Latest news with #AynRand
Forbes
22-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Questions on Unpredicted Results From Recent Ad-Tech Court Decisions
What is the right balance when consumers and clients drive decisions? A lot of schadenfreude has floated around the recent U.S. Justice Department doubling down on accusations about Google's search and ads business. Would the proposed remedies, such as forcing the sale of Chrome, lead to the predicted outcomes—and would those outcomes improve the state of digital? After all, the close cousin of schadenfreude (aka the delicious joy one feels at other people's misfortune) is, 'Be careful what you wish for….' And that's where things might well be headed for most with this ruling. In a business like digital where so many of its leaders are so convinced that the only means of judgement is effectiveness and efficiency, it's interesting to watch when competitors who don't get the winning results they are persuaded they so richly deserve turn their traditional form of appreciation for winning at all costs into approbation at the superior performance of others in the marketplace. What were once the only success metrics that mattered are now viewed as 'unfair.' Once ruthless competitors who valued only effective results beg for outside marketplace interventions as they have come to view themselves as victims… If one were cynical, one might wonder, Has the Objectivist hero we know from Ayn Rand become a tender, help-me-I'm-melting snowflake? In time alone, for starters, the case is ancient in internet years and tragically backward-looking. Turns out, that since the time that the government brought this case in 2023, the world has indeed changed. To review: After a trial that ended last November but with a decision not coming until just a few weeks ago, in April, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia announced that she had accepted some arguments from the Department of Justice and found Google guilty of operating a monopoly in ad tech. Government lawyers had argued at trial that Google had dominated the technology that delivers ads to websites around the internet using a system that runs an auction for open ad space on a website in real time as pages load. However, Judge Brinkema didn't accept the entire case as laid out by the DOJ. As Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's VP of regulatory affairs, said in a widely quoted statement: 'We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half. The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don't harm competition. We disagree with the Court's decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.' Most recently, on May 6, 2025, Judge Brinkema held the first hearings on remedies proposed by the two sides. At that hearing, the DOJ pushed for a breakup of Google's ad tech business, specifically the forced sale of its AdX exchange and DFP ad server among other things. Google instead advocated for allowing competitors real-time bidding access to its ad exchange, arguing that forced divestiture is unnecessary, lacks legal basis and would harm publishers and advertisers. These opposing remedies have been floating out there for a while, and they are just intermediary considerations for now since Judge Brinkema plans to hear the ad-tech remedies at a trial scheduled for September 22, 2025. A close look at Google's Network ad tech revenues shows a steady shrinkage in recent reports In the time it took to bring the case, hear the two sides and render a verdict—let alone get to final specific remedies, which aren't expected until another four months from now—things have continued to change in the ad-tech marketplace. Just take a look at Google Network's ad tech revenues, which have been intermittently but steadily shrinking. The first quarter of 2025 saw revenues at $7.2 billion, down from $7.9 billion the previous quarter and having dropped from $7.4 billion from one year ago, a decrease of -8.7% from the previous quarter and -2% from the previous year. Many of those pushing for a Google breakup are those who, unsurprisingly, stand to benefit the most: owners of demand-side platforms, ad servers, and supply-side platforms that directly compete with Google's ad tech, or the publishers who feel their revenues have been reduced by unfair ad auctions. In the former category one might think about major companies like The Trade Desk, Magnite and Roku, at least for the ad tech portion of its revenues. The global ad tech sector in 2025 is estimated to be between $795 billion and $1.5 trillion depending on who's