Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread

[Winstonm]

Well there was

...

 

By my count it was 9-2 against the police - I'm certain that being outnumbered to that degree they surely feared for their lives but no guns drawn. How curious.

[y66]

Paging Captain Ahab ...

 

SoftBank is the “Nasdaq whale” that has bought billions of dollars’ worth of US equity derivatives in a move that stoked the fevered rally in big tech stocks before a sharp pullback on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

The Japanese conglomerate has been snapping up options in tech stocks during the past month in huge amounts, contributing to the largest trading volumes in contracts linked to individual companies in at least 10 years, these people said. One banker described it as a “dangerous” bet.

 

The aggressive move into the options market marks a new chapter for the investment powerhouse, which in recent years has made huge bets on privately held technology start-ups through its $100bn Vision Fund. After the coronavirus market tumult hit those bets hard, the company established an asset management unit for public investments using capital contributed by its founder Masayoshi Son. 

 

Now it has also made a splash in trading derivatives linked to some of those new investments, which has shocked market veterans. “These are some of the biggest trades I’ve seen in 20 years of doing this,” said one derivatives-focused US hedge fund manager. “The flow is huge.”

 

The surge in purchases of call options — derivatives that give the user the right to buy a stock at a pre-agreed price — has been the talk of Wall Street in recent weeks, as the sheer size of the trades appears to have exacerbated a “melt-up” in many big technology stocks over the summer. Shares in Tesla soared 26 per cent in under a week to September 1, while Amazon and Google parent Alphabet gained about 9 per cent.

 

One person familiar with SoftBank’s trades said it was “gobbling up” options on a scale that was even making some people within the organisation nervous. “People are caught with their pants down, massively short. This can continue. The whale is still hungry.”

 

The options boom means that the US stock market remains vulnerable to further bursts of volatility, according to Charlie McElligott, a strategist at Nomura. “The street is still very much in a dangerous space, and that flow is still out there,” he said in a note on Friday, adding that this leaves the market open to swings higher or lower.

 

The overall nominal value of calls traded on individual US stocks has averaged $335bn a day over the past two weeks, according to Goldman Sachs. That is more than triple the rolling average in 2017 to 2019. The retail trading boom has played a big part of the frenzy, but investors say the size of many recent option purchases are far too big to be retail-driven. 

 

Unusually, single-stock call trading volumes have surged beyond the average daily volumes of calls on the broader US stock market, and are almost as high as the level of trading in index puts — which give the buyer the right to sell at a pre-set price and act as a popular form of insurance against stocks falling. 

 

The size and aggressiveness of the mysterious call buyer, coupled with the summer trading lull, has been a major factor in not only the buoyant performance of many big tech names, but the broader US stock market, according to Mr McElligott. This week he warned that dynamics around options meant the heavy purchases forced banks on the other side of the trades to hedge themselves by buying stocks, in a “classic ‘tail wags the dog’ feedback loop”. 

 

This also helped explain the unusual sight of the US stock market climbing in tandem with the Vix index — often referred to as Wall Street’s “fear gauge” — and meant that equities were fragile and vulnerable to the kind of sudden setback that erupted on Thursday. “The equity volatility complex is acting ‘broken’ and indicative that ‘something’s gotta give’,” Mr McElligott warned in a note shortly before the Nasdaq fell 5 per cent. 

 

One banker familiar with the latest options trading activity said Thursday’s market pullback would have been painful for SoftBank, but he expected the buying to resume. A larger and longer-lasting stock-market decline would be more damaging for this strategy, and would probably involve rapid declines, he added.

 

The options buying comes alongside $10bn in public investments SoftBank is targeting through its new asset management arm.

 

According to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, SoftBank has bought stakes of nearly $2bn in Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Tesla — investments that are partially funded by cash from its $41bn asset sale programme that was triggered by a collapse in its share price during the Covid-19 market turmoil. 

[shyams]

Paging Captain Ahab ...

