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The Herald Scotland
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Live Aid: When the world's rock stars came together just for one day
As Live Aid promoter Harvey Goldsmith told Mojo magazine recently: 'Queen performed a short set, but it was the set of a lifetime, and it transformed them as a band. If you talk about Live Aid, most people go 'yeah, Queen'.' Francis Rossi of Status Quo, the band that opened proceedings at Wembley on July 13, 1985, later said that, in his view, Queen were the best band on the day. For many musicians – Queen's drummer Roger Taylor among them – the reaction of the 72,000-strong crowd remains an imperishable memory. 'During Radio Ga Ga,' he says in the new edition of Radio Times, 'it did seem that the whole stadium was in unison. But then I looked up during We Are The Champions, and the crowd looked like a whole field of wheat swaying.' U2's set was equally memorable, especially when, during the song Bad, Bono panicked his bandmates by disappearing from their sight in order to get closer to the audience. Confusion then reigned among security staff as he picked out three young women from the crowd. As Bono vanished over the edge of the stage, and showed no sign of reappearing, drummer Larry Mullen thought to himself 'how long can we do this for?'. Mullen admitted to Rolling Stone magazine in 2014: 'It was kind of excruciating. We didn't know whether we should stop, we didn't know where he was, we didn't know if he had fallen.' U2's guitarist The Edge told the same magazine: 'We lost sight of him completely. He was gone for so long I started to think maybe he had decided to end the set early and was on his way to the dressing room. 'I was totally thrown, and I'm looking at Adam [Clayton] and Larry to see if they know what's going on and they're looking back at me with complete panic across their faces. I'm just glad the cameras didn't show the rest of the band during the whole drama, because we must have looked like the Three Stooges up there.' Though Bono's inspired, impromptu interaction with the audience meant that U2 had no time to play a third song, Live Aid turned out to be a key chapter in the story of the band. As he wrote in his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, it was 'a gigantic moment in the life of U2. In the life of so many musicians'. He took a more detached view of U2's actual performance, however: 'Influential though it was in the arc of our band, I confess that I find it excruciating to watch. It's a little humbling that during one of the greatest moments of your life, you're having a bad hair day. 'Now, some people would say that I've had a bad hair life, but when I am forced to look at footage of U2 playing Live Aid, there is only one thing that I can see. The mullet. All thoughts of altruism and of righteous anger, all the right reasons that we were there, all these flee my mind, and all I see is the ultimate bad hair day.' The line-up of artists at Wembley and Philadelphia's JFK Stadium that July day included so many stellar names: Bob Dylan, Sting, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Dire Straits, David Bowie, Joan Baez, Eric Clapton, Simple Minds, Elton John, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Black Sabbath, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Who, Brian Ferry, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner and Run DMC. Watching them all over the course of one unforgettable day was a global audience of one and a half billion - the largest ever. Led Zeppelin, who had broken up in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, reformed as a one-off for Live Aid in Philadelphia. The Who, playing Wembley, had also got back together for the occasion. Zeppelin's performance, so eagerly awaited by their fans, was marred by any number of setbacks, and the band subsequently refused to allow footage of their songs to be included in the official Live Aid DVD. Black Sabbath, for their part, had been going through a particularly disruptive period, and their bass guitarist, Geezer Butler, seriously doubted whether the original line-up - himself, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward - would ever play together again. Osbourne, the band's singer, had been fired in April 1979, and replacements Ronnie James Dio and Ian Gillan had come and gone. Ozzy's solo career in the States was proving hugely successful, and when all four original Sabbath members got on stage in Philadelphia, it was the first such occasion since 1978. Sabbath were managed by the notorious Don Arden, Osbourne by his wife Sharon, Arden's daughter. A reunion had been tentatively mooted but in any event, Arden served Ozzy and Sharon with a writ. 'My father-in-law and my wife and I were in a f*****g war,' Osbourne said a few years ago. 'I was f*****g served [a lawsuit] at Live Aid by my father-in-law, for interference or some b******t, and nothing ever materialised from it.' Butler, for his part, has said that Arden was threatening to take legal action if Osbourne appeared under the Sabbath banner. Sabbath, a late addition to the line-up, had only one rehearsal before playing the first of their songs at Live Aid at 9.55am. "We hadn't slept and some of us were a bit hungover", Butler writes in his memoirs. "We didn't do a Queen and steal the show, but Think we got away with it". Dire Straits, for their part, didn't have far to walk to get onto the Wembley stage, as they happened to be playing 12 nights at Wembley Arena, across the road. At 6pm, they played a brief Live Aid set – Money for Nothing, and Sultans Of Swing – and casually made their way back to the Arena. 