doing the estimating (exact market definitions and overlaps can vary, with most estimates closer to the first number). If the global market is $795 billion or thereabouts, Google has controlled about 34–35% of the market based on its Q1 earnings numbers. So while Google is the largest player, it's by no means the only one and, according to these figures at least, 65% of the market is owned by other players. In other words, competition in ad tech had already been seeing others step into and thrive in the marketplace. Of course, one wonders, who else might really benefit from a Google breakup? One might think about the biggest competitors like Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft which could perhaps gain market share where they play in ad tech—but they, too, could find and have found themselves targets of attention from an activist DOJ and a regulation-curious European Union. By contrast, there might be a lot more losers. One could predict that brand advertisers will likely find themselves in a more fragmented world, having to stitch together proactively more suppliers with potentially less impact. If Google has to sell its ad exchange or ad server, buying digital ads could get harder, time intensive and more expensive. In a time of uncertainty around tariffs and their effects on pricing and general inflationary trends, consumers could be facing higher prices, reduced integration between services, reduced data security and an inferior, even frustrating user experience. Google itself could get distracted in all this and fall behind in the AI race if it's forced to divert resources. And if Google is forced to divest Chrome, what does that mean for fair competition against other players in what we called a short while ago 'the browser wars,' like Edge and Safari? Consumers install Chrome because they prefer it, and the same applies to many other Google products like Gmail. The advantage that those other two browsers have: they come preinstalled on devices and if Chrome were to be spun off, they might well find themselves without any serious marketplace competition. Could that be an unintended result that the DOJ hands back to Microsoft, in shades of Internet Explorer in 1995? In a larger context, there are also questions, which we can't yet see the answers to, but about which we can seriously wonder. Speculation can lead us in many directions. Monopolies by their nature can reduce competition and create pricing distortions. For the last few decades, the internet, and especially the free ad-supported internet, or open web, has on the other hand been nothing short of a modern marketing and financial miracle. No industry has been more efficient than digital advertising. It's contributed trillions to the GDP of the U.S. and the world. Digital ad prices, ad tech fees and search ad prices have consistently fallen, without government interference, and benefiting businesses and consumers. So, what would be the impact of forcing Google to share ad data with commercial rivals and being prohibited from integrating ads into search (as that would arguably 'preference' Google search over competitors)? Disrupting the internet ad ecosystem could cause prices to rise, which would be passed along to consumers. So, while the recent Google breakup decision has met with some positive responses (see schadenfreude above), with some publishers seeing the potential for them to increase revenues, others are bracing for a decrease in revenue as the solutions work their way through the system (that's the 'careful what you wish for' part). We don't hear a lot of brands out there calling for these solutions—and they themselves might be the ones that, through fragmentation, face the biggest resulting costs What we don't hear or see a lot of? Advertisers and brands themselves out there calling for this, talking about how it improves their businesses. Same applies to smaller companies that rely on Google Ad Manager. In fact, brands have been mostly silent. It's the competition in the tech world that is salivating for the potential. What brands face is an even more fragmented and competitive ad-tech landscape, costing them at a minimum more time, with other possible expenses still to be seen, as they make new decisions on which vendors to work with and how. The remedies phase of this ruling coming on September 22 may not include remedies favorable at all for many of the small businesses and brands that rely on the digital ad tech ecosystem for reaching their consumers. We shall see but that could well cost them—and us all in times of inflation—mightily.
