麒麟820配90Hz屏,荣耀最新5G手机X10发布,1899元起

5月20日,荣耀X系列首款5G机型荣耀X10正式发布,搭载麒麟820 5G SoC,拥有业界目前已上市手机中最多的9大5G频段、超级上行技术的同时,还采用了RYYB高感光摄影、鹰眼级AI抓拍、90Hz/180Hz全速屏等领先技术,在5G、游戏和影像等方面带来全方位的旗舰级体验。业界普遍认为,这款产品以其强大的产品力和跨级进化将会加速5G手机普及。近期,中国登山队纪念首登珠峰60周年活动选择荣耀手机为唯一指定5G手机,更是认可了荣耀X10在5G行业的重要地位和可靠品质。

荣耀X10首发价格为6GB+64GB版本1899元,6GB+128GB版本2199元,8GB+128GB版本2399元,并有竞速蓝、探速黑、光速银、燃力橙四种配色供选。目前已经启动预约,5月26日将在华为商城、各大授权电商平台、荣耀线下各大门店正式开售。

2020年5G风暴定局之作

2020年中已至,在5G新基建的快速推动下,5G行业进入到全面开打的全新竞争阶段。根据中国信通院数据,今年1月和2月5G手机出货量占比已达26.26%和37.28%,而全年预计5G手机规模将逼近2亿台。这说明5G手机不再是少数机型标榜高端的噱头,而是即将全面普及成为主流。新形势下,产品力和产品策略也应顺势而变。然而纵观市场,多数品牌还沿用着3G、4G时代亦步亦趋的产品思维,例如虽支持5G却缺乏重要的5G频段、整机性能偏弱难以支撑5G场景应用等等,无法满足5G消费者日益增长的需求。

荣耀总裁赵明在发布会上重点强调,荣耀X10所带来的是全方位旗舰级5G体验,一步到位直接将旗舰级5G体验提供给主流用户。可以预见,荣耀X10的面世必将给行业带来巨大震动,并且以风暴式的速度推动5G的全面普及,荣耀X10的命名就包含了这种10倍加速的含义。而另一方面,荣耀X10改变了X系列的命名方式,不仅宣告全面拥抱5G时代,也标志着X系列战略地位的提升,产品谱系将持续扩大,未来会推出不同的产品满足消费者多元化的需求。由此可见,无论是面对行业还是在荣耀内部,荣耀X10都是一款2020年的定局之作。

全方位5G旗舰体验实现跨级进化

具体而言,荣耀X10提供了远超同价位水平的旗舰级5G体验,带来5G十项“全能”:超快5G上行速率、超快5G下载速率、超强5G双卡体验、超强5G天线布局、目前已上市机型中最全频段双模5G、5G双模SA/NSA、智慧5G、超强5G能效比、5G低时延、超强5G信号干扰能力。例如支持了多达9个5G频段,远超同价位基本要求的2-3个频段,保证用户能顺利连接5G,从而避免了有5G信号却无法使用5G的尴尬。同时,荣耀X10还是同价位为数不多支持超级上行技术的机型,实验室实测能够将边缘上行速率体验提升412%甚至更高。5G环绕分布式天线和AI 5G信号疾速恢复不仅让5G信号更加稳定,而且从地库、地铁、地下商场之类5G覆盖不佳的场景返回5G时的速度更快,提供不打折的旗舰级5G体验。

为了支撑对性能要求更高的5G全场景应用,荣耀X10搭载了麒麟820 5G SoC芯片。该芯片在CPU性能上升级了全新三档能效架构,性能更强而能效比更佳,旗舰级的6核Mali-G57架构大幅提升游戏性能,自研达芬奇架构NPU则升级为大核+微核的创新设计,在权威机构ETH AI Benchmark的AI性能排行榜上位居全球前列。屏幕方面则是在荣耀X系列首次采用90Hz高刷新率屏幕,配合180Hz触控采样率,游戏画面更流畅丝滑,操作手感更加“跟手”,势必将受到5G时代游戏玩家的追捧。

拍照方面的进化同样有惊喜,荣耀X10同样开启了荣耀X系列的新时代。首次搭载华为独家的RYYB高感光夜拍三摄,进光量提升40%,全新的ISP 5.0、华为手机端BM3D单反级图像降噪技术、荣耀猫头鹰算法2.0、AI追焦技术……让荣耀X10不仅成为新一代的夜拍神器,还拥有了鹰眼级AI抓拍能力。

而此前荣耀X系列广受好评的传统也得到了传承和进化。3D幻变玻璃机身工艺升级至21层玻璃工艺,在视觉上带来一种独特的速度感;屏占比高达92%的升降式全面屏,提供沉浸式的观看体验和更精准的控制,双轨道结构同时也更坚固耐用。

荣耀X系列一向以硬核品质著称,5G时代依旧如此。据荣耀锐科技5G实验室负责人透露,在荣耀X10的研发过程中,前期的测试成本就超过了3亿元,5G上网测试超过50万小时,拨打电话次数超过25万次。而在5月7日,中国登山队纪念首登珠峰60周年活动宣布荣耀手机为唯一指定5G手机,就是认可了荣耀X10的可靠品质。在珠峰海拔5800-6500米高度处,荣耀X10实测5G最高下载速度达到1617Mbps,显示出强大稳定的5G性能,以及在恶劣环境下依旧正常运行的硬核品质。