'We literally walked off the stage, out of the stadium and across the car park to the Arena,' the band's Guy Fletcher said in a Classic Rock magazine interview last month. 'I think John [Illsley] was even carrying his bass – and to some funny looks from the car park attendants, I might add.' Backstage in London, Billy Connolly heard Bob Geldof barking at someone on the phone. The call over, Connolly queried: 'Somebody on your back there?' Geldof replied: 'Somebody wanted to put Santana on next. They're f*****g c****!' Connolly, interviewed on a BBC documentary Live Aid: Against All Odds, laughed as he added: 'This guy from the Boomtown Rats telling me that Santana are c****. I don't think so!' Backstage at Wembley, David Bowie was a bag of nerves; and Eric Clapton, in Philly, was said by a later biographer to have been overcome with nerves, such was the global profile of the acts with whom he was competing. Read more: Geldof attacks Live Aid critics Live Aid names for sale The Band Aid controversy: the Scottish founder has his say Calling kids who bought the Band Aid record 'racist' is a disgrace 'Pathetic and appalling. I thought we dealt with this 20 years ago'; Geldof returns to Ethiopia and attacks lack of European aid Live Aid, which was put together by Geldof and Midge Ure, raised £40 million on the day – the equivalent of over £100m today – which was then used to provide relief of hunger and poverty in Ethiopia and the neighbourhood thereof. Between January 1985 and the release of the official Live Aid DVD in November 2004, the Band Aid Trust spent over £144m on the relief of famine in Africa. More than 30,000 TV viewers in Scotland got through to the special phone lines on July 13, 1985, donating a reported £300,000. Millions of people were moved to make all sorts of donations. Old couples sent in their wedding rings. One newly-wed couple even sold their new home and donated the proceeds. Live Aid was a colossal achievement, given that in excess of 70 artists and bands performed over 16 hours of live music across the London and Philadelphia concerts, all of them organised in just a few months. * Tomorrow night (Sunday, July 6) at 9pm, BBC Two will broadcast the first two parts of a three-part series, Live Aid At 40: When Rock'n'Roll Took on the World. Greatest Hits Radio will replay the entire concert next Sunday, July 13. Just for One Day: The Live Aid Musical is playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London.
Atlantic
29-06-2025
- Automotive
- Atlantic
The Real Reason You're Still on Hold
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. In hindsight I'll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent. I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I'd looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I'd seen. It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I'd been driving to my brother's house, going about 40 mph, when my family's newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it. I jabbed at the 'Power' button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle. What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began. That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.) 'We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,' the guy told me a few days later. 'But we can't identify the problem.' Then he asked if I'd like to come pick up the car. 'Won't it just happen again?' I asked. 'Might,' he said. 'Might not.' I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem. 'Look'— annoyed sigh —'we're not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.' This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center. Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she'd call back the next day. Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela's line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle's malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn't apply. 'But nobody can replicate the malfunction,' I said. 'I understand your frustration.' Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who— CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they'd somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car. 'Would you put your kids in it?' I'd ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up! As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn't even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I'd slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through. Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject. 'It's boring,' she said. 'Disregard.' On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail. Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years. I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything's broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us? Turns out there's a word for it. In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called 'sludge'—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives. The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. 