SoftBank is the “Nasdaq whale” that has bought billions of dollars’ worth of US equity derivatives in a move that stoked the fevered rally in big tech stocks before a sharp pullback on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

The Japanese conglomerate has been snapping up options in tech stocks during the past month in huge amounts, contributing to the largest trading volumes in contracts linked to individual companies in at least 10 years, these people said. One banker described it as a “dangerous” bet.

 

The aggressive move into the options market marks a new chapter for the investment powerhouse, which in recent years has made huge bets on privately held technology start-ups through its $100bn Vision Fund. After the coronavirus market tumult hit those bets hard, the company established an asset management unit for public investments using capital contributed by its founder Masayoshi Son.

 

Now it has also made a splash in trading derivatives linked to some of those new investments, which has shocked market veterans. “These are some of the biggest trades I’ve seen in 20 years of doing this,” said one derivatives-focused US hedge fund manager. “The flow is huge.”

 

The surge in purchases of call options — derivatives that give the user the right to buy a stock at a pre-agreed price — has been the talk of Wall Street in recent weeks, as the sheer size of the trades appears to have exacerbated a “melt-up” in many big technology stocks over the summer. Shares in Tesla soared 26 per cent in under a week to September 1, while Amazon and Google parent Alphabet gained about 9 per cent.

 

One person familiar with SoftBank’s trades said it was “gobbling up” options on a scale that was even making some people within the organisation nervous. “People are caught with their pants down, massively short. This can continue. The whale is still hungry.”

 

The options boom means that the US stock market remains vulnerable to further bursts of volatility, according to Charlie McElligott, a strategist at Nomura. “The street is still very much in a dangerous space, and that flow is still out there,” he said in a note on Friday, adding that this leaves the market open to swings higher or lower.

 

The overall nominal value of calls traded on individual US stocks has averaged $335bn a day over the past two weeks, according to Goldman Sachs. That is more than triple the rolling average in 2017 to 2019. The retail trading boom has played a big part of the frenzy, but investors say the size of many recent option purchases are far too big to be retail-driven.

 

Unusually, single-stock call trading volumes have surged beyond the average daily volumes of calls on the broader US stock market, and are almost as high as the level of trading in index puts — which give the buyer the right to sell at a pre-set price and act as a popular form of insurance against stocks falling.

 

The size and aggressiveness of the mysterious call buyer, coupled with the summer trading lull, has been a major factor in not only the buoyant performance of many big tech names, but the broader US stock market, according to Mr McElligott. This week he warned that dynamics around options meant the heavy purchases forced banks on the other side of the trades to hedge themselves by buying stocks, in a “classic ‘tail wags the dog’ feedback loop”.

 

This also helped explain the unusual sight of the US stock market climbing in tandem with the Vix index — often referred to as Wall Street’s “fear gauge” — and meant that equities were fragile and vulnerable to the kind of sudden setback that erupted on Thursday. “The equity volatility complex is acting ‘broken’ and indicative that ‘something’s gotta give’,” Mr McElligott warned in a note shortly before the Nasdaq fell 5 per cent.

 

One banker familiar with the latest options trading activity said Thursday’s market pullback would have been painful for SoftBank, but he expected the buying to resume. A larger and longer-lasting stock-market decline would be more damaging for this strategy, and would probably involve rapid declines, he added.

 

The options buying comes alongside $10bn in public investments SoftBank is targeting through its new asset management arm.

 

According to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, SoftBank has bought stakes of nearly $2bn in Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Tesla — investments that are partially funded by cash from its $41bn asset sale programme that was triggered by a collapse in its share price during the Covid-19 market turmoil.

 

It looks like markets (and market makers?) are working hard to ensure SoftBank doesn't cash out on their large gambles. Nasdaq is down 8% in two days.

[kenberg]

Well there was

...

 

First and foremost, really way first and way foremost, I really enjoyed the video. I still have memories of the "big kids" teaching me to ride a bike when I was five or so and then the freedom that came with that. And, years later, my granddaughter was telling her young friends, "My Grandpa taught me to ride". For many years my primary criterion for rating cites was on how bicyclists were treated. Granddaughter turns 28 soon.