Irish Times
20-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Should you give pocket money to your children? Conor Pope and Rachel O'Dwyer debate
Rachel O'Dwyer: Yes. A modest, no-strings-attached payment is the way to go When my son was four, we were given a Richard Scarry book of children's nursery tales. Tucked after Goldilocks and The Gingerbread Man, was The Little Red Hen – or, as I like to call it, 'Ayn Rand for Babies'. You probably know the story: like a smug tradwife, our protagonist picks the wheat, grinds it to flour and bakes the perfect loaf all by herself. Along the way she pitches the idea of 'help' to the rest of the farmyard animals, (but I've always suspected she can't delegate and doesn't really want them pitching in). When the bread is ready the hen asks the other animals if they'd like to help her eat it (rhetorically as it happens). Those who say yes get a lecture on incentives and opportunity costs. Red eats the loaf herself. 'I hope all that bread sticks in her throat and makes her choke,' four-year-old Ted said, glaring like a tiny Bolshevik at the hen, now stuffing her beak with sourdough. READ MORE My feelings about The Little Red Hen reflect my outlook on pocket money: I'm for it as a modest, no-strings-attached payment – not as a tool for moral instruction, financial training or behavioural compliance. Pocket money as we know it emerged in the early 20th century as children shifted from mini-workers to priceless darlings – who are now, all in, thought to cost the average parent €169,000 before they turn 21 . Pocket money accounts for €1,196 of that a year. Like women's allowances and moral charity, it wasn't always clear if pocket money was a gift, a payment, a bribe or even a lesson in economics, doled out to teach children prudent spending. I'd rather he didn't grow up to believe that value is tied to what society deems economically productive Take the book A is for Allowance (2023), a financial primer for five-year-olds. U is for Utility. Y is for Yield. (B is for Budget and not, as you might expect, for Bitcoin or Blockchain). Like the 'bolsa família', a conditional benefit paid to Brazilian families, or incentives for Irish teachers to brush up on their Gaeilge, pocket money conveys not just value but values – shaping the future consumer-worker-citizen. Today, many apps allow parents to send money directly to their children. In Ireland, we have Revolut <18. In the UK, there's Go Henry. Along with a cash transfer function, Revolut's Pockets app teaches them how to save. Pockets even lets parents link chores to financial rewards. (One pocket money app I see on the Apple store even has a spuriously named 'Teach' – which lets a guardian subtract money as a punishment for bad behaviour.) Most have built-in oversight. Parents can see how children are spending their money and even embargo things such as vapes and Fortnite computer game V-Bucks. (Revolut <18 automatically blocks the purchase of alcohol, cigarettes and gambling products.) My son, who is now eight, gets €3 a week in pocket money – no strings attached. While writing this I've learned that this is a relatively stingy stipend; many sources suggest a euro for each year. While his basic income might seem low, he's often paid extra for larger chores (last week he and a friend were given €10 each for serving drinks at a football tournament). Otherwise, he's expected to help out around the house and water the plants – but his pocket money isn't a reward, an incentive or a lesson. It's about having a tiny slice of economic freedom. I'd rather he didn't grow up to believe that value is tied to what society deems economically productive. That's less about the kind of financial actor I want him to become and more about how I'd like him to relate to and value others. Less 'work or you don't eat', like the Little Red Hen, and more 'to each according to their needs'. This matters more to me than whether he opens a high-yield savings account, or invests in a sweet 10X trade by his 10th birthday. Rachel O'Dwyer is a lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and the author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform Conor Pope: No. Linking cash to chores might actually teach them something While I understand that manythink giving children pocket money is a fine idea, one which promotes prudence and fiscal responsibility, it was a disaster for me as child. I was poor with money and, despite parental efforts to make me a richer, more rounded person, I remained a financial dunce for decades. Every week, the same dance of the dullard would unfold. I'd get pocket money, starting at 5p – rising incrementally as I aged. Once the coins landed in my sweaty palm on a Friday, I'd race to my local newsagents and blow it on comics. After the unbridled joy of Fridays, there would be the lean days – six of them. Occasionally, like a latter-day Oliver Twist, I'd ask for more and, like a latter day Mr Bumble, my father would recoil in faux horror. While he didn't sell me to an undertaker, he never extended credit, urging me instead to learn from my mistakes. (I learned nothing except how to say 'warning', 'God in heaven' and 'hands up, for you the war is over' in German, thanks to the popularity of comics of a particular genre when I was small.) Pocket money creates a sense of dependence and a reliance on the bank of mam and dad