'People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,' he wrote in the Duke Law Journal. The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they'd pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn't happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it. Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was 'incorrect.') Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota's motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, 'Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.' Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. 'If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,' Thum told me. 'If you're a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.' Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren't going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that's just how things go. The result: We're exhausted as hell and we're probably going to keep taking it. Call Pamela. Call the mechanic. Call the other mechanic. Call that lemon-law lawyer. My exhausted efforts, to the extent I understood them, revolved around getting my car either fixed or replaced and getting the various nodes in the Ford universe to talk with one another. In the middle of work, or dinner, or a kid's soccer game, I'd peel off to answer a random call, because every now and then it was that one precious update from Ford, informing me that there was no news. The hope, with all of this, was to burrow my way far enough into the circuitry to locate someone with the authority and inclination to help. Sometimes I got drips of information—the existence of a buyback department at Ford, for instance. Mostly I got nowhere. The longer this dragged on, the more the matrix seemed to glitch. The dealership where I'd bought the car had no record of the salesman who'd sold it to me. Ford's internal database, at one point, claimed that I had already picked up the car I was still trying to get them to fix. A mechanic told me, 'It's not that we couldn't fix it. It's that we never found the problem, so we were unable to fix it.' Another mechanic, apparently as delighted by our conversations as I was, grew petulant. 'Driving is a luxury,' he told me without explanation. Initiating these conversations in the first place: also a luxury, I was learning. For this we have the automatic call distributor to thank. The invention of this device in the mid–20th century allowed for the industrialization of customer service. In lieu of direct contact, calls could be funneled automatically to the next available agent, who would handle each one quickly and methodically. Contact centers became an industry of their own and, with the rise of offshoring in the '90s, lurched into a new level of productivity—at least from a corporate perspective. Sure, wait times lengthened, pleasantries grew stilted, and sometimes the new accents were hard to understand. But inefficiency had been conquered, or outsourced to the customer, anyway. Researching this shift led me to Amas Tenumah. As a college student in Oklahoma, Tenumah had come up with a million-dollar invention: a tool that would translate those agent voices into text, and then convert that text into a digital voice. 'So you'd end up with this robotic conversation,' he told me, 'which one could argue may even be worse. I didn't know what the hell I was doing.' The million dollars didn't materialize, but connections did. Needing work, he took a telemarketing job at a company called TCIM Services. Rather than transform contact centers, he strapped on a headset and joined one. The obsession with efficiency in his new field astonished him. Going to the bathroom required a code. Breaks were regulated to the minute. Outwardly he worked in an office, but by any measure it was a factory floor. Overly long 'handle time'? He'd get dinged. Too few calls answered? He'd get dinged. Too many escalations to a supervisor? Ding. Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them. In the two decades after he took that first job, Tenumah rose from agent to manager, ultimately running enormous contact centers around the world. His work took him from Colombia to the Philippines in an endless search for cheap and malleable labor. In 2021, he published a slim book titled Waiting for Service: An Insider's Account of Why Customer Service Is Broken + Tips to Avoid Bad Service. Between calls to Ford and various mechanics, I'd begun reading it, and listening to the podcast that Tenumah co-hosts. He has a funny, straight-shooting manner that somehow lets him dish about his industry while continuing to work in it. When we first spoke, I mentioned that someone at Ford had told me that my case had been closed at my request; I had to go through the whole process of reopening it. Was I imagining things, I asked, or was my lack of progress deliberate? Tenumah laughed. 'Yes, sludge is often intentional,' he said. 'Of course. The goal is to put as much friction between you and whatever the expensive thing is. So the frontline person is given as limited information and authority as possible. And it's punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.' Helpfulness aside, I mentioned that I frequently felt like I was talking with someone alarmingly indifferent to my plight. 