荣耀5G正式发动全线饱和攻击

荣耀目前已经拥有麒麟990 5G、麒麟985、麒麟820三大5G SoC芯片,超强阵容。进入2020年上半年,荣耀在5G领域接连扔下重磅炸弹。科技标杆荣耀V30、潮美科技荣耀30系列,荣耀X10的加入,正标志着荣耀旗下的5G大军已经组成了全行业较为齐全的5G产品线。

从时间脉络上来看,荣耀不是最早推出5G手机的,但对5G节奏和产品的把握是极其精准的,自首款5G产品开始,便一路引领行业潮流。荣耀V30系列作为行业首个全系5G双模手机系列,为5G的体验树立了行业标杆。之后的荣耀30系列,更是首次将潮美与5G结合,让行业感叹原来领先科技也可以是时尚夺目的。

而从战斗力而言,代代销量破千万的荣耀X系列一向被认为是荣耀家族最能打的选手,发布会上,荣耀总裁赵明也宣布荣耀X系列全球累计发货超8000万,并从千万好评中挑选出部分组成海报拼图,成功挑战吉尼斯最大海报拼图世界记录。而荣耀X系列最新升级进化成员荣耀X10,同样拥有销量破千万的实力和潜力,一出手便将旗舰级5G体验普及到千万用户,对未来5G行业的走向和生态结构将产生深远的影响。

可以认为,在荣耀X10投入5G大战之后,荣耀5G大军就已组建完成,随时可以发动5G全线饱和攻击;在2020年5G风暴全面普及的过程中,荣耀X10必将再次席卷全行业,获得骄人战绩。

Tesla Owners Try to Make Sense of Elon Musk’s ‘Red Pill’ Moment

A liberal status symbol now has a founder who is moving to the right.

A pivotal scene from the 1999 movie “The Matrix.”

Owning a Tesla, the luxurious electric car, is a major liberal status symbol. It signals nothing more than good taste — the perfect balance of wealth with care for fossil fuels. But the man behind the brand is crafting a very different persona online that may now prove to be a challenge for his fans.

Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to “take the red pill.” The comment was quickly embraced by his followers, including Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s elder daughter, who announced that she had taken the pill already.

The exchange referred to a scene from “The Matrix,” the 1999 science fiction action film. But the meaning of “red pill,” and the idea of taking it, have since percolated in online forums and become a deeply political metaphor. And with Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump, the phrase is now lodged more fully into the mainstream.

So Tesla owners are having to grapple with a car that carries a few new connotations.

“Honestly, Musk is becoming a liability and the Tesla board needs to seriously consider ousting him,” wrote Markos Moulitsas, author of “The Resistance Handbook: 45 Ways to Fight Trump.” “And I say that as a proud owner of a Tesla and a SpaceX fanatic who truly appreciates what he’s built.”

In “The Matrix,” the movie’s hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.

The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie; his body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries. Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into an arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.

The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to society’s grand lies. It was embraced by the right, especially by members of its youngest cohort who organized and spent their time in online forums like Reddit and 4chan.

The truth to be woken up to varied, but it ended up usually being about gender. To be red-pilled meant you discovered that feminism was a scam that ruined the lives of boys and girls. In this view, for a male to refuse the red pill was to be weak.

Red Pill forums were often filled with deeply misogynistic and often racist diatribes. The more extreme elements splintered into groups like involuntary celibates (“incels”) or male separatists (Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOWs). Conferences like the 21 Convention and its sister convention, Make Women Great Again, sprang up to gather red-pilled men. Being red-pilled became a sort of umbrella term for all of it.

As these conversations seeped into the mainstream, pulled along by a host of other internet language from message boards to establishment Republican conversations on sites like Breitbart, the meaning broadened and got watered down. To be red-pilled can now mean being broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism.

Mr. Musk has been pretty wild online for years now, which has made him a major internet celebrity with devoted fans who call themselves Musketeers. There are fan pages like Musk Memes with nearly 100,000 followers, and a Reddit page with 200,000 members in constant, extremely active conversation.

Most recently, Mr. Musk has been a prominent skeptic online of the coronavirus, calling the response to it a “panic” and “dumb” and wrongly predicting close to zero new cases by the end of April. As of Tuesday, there were more than 90,000 deaths from the virus and more than 1.5 million cases in the United States alone.

The Tesla chief Elon Musk has railed against pandemic policies.

Ivanka Trump replied to Mr. Musk that she had already taken the red pill.

The night before Tesla’s earnings were released last month, Mr. Musk tweeted an anti-lockdown rallying cry: “FREE AMERICA NOW.” He had a showdown with local lawmakers, threatening to move Tesla headquarters out of California and deciding to reopen a Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., despite the local county’s restrictions to prevent the virus from spreading. When State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez objected on May 9 with an obscene tweet, Mr. Musk responded, “Message received.”

Defending his reopening of the Tesla factory, Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter that he would be on the factory floor and offered himself up to authorities. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he posted on May 11. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

This month, he and his girlfriend, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, had a child and named him X Æ A-12. And Mr. Musk announced that Tesla shares were too high and that he was selling almost all his possessions to the point of owning no house.

