Fender Highlights Customization With New Player II Modification Series
DETROIT - AUGUST 13: American musician, songwriter, producer, and inventor Eddie Van Halen ... More (1955-2020) plays his custom Frankenstrat guitar at Cobo Arena during Van Halen's "Hide Your Sheep Tour" on August 13, 1982, in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Ross Marino/Getty)
Put a guitar in the hands of an artist like Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Tom Morello and you have a template, not a finished product.
Since Leo Fender started Fender with repairable guitars, that concept of adaptability has been at the core of the Fender guitar. Now the company is bringing that to the forefront with the new Player II Modified series, 'Featuring select electric guitar and bass models enhanced with performance-driven upgrades, Player II Modified offers modern players refined tone, performance, and style straight out of the box,' according to a press release.
I spoke with Justin Norvell, EVP of Product, and Jason Klein, Artist Marketing Lead, for an in-depth look at how customization has shaped Fender's history and instruments.
Steve Baltin: So where are you guys today?
Justin Norvell: I'm LA -based, but I'm in our Arizona office.
Jason Klein: I'm in the Kurt Cobain room in our Fender office in LA.
Norvell: Our different conference rooms and common rooms, like there are pictures on the wall. There's Nile Rogers, Johnny Marr, we have Clapton, George Harrison, we just name them all instead of some other name for the rooms.
Klein: My personal favorite's the Tom Morello editing bay.
Baltin: Does Tom ever come in there?
Klein: Sure, yeah.
Baltin: That actually is a good lead in cause my guess is you get a lot of really cool product ideas and ideas for what you want to do going forward dealing with all these artists who have so many innovative ideas.
Norvell: All the way back, Leo Fender was a repair guy. He was a service guy, radio repair guy. So, he decided to build guitars that were repairable. He made a modular, because if you look at an old hollow body, an old jazz guitar, if the neck twists or something happens, it's broken. So, he created this bolted together Henry Ford style guitar, but it was too service. But players took that modularity and were like, 'I can upgrade, change, modify, get a guitar out of a pawn shop, hack the wood out of it and throw different pickups in it and start doing all this different stuff.' That's what's kind of led to this, the modular nature of Fenders, which is unique, has led to modification from Kurt Cobain right behind him had a Jaguar that famously had two big humbuckers in it and he changed the switching and everybody, like most of our signature models, Johnny Marr has a blade switch and different electronics in his and Eric Clapton has a boost circuit in his. It's like a base platform that then you can personalize to your own style and taste, and it can evolve with you too through your life.
Klein: Yeah, a lot of the mods can be done DIIY. We had artists like Hendrix and Clapton, who were modifying their three -way switches with matchsticks to create extra spaces and the pickups to up to create more sonic sounds. And then years later, we have the five-way switch. It's just like paying attention to our artists and the changes they make. And it's this great reciprocal thing back and forth.
Norvell: It's like crowdsourcing before crowdsourcing existed.
Klein: Yeah, particularly just hearing what people are doing with stuff. Then we made modifications to our products based upon what people were doing with them.
Baltin: The pawn shops thing is interesting to me because as a music geek I read all these memoirs like Bruce Springsteen and Keith Richards, and they can't really afford new guitars, so they'll buy something at a pawn shop and make something out of nothing. I imagine it starts from there.
Norvell: Yeah, and a lot of artists throughout their career continue changing and evolving their gear because that never goes away. Experimentation leads to innovation. It's not just 'I want X sound out of my pickups or whatever,' it's literally making changes to the instrument, which can change the way it sounds, it reacts to change the way it feels, and it can build something new. Putting a big beyond a Tele can change [so much]. Everything's all liquid and swimming now and it changes the whole artist's sound or something.
Klein: The pawn shop thing is interesting. It's cool to see how genres can actually come out of the ability to obtain certain instruments. The Jazzmaster, for instance, is a very high-end instrument made for jazz, and it was meant to be played a certain way. Then, as it ebbs and flows with musical trends, it became really common in pawn shops. So, then you had all the bands that would create shoegaze and grunge and noise rock buying Jazzmasters and Jaguars cause they were obtainable. And then it creates entire genres and trends from that. It's very cool to see.