I'm not convinced anyone learns much from pocket money. While the accepted wisdom suggests it teaches the young how to spend and save wisely I've never seen convincing evidence. Instead, what pocket money does is create an illusion of financial independence while working as an expensive financial crutch. And, boy, is it expensive. A recent study from Laya Life put the annual cost of pocket money for a child at €1,196. It's a lot to spend on treats and comics. It's not all about the money, though. There are logistical issues, too. Physical cash is increasingly uncommon. While apps can dole out dosh, I'm unconvinced money magically appearing on fake credit cards weekly can teach many life lessons. It certainly lacks the theatre of times past. Instead of pocket money for nothing, linking cash to chores is a better option. This nakedly transactional approach might imbue in children a better sense of how money works while allowing parents to sidestep jobs they lack the time or desire to do themselves. Mind you, even the chore-based model can fail. Not long ago I charged a sweet child of mine with the job of reuniting socks that had lost their partner in the perilous journey from laundry basket to washing machine and back to bedrooms. We settled on some trifling sum, but while 20 cent or 50c doesn't sound steep in insolation, when hundreds of lone socks miraculously find their 'sole-mate' it quickly becomes financially ruinous. I stuck to the deal, and it was only after the money was spent that I discovered the word 'matched' had been loosely interpreted. If the colours of two socks found in a ball were even vaguely similar, it was considered a win. That child didn't lick her cunning off the stones. Linking cash to chores – even ones done badly – gives parents more control over how and when money is handed over while actually teaching children something about the value of money, and where it comes from. By contrast, pocket money creates a sense of dependence and a reliance on the bank of mam and dad. It can be viewed – as I certainly viewed it – as a spending target to be reached quickly to ensure the well of magic money doesn't dry up. And while that might prepare people for life as a government minister, it doesn't remotely prepare them for real life. Conor Pope is Consumer Affairs Correspondent
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Gina: What does she want? – episode 7
At 13 years old, a young Gina Rinehart read a book that would help shape her worldview – Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which is having a moment around the world. The novel's capitalist underpinnings promote the idea that people should strive to be their best industrial selves. In this episode, we explore how these values are playing out in Rinehart's life today, including her proposal to build a coalmine in Canada's Rocky Mountains. And we hear how author and environmental campaigner Tim Winton views her efforts to prevent an overhaul of Australia's environmental laws
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Why is Donald Trump crashing the US economy? Because he's high on his own supply of fake news
Not content with shattering the post-1945 international order, which delivered prosperity and power to his country for eight long decades, Donald Trump is seemingly set on destroying the US economy. And he's doing it because he, and the American right, have lost their ability to grasp reality. Start with the economic vandalism, unfolding in real time and mesmerising to watch. For weeks, you could see the US stock market falling and falling until on Thursday the S&P index passed an unwanted milestone: it stood more than 10% down from the peak it had reached less than a month earlier, a fall that meets the Wall Street definition of a 'correction'. In other words, even if the market eventually rallies, this is no blip. The talk now is of a recession and you can tell that Trump himself suspects it's coming. 'I hate to predict things like that,' he said this week. 'There is a period of transition because what we're doing is very big. We're bringing wealth back to America … It takes a little time.' Did you catch that? The great booster, who campaigned on a promise to turn things around 'on day one', is now adopting the lotus position, talking of 'transition' and urging patience. The source of the trouble is not mysterious. It is Trump himself. His actions since taking office less than two months ago have spooked investors. They crave stability but see a president who governs by whim. Those whims can change hourly – imposing a tariff after breakfast only to drop it before lunch. One minute it's a 50% levy on Canadian aluminium, the next it's 200% on European wine, only for one or the other to be binned within hours. It keeps Trump in the news, which he loves, but plays havoc with companies that have to plan for the long term. Confronted by chaos, they prefer to wait to see where things settle. That means orders on hold, workers without work, less money in everyone's pocket. Add in a wild-eyed guy with a chainsaw taking chunks out of a federal bureaucracy that provides services that, for all their Ayn Rand talk of a minimal state, business leaders rely on – whether it's schools, roads or air traffic controllers to keep planes in the sky – and you can see why the only surging number on Wall Street right now is the one that