 

Of course the video is part of a social/political discussion. It is a portrayal of how we would like things to go. Ok, I would prefer the cyclists not be stopped for this minor transgression but they were stopped and then it proceeded smoothly. That's what we want.

 

We all have a role to play. In a marriage, if one partner can only see the errors of his/her spouse then they are headed for a divorce. The video shows what is good, with everyone acting responsibly, we need to have more of it.

[y66]

Today is for nachos by Sam Sifton at NYT:

 

Good morning. How are you? You getting enough sleep, or sleeping all the time? You eating enough, not enough, too much? How’s your stress level? You feeling optimistic? Or the opposite? I watched the sun rise the other morning and asked myself those questions. I found I could not answer them. And I can’t be alone in that. We’re caught in the continuum between what was and what will be, and it’s dizzying. We’re all in, all the time.

 

What I know we can do: shrug and head into the kitchen. It’s different in there, or it can be. We can enter unsure of ourselves and the state of the world, assemble an array of ingredients and then put them together into something that brings pleasure both in the making and the consumption, and that’s not nothing. That’s healthy.

 

That’s nachos, for me. I love Priya Krishna’s version, Indian-ish nachos (above) that she makes with her mother, Ritu, with cilantro chutney, tamarind drizzle and chhonk, a sauce of melted ghee, cumin seeds and red chile. I love my own game-day nachos as well, and have come around strongly to Mark Bittman’s Greek-style version, too. Loaded nachos? Short-rib chili nachos? On a Monday night in the midst of a pandemic, with the West on fire and an important election looming, nachos are a kind of tranquilizer, good for the soul.

See

[Winstonm]

This may explain a lot.

 

 

Brain-Eating Amoeba Found in Texas Town’s Water Supply

 

[y66]

Fun read:

 

This Year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors a Revolution

 

Video of Doudna after getting the call. https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/10/07/jennifer-doudna-wins-2020-nobel-prize-in-chemistry/?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=6cfb77501c-briefing-dy-20201008&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-6cfb77501c-45443718

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02765-9

[y66]

Fun conversation (2019) between Mark Zuckerberg, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison. The ratio of interesting questions to interesting answers is high.

[Cyberyeti]

Bizarre incident, Dutch metro train overshoots buffers and is saved by a sculpture.

 

https://www.mediatv.nl/metro-rijdt-door-stopblok-en-crasht-nabij-station-de-akkers-in-spijkenisse?fbclid=IwAR3VETYN2ntoTklsvCxxDowN4YZC4ywBW0e0ynjizW00XsARLkEhbWSprMc

 

An extremely fortunate fluke

[y66]

Of possible interest: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Tyler Cowen discuss how the online encyclopedia will maintain objectivity in polarizing times.

 

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/

 

Jimmy Wales used to joke that choosing to build Wikipedia on a non-profit, non-advertising model was either the best or worst decision he ever made—but he doesn’t joke about that anymore. “If you think about advertising-driven social media…it's driven them in many cases to prioritize agitation and argumentation in a negative sense over education and learning and thoughtfulness.” In his now ceremonial role, Jimmy spends a lot of time thinking about how to structure incentives so that the Wikipedia community stays aligned on values and focused on building an ever-improving encyclopedia.

 

Jimmy joined Tyler to discuss what happens when content moderation goes wrong, why certain articles are inherently biased, the threat that repealing section 230 poses to Wikipedia, whether he believes in Conquest’s Law, the difference between “paid editing” and “paid advocacy editing,” how Wikipedia handles alternative accounts, the right to be forgotten, his unusual education in Huntsville, Alabama, why Ayn Rand is under- and over-rated, the continual struggle to balance good rules and procedures against impenetrable bureaucracy, how Wikipedia is responding to mobile use, his attempt to build a non-toxic social media platform, and more.

 

How do we construct systems and models and procedures and processes in the community that strive for maintaining our values in the long run and building something that we value?

Good question.

[y66]

Why I am Bearish on Substack by Tanner Greer

[y66]

Paul Farmer Is Awarded the $1 Million Berggruen Prize

 

Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist who has fought for stronger public health care infrastructure around the world, has been named the recipient of the 2020 Berggruen Prize.