“We have a phrase, it’s E.M.M. — Elon Moves Markets,” said Bill Selesky, an analyst at Argus Research who tracks how Mr. Musk’s messages impact Tesla’s stock price. “People want to listen to him no matter what he says. He tends to be thought of as a great visionary.”

Mr. Selesky said even Mr. Musk’s detractors parsed every tweet and utterance. “Plus, if you have a Tesla, nobody can ever complain about you because you’re good for society,” he added.

This leads back to Mr. Musk’s message on Sunday, telling his followers to take the red pill.

No. Lilly Wachowski, a “Matrix” co-creator, told Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump in colorful language on Twitter that they could take a hike.

To some extent.

There has long been a strain of men’s rights activism in Silicon Valley, exemplified by James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired after writing a memo arguing that the reason there are fewer female engineers is biological differences rather than discrimination.

Mr. Damore became a folk hero for a simmering movement in the technology industry of people who thought the efforts toward 50/50 representation at tech companies were absurd. Cassie Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist, made a 2016 documentary about the Red Pill community and said it had flourished in the tech world.

But the more common phrase in Silicon Valley to signal contrarian thinking is “narrative violation,” which is often used to describe an event that cuts against the mainstream media’s consensus on a topic. The idea is that there is a story being told about the world and how it works, but that the story is too simplistic to be entirely true and an event occasionally pops up to remind people of that.

 

Few products today are as deeply entwined with a person’s brand as Tesla is with Mr. Musk, and so his comments can feel personal for Tesla drivers.

“As a Tesla owner, a 47-year-old male recovering from Covid-19, and someone very concerned simultaneously about the environment, the economy, my kids’ and my parents’ future, this ain’t great,” said Jeff Guilfoyle, a product manager at FireEye in San Diego. “This disease is no joke, and the long-term health impacts are unknown for survivors.”

Many have implored Mr. Musk online to stop.

Raja Sohail Abbas, the chief executive of an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Allentown, Pa., wrote: “I am a Tesla owner and love the company. You have to stop being an idiot about this.”

“Tesla owner and Fan here, but this was a disappointing tweet despite the frustrations of and holdups,” added Alex Goodchild, a D.J. in Brooklyn. “Words are weapons especially when used during situations like the one we’re currently experiencing. You sound just like Trump in this tweet.”

The debate has riven the Tesla community.

“The last two months, there’s been this polarization in the Elon Musk fan club,” said Paula Timothy-Mellon, a technology consultant who moderates that LinkedIn-based fan club, which has 22,000 members. “There are those who are believers in these California guidelines and there are those in favor of his push to re-open Tesla.”

Driving a Tesla often carries great symbolism for the owner (and observers).

“If you own a Tesla, you feel you are directly connected to Elon Musk and people think that Tesla owners are directly connected to the politics of the C.E.O.,” said Sam Kelly, a Tesla owner and investor based in Spain who posts under the name SamTalksTesla.

He added that he did not think the red pill comment meant any big new political awakening from Mr. Musk.

Asked to explain his thinking, Mr. Musk pasted an image of the Urban Dictionary definition of red pill in an email. It read:

“‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.”

History shows firing workers during an economic crisis is a mistake

An unemployed man in a coat is seen lying down on a pier in the New York City docks during the Great Depression, 1935.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, IBM’s CEO, Thomas Watson, proved a point that today’s executives should consider. In the worst of times, bravely bucking pressure to lay off workers and instead investing in the business can tee up explosive growth later.

Reports about layoff strategies amid the COVID-19 crisis range wildly. PwC released a survey in April saying that 32% of companies expect to lay off workers in the next month. The White House said unemployment could hit 20% by June. And more than 20 million Americans lost their jobs during the month of April, according to Friday’s jobs report.

Yet some big tech companies – Cisco, Nvidia, ServiceNow – have pledged to avoid layoffs. Some are even giving raises. It would be easy for investors to think those CEOs are delusional.

But IBM’s story from the 1930s suggests they may not be. Watson’s bet nearly destroyed IBM, yet ultimately launched it into nearly 50 years of domination of its category.

Dealing with a crash

The US economy in the first years of the Depression was in terrible shape. GDP contracted by 8% in 1930 and another 7% in 1931. More than 3,000 banks failed. Unemployment pushed toward 20% and soup lines stretched around blocks.

IBM was not huge or well-known at the time, though it had created the then-new category of “data processing.” It made time clocks and tabulating machines – electro-mechanical punch card predecessors to computers – that helped big companies manage information. The market for such products had plunged by half in the Depression. Wages dipped so low, hiring an ocean of clerks to handle data was no more expensive than getting a machine to do it.

I know Watson’s story well: 20 years ago, I wrote his biography after sifting through hundreds of boxes of his personal papers and transcripts of meetings. Watson knew the facts about the broken economy. But the grim outlook didn’t fit his plan. His words intentionally reflected optimism. “I see no signs of a severe recession,” Watson told a journalist for the April 1, 1930, issue of Forbes. “As a matter of fact, I think 1930 will end up as a very good year.”

Watson’s actions backed up his words. He made two pledges: he would keep the factories running and lay off no one; and he would increase spending on research and development.