'That's called good training,' Tenumah said. 'What you're hearing is a human successfully smoothed into a corporate algorithm, conditioned to prioritize policy over people. If you leave humans in their natural state, they start to care about people and listen to nuance, and are less likely to follow the policy.' For some people, that humanity gets trained out of them. For others, the threat of punishment suppresses it. To keep bosses happy, Tenumah explained, agents develop tricks. If your average handle time is creeping up, hanging up on someone can bring it back down. If you've escalated too many times that day, you might 'accidentally' transfer a caller back into the queue. Choices higher up the chain also add helpful friction, Tenumah said: Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers leads to poor connection with offshore contact centers; many of the calls disconnect on their own. 'No one says, 'Let's do bad service,'' Tenumah told me. 'Instead they talk about things like credit percentages'—the number of refunds, rebates, or payouts extended to customers. 'My boss would say, 'We spent a million dollars in credits last month. That needs to come down to 750.' That number becomes an edict, makes its way down to the agents answering the phones. You just start thinking about what levers you have.' 'Does anyone tell them to pull those levers?' I asked. 'The brilliance of the system is that they don't have to say it out loud,' Tenumah said. 'It's built into the incentive structure.' That structure, he said, can be traced to a shift in how companies operate. There was a time when the happiness of existing customers was a sacred metric. CEOs saw the long arc of loyalty as essential to a company's success. That arc has snapped. Everyone still claims to value customer service, but as the average CEO tenure has shortened, executives have become more focused on delivering quick returns to shareholders and investors. This means prioritizing growth over the satisfaction of customers already on board. Customers are part of the problem too, Tenumah added. 'We've gotten collectively worse at punishing companies we do business with,' he said. He pointed to a deeply unpopular airline whose most dissatisfied customers return only slightly less often than their most satisfied customers. 'We as customers have gotten lazy. I joke that all the people who hate shopping at Walmart are usually complaining from inside Walmart.' In other words, he said, companies feel emboldened to treat us however they want. 'It's like an abusive relationship. All it takes is a 20 percent–off coupon and you'll come back.' As in any dysfunctional relationship, a glimmer of promise arrived just when I was giving up hope. As mysteriously as she'd vanished, Pamela came back one day, and non-updates began to trickle in: My case was still under review; my patience was appreciated. All of this was starting to remind me of something I'd read. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was created in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA. The document was intended to spark a wave of nonviolent citizen resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. 'Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions,' advised one passage. 'Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.' I'd encountered the manual in the past, and had thought of it as a quirky old curio. Now I saw it anew, as an up-to-the-minute handbook for corporate America. The 'purposeful stupidity' once meant to sabotage enemy regimes has been repurposed to frustrate us —weaponized inefficiency in the name of profit. (I later discovered that Slate 's Rebecca Onion had had this same revelation a full decade ago. Nevertheless the sabotage persists.) As I waited for news from Ford, I searched for more contact-center agents willing to talk. Rebecca Harris has fielded calls—mainly for telephone-, internet-, and TV-service companies—since 2007. She calls the work 'traumatic.' 'I'd want to do everything I can to help the person on the other end,' she told me. 'But I had to pretend that I can't, because they don't want me to escalate the call.' Many customers called because they were feeling pinched by their bill. For a lot of them, a rebate was available. But between the callers and that rebate, the company had installed an expanse of sludge. 'They would outright tell you in training you're not allowed to give them a rebate offer unless they ask you about it with specific words,' she said. 'If they say they're paying too much money, you couldn't mention the rebate. Or if the customer was asking about a higher rebate but you knew there was a lower one, they trained us to redirect them to that one.' Harris told me she'd think about her parents in times like this, and would treat her callers the way she'd want them treated. That didn't go over well with her managers. 'They'd call me in constantly to retrain me,' she said. 