 

The $1 million prize, which is awarded annually to people who “have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world,” went to the doctor in recognition of his leadership related to the coronavirus pandemic.

 

“Dr. Farmer’s call to improve public health systems is a matter not only of science but also of politics, economics and ethics,” Amy Gutmann, a contest juror and the president of the University of Pennsylvania, said in a news release. “In this crisis, like the ones that preceded it, our knowledge far outpaces our will to put effective solutions into action.”

 

Dr. Farmer, who has worked in the field for decades, helped found Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit focused on improving health care in resource-poor communities, in 1987. As he has traveled the globe, he has accumulated accolades: Dr. Farmer was a 1993 MacArthur Fellow and received the National Academy of Sciences’s 2018 Public Welfare Medal. He has been the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School since 2009.

 

“He has reshaped our understanding not just of what it means to be sick or healthy, but also of what it means to treat health as a human right and the ethical and political obligations that follow,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chairman of the prize committee and a professor at New York University who writes The New York Times’s Ethicist column.

 

Throughout his career, Dr. Farmer has helped provide treatments for Ebola, tuberculosis, H.I.V. and AIDs in “clinical deserts” like Haiti, Rwanda and Peru. He also wrote 12 books — most recently “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds,” in which he dissected the structural inequalities that worsened Ebola’s spread and the ways that the 2014 outbreak was not inevitable. He was also the subject of the 2017 documentary “Bending the Arc.”

 

“As both thinker and actor, Dr. Paul Farmer has connected the philosophical articulation of human rights to the practical pursuit of health,” said Nicolas Berggruen, the chairman of the institute.

[Winstonm]

For 19 years, Termaine Joseph Hicks maintained his innocence.

 

 

 

In 2001, a police officer shot the 26-year-old Popeyes manager, later telling a court that Hicks reached for a gun after the officer found him raping a woman in a Philadelphia alleyway. A jury later convicted Hicks of rape, and a judge sentenced him to up to 25 years in prison.

 

But Hicks has always told a different story: He ran into the alley to help the woman when he heard her scream. As he was reaching for his cellphone to dial 911, the police suddenly arrived, shot him in the back, and charged him unjustly.

Now, under the scrutiny of a new investigation, the case against Hicks has fallen apart.

 

The 45-year-old was exonerated on Wednesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer first reported, after a new analysis suggested the conviction was based on false testimony and questionable evidence — possibly in an attempt to justify a botched police shooting.

 

The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office's Conviction Integrity Unit sided with Hicks and his lawyers, and Common Pleas Court Judge Tracy Brandeis-Roman vacated his conviction on Wednesday.

 

I am quite cognizant of the pain and the trauma of the victim, and then more pain in realizing that the wrong person was convicted," Brandeis-Roman said Wednesday, the Inquirer reported. "I do feel that, one case at a time, this system is being improved."

 

The reversal comes amid a recent flurry of exonerations as the city's district attorney, Larry Krasner, has aggressively pushed to revisit at least 16 questionable convictions.

 

Hicks's case began in the early-morning hours of Nov. 27, 2001, according to a memorandum summarizing the case, as a woman walked to an early shift at Dunkin' Donuts. Someone grabbed her, dragged her into an alley and raped her at gunpoint. She couldn't clearly see her attacker in the dark and she suffered a head injury.

Philadelphia police officer Marvin Vinson arrived on the scene with his partner, Sgt. Dennis Zungolo. Vinson told the court he saw Hicks attacking the woman, and saw him reach for a gun. Then, he said he shot Hicks in the chest or stomach.

 

A jury believed the police's version of events over Hicks's story. He was convicted and served 19 years in State Correctional Institution Phoenix, about an hour northwest of Philadelphia.

 

But in recent years, evidence has piled up to suggest that the case presented by police and prosecutors was riddled with errors, the Inquirer reported.

 

Although most of the evidence analyzed in the recent review of the case was available at the time of Hicks's original trial, the jury never saw an enhanced security tape that corroborated parts of Hicks's story. The tape showed a man in a gray hoodie dragging the victim into the alley. Witnesses also testified that they had seen a man in a gray hoodie attack the woman, according to court records. But there was no gray hoodie among Hicks's clothes that were turned over to police after he was treated for gunshot wounds in the hospital.