Baltin: Is there one sound or one thing that emerged that surprised you guys the most and that you got most excited about?
Norvell: Yeah, all of that stuff. Distortion, which is now a mainstay of someone's sound was an accident, like amps weren't supposed to drive that hard or whatever. And the tremolo was supposed to approximate a classical guitar player, and it was used for all those whaling solos that Hendrix did. So, all that stuff's crazy. I would say, for Fender, it's the putting a humbucker, which is more like a Gibson style thing, into a Stratocaster or a Telecaster, which created this kind of hybrid instrument. It used to be like Fenders were single coils and were clean. Then there were other brands that did other stuff. Players started taking stuff and hacking openings. Edward Van Halen, his main guitar was kind of a Stratocaster-esque self-built guitar that he very crudely put a humbucker in. That started a whole revolution of modification in the late '70s to this day of people taking routers and drills and stuff to their instruments and it's really its own cottage industry. If you look into it, there are people that sell templates, and they sell all these different things and you can buy any type of Stratocaster aftermarket pickguard with any type of number of different holes or different pickup configurations. There's a whole modification industry that now exists based upon this obsession.
Klein: Yeah, and it's still super strong. Speaking to how our guitars are modular and they can be combined, you have artists like Nick Reinhardt who you're speaking with today and Mickey who's creating a new sound by mixing Jaguar and baritone components and then using other preamps to create this sound that is super unique and harkens back to a little bit of a Pink Floyd thing but sounds totally new and really could only be done by combining these two Fender instruments .
Baltin: Has there been one that people come to you and you're like 'This is crazy, but it's awesome?'
Norvell: I think there are some that really want to deconstruct and modify the instrument deeply. And that's cool, but then when you're talking about Ed Van Halen and Eric Johnson as a guitar player, those people have the kind of dog whistle hearing that is on a different plane. When we were voicing amp's, pickups, guitars with Ed, it was years and it was tiny detail things, but things that they could hear that they were or were not reacting to. And Eric Johnson, I think the first time we did a guitar with him, we went through 69 sets of pickups. He can hear the most subtle things in instruments. I think that's a thing that keeps us honest, as we're kind of testing these things out in the world. But then there's this guitar behind me that's three humbuckers, chrome pickguard and a Strat head stuck on a Tele with a strap tremolo on it. So that's John 5, who played with Rob Zombie and is in Motley Crue right now. So yeah, these things are just platforms for people to express. That right there is the Malcolm Young from AC/DC and it's got holes in it because he pulled the pickups out and it's just open. So, some of it's to upgrade it and make it look beautiful and sometimes it's just a complete Frankenstein garage project. But it's fascinating; it runs the gamut from someone wanting to take a chisel and a hammer to a guitar and make it look really rough; the Sonic Youth guys had these satin finished very not cosmetically like overdone instruments, and then some people go hyper-detailed and hyper-nuanced and want it to be like Strata various to use a pun.
Klein: Yeah, and it's cool. I really like seeing how these really big mods and the things that are grand adjustments to a guitar lead to quality-of-life changes in our products as they come out in real time. So, as a bass player myself the preamp and the new player mods is just a major improvement on past preamps where you can blend in passive control, have like a much more refined EQ. Those conversations are through ongoing mods and custom projects and whatever with our bass players and experimenting with preamps until we get to this space where we have the perfect preamp in our player model line. It's this ongoing process of starting really big or granular or making big changes to the instruments and just refining it to a point that it's this great quality-of-life adjustment too.
Norvell: This series is reminding people of the modification nature of the instruments and how important it is and how you can very simply make upgrades. Locking tuners, noiseless pickups, different wiring, like treble bleed circuits and stuff like that. That's all stuff that takes a baseline instrument and knocks it up a couple levels. It really is doing as has been done since the earliest days of Fender and it just keeps evolving.