'I wasn't meeting the numbers they were asking me to meet, so they weren't meeting their numbers.' Supervisors didn't tell Harris to deceive or thwart customers. But having them get frustrated and give up was the best way to meet those numbers. Sometimes she'd intentionally drop a call or feign technical trouble: ''I'm sorry, the call … I can't … I'm having a hard time hearing y—.' It was sad. Or sometimes we'd drag out the call enough that they'd get agitated, or say things that got them agitated, and they'd hang up.' Even if an agent wanted to treat callers more humanely, much of the friction was structural, a longtime contact-center worker named Amayea Maat told me. For one, the different corners of a business were seldom connected, which forced callers to re-explain their problem over and over: more incentive to give up. 'And often they make the IVR'—interactive voice response, the automated phone systems we curse at—'really difficult to get through, so you get frustrated and go online.' She described working with one government agency that programmed its IVR to simply hang up on people who'd been on hold for a certain amount of time. There's a moment in Ford's hold music—an endless loop of demented hotel-lobby cheer—when the composition seems to speed up. By my 8,000th listen I was sure of it: The tempo rose infinitesimally in this one brief spot. Like the fly painted on men's-room urinals, this imperfection was clearly engineered to focus my attention—and, in so doing, to distract me from the larger absurdity at hand. Which is to say, my sanity had begun to fray. When I set out to document the inner workings of sludge, I had in mind the dull architecture of delays and deferrals. But I had started to notice my own inner workings. The aggravation was adding up, and so was the fatigue. Arguing was exhausting. Being transferred to argue with a different person was exhausting. The illogic was exhausting. Individually, the calls and emails were blandly substance-free. But together they spoke clearly: You are powerless. I began to wonder: Was the accretion of these exhaustions complicit in the broader hopelessness we seem to be feeling these days? Were these hassles and frictions not just costing us but warping us with a kind of administrative-spiritual defeatism? Signs of that warping seem to be appearing more and more, as when a Utah man who says he was denied a refund for his apparently defective Subaru crashed the car through the dealership's door. But most of us wearily combat sludge through the proper channels, however hopeless it seems. A Nebraska man spent two years trying to change the apparently computer-generated name given to his daughter, Unakite Thirteen Hotel, after a bureaucratic error involving her birth certificate. She also hadn't received a Social Security number—without which she couldn't receive Medicaid and other services. In his 2021 follow-up to Nudge, Sludge, Sunstein notes that this constellation of frictions 'makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter.' I asked Sunstein about this depletion. 'Suppose that people spend hours on the phone, waiting for help from the Social Security Administration, or seeking to get a license or a permit to do something,' he replied. 'They might start to despair, not only because of all that wasted time but because they are being treated as if they just don't count.' For Pamela Herd, a social-policy professor at the University of Michigan, sludge became personal when she began navigating services for her daughter, who has a disability. 'It's one thing when I get frustrated at the DMV,' she told me. 'It's another thing when you're in a position where your kid's life might be on the line, or your kid's access to health insurance, or your access to food.' In 2018, Herd published Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, with her husband, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Michigan. The book examines how bureaucratic quicksand—complex paperwork, confusing procedures—actively stymies policy and access to government services. Rather than mere inefficiencies, the authors argue, a number of these obstacles are deliberate policy tools that discourage participation in programs such as Medicaid, keep people from voting, and limit access to social welfare. Marginalized communities are hit disproportionately. Throughout my ordeal, it was always clear that I was among the fortunate sludgees. I had the time and flexibility to fight in the first place—to wait on hold, to write follow-up emails. Most people would've just agreed to start driving the damn car again. Fuck it. One of sludge's most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions, Herd told me. Once that skepticism sets in, it's not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency. She was on speakerphone as she told me this, driving through the Southwest on vacation with Moynihan. As it happened, something had flown up and hit their windshield just before our conversation, and they were surely headed for a protracted discussion between their rental-car company and their insurance company—a little sludge of their own. Exasperated as we all are, said Tenumah, the customer-service expert, things are going to get much worse when customer service is fully managed by AI. And, as Moynihan observed, DOGE has already taken our frustration with government inefficiency and perverted it into drastic cuts that also will only further complicate our lives. But in some corners of academia and government, pushback to sludge is mounting. Regulations like the FTC's 'Click to Cancel' rule seek to eliminate barriers to canceling subscriptions and memberships. And the International Sludge Academy, a new initiative from both the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the government of New South Wales, has promoted the adoption of 'sludge audits' around the world. The business research firm Gartner predicts that 'the right to talk to a human' will be EU law by 2028. In the meantime, I've developed my own way of responding. Years before my Ford ordeal, I'd already begun to understand that sludge was doing something to us. It first registered when I noticed a new vein of excuse in the RSVP sphere: 'Sorry, love to, but I need to figure out our passport application tonight.' 