First, the factories. Watson reasoned that the need for IBM machines was so great, if businesses put off buying them now, certainly they’d buy a lot of them when the economy picked up. He wanted IBM to be ready to take advantage of that demand. So he kept the factories building machines and parts, stockpiling the products in warehouses. From 1929 to 1932, IBM actually increased production capacity by one-third.

As the Depression wore on, Watson’s greatest risk was running out of time. If IBM’s revenue continued to falter past 1933, the burden of running the factories and holding inventory would threaten financial stability. In one meeting, Watson said to his executives about continuing to make machine parts:

“Conditions in this country are going to be better, our sales force is going to get stronger, and later on we are going to be able to do more business. I will take my chances on selling enough machines later to absorb those parts.”

And then, on January 12, 1932, Watson announced that IBM would spend $1 million – nearly 6% of IBM’s total annual revenue – to build a world-class corporate research center in Endicott, N.Y. He set his engineers loose and throughout the 1930s IBM cranked out new products and innovations, finally getting its technology well ahead of competitor Remington Rand and any other potential challengers in the category.

Soon, though, Watson’s gamble on manufacturing and research looked disastrous. The company was running out of cash. In 1932, IBM’s stock fell to 1921 levels. The board of directors discussed ousting Watson, but put it off. As the late management guru Peter Drucker told me in 2000, Watson “didn’t know how close he’d come to collapse.”

No one foresaw the coming impact of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic stimulus plan. FDR was elected president in 1932. As part of the New Deal, on August 14, 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act.

No single flourish of a pen had ever created such a gigantic information processing problem. The act meant that every business had to track every employee’s hours, wages, and the amount that must be paid to Social Security. Then the government had to process all those millions of reports, track the money, and send checks to those who should get them.

Overnight, demand for tabulating machines soared. An officer of the store chain Woolworth’s told IBM that keeping records for Social Security was going to cost the company $250,000 a year (the equivalent of about $5 million today). Businesses that didn’t have machines wanted them. The government needed them by the boatload.

Only one company could meet the demand. IBM had warehouses full of machines and parts and accessories, and it could immediately make more because its factories were up and running. Because IBM had been funding research and introducing new products, it had better, faster, more reliable machines than any other company. IBM won the contract to do all of the New Deal’s accounting.

This combination of events became IBM’s slingshot. Revenue jumped from $19 million in 1934 to $31 million in 1937. It would climb unabated for the next 45 years as IBM dominated the data processing industry.

Drucker said he’d asked Watson (the two knew each other) if he had anticipated the Social Security Act. Of course, the act was debated and written about well before it passed. But Watson said he had no idea it would impose such a record-keeping burden on business and the government. No one did – otherwise Congress may never have passed the act.

Watson’s recipe for success: one part daring; one part luck; and one part hard work to be ready when the luck kicked in.

So what does that say to Uber, which just laid off 14% of its employees, or Airbnb, which cut 25%, or any company looking to save money by slashing R&D?

The COVID crisis is accelerating change in business and society. Healthcare, travel, education, retail, food, and other huge sectors are getting reinvented. While the economic downturn is tragic for millions of workers and small businesses, great change also opens up great new opportunities.

Watson showed that when business leaders have the guts to prepare to jump on those opportunities while competitors hunker down and hope for the best, a touch of luck could tee up a long winning streak.

Source:Business Insiders

https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-shows-firing-workers-during-great-depression-coronavirus-mistake-2020-5

Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?

He has delivered revelatory reporting on some of the defining stories of our time. But a close examination reveals the weaknesses in what may be called an era of resistance journalism.

It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.”

In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities.

The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.

Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.

The records were simply put on restricted access, a longstanding practice to prevent leaks, a possibility Mr. Farrow briefly allows for in his story, but minimizes. And Mr. Fry’s leaks had been encouraged and circulated by a man who was barely mentioned in Mr. Farrow’s article, the now-disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, a passionate antagonist of Mr. Cohen.

Mr. Farrow may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America, a rare celebrity-journalist who followed the opposite path of most in the profession: He began as a boy-wonder talk show host and worked his way downward to the coal face of hard investigative reporting. The child of the actress Mia Farrow and the director Woody Allen, he has delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact, especially his revelations about powerful men who preyed on young women in the worlds of Hollywood, television and politics, which won him a Pulitzer Prize.

I’ve been watching Mr. Farrow’s astonishing rise over the past few years, marveling at his ability to shine a light on some of the defining stories of our time, especially the sexual misconduct of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, which culminated with Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in February just before the pandemic took hold. But some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun.

Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.

Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.

The New Yorker has made Mr. Farrow a highly visible, generational star for its brand. And Mr. Farrow’s supporters there point out the undeniable impact of his reporting — which ousted abusers like New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and helped rewrite the rules of sex and power in the workplace, sometimes with his colleague Jane Mayer. Ken Auletta, The New Yorker writer who helped Mr. Farrow take his work from NBC to the magazine, said that the important thing is that Mr. Farrow helped reveal Mr. Weinstein’s predatory behavior to the world and bring him down.

“Are all the Ts crossed and the Is dotted? No,” Mr. Auletta said of some of Mr. Farrow’s most sweeping claims of a conspiracy between Mr. Weinstein and NBC to suppress his work.