 

 

Medical records and damage to the clothes Hicks was wearing that night showed he had actually been shot in the back, contrary to what police claimed, the Inquirer reported. The gun police said they found on Hicks was registered to another Philadelphia police officer, who had not reported it stolen or missing, according to court records. The Inquirer reported that Hicks's lawyer, Vanessa Potkin, said the gun was covered with blood, but the coat pocket, where Vinson claimed Hicks had been keeping the gun, was clean.

Hicks tried to appeal his conviction, court records show, claiming that his former defense attorney had erred by not insisting that police show the enhanced surveillance footage. That video also showed a delivery truck pull into a nearby loading dock, flashing its lights across the alley.

 

The victim had told police the attack stopped when bright lights shined on her assailant, spooking him. She assumed the lights were police flashlights, but the enhanced footage suggested the light had instead been the delivery truck's headlights. Hicks said he showed up at the scene moments after the true assailant ran away from those headlights and just a few moments before police arrived.

 

 

Judges denied Hicks's requests for a new trial until this year. But the prosecutors who reworked the case now say at least some of the testimony against Hicks was not true.

 

"False testimony was used," said Patricia Cummings, chief of the Conviction Integrity Unit, the Inquirer reported. "And I believe it's impossible to say that did not contribute to the conviction."

 

Cummings said Philadelphia prosecutors would not attempt to retry the tainted case.

 

The Philadelphia police did not immediately return a request for comment on the case, but Anthony Erace, the executive director of the Police Advisory Commission, told the Inquirer he would seek a review of the investigation. Vinson and Zungolo still work for the Philadelphia police, the Inquirer reported.

Hicks was released from a state prison outside Philadelphia on Wednesday.

"I feel 100 pounds lighter," he told the Inquirer. "It's unfortunate and sad that it took how long it took for me to clear my name."

 

His attorneys celebrated the exoneration Wednesday, noting that Hicks, who was the father of a 5-year-old boy when he was incarcerated, would be able to meet his 2-year-old grandson for the first time.

 

"He is going to be returned to something that he should have had on November 27, when police encountered him, but he didn't," Potkin said, the Inquirer reported. "The presumption of innocence."

 

Here are at least two officers who need to be defunded. It is a shame that the statute of limitations will prevent criminal prosecution for at minimum perjury.

[Zelandakh]

 

Here are at least two officers who need to be defunded. It is a shame that the statute of limitations will prevent criminal prosecution for at minimum perjury.

Three officers - the (unnamed) owner of the gun as well.

[y66]

Every Friday evening for the last 19 years, Mark Shields and I have gathered to talk politics on the “PBS NewsHour.” When people come up to me to discuss our segment, sometimes they mention the things we said to each other, but more often they mention how we clearly feel about each other — the affection, friendship and respect. We’ve had thousands of disagreements over the years, but never a second of acrimony. Mark radiates a generosity of spirit that improves all who come within his light.

 

This week, at 83, and after 33 years total on the show, Mark announced he was stepping back from his regular duties. Friday will be our final regular segment together. I want to not only pay tribute to him here, but also to capture his conception of politics, because it’s different from the conception many people carry in their heads these days.

 

We are all imprinted as children and young adults with certain ideas about the world, which stay with us for the rest of our lives. Mark, like many who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s — including Joe Biden — was imprinted with the idea that politics is a deeply noble profession, a form of service, a vocation.

 

Mark’s father was the first Catholic to serve on their town’s school board. The first time he saw his mother cry was when Adlai Stevenson lost to Dwight Eisenhower. Mark went off to Notre Dame and then served in the Marine Corps, before working as a congressional aide.

 

This was the mid-60s. Evidence that government worked was all around. The G.I. Bill had worked, though mostly for whites. Mark had served with Black Marines because Harry Truman had the courage to integrate the military. Mark saw the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

 

There was never a moment when passing this stuff was easy, but everybody took for granted the legitimacy of the system, treasured the country and the way it worked. “The two hallmarks of American politics are optimism and pragmatism,” Mark told me this week, pointing to the optimism of F.D.R., J.F.K. and Ronald Reagan.