Baltin: How does all this tie together for the player mod campaign?
Norvell: We're working with Idles and stuff like that. The player series is our best-selling series of instruments. We took the player series and said, 'What are the most desirable or easily upgradable modifications that would be compelling to musicians as that level up if you just want to say this is cool as a base model, but I want something that's a little bit plus.' That's why we're talking about new preamps, active passive bases, we have improved bridges, new different wiring, better pickups, locking tuners, all of that stuff. This is not a vintage replica guitar. This is a modern contemporary taking these classic forms, Strat, Tele, PJ, et cetera, to their contemporary height as products. So, it's like if you took your hot rod in somewhere and said, "Do your thing, this is what someone would do." And then the way that we're taking that out to the world is telling the story of modification as a hallmark of Fender, a hallmark of what our artists have always done to our instruments.
Klein: It was important for us to work with artists that embody that. So be it the sounds they're creating and sonically and who their audience is and what they're interested in, but also the individual players in the bands or the ones done with the instruments and our history with them and what we know they do with their guitars. So, it was a very organic fit. Idles, sonically they really do embody this, taking things to a next level by mixing genres, but always keeping the core aggression of being a punk band. And we've been modifying their guitars for years.
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Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
How I Accidentally Inspired a Major Chinese Motion Picture
In December, a friend sent me the trailer for a new Chinese movie called Clash. It's a sports comedy about a ragtag group of Chinese men who start an American-football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learn to block and tackle, build camaraderie, and face off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. Funny, I thought. In 2014, I wrote an article for The New Republic about a ragtag group of Chinese men who'd started an American football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing. With the help of a foreign coach, the Chongqing Dockers learned to block and tackle, built camaraderie, and—yes—faced off in the league championship against the evil Shanghai team. The Chinese studio behind Clash, iQIYI, is not the first to take an interest in the Dockers' story. My article, titled 'Year of the Pigskin,' was natural Hollywood bait: a tale of cross-cultural teamwork featuring a fish-out-of-water American protagonist, published at a moment when Hollywood and China were in full-on courtship and the future of U.S.-China relations looked bright. It didn't take much imagination to see Ryan Reynolds or Michael B. Jordan playing the coach—a former University of Michigan tight end who'd missed his shot at a pro career because of a shoulder injury—with Chinese stars filling the supporting roles. Sony bought the option to the article, as well as the coach's life rights. When that project fizzled a few years later, Paramount scooped up the rights but never made anything. Now a Chinese studio appeared to have simply lifted the idea. I texted Chris McLaurin, the former Dockers coach who now works at a fancy law firm in London. (Since my original article published, we have become good friends.) Should we say something? Should we sue? At the very least, one of us had to see the movie. Fortunately, it was premiering in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. I booked a flight to the Netherlands. The movie I saw, which came out in Chinese theaters last month, did not alleviate my concerns. But the film, along with the conversations I had with its producer and director, provided a glimpse into the cultural and political forces that led to Clash 's creation. Indeed, the trajectory of the IP itself—from the original article to the Hollywood screenplays to the final Chinese production—says a lot about how the relationship between the United States and China has evolved, or devolved, over the past decade. What began as a story about transcending cultural boundaries through sports has turned into a symbol of just how little China and the U.S. understand each other—and how little interest they have in trying. I went to China in 2011 because I had a vague sense that something important was happening there. I moved to Beijing, with funding from a Luce scholarship, and started looking for stories. They weren't hard to find. The years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics turned out