“You’re still left with the bottom line — he delivered the goods,” Mr. Auletta said.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, defended Mr. Farrow’s reporting, calling it “scrupulous, tireless, and, above all, fair.”

“Working alongside fact checkers, lawyers and other editorial staff members at The New Yorker, he achieved something remarkable, not least because he earned the trust of his sources, many of whom had to relive traumatic events when they talked to him,’’ Mr. Remnick said in a statement. “We stand by Ronan Farrow’s reporting. We’re proud to publish him.”

Mr. Farrow, in his own statement to The New York Times, said he brings “caution, rigor, and nuance” to each of his stories. “I’m proud of a body of reporting that has helped to expose wrongdoing and to bring important stories into public view.”

It’s impossible, however, to go back and answer the question of whether Mr. Farrow’s explosive early reporting would have carried such power if he’d been more rigorous and taken care to show what he knew and what he didn’t. Is the cost of a more dramatic story worth paying? Because this much is certain: There is a cost.

That becomes clear in an examination of Mr. Farrow’s debut article on Mr. Weinstein, back in October 2017, which provided the first clear, on-the-record claim that Mr. Weinstein had gone beyond the systematic sexual harassment and abuse revealed days earlier by The Times into something that New York prosecutors could charge as rape. The accuser was Lucia Evans, a college student whom Mr. Weinstein had approached at a private club, and then later lured to his office with a promise of acting opportunities. There, she told Mr. Farrow, he forced her to perform oral sex on him.

The Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein inside Manhattan Criminal Court during his arraignment on sexual assault charges in 2018.

But a fundamental principle of the contemporary craft of reporting on sexual assault is corroboration: the painstaking task of tracking down friends and neighbors a traumatized victim may have confided in soon after the assault, to see if their accounts align with the victim’s story and to give it more — or less — weight. In much of the strongest #metoo reporting, from the stories about Mr. Weinstein in The New York Times to The Washington Post’s exposé of Charlie Rose and even some of Mr. Farrow’s other articles, clunky paragraphs interrupt the narrative to explain what an accuser told friends, and often, to explore any conflicting accounts. Americans are now watching this complicated form of reporting play out in the stories about Tara Reade, who has accused Joe Biden of assaulting her.

Mr. Farrow’s first big story on Mr. Weinstein offered readers little visibility into the question of whether Ms. Evans’s story could be corroborated. He could have indicated that he had, or hadn’t, been able to corroborate what Ms. Evans said, or reported what her friends from the time had told the magazine. He wrote instead: “Evans told friends some of what had happened, but felt largely unable to talk about it.”

It appears Mr. Farrow was making a narrative virtue of a reporting liability, and the results were ultimately damaging.

A crucial witness, the friend who was with Ms. Evans when both women met Mr. Weinstein at the club, later told prosecutors that when a fact checker for The New Yorker called her about Mr. Farrow’s story, she hadn’t confirmed Ms. Evans’s account of rape. Instead, according to a letter from prosecutors to defense lawyers, the witness told the magazine that “something inappropriate happened,” and refused to go into detail.

But the witness later told a New York Police Department detective something more problematic: That Ms. Evans had told her the sexual encounter with Mr. Weinstein was consensual. The detective told the witness that her response to the magazine’s fact checker “was more consistent” with Ms. Evans’s allegation against Mr. Weinstein and suggested she stick to The New Yorker version, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorneys office later acknowledged. The detective denied the exchange, but when Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers unearthed the witness’s contradictory accounts, the judge dismissed the charge. Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers gloated, though, of course, their client was ultimately convicted on other counts.

In his 2019 book, “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow dismisses the incident as an issue with a “peripheral witness” and attacks Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman for “private espionage.”

A similar problem appears at the heart of “Catch and Kill,” in a section in which he describes Matt Lauer assaulting a junior employee at NBC. In Mr. Farrow’s telling, Mr. Lauer’s accuser leaves his dressing room after the assault. “Crying, she ran to the new guy she’d started seeing, a producer who was working in the control room that morning, and told him what had happened.” Mr. Farrow and the fact checker for his book, Sean Lavery, never called “the new guy” to corroborate the story, both Mr. Lavery and the man told me.

“I might look at something and say that’s good enough, there’s enough other evidence that something happened,” Mr. Lavery said, speaking hypothetically, when I asked why he and Mr. Farrow didn’t call a potentially corroborating witness.

But the “new guy” told me that, in fact, he doesn’t remember the scene that was portrayed in the book. He spoke on the condition he not be identified.

When I told Mr. Farrow that in an email last week, he wrote back: “I am confident that the conversation took place as described and it was verified in multiple ways.”

Mr. Farrow did not share his methods. But this much is clear: Mr. Farrow and the fact checker never called the producer. And if they had, that element of the story would have been much more complicated — or would never have appeared in print.

Matt Lauer, on the set of the NBC show “Today” in September 2017. He was fired two months later.

Mr. Lauer was fired from NBC, and a series of reports and an internal investigation portrayed him as a star who abused his power in the workplace for sex. He declined to speak for the record during a telephone conversation, except to say that he had found issues with the corroboration of Mr. Farrow’s reporting on him.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a predator like Mr. Weinstein or to shed tears over Mr. Lauer’s firing. And readers may brush aside these reporting issues as the understandable desire of a zealous young reporter to tell his stories as dramatically as he can.