measures pessimism. To be clear, it's not just the manic style of Trump and Elon Musk that's causing alarm. Even if imposed calmly, tariffs are a prosperity killer. Trump may be their biggest advocate, but it's clear he doesn't understand how they work. He speaks as if the people paying them will be hated foreigners, the likes of China or Canada forced to pay billions into US coffers. When, in fact, tariffs are a sales tax levied on US consumers who have to pay extra for imported goods. A tariff on foreign cars, say, is not paid by Germany but by an American who buys a BMW. It drives prices up for Americans. When other countries hit back with tariffs of their own, making US products harder to sell, you're in a trade war that only makes everything worse. Hence the current dread of stagflation, the grim combination of zero growth and rising inflation. The word was born in the Jimmy Carter era, but the Trumpcession will have bonus features all its own. When I spoke to Heather Boushey, who served as an economic adviser to the Biden administration, for the latest Politics Weekly America podcast, she told me that Musk's supremacy over so much of the federal government, even as he continues to run his own mega-businesses, is having one particular chilling effect. 'Companies are looking at this and saying: 'I can't compete with an Elon Musk that's in charge of the regulatory agencies, that's going to do things only for himself.' That's going to stymie investment, it's going to stymie innovation, and ultimately be terrible for the US economy.' Boushey adds that Trump's US will be less able to weather a recession, because the Trump-Musk cuts are stripping away so much of the infrastructure of support, cutting a combined total of more than $1tn from the Medicaid and food stamps programmes alone. When the storm hits, families will go hungry. It's bad for the country and bad for Trump politically: the people most dependent on soon-to-be gutted government help such as Medicare or Medicaid are Trump voters. As the impact of the cuts kicks in – national parks closed during the summer, delayed benefits for veterans, a deadly accident, for example, in an area previously safeguarded – many Americans could sour on the president who promised to make their lives better. Especially when they see him go ahead with his signature policy: a $4.5tn tax cut that will massively benefit the very richest. Why, then, is Trump pursuing a course of action that can only damage the country and dent his own standing? The explanation lies in the way Trump sees the world. Which is through a lens clouded by the very phenomenon he once did so much to identify: fake news. For most of the past decade, the focus has been on the likes of Trump and Musk as peddlers of falsehoods. There has been less attention paid to their role as consumers of lies. And yet it's long been clear that Musk is spending too much time on X and is getting extremely high on his own supply. Witness his credulous swallowing of all kinds of far-right rubbish about Britain. Trump is scarcely any better, believing provable nonsense about Volodymyr Zelenskyy's poll ratings being in the single digits, when in fact the Ukrainian leader's numbers are much better than his, to pick just one instance of Trump putting aside the briefings he could have from the world's best-resourced intelligence agencies and preferring to gobble up internet slop instead. It's a function of Trump not shifting his core views in decades – he was banging on about tariffs in the 1980s – and being, as Zelenskyy memorably put it, 'trapped' in a 'disinformation bubble'. It consists of the team of sycophants that now envelops him – the 'adults in the room' of the first term are long gone – and whose message is reinforced when he meets the press: note how many of the supposed reporters whom Trump encounters are, in fact, representatives from pro-Trump outlets so slavish they make Fox News look like Edward R Murrow. The result, says one longtime Trump watcher, is that 'he's more sheltered from outside information than he ever has been before'. Like Saddam Hussein in his bunker as US forces approach the palace, he is being told that tariffs made the US rich in the 19th century and will do so again, that Elon Musk is popular and that the people are grateful to their leader, even when the economy is nosediving. Inside the info-bubble, any contrary voice can be dismissed, even if it requires acrobatics to do it. Trump's latest target is the Murdoch-owned, conservative Wall Street Journal, which dared point out the dangers of a trade war: Trump countered that the 'globalist' WSJ was 'owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union'. Inside the bubble, there is no room for truth: it must be kept out by lies. For now, and armed with the loudest megaphone on the planet, the US president can keep reality at bay. But eventually, Americans will be able to see with their own eyes and in their own lives what Trump has done to the US and the wider world. Their daily experience will expose him for what he is: a confidence trickster who has made them poorer and less safe. The only question is when. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Chicago Tribune
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Architecture is having a movie moment — but do ‘Brutalist' and ‘Megalopolis' make architects more than pure ego?