to be a remarkable era of relative openness. Many international observers saw Xi Jinping's rise in 2012 as the beginning of a period of liberalization, the inevitable political outcome of the country's growing prosperity. For journalists, China was a playground and a gold mine at once. We could travel (mostly) freely and talk to (almost) anyone. Along with the wealth of narrative material came a sense of purpose: We felt as though we were writing the story of the New China—a country opening up to the rest of the world, trying on identities, experimenting with new ways of thinking and living. The story that captivated me most was that of the Chongqing Dockers. It was one of those article ideas that miraculously fall in your lap, and in retrospect feel like fate. I'd heard that McLaurin, another Luce Scholar, had started coaching a football team in Chongqing, so I flew down to visit him. The first practice I attended was barely controlled chaos: The team didn't have proper equipment, no one wanted to hit one another, and they kept taking cigarette breaks. 'It was like 'Little Giants,' except with adult Chinese men,' I wrote to my editor at The New Republic. He green-lighted the story, and I spent the next year following the team, as well as McLaurin's efforts to create a nationwide league. The movie analogy was fortuitous. Just before the article was published, Sony bought the IP rights, as well as the rights to McLaurin's life story. The project would be developed by Escape Artists, the production company co-founded by Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants. Maybe the NFL, struggling to break into the Chinese market, would even get involved. The deal changed McLaurin's life. Sony flew him and his mom out to Los Angeles, where a limo picked them up at the airport. He met with Tisch and the other producers. They floated Chris Pratt for the role of the coach. One executive asked McLaurin if he'd considered acting. McLaurin also met with high-level executives at the NFL interested in helping establish American football in China. He'd been planning to apply to law school, but now he decided to stay in Chongqing and keep developing the league. In retrospect, the China-Hollywood love affair was at that point in its wildest throes. As the reporter Erich Schwartzel recounts in his 2022 book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China spent the late 2000s and 2010s learning the craft of blockbusting by partnering with Hollywood filmmakers and executives. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, got access to the growing market of Chinese moviegoers. (In 2012, then–Vice President Joe Biden negotiated an agreement to raise the quota of U.S. films allowed to screen in China.) It was, in effect, a classic technology transfer, much like General Motors setting up factories in China in exchange for teaching Chinese workers how to build cars. Erich Schwartzel: How China captured Hollywood With a potential audience of 1.4 billion, every U.S. studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to the Chinese market. This led to some ham-fisted creative choices. The filmmakers behind Iron Man 3 added a scene in which a Chinese doctor saves Tony Stark's life, though it wasn't included in the U.S. cut. The Chinese release of Rian Johnson's time-travel thriller, Looper, contained a gratuitous sequence in which Bruce Willis and Xu Qing gallivant around Shanghai. In the same film, Jeff Daniels's character tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's, 'I'm from the future—you should go to China.' The threat of being denied a Chinese release also resulted in countless acts of self-censorship by Hollywood studios. Sony changed the villains of its Red Dawn remake from Chinese to North Korean in postproduction, and removed a scene showing the destruction of the Great Wall of China from the Adam Sandler film Pixels. In this environment, Hollywood put a premium on stories that could appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences. That usually meant going as broad as possible and leaning away from cultural specifics, as in the Transformers and Marvel movies. But in theory, another, more difficult path existed, the Hollywood equivalent of the Northwest Passage: a movie that incorporated Chinese and American cultures equally. This could be a breakthrough not only in the box office but also in storytelling. It could even map a future for the two countries, offering proof that we have more in common than we might think. The producers at Sony apparently hoped that a 'Year of the Pigskin' adaptation could pull off that trick. 'The movie we want to develop is JERRY MAGUIRE meets THE BAD NEWS BEARS set in China,' Tisch wrote in an email to Sony's then-chairman and CEO, Michael Lynton. 