 

To this day Mark argues that politics is about looking for converts, not punishing heretics. You pass bills and win campaigns by bending to accommodate those whose votes can be gotten.

 

He went on to work on and run political campaigns, for people like Bobby Kennedy and Ed Muskie. He came to deeply respect those he worked to elect, including presidential candidate Mo Udall: “Just a great human being.” Vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver: “He had the best relations with his family of any candidate I have known. His kids revered him.” And Gov. Jack Gilligan of Ohio: He “believed in us more than we believed in ourselves.”

 

After decades in journalism, Mark still puts the character lens before the partisan lens. He has been quick to criticize Democrats when they are snobbish, dishonest or fail to live up to the standards of basic decency — often infuriating some of our viewers.

 

I don’t know if it was midcentury liberalism or the midcentury record of the Boston Red Sox, but Mark instinctively identifies with the underdog. Every year he invites me to do an event with him with Catholic social workers. These are people who serve the poor and live among the poor. They have really inexpensive clothing and really radiant faces, and in their lives you see the embodiment of an entire moral system, Catholic social teaching, which has its service arm and, in Mark, its political and journalistic arm.

 

He comes from a generation that highly prized egalitarian manners: I’m no better than anyone else and nobody is better than me. Like Biden, condescension is foreign to his nature. As everybody at the “NewsHour” can attest, he treats everybody with equal kindness. He also comes from a generation in which military service was widespread, along with a sense of shared sacrifice.

 

I look at Mark’s constellation of values and worry that they are fading away. He doesn’t buy that decline narrative: “I’m more optimistic than I have been. We have to do a little better at celebrating our successes.”

 

When you work with somebody this long you remember little things — the way he pops chocolates into his mouth during late-night campaign coverage — and the big emotional moments, watching, on set, the first footage of bodies floating after Katrina.

 

One story sticks in my mind. In 2004, the Red Sox fell behind the Yankees three games to none in the American League Championship Series. The Sox miraculously won the next four games and took the series. Mark went to a bunch of those games, including the final one at Yankee Stadium.

 

After that game Mark lingered in his seat. Memories flooded over him as sweet tears flowed — a lifetime of games with his mother and father, this magnificent victory they never got to see, the century of heartbreaks now overcome. Mark and the other Sox fans just sat there, refusing to leave, absorbing this new victorious feeling, a hint of justice in the universe.

 

I like to think that was God’s way of saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

[blackshoe]

@y66: every once in a while I check back in here, expecting to see the usual drivel. Not this time. Thank you.

[y66]

The wildly popular Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” has done for chess what Julia Child once did for French cooking. Chess set sales have skyrocketed; enrollment in online chess classes has surged. The series has been the subject of hundreds of articles and interviews. The novel that inspired the show, first published in 1983, has been on The New York Times’s trade paperback best-seller list for five weeks.

 

Yet little attention has been paid to Walter Tevis, the author whose creation has stirred all the commotion.

 

Tevis once pegged himself as “a good American writer of the second rank.” But Allan Scott, the screenwriter who first optioned “The Queen’s Gambit” in the 1980s, disagrees. Mr. Scott co-created and executive-produced the current Netflix show.

 

“I think very highly of Tevis,” he said in an email. “I think he was one of the best American writers of the 20th century. ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ lays out a terrific story very simply. Child, mother killed, orphanage, touch of genius, addiction. It’s Dickensian.” (It took decades to bring the book to the screen, Mr. Scott said, because studios thought the subject of chess was a commercial dead-end.)

 

Born in 1928, Tevis wrote six novels, a surprising number of which made high-profile leaps to the screen: “The Hustler,” about a young pool shark played by Paul Newman; “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” starring David Bowie as a lonesome alien; and “The Color of Money,” a follow-up to “The Hustler,” which won Mr. Newman his first Oscar. Tevis’s 1980 science fiction book, “Mockingbird,” a commentary on humanity’s dwindling interest in reading, has long had a modest cult following.