'Sorry, researching new insurance plans.' The domestic tasks weren't new; the novelty was all the ways we were drowning in the basic administration of our own lives. I didn't have a solution. But I had an idea for addressing it. I fired off an email to some friends, and on a Tuesday night, a tradition began. 'Admin Night' isn't a party. It isn't laborious taking-care-of-business. It's both! At the appointed hour, friends come over with beer and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, summer-camp paperwork. Five minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, rinse, repeat. At the end of each gathering, everyone names a minor bureaucratic victory and the group lets out a supportive cheer. Admin Night rules. In an era of fraying social ties, it claws back a sliver of hang time. Part of the appeal is simply being able to socialize while plowing through the to-do list—a 21st-century efficiency fetish if ever there was one. But just as satisfying is having this species of modern enervation brought into the light. Learning of sludge's existence, Thum, the bureaucracy researcher, told me, is the first step in fighting it, and in pushing back against the despair it provokes. Among sludge's mysteries is how it can suddenly clear. With no explanation, Pamela called one day to tell me that Ford had decided to buy back my car. She put me in touch with the Reacquired Vehicles Headquarters. From there I was connected to a 'repurchase coordinator,' then I was told to wait for another process in 'Quality,' and after some haggling over the price they agreed to buy the car back. To Ford's credit, they gave me a fair offer. But I would've accepted a turkey sandwich at that point. What happens to the car next? I asked. I was told that if returned vehicles could be repaired, they could be resold with disclosures. But was Ford obligated to fix the defect before selling it? No one could give me a clear answer. I pondered options for warning potential buyers. Could I post something to Yelp and hope it somehow got noticed? Hide a note inside the car somewhere? Publish the Vehicle Identification Number—1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474—in a national magazine? Before I could decide on a solution, I got the call. One hundred eight days after this whole thing began, I borrowed a friend's car and drove to the San Jose dealership where my Escape had been waiting all this time. When I arrived, a man named Dennis greeted me and we walked to the lot where the car was sitting. I grabbed everything out of the center console, and then we walked back inside. 'What's going to happen to it?' I asked. 'Are they going to resell it?' Dennis didn't know, or didn't seem inclined to discuss. (A Ford communications director named Mike Levine later told The Atlantic that the company does not resell any repurchased vehicles that can't be fully repaired. Given the confusion I witnessed, I still wonder how they confirm that a car is fully repaired.) I signed some papers, and it was over. The car that wasn't safe to drive, the process that seemed designed not to work—the whole experience ended not with a bang but with a cashier's check and a wordless handshake. When I originally alerted Ford about this article, a spokesperson named Maria told me that my case was not typical and that she was sorry about it. Regarding all the back-and-forth, she said, 'that was not seamless.' Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not 'encourage or measure 'sludge,'' and that 'there was zero intent to add 'sludge'' to my interactions with Ford. He said that the teams I spoke with had needed time to see whether they could replicate the problem with my car, though to my mind that suggests a more concerted effort than what I perceived. Pamela emailed an apology, too, adding that, given 'the experience you had with your vehicle, I do want to extend an offer for a maintenance plan for your vehicle should you decide to purchase a Ford again, as a complimentary gift for your patience with the brand, as I understand this process took a long time.' We did purchase another vehicle, but it wasn't a Ford. Lately I've taken to noticing small victories in the war against sludge. That Nebraska dad with the daughter named Unakite Thirteen Hotel? I'm happy to report she was at last given a Social Security number in February, and was on her way to finally, officially, becoming Caroline. Still, I couldn't help thinking of all the time her dad lost in that soul-sucking battle. 'It's been very, very taxing,' he said in an interview. I understood his frustration.