'This is the perfect movie to film in China.' But there was a puzzle built into the project. 'The struggle for me was trying to figure out who the movie was for,' Ian Helfer, who was hired to write the screenplay, told me recently. His task was to create a comedy that would be a vehicle for a big American star while appealing to Chinese audiences. But nobody in Hollywood really knew what Chinese audiences wanted, aside from tentpole action movies. They seemed happy to watch Tom Cruise save the world, but would they pay to see Chris Pratt teach them how to play an obscure foreign sport? Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. When I met the Clash producer and screenwriter Wu Tao outside a hotel in Rotterdam in February, he greeted me with a hug. He told me he couldn't believe we were finally meeting after all these years, given how our lives were both intertwined with the Dockers. 'It's fate,' he said. Wu has spiky hair, a goatee, and an energy that belies his 51 years. He was wearing a bright-green sweater covered with black hearts with the words THANKYOUIDON'TCARE spelled backwards. We sat down at a coffee table in the hotel lobby alongside the director of Clash, Jiang Jiachen. Jiang was wearing computer-teacher glasses and a ribbed gray sweater. Wu, who'd produced and written the script for Clash, right away called out the elephant in the room with a joke. He had stolen one line from my article, he said with a chuckle—a character saying, 'Welcome to Chongqing'—but hadn't paid me for the IP. (This line does not actually appear in the article.) 'Next time,' I said. Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. But Wu had his own vision. Shirley Li: How Hollywood sold out to China Wu got to work writing a script. By 2022, he'd persuaded iQIYI to make the movie and gotten his script past the government censorship bureau with minimal changes. In summer 2023, they began shooting in Chongqing. Wu told me that he'd set out to tell the Dockers' story from a Chinese perspective. 'It's easy to imagine the Hollywood version, like Lawrence of Arabia,' he said. 'A white Westerner saves a group of uncivilized Chinese people.' Even if he'd wanted to tell that kind of story, Wu knew it wouldn't fly in the domestic market. 'We're not even talking about politics; that's just reality,' Wu said. Jiang added, 'It's a postcolonial context.' This argument made sense to me in theory, but I was curious to see what it meant in practice. That evening, I sat in a packed theater and took in the film. Clash opens with a flashback of Yonggan, the hero, running away from a bully as a kid—behavior that gets him mocked as a coward. (His name translates to 'brave.') It then cuts to adult Yonggan, who works as a deliveryman for his family's tofu shop, sprinting and careening his scooter through Chongqing's windy roads, bridges, and back alleys. When Yonggan gets an urgent delivery order from an athletic field where a football team happens to be practicing, the team captain watches in awe as Yonggan sprints down the sideline, takeout bag in hand, faster than the football players. He gets recruited on the spot. Although Clash has the same basic framing as the American film treatments—an underdog team struggling against the odds—the details are original, and telling. Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. I was writing at a cultural and political moment when American audiences—and I myself—felt a self-satisfied comfort in the idea that China might follow in our footsteps. What Hollywood didn't realize is that Chinese viewers weren't interested in that kind of story—not then, and certainly not now. Part of me still wishes that a filmmaker had managed to tell the Dockers story in a way that emphasized international cooperation, especially now that our countries feel further apart than ever. But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work. I'm glad someone made a version that does.
Atlantic
3 hours ago
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Paris Can Be Intimidating—But It Has Great Butter