'There's no place for originality in architecture! Nobody can improve on the buildings of the past!' Those are the second and third lines spoken in the 1949 film version of Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead,' adapted by Rand, contractually protected from studio meddling, from her 1943 bestseller about the world's hunkiest and most uncompromising visionary architect. The story culminates in the construction of the world's tallest building, and a godlike man's fulfillment of the destiny of the planet he shares, reluctantly, with smaller minds and aesthetic weaklings. One such weakling, the architecture school dean expelling his untamed prodigy Howard Roark (played by Gary Cooper), is the first voice heard in 'The Fountainhead.' The movies have long exploited a select handful of go-to professions for stories of obsessive creatives, creating. Sometimes it's a real-life singer-songwriter, blowin' in the wind from the recent past, a la 'A Complete Unknown.' Or a real-life theoretical physicist who risks destroying the world in order to end a war, aka 'Oppenheimer.' Lately it's architects, fictional division, two in particular. 'The Brutalist' concerns a fictional Hungarian Jew, one László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody), who survives the Holocaust and sails to America in 1947. Here, his Bauhaus-trained credentials and pre-war design achievements mean little. A stroke of luck arrives, at a price. The son of a wealthy industrialist commissions a library renovation as a surprise to his stuffy, imperious father (Guy Pearce). This man, Harrison Lee Van Buren, loathes the modernist results, at least until Look magazine lavishes praise on the architect and the Van Buren library. Directed and co-written by Brady Corbet, 'The Brutalist' devotes a significant chunk of its running time to Toth's magnum opus: a huge, concrete community center outside Doylestown, Pennsylvania, commissioned by Van Buren, designed by Tóth in the Brutalist architectural style seen as an affront to every Neoclassical, tradition-bound bone in his adopted country's body. Brody's character is Mr. Easygoing compared to Adam Driver's supernaturally gifted genius in 'Megalopolis,' the sole movie architect whose arrogance exceeds Ayn Randian levels. Writer and director Francis Ford Coppola does not hold back. 'You find me cruel, selfish and unfeeling?' Driver asks his future adoring wife, quickly answering his own question with: 'I am.' He doesn't say 'I am, because I am an architect!' only because there's no need. I talked with Chicago's Anjulie Rao about the architect's screen image, the terrors and pleasures of Brutalist design and (since she brought him up) America's highest-ranking amateur architecture expert . Rao, of Garfield Park, lectures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and contributes to Dwell magazine, for which Rao recently interviewed 'The Brutalist' production designer Judy Becker. Our conversation is edited for clarity and length. Q: Anjulie, you've seen both 'The Brutalist' and 'Megalopolis.' Are we stuck with a certain image of the difficult, uncompromising architect, as different as these films are? A: Well, I do think 'The Brutalist' doesn't settle for the trope of 'one man changing the world with his vision.' The Adrien Brody character escapes the Buchenwald concentration camp but he hasn't escaped his trauma. He's tormented. And he's not viewed as any kind of genius by anyone except maybe his patron, the Guy Pearce character. That relationship, patron and architect, is two men feeding off each other, reaffirming each other's worst traits. And it makes them feel both smarter and more in control than they are, really. Q: For those who don't know what the title 'The Brutalist' refers to, outside the familiar meaning of 'brutal,' what does Brutalism mean to you? A: It's the most loved and the most hated style of architecture. It's also the thing our new president deplores, as he made clear in his first term. He really hates the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., for example, which is Brutalist in its heavy concrete structure, and very small windows strategically placed so that light comes in at unusual angles. Often with Brutalist buildings, there's a kind of sunken garden, a sunken plaza area, so that you step down in order to enter the building. When I was in grad school at SAIC, I remember