But Mr. Farrow brings that same inclination to the other big theme that shapes his work: conspiracy. His stories are built and sold on his belief — which he rarely proves — that powerful forces and people are conspiring against those trying to do good, especially Mr. Farrow himself.

At the heart of “Catch and Kill” is an electrifying suggestion: that Mr. Weinstein blackmailed NBC executives to kill Mr. Farrow’s story on his sexual misconduct with the threat that The National Enquirer would expose Mr. Lauer’s misconduct if they did not. This is the “conspiracy” in the book’s subtitle. And it is the thread that holds together its narrative.

In Mr. Farrow’s telling, by the end of July 2017, he had nailed down the story of Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of sexual predation, and the NBC brass had begun to shut him down. He has said repeatedly that he had at least two women on the record for his story at the time he left NBC for The New Yorker. He told NPR in an interview, “There is no draft of this story that NBC had that had fewer than two named women.” But NBC has disputed that claim, and an NBC employee showed me what he described as the final draft of Mr. Farrow’s script, as of Aug. 7. It had no on-the-record, on-camera interviews. (It did have one strong piece of reporting that Mr. Farrow took to The New Yorker: an audio recording of Mr. Weinstein appearing to confess to an Italian model that he had groped her. )

Nor does Mr. Farrow provide any proof that NBC executives were acting out of fear of blackmail when they refused to air his story, a central theme he promoted on his book tour. When the ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Farrow about “the suggestion that Mr. Weinstein was blackmailing NBC News,” Mr. Farrow replied, “Multiple sources do say that, and the way in which that’s framed is very careful.” Pressed on whether NBC had let the story go “because they were afraid information about Matt Lauer was going to get out,” Mr. Farrow replied, “That is what the extensive conversations, transcripts, and documents presented in this book suggest.”

But the reporting in the book does not bear that out. And in the absence of compelling proof, Mr. Farrow relies on what the critic and private detective Anne Diebel earlier this year described in The New York Review of Books as “New Journalism on the sly” — using novelistic technique to make his case. Mr. Farrow, for example, describes the facial expressions and physical gestures of NBC executives during his meetings with them, and then deduces dark motives.

“If the Lauer threat was indeed made, and taken seriously, then NBC’s killing of the story is not just a case of muddy corporate cowardice; it’s a case of abject journalistic malfeasance and moral failure,” Ms. Diebel wrote. “But in the absence of persuasive sourcing, Farrow’s exploration of the alternatives is insufficient.”

Even Mr. Auletta, a supporter and mentor to Mr. Farrow, told me that Mr. Farrow’s central conspiracy allegation was unproven.

Photographers gathered outside the State Supreme Court in Manhattan in February as Mr. Weinstein arrived for his trial.

The one on-the-record source supporting the core conspiracy theory in “Catch and Kill” is William Arkin, a maverick journalist and acolyte of Seymour Hersh who departed bitterly from NBC soon after Mr. Farrow.

In a curious passage in “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow writes that Mr. Arkin — an ally of his at the network — told him of two anonymous sources who made the charge. In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Arkin told me that his sources, only one of whom offered a firsthand account, had been unwilling to speak to Mr. Farrow for his book. Mr. Arkin said the firsthand source told him that Mr. Weinstein had made a threat to an NBC executive about exposing Mr. Lauer, but that he doesn’t know who told his source. And he said he had no knowledge of the other elements of Mr. Farrow’s shadowy suggestions — the involvement of The National Enquirer, or whether executives actually shut down Mr. Farrow’s story because of a threat. (NBC has denied that Mr. Weinstein threatened anyone and said most of the producer’s communication was with MSNBC’s president, Phil Griffin, who wasn’t directly involved in the reporting on Mr. Weinstein.)

Two other NBC journalists, neither of whom would speak for the record, expressed a different view, which is shared by network executives: That Mr. Farrow was a talented young reporter with big ambitions but little experience, who didn’t realize how high the standards of proof were, particularly at slow-moving, super-cautious news networks. A normal clash between a young reporter and experienced editors turned toxic.

Mr. Arkin said he agreed with NBC’s view that Mr. Farrow didn’t have the Weinstein story nailed by August 2017, when he took the story to The New Yorker. But Mr. Arkin said he also believed that NBC didn’t really want the story.

The right move would have been to “take a 29-year-old and you hold him by the hand and you walk him through the story,” Mr. Arkin said in a telephone interview. “Instead what they did was they took him out to the deep end and threw him in — and then they said ‘Oh my God, you can’t swim.’”

That’s an account less heroic than Mr. Farrow’s. It’s also hard to argue that NBC wouldn’t have been better off staying close to Mr. Farrow and getting the story.

Mr. Farrow’s other irresistible conspiracy has even less to support it: that Hillary Clinton, whom Mr. Farrow had once worked for at the State Department, also sought to kill his reporting and protect Mr. Weinstein. In “Catch and Kill,” Mr. Farrow described receiving an “ominous” call from Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, in the summer of 2017 saying his Weinstein reporting was “a concern.” “It’s remarkable,” Mr. Farrow told The Financial Times about Mrs. Clinton during his book tour, “how quickly even people with a long relationship with you will turn if you threaten the centers of power or the sources of funding around them.”

