruction, was revitalized as Jim Crow.

At no time does Thomas argue that United States should return to forced segregation or chattel slavery. Rather, he looks to those times as exemplary moments when African Americans developed virtues of independence and habits of responsibility, practices of self-control and institutions of patriarchal self-help, that enabled them to survive and sometimes flourish. During Jim Crow, in other words, authority was clearly marked out; it offered a framework within which Black men could protect and provide for their families and communities. That framework was obscured and undermined by the welfare state.

Both Thomass Black and White Constitutions work to create a stark form of authority meant to order Black political and social life. For Thomas, the most important part of the Black Constitution is its extension of the Bill of Rights to all citizens after the Civil War, most notably, the right to bear arms. This Constitution granted Black men the means to physically confront White terror, a means that was with notable exceptions like the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 absent in the antebellum United States. Thomass Black Constitution allows [him] to tell a version of American history from the revolution against slavery to the counterrevolution of Jim Crow in which racial violence has been the motor of change [and] black actors and black violence are central both to the making of freedom and to its unmaking.

However, in order for Thomass Black Constitution to exist, society must remain in a permanent state of tension, and its in the last chapter, The White Constitution, that Robin presents the Justices logic at its most perverse. Only an antagonistic White Constitution of states rights can re-create the conditions that made for black survival[,] undo the culture of rights and replace it with a state of exigency. That exigency is to be found in the harsh rules of the penal state. All the better if these harsh rules are implemented in a racist fashion, because only then will the necessary tension rescue Black patriarchal authority.

How could a Justice who spends so much of his energy arguing that affirmative action and welfare are the tools of White domination give a pass to the carceral state? Here, Robin reads between the lines, surmising that the carceral state

serves a vital function: it provides African Americans with every reason they need to steer clear of trouble. That is a foundation not only for law-abiding behavior but also for the market-based activity [] Thomas regards as critical to the African American community. The carceral state re-creates the kind of adversity African Americans once suffered under Jim Crow.

Unless the state enacts carceral violence there is no hope, in Thomass mind, of bringing about his ideal of the strong Black patriarch, who will protect his race from the forces of White supremacy. This is the disturbing core of Thomass constitutional jurisprudence a nostalgic project that aims to return us to the idealized life of his childhood, where men were patriarchs, women wore their finery to church, and boys never strayed from the lines that authority had laid out for them.

Corey Robin has done all US citizens a great service by reading Thomas with such care, and by providing a fascinating and original interpretation of the man who, in many cases, quietly determines the direction we are taking. Thomas now wields significantly more power on the Court than he did even a decade ago, and his acolytes are in step with him on deregulation, the expansion of the state monopoly on violence, and the project to erode hard-won rights. Even if they dont share his unique views, the results are the same: the vote is 5-4.

John W. W. Zeiser is a poet, journalist, and critic. He no longer lives in Los Angeles.

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A Mix of Malcolm and Milton: On Corey Robin's The Enigma of Clarence Thomas - lareviewofbooks