reading about surveys of people's feelings about these sunken plazas, which a lot of people hated. It felt like people were sort of looking down on them. So Brutalism is a not-loved style. Walk around UIC's campus sometime, which is almost all Brutalist buildings. You'll find out where you are on the style pretty quickly. I actually love Brutalism for its craft and the texture-heavy buildings. I personally love Brutalism. My dad worked at the IBM campus in Boulder, Colorado (now closed), which is a long, low, Brutal building. I feel like I grew up with it. Q: I love so much of what 'The Brutalist' production designer Judy Becker does to show you the make-or-break project under construction without showing you the entire thing. It's just fragments we see. Your dad worked for IBM; in Racine, Wisconsin, my dad worked at the Johnson Wax building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. 'The Brutalist' borrows Wright's skinny columns from the Johnson Wax administration building! A: Wright's Prairie School style of modernism exists in that long lineage of modernism. Brutalism has its own place, and can be minimal in some ways, but with a much heavier aesthetic. If you look at 'Megalopolis,' that's nothing like 'The Brutalist.' It's completely dedicated to the myth of the lone male genius architect. In the most offensive way (laughs). Everyone has to worship at his altar. That's different from 'The Brutalist,' which pays some attention to Tóth's journalist wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), though in the end Tóth is strapped in his own traumatic past. And it informs why he behaves the way he does. Particularly after COVID, I think more and more people are sensitive to the built environments around them, how cities look and feel. In America, at least, a lot of people are trying to figure out where they belong. That search for belonging feels more profound than ever. I don't know if 'The Brutalist' is tapping into that, but it might be. Q: What's your feeling about the state of Chicago's design future? A: I feel a little … jolted by the last couple of years, like we've hit the brakes. With eight years of Rahm Emanuel and one term with Lori Lightfoot, we had mayors who were design- and architecture-forward. Rahm was more focused on architecture as an object of culture, not so much an object of wealth creation. Lightfoot had more of a wealth creation idea, and her planning and development commissioner, Maurice Cox, had a real belief in (bolstering) the South and West Sides. With Rahm we got the Riverwalk, which is great, and Lightfoot gave us a revitalized city plan. And now, with Brandon Johnson, it's more about cutting red tape and rethinking regulations for developers. Q: So the aesthetics …. A: Are in the back seat now. (pause) Sometimes I feel down about the state of architecture. There certainly isn't much enthusiasm for extravagance anymore. Q: Is that a purely economic matter, you think? A: It may also be that people are more focused on interior spaces, the places they inhabit. And when we get another new glass tower, like Salesforce Tower Chicago, it kind of blends in with the rest of the glass towers. Q: So they're the Marvel movies of architecture? A: Yep. Here comes another one! Q: Give me a movie about an architect people may not know, one that you really like. A: Ooh! 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the Netflix show (from 2018). I love it because the lead character, the mother (Carla Gugino), is an architect and she's dealing with this house that basically devours people. And she uses her architectural drawings to save her from being devoured herself. I mean, that's a beautiful use of architecture. But I'm a lowbrow. I'm kind of over the thinking that poetry, filmmaking, writing, architecture all has to touch everyone, or has to make some large comment on the world. Or shift people's perspectives on everything in life. Architecture doesn't have to change the world, or the course of history. Buildings usually just change the lives of somewhere between one and 300 people. I don't think 'The Brutalist' isn't meant to be 'educational.' I like that's it's actually very small. It's not about how one man changed the course of history. Q: So, the quicker we get 'The Fountainhead' in the rearview mirror, the better? A: Right. Let it go! Let things be small. 'The Brutalist' is now in theaters.