But Mr. Farrow appears to have misinterpreted Mr. Merrill’s call. Mr. Merrill said at the time that Mrs. Clinton was preparing to do a documentary film with Mr. Weinstein, and the Clinton camp was trying to find out if damaging reporting was about to be published about the producer. He had no way of proving it, but another reporter he spoke to at the time about Mr. Weinstein shared with me text messages that back Mr. Merrill’s account, and contradict Mr. Farrow’s. “We’re about to do business with him unless this is real,” Mr. Merrill wrote the other reporter on July 6. In other words, Mr. Merrill was trying to protect his boss, not Mr. Weinstein.

Predictably, Mr. Farrow’s account was seized on by Mrs. Clinton’s detractors, both on the right and left, who saw it as vivid confirmation that Mrs. Clinton was a devious and manipulative character.

When I asked Mr. Farrow whether he has evidence for his conspiracies, he first referred the questions to his publisher, Little, Brown. Sabrina Callahan, the executive director of publicity for Little, Brown, said in an email: “The book is very careful about laying out the facts uncovered by Ronan around NBC’s contact with Weinstein and his associates — and only going as far as the facts support,” adding, “We would encourage people to read it and form their own conclusions.”

When I asked specifically about the Clinton conspiracy, she said, “Ronan‘s book recounts his own experiences.”

The essence of those responses — the first legalistic in a misleading way, the second to suggest Mr. Farrow’s journalistic conclusions are based on his subjective experience — captures the deepest danger of Mr. Farrow’s approach. We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies — that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.

On Sunday night, Mr. Farrow offered another defense of the word “conspiracy” in his book’s subtitle, saying it “accurately conveys the substance of the book and efforts by powerful men to evade accountability.” He added, “With respect to Weinstein, I carefully lay out the various levers of pressure exerted against my reporting — through personal relationships, private espionage, legal threats, etc.”

Mr. Farrow last year in New York

I’m writing this for The Times, which competed with Mr. Farrow on many stories and shared the Pulitzer Prize with him in 2018 for coverage of sexual harassment. I wasn’t here during that coverage. What first set off my skepticism about Mr. Farrow’s work was reporting in 2018 by Jason Leopold at BuzzFeed News, when I was editor in chief there. (Disclosure: I don’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column because I retain stock options in the company, which I left in February. I’ve agreed to divest those options by the end of the year.) That reporting made clear that Mr. Farrow’s article on the Cohen documents was wrong — that they were not missing, but merely restricted to avoid leaks of sensitive materials.

And I found more recently when I dug into the Cohen story that for all Mr. Farrow’s attraction to screenplay-ready narratives, he missed one that was made for this moment. The real story of John Fry, the I.R.S. employee who leaked Mr. Cohen’s records, went like this: Amid the swirl of the scandal involving Stormy Daniels, Mr. Avenatti, her lawyer, took to Twitter one day in May 2018, and demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr. Cohen’s records.

Mr. Fry, a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco, was one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts. Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. “John: I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate this. Thank you,’’ Mr. Avenatti wrote to Mr. Fry, according to the documents, then pressed him for more.

Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January. In Mr. Fry’s defense, his lawyer said he had been watching “hours and hours” of television, and described him as “a victim of cable news.”

I’m writing this for The Times, which competed with Mr. Farrow on many stories and shared the Pulitzer Prize with him in 2018 for coverage of sexual harassment. I wasn’t here during that coverage. What first set off my skepticism about Mr. Farrow’s work was reporting in 2018 by Jason Leopold at BuzzFeed News, when I was editor in chief there. (Disclosure: I don’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column because I retain stock options in the company, which I left in February. I’ve agreed to divest those options by the end of the year.) That reporting made clear that Mr. Farrow’s article on the Cohen documents was wrong — that they were not missing, but merely restricted to avoid leaks of sensitive materials.

And I found more recently when I dug into the Cohen story that for all Mr. Farrow’s attraction to screenplay-ready narratives, he missed one that was made for this moment. The real story of John Fry, the I.R.S. employee who leaked Mr. Cohen’s records, went like this: Amid the swirl of the scandal involving Stormy Daniels, Mr. Avenatti, her lawyer, took to Twitter one day in May 2018, and demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr. Cohen’s records.

Mr. Fry, a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco, was one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts. Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. “John: I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate this. Thank you,’’ Mr. Avenatti wrote to Mr. Fry, according to the documents, then pressed him for more.

Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January. In Mr. Fry’s defense, his lawyer said he had been watching “hours and hours” of television, and described him as “a victim of cable news.”

Mr. Farrow has a big following on social media, too, and some of the same tendencies that undermine his reporting show up there. In January, when jurors were being selected for the Weinstein trial, they were asked what they had read about Mr. Weinstein to see if they could serve impartially. Mr. Farrow tweeted that a “source involved in Weinstein trial tells me close to 50 potential jurors have been sent home because they said they’d read Catch and Kill.”

Mr. Farrow was not in the courtroom that day, and he told me last week that his source stands by that figure. But the court reporter, Randy Berkowitz, told me that he recalled laughing with lawyers and court staff the day after about Mr. Farrow’s tweet, which he said was seen as “ridiculous.”