 

Tevis was a family man who played board games and fished with his kids; a popular professor of writing and literature at Ohio University in Athens; a cat-lover and movie aficionado; and a talented amateur chess and pool player. He was pale and gangly; some of his students called him “Ichabod Crane.” He was also a three-pack-a-day smoker, a serious gambler and an alcoholic who made several suicide attempts. His fiction often plumbs his psyche, metaphorically.

 

“He’s the hero of all his own books,” said his son, Will Tevis, 66, before correcting himself: “He’s the antihero.”

 

Tevis considered his terrain to be the world of underdogs.

 

“I write about losers and loners,” he told this newspaper in 1983. “If there’s a common theme in my work, that’s it. I invented the phrase ‘born loser’ in ‘The Hustler.’ In one way or another I’m obsessed with the struggle between winning and losing.”

 

Tevis was born in San Francisco, into what he called a “feelingless, uptight” home. His parents moved to Kentucky when he was 10. Because young Walter had a heart condition, his parents left him behind in a convalescent home, where he spent months drugged on phenobarbital like Beth Harmon, the main character in “The Queen’s Gambit.” In an essay published in 1990, Tevis’s first wife, Jamie, wrote: “He never got over the scars of the early experience with narcotics.”

 

Tevis believed that early experience fueled his later alcoholism.

 

When he left California to rejoin his family, Tevis found his new environment bewildering. In a 1981 interview, he said that “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” about an alien who lands in Kentucky and can’t adjust to life on this planet, was “disguised autobiography.”

 

“[it] has to do with my having moved from what I thought was the city of light, San Francisco, when I was 11, to Lexington, Ky., where I went to a tough Appalachian school in the fifth grade and was beaten up regularly,” Tevis said. (Tevis gave the movie version of the book a C-plus, calling it confusing, but when he met David Bowie found him to be “a wonderful man.”)

 

Walter Tevis with David Bowie on the set of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which was adapted from Tevis’s novel of the same name.Credit...via Julia McGory

 

The day he turned 17, Tevis joined the Navy. On a ship home from Okinawa, he met Hilary Knight, who went on to illustrate the Eloise books. The two connected instantly, Mr. Knight, now 94, recalled, because both were “total misfits.”

 

“We were two people in a dream world, though his was much more logical than mine,” Mr. Knight said. “The other crew paid little or no attention to us. They didn’t want to know these weirdos. Walter was too smart, and the ship was full of dumbbells. We had a great time laughing about everything.”“The Hustler,” drawn from Tevis’s rough-and-tumble pool hall experiences before and after the war, came out in 1959, followed by “The Man Who Fell to Earth” in 1963. Then, Tevis published almost nothing until 1980. He and his wife, whom he met when they taught at the same high school, raised two children while Tevis was at Ohio University. He played chess and shot pool, often with his colleague Daniel Keyes, who wrote “Flowers for Algernon.” Tevis drank heavily and his marriage suffered. Even so, his children remember Tevis as a devoted parent.

 

His daughter, Julia McGory, 63, said that his kids had experienced some of “the sadness and complexities of our father,” but “never doubted how much he loved us and enjoyed being with us.”

 

In the mid-1970s, Tevis sobered up, partly with help from Alcoholics Anonymous. Deeply frustrated by his writer’s block, he got a divorce and decided to try his creative luck in Manhattan. He began a relationship with, and eventually married, Eleanora Walker, who worked for his agent. He reconnected with Mr. Knight: “We became great friends again,” Mr. Knight said.

 

Tevis also regained his writerly mojo, finishing four more novels and a collection of short stories. He helped convince Paul Newman to star in the movie version of “The Color of Money.” He also wrote “The Queen’s Gambit” during those years. The writer Tobias Wolff called it an “overlooked masterpiece.”

 

“Tevis has a gift for vivid characterization and propulsive narratives,” Mr. Wolff said in an email. “His style is direct and efficient, never calling attention to itself; yet it grows in power through the course of a novel by its very naturalness.”