San Francisco Chronicle
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Can a rock star also be humble? Bono's ‘Stories of Surrender' will surprise you
Reading Bono's 2022 memoir ' Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,' you might be struck by an intriguing juxtaposition: For a rock star often accused of harboring a messiah complex, this guy also, somehow, seems admirably humble. That same spirit guides the new performance documentary 'Bono: Stories of Surrender,' adapted from the U2 leader's one-man stage show inspired by that book. Given stark cinematic life by director Andrew Dominik, the film — which streams on Apple TV+ starting Friday, May 30, after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the month — features paradoxes worthy of its subject. It is both stripped-down and grandiose, over-the-top and understated. 'Stories of Surrender' was shot before an adoring live audience at the Beacon Theatre in New York and enhanced with filmic touches provided in post-production. While it sometimes struggles with the transition from stage to screen, it ultimately succeeds due to its star's unassuming charisma and effortless storytelling. 'It is preposterous to think others might be as interested in your own story as you are,' the Irish rock star, born Paul David Hewson, tells his audience from the stage. But we know that he knows his story is worth hearing, and it's clear that he relishes the opportunity. That story is about a rebellious Dublin teen who at 14, his mother, Iris, dies from an aneurysm, and his already-reticent father (or 'the da,' as Bono consistently calls him) grows even more distant. Under the sway of punk acts like the Ramones, dreaming of forming his own band, young Paul rounds up some friends — Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr. and the Edge — and, through force of will and talent, make the climb from sparsely populated pub gigs to sold-out stadiums. At only 86 minutes, 'Stories of Surrender' makes no pretense of telling the full Bono story. But it picks its spots with artful precision and with keen cinematic instincts. Dominik (2007's ' The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ' and 2022's ' Blonde ') and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt use black-and-white imagery shot with chiaroscuro lighting to set an intimate but poetic tone. At times we see multiple Bonos talking to each other. The occasional blast of pyrotechnics tends to be muted. The music itself is presented with a minimalist touch. Music supervisor Jacknife Lee, working with cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty, provide the backbone, with the occasional prerecorded blast of a familiar anthem. The songs provide autobiographical background and heft, as when Bono recalls the sense of purpose and thrill that came with belting out 'Pride (In the Name of Love)' at the 1985 Live Aid benefit concert — then notes ruefully that the $250 million that concert raised for Ethiopia was a mere drop in the bucket of the country's desperate need. Wearing a suit jacket, pinstriped vest and beads, Bono uses empty chairs and spotlights to recreate key moments of his tale. Three simple kitchen chairs placed in a row represent Clayton, Mullen and the Edge as the aspiring rock stars who try to piece together what would become the early hit 'I Will Follow.' More poignantly, Bono sits in a plush lounge chair as he imagines the pub conversations he used to have with his father, who would begin every conversation with the same question: 'Anything strange or startling?' One day, well into U2's run of stardom, the son decides to turn the question on the father, only to receive the devastating news that the old man has cancer. 'Stories of Surrender' is a disarming portrait of a self-aware megastar with an authentically personal demeanor, the kind of guy you might want to join for one of those pub conversations. If you do think Bono has a god complex, he comes across here as someone eager to sit down, laugh about it and perhaps tip a couple of pints.
Irish Independent
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Bono – Stories of Surrender review: The life and times of this gifted raconteur is an elegant affair
We might add to this list a night in late 2022 when Bono brought the debut show of his all-singing, all-sharing book tour to the Olympia Theatre. Marking the release of his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the night was attended by a who's-who of Irish life; everyone from heads of state to broadcasting giants. What greeted them was a side to the U2 frontman perhaps less seen, part opera star, part seanchaí, relating the knots of his extraordinary life from a stage of rare intimacy. Stripped-down versions of songs would helix through stories about his parents, his upbringing in Dublin, meeting wife Ali and his eventual bandmates (in the same week), and the globe-gobbling stardom that would eventually come. Two things seemed to strike anyone lucky enough to get a ticket or an invite that night – the stagecraft of the entire performance, and the sheer dexterity and control of the then 62-year-old's vocal cords. One music industry friend of mine, someone who has seen all the greats down through the years, put it in the top five things he had ever seen staged anywhere in our capital. That show's beguiling format of yarns and renditions from one of the most famous people on the planet has been captured on camera without too much in the way of