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain's account of his international adventures, made him famous—and cemented the stereotype of the Ugly American. One hundred and fifty-eight years later, Caity Weaver followed him to Paris. Caity and I chatted about her hilarious recounting of her trip in The Atlantic, why Paris can feel so intimidating, and the only food she ate there that she actually liked. Isabel Fattal: If you could go back in time and travel to Paris with Mark Twain, would you? Caity Weaver: Could I be assured of a safe return? Isabel: Yes, for imagination's sake. Caity: Absolutely. I would go anywhere with him. One of the things I was struck by when I reread this book before my trip was how unbelievably funny it is. Of course I knew that Mark Twain was 'a humorist,' but there were sections where I was laughing out loud. I think a lot of times when people think of old books, they get an idea in their head of a book that's really stuffy or boring. But this was cracklingly interesting. As a reader, it's rewarding to come across prose like that. As a writer, it's extremely irritating and intimidating. This man was funnier than I'll ever be, and he did it in 1869. Isabel: Do you have a favorite line or passage from the book? Caity: There was a section where he wrote about what he calls 'the Old Travelers'—well-traveled know-it-alls you sometimes encounter abroad: 'They will not let you know anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities.' Isabel: If you could ask Twain one question about his trip, what would it be? Caity: I would say: 'Sam, Mr. Clemens, did you go to the Louvre? Did you set foot inside the Louvre, really?' I can't prove that he didn't, but I strongly suspect that he didn't. And I feel like he would tell me. Can't kid a kidder. Isabel: You write in your story about the possibility that Twain was ashamed about not understanding the art at the Louvre. Does visiting Paris make a person feel like they need to have a certain level of cultural knowledge? Did you feel intimidated at any point? Caity: I feel like a completely idiotic, disorganized, disheveled crumb bum anywhere, but especially in Paris. It's like walking into a very fancy hotel lobby. Some people are going to be really comfortable there, and some people are going to think, Am I gonna be arrested for walking into this hotel lobby? Paris is so just-so. I find it to be an intimidating place. The combination of not really speaking the language and the city being so beautiful … I felt a little bit on edge there. Isabel: I have one bone to pick with you. I think you were eating wrong in Paris. You didn't eat anything yummy! Caity: I sure didn't. (Well, I had great ramen.) Isabel: What went wrong? Caity: I didn't eat anything I absolutely loved except the butter. I had a crêpe suzette—delicious, and thrilling to have a small fire caused in a restaurant at your behest. I had some croissants. I really was hoping to be able to write, 'Oh my God, I found the best croissant in the world,' and I just don't think I did. But the butter: unbelievably good. I took so many notes for myself trying to describe the color and the taste of the butter. [ Reads through her notes.] I suppose I am an Ugly American, because this is my description of butter: 'creamy; has a scent; smells almost like movie theater butter.' The color was such a rich, deep yellow, almost like how an egg yolk can sometimes tip over into orange. My notes say, 'So fatty and rich.' Next bullet point: 'like if the whole room were made out of pillows.' And then: 'Yes, I realize I am describing a padded cell.' But it was an ultimate richness, softness, like, Just let me roll around in a padded cell. That was how I felt eating this butter. I took dozens of photos in my hotel room trying to capture its exact hue, and failed to. I encountered another group of Americans in my hotel lobby who were trying to figure out a way to transport butter home in their luggage. I involved myself in their conversation, as Americans do: What if the hotel was willing to store it in a freezer, in an insulated lunch bag? We devoted quite a bit of time to solving this problem. Caity: Oh, no, I think they're probably enjoying that butter right now. I wanted to bring a bunch of dried sausage back to the U.S. And then, after I purchased it, I realized that I could get in trouble for flying with it. I ate so much saucisson in my hotel room so fast. I worried such a dense concentration of salt might cause my heart to shut down. I Googled something like: How much dried sausage too much. Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Week Ahead Essay A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius By Helen Lewis Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius. I've been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it's so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley. Vos Savant hasn't made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. More in Culture Catch Up on The Atlantic When Pete Hegseth's Pentagon tenure started going sideways The travel ban shows that Americans have grown numb. The Trump administration is spending $2 million to figure out whether DEI causes plane crashes. Photo Album Spend time with our photos of the week, which include images of monsoon flooding in India, Dragon Boat Festival races in China, a huge tomato fight in Colombia, and more.