 

Describing young Beth learning a chess move in “The Queen’s Gambit,” Tevis wrote: “She decided not to take the offered pawn, to leave the tension on the board. She liked it like that. She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when the pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her. She brought out her king’s knight, feeling its power spread.”

 

More lyrically, as Beth sits bored in class, Tevis wrote that her “mind danced in awe to the geometric rococo of chess, rapt, enraptured, drawing in the grand permutations as they opened to her soul, and her soul opened to them.”

 

In the book, Beth is a harder-edged, less obviously triumphant character than in the Netflix series. Tevis once explained why he made the choice to portray a female chess champion. “Sometimes I was really more wrapped up in the idea of intelligence in women, for which I have an enormous respect and a kind of awe, more wrapped up in that even than the game of chess itself,” he said.

 

In a 1981 interview, Tevis said he’d realized in middle age that “life is worth living.” He hoped to write one book per year for the rest of his life. Just three years later, he died of lung cancer, at 56.

 

Tevis’s publishing career may not be over. His estate holds two unpublished children’s books, said Susan Schulman, the agent who represents it. “Gangster Cat” is the story of a New York City cat and his gang. “Turnip Island” is the story of a family who live on an island of nothing but mud.

 

“They are completely delightful,” Ms. Schulman said.

 

If he were still alive, Will Tevis said, his father would be “basking in glory right now. He had desires for the spotlight. He wanted to be known and noticed.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/books/walter-tevis-novelist-queens-gambit-netflix.html

[y66]

One of my favorite wc posts over the years was by passedout in which he described sitting by a blazing fire in his home in Michigan, drinking wine and, I think, reading a book. I am reenacting the scene now. Here's to everyone who posts here getting safely to the other side (raises glass).

[Winstonm]

One of my favorite wc posts over the years was by passedout in which he described sitting by a blazing fire in his home in Michigan, drinking wine and, I think, reading a book. I am reenacting the scene now. Here's to everyone who posts here getting safely to the other side (raises glass).

 

getting safely to the other side

 

I think you have to break on through to get to the other side - at least, that was Morrison's take.

[y66]

Fun read:How to be less full of ***** in which Matt Yglesias resolves to have more structured conversations about moderately improbable bad events. His goal is to objectively assess his judgment and have conversations in which almost everyone can agree that stuff like a Trump Coup is pretty unlikely but not so unlikely that one should dismiss all concern about it vs conversations that sound like the boy who cried wolf.

[y66]

Every paragraph of this piece by Jeff Leen on John le Carré’s Miami swing to do research for “The Night Manager” is delicious.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/12/30/my-two-weeks-with-john-le-carre/?arc404=true

[johnu]

Alaska Airlines becomes first to BAN all emotional support animals

 

I've always thought that many flyers were abusing the airline's emotional support programs.

 

In 2018, Belen Aldecosea, 21, admitted to flushing her emotional support hamster down an airport toilet after Spirit Airlines stopped her from bringing the rodent with her on the plane

[y66]

Good morning. You aren’t, I hope, struggling this morning after a night of excess, considering your options at the crossroads of madness and death. If 2020 gave us anything it was an excuse — an order, really — not to gather on New Year’s Eve for its sad, sentimental dance of forced cheer and sweet Champagne, its endless hours before that dreadful song. Here we are in a new year, still very much like the last one, though there’s light now at the end of the tunnel and we dare to be hopeful sometimes, particularly today. We feel good, despite all!

 

So maybe celebrate a little in the kitchen today?

 

More

Cook 'em Danno.

[Winstonm]

Great word!

 

From the urban dictionary….Caucacity

Caucacity is the audacity of white people. Meaning, the willingness to take bold risks only white people feel safe doing But it's more than that: it's about behaving in a manner that disregards or refuses to acknowledge one's white privilege.

[shyams]

A lot of truly weird things happened in the NFL Week 17 matches yesterday.

 

Capped off by a truly shocking decision by the Eagles to engineer a loss for reasons that are difficult to comprehend. Guess thats my reward for staying awake till almost 4 am (here) merely to watch what I thought would be a crucial game with lots on stake.