reverence or pomp. Andrew Dominik's film brings just a slick monochrome sheen and some light digital trickery to proceedings as it swoops about New York's Beacon Theatre. Accompaniment is provided by producer and occasional U2 collaborator Jacknife Lee, who strips those arena-filling compositions back to their essence with vocal and instrumental help from Crash Ensemble cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty (of Saint Sister). That aside, it's just a table, a few chairs, a bit of a lighting rig and a gifted raconteur cherry-picking from his bestselling memoir. ADVERTISEMENT Learn more As with the book, the 'eccentric heart' trouble that hospitalised him in New York in 2016 is a jumping-off point for what is essentially a scenic route through a newfound sense of mortality. And then it's right into Cedarwood Road, The Ramones and a complicated parental dynamic. More than in the print memoir, Bono's over-arching niggle in Dominik's film is father Bob, the opera-lover who married protestant Iris (much to his own family's disapproval). Following Iris's death when then Paul Hewson was just 14, much head-butting went on between the punkish teenager and the nonchalant, old-school Bob. All good frontmen carry the 'look at me, Mum' gene, but while Iris's death certainly played a role, it was Bob's reluctance to really acknowledge his pride in the rising superstar that provides the emotional cornerstone for these stories. By the time Bono is re-enacting their stunted Sunday afternoon conversations in Finnegan's pub, the delicate dynamic is tangible but somehow never mawkish or self-pitying. Always there is a sense of forward momentum, a dance that, much like the operas his father would sing along to, have their ebbs and flows. A brilliant mimic who is naturally predisposed to physical showmanship and far-reaching activism, you come to appreciate just what a rare and unusual creature Bono is and how wide of the mark are those tiresome slurs on his character (he does pay taxes, by the way, as do all members of U2 – find a new hobby). And what of the songs chosen from that imperious back catalogue? Well, there are moments in this show where a classic track bubbles up to the surface of an anecdote – see the penning of debut single Out of Control or Pride (In the Name of Love) – that are so cannily timed they arrive like goosebumps exploding. Hate them all you like, but there can be no denying that U2 and their singular frontman push buttons that no one else has really found access to. While an early Christmas present for fans, for everyone else this is an elegant, classy, fun and often poignant one-man opera that revels in the limitations of its setting. Four stars
Extra.ie
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
'Zero respect' -- Bono under fire over Netanyahu comments
U2 frontman Bono is under fire following his calls for Israel to be 'released from Benjamin Netanyahu,' with many feeling the musician is 'late to the party'. The 65-year-old made the comments last week at London's Grosvenor House. It was the first time the human rights activist spoke out in public against Israel since October 2023. U2 frontman Bono is under fire following his calls for Israel to be 'released from Benjamin Netanyahu,' with many feeling the musician is a little late to the party. Pic: Dave Hogan/Hogan Media/REX/Shutterstock The lead singer said: 'Peace creates possibilities in the most intractable situations. Lord knows there's a few of them there right now. 'Hamas, release the hostages. Stop the war. Israel, be released from Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalists that twist your sacred text.' He added: 'All of you protect our aid workers, they are the best of us.' U2 singer Bono is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Joe Biden. Pic:The speech came as the musician received an award from Ed Sheeran alongside his bandmates. The band were awarded an academy fellowship at the 70th year of the annual awards. While Bono's speech has circulated online, many have reacted negatively as they hit out at the musician for remaining silent for more than a year and a half. While the speech circulated online, many have reacted negatively as they hit out at the musician for remaining silent for more than a year and a half. Pic: Anthony Harvey/REX/Shutterstock One person wrote: 'After nearly 20 months of blatant genocide and thousands upon thousands of civilians pulped by Israeli bombing, including a high proportion of children and babies, Bono decides it's safe enough to criticise Netanyahu. F*** off.' Another echoed: 'F*** off Bono.' A third added: 'He 'forgot' the most important part; STOP THE GENOCIDE!! Zero respect for Bono, it was a p**s weak speech.' He "forgot" the most important part; STOP THE GENOCIDE!! Zero respect for Bono, it was a piss weak speech. — Domestic Godmess (@Melanieakroyd) May 25, 2025 Someone else took to the comments to point out: 'Great to hear from Bono again, he's such a champion of human rights, coincidentally, he has a documentary out at the moment!' Bono: Stories of Surrender is set for release on Apple TV on Friday, May 30, and is a one-man show by the same name of his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. The film is set to feature never-before-seen exclusive footage from the Stories of Surrender Beacon Theatre shows, as well as Bono performing a number of U2 hits. An updated paperback edition of his bestselling memoir is set to be released concurrently.