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50th anniversary of 'Jaws': How the film impacted public perception of sharks
A theme song consisting of a simple two-note motif has kept swimmers terrified of open water for decades. John Williams' iconic score for the movie "Jaws," which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release later this month, is instantly recognizable -- the sound of which is enough to prompt people to look around for a monster of the sea to emerge from the surface, even if they are no where near the ocean, shark experts told ABC News. The movie, one of the first feature films directed by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg and based on the book of the same name by Peter Benchley, shifted the collective consciousness surrounding sharks and the danger they present for the past 50 years, some experts said. Based in a coastal town in New England, residents are terrified after a woman is killed by a great white shark that seems to want to continue raising its number of human kills as it stalks boats and swimmers. "Jaws" is almost synonymous with the American summer -- similar to Fourth of July and apple pie, Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, told ABC News. The film tapped into humans' primal fear and became a social phenomenon in the U.S. and abroad, grossing over $470 million at the box office, adjusted for inflation. Shot at water level, which is where humans see the water, "Jaws" instilled a fear of the unknown -- which is why it is still relevant today, Ross Williams, founder of The Daily Jaws, an online community dedicated to celebrating the movie, told ABC News. "It villainized sharks and people became absolutely terrified of any species that was in the ocean," James Wilkowski, director of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Oregon State University, told ABC News. 'Jaws' transformed sharks into the new marine villain When "Jaws" was released on June 20, 1975, it transformed the apex predator into an underwater villain whose presence made water unsafe, Wilkowski said. Whales were the most feared marine animal in the generations before "Jaws," said Lowe, who grew up in Martha's Vineyard, where the movie was shot. Lowe's grandfather was a commercial fisherman, and his grandfather's uncles were commercial whalers, who passed down the terror of whales to the subsequent generations, Lowe said. The fear was based on stories of sailors coming back from whaling expeditions where friends and family had died, Lowe added. "Moby Dick," the 1851 novel by Herman Melville about a whaling ship captain named Ahab and his quest to get revenged on the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg, likely contributed to the trepidation as well, Lowe said. But the anti-shark propaganda had been brewing long before the movie was released, Williams said. Horror stories published during World War II and films that preceded "Jaws" did not paint sharks in a nice light, Williams said. Chapple, who started his career in Cape Cod, knew people who saw the movie as a kid and still refused to enter ocean waters as an adult. "It was really in the psyche of the community," he said. Misconceptions about sharks due to 'Jaws' Like many fictional films, there were several exaggerations or dramatizations about sharks included in "Jaws" for cinematic effect. The most glaring inaccuracy is that sharks want to attack or eat people, the experts said. The notion that sharks are some "mindless killer" that are going to kill anyone who is swimming in the water or on a boat is inaccurate to the nature of the predator, Taylor Chapel, co-lead of Oregon State University's Big Fish Lab, told ABC News. "We're not on a shark's menu," Wilkowski said. "They don't want to eat us, and if they did, we'd be easy pickings. It'd be a buffet." Shark research began in the 1970s, so at the time, scientists -- and especially the public -- didn't know a lot about them, Chapple said. There are also anatomical inaccuracies in the shark animatronic itself -- including bigger teeth, larger "dark, black" eyes and an unrealistic 25-foot body, Wilkowski said. Technology at the time made it difficult for the filmmakers to get actual footage of the sharks, so there are barely any glimpses of real sharks in the movie and filmmakers largely relied on the animatronic as well, Lowe said. "When the movie came out, it was probably the most deceptively but brilliantly marketed movie ever," Williams said. The biggest misconception that still reverberates among public fear is that a shark sighting is a "bad thing." But the presence of sharks is actually a sign of a healthy ecosystem, Wilkowski said. "To see sharks in an environment is a good thing," he said. "...we just have to learn how to coexist with them." After the movie was released and permeated society's awareness of the dangers that lurk beneath the surface of the water, there was a direct correlation of shark population declines due to trophy hunting, Wilkowski said. "Because people's perceptions of sharks were negative, it made it easier for them to allow and justify overfishing of sharks, regardless of the species," Lowe said. Both Spielberg and Benchley have expressed regret in the past over how "Jaws" impacted the public perception of sharks. But Chapple has noticed a shift in the past two decades, where sharks have transformed from a "terrifying" creature to one people are fascinated by, instead, he said. "The fascination has outlasted and outpaced the fear," Williams said. Humans are actually a much bigger threat to sharks, killing up to 100 million sharks per year as a result of overfishing, according to the Shark Research Institute. Climate change and shifting food sources are also causing species-wide population declines, the experts said. Sharks are crucial for a healthy ocean ecosystem. The apex predators maintain balance in the food web and control prey populations. "If we lost sharks, our marine ecosystem would collapse," Wilkowski said.