And Jan Ransom, a reporter who covered the trial for the Times, was there. The actual number of potential jurors who read the book, according to Ms. Ransom’s reporting? Two.

Correction: 

An earlier version of this article misstated the month of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction. It was in February, not January. The earlier version also misstated how long after Michael Avenatti’s tweet that he was contacted by an Internal Revenue Service analyst, John Fry. It was later that day, not less than three hours.

Source:The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/business/media/ronan-farrow.html

Come On and Zoom-Zoom

Some original cast members of “Zoom,” including Bernadette Yao, emerged as national celebrities during their abbreviated tenure on TV.

The transition from in-office meetings to at-home video conferencing has occasioned lots of memes and social-media posts about “my idea of a Zoom meeting,” usually accompanied by a grainy video or photo of haphazardly barbered nineteen-seventies children romping around in striped rugby shirts. Among older members of Generation X, it’s hard to hear the word “zoom” without associating it with “Zoom,” one of the most memorable and radically experimental television programs of its era. Like the teleconferencing service, the original “Zoom” was screen-based and interactive, and it quickly evolved into a national obsession. But, unlike Zoom the online platform, “Zoom” was mostly the province of kids, primarily those in the tween cohort.

The program was created by a young producer at WGBH, Boston’s public-television station, named Christopher Sarson. He and his wife, Evelyn, were English immigrants to the U.S. and something of a glamour couple: he had been a rising star at Granada Television, and she had been a reporter for the Guardian and Reuters. (They were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, the actress Eleanor Bron, to whom the Beatles sang “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” on “Help!”) By 1971, the Sarsons, living in the Boston area, were the parents of an eight-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy, and Christopher, who was then working for WGBH, was increasingly concerned about his children’s social awkwardness around other kids as they approached their preteen years. “They were cautious,” he said. “It was, ‘We would like to be your friend, but we don’t want you to laugh at us.’ ”

Keen to foster more easygoing relationships between kids, Sarson came up with a general outline for a program in which a cast of children of preteen age would perform songs, sketches, and craft projects based on scripts and premises sent in by home viewers in the same age group. Onscreen and off, kids would learn from each other rather than from an adult authority figure. “If the emphasis is on learning rather than teaching, you achieve a lot,” Sarson said. “If the kids are learning rather than being taught, they’ll be more sure of themselves and enjoy life more. So, it was this feeling of getting kids in a position where they could be thinking for themselves.”

Sarson had already set a precedent for making waves at WGBH. A year earlier, recognizing that his native Britain excelled in a television format in which the U.S. was lacking—the limited-edition serialized drama—he suggested to the station’s top brass that they should secure the American broadcasting rights to such series. The result, premièring in January, 1971, was “Masterpiece Theater,” which is now, under its abbreviated title, “Masterpiece,” the longest-running prime-time drama series on TV. The more Sarson thought about his new idea, the more its specifics came into focus: there would be a diverse cast of seven children, local Boston-area kids, none of them trained performers. There would be no adults. Sarson decided to call the program “Zoom In, Zoom Out,” he said, “because it was, ‘We’re gonna zoom in on the kids’ lives, and we’re going to zoom out on how that affects you in the world.’ ”

The program, renamed “Zoom,” was made on the cheap, starting with a thirty-thousand-dollar surplus left over from another WGBH program’s budget. Sarson’s cast of seven kids, ranging in age from nine to thirteen, needed a unisex uniform: bluejeans and some sort of top. The thriftiest option was found at Sears, where children’s rugby-striped jerseys were selling in multiple sizes for five dollars apiece. The stripes would become the visual motif of “Zoom,” adorning not only the children but also the big “Z-O-O-M” letters that stood, Stonehenge-like, at the rear of the set. “The idea of the stripes came from the shirts—the only way we could afford to make a set was to cut out big pieces of cardboard in the shape of the letters and stick the stripes on them,” Sarson said.

For music, Sarson reached out to a classically trained musician named Newton Wayland, who at the time was a pianist and harpsichordist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A burly, thickly bearded man who was evangelical about getting kids interested in music, Wayland served as the show’s music director and composer. His theme song, “Come On and Zoom,” began with an unrefusable invitation: “We’re gonna zoom, zoom, zoom-a, zoom / Come on and zoom-a, zoom-a, zoom-a zoom,” and ended with a sweetly encouraging plea:

Come on, give it a try
We’re gonna show you just why
We’re gonna teach you to fly high!
Come on and zoo-oom! Come on and zoom-zoom!

The children performed this song to boisterous choreography by Billy Wilson, a director and choreographer who also taught dance at Brandeis University. Their execution was raggedy, and all the more exciting for it: hanging off of the giant letters, arraying themselves into a shimmying group, and then splitting off from each other, running barefoot (with the blessing of an on-set physician) into the far reaches of WGBH’s cavernous Studio A, where, in a corner out of view of the camera, Julia Child’s “French Chef” kitchen set stood dormant.

The beguiling optics of this opening sequence alone—preteens leaping and gallivanting freely, alike but different, white boys with great, thick mops of unregulated hair, black boys with tight Afros, girls with all manner of center partings—presented a picture of children’s liberation that, while bursting with youthful energy, was orderly and coöperative rather than a “Lord of the Flies”-like, Hobbesian state of nature.

The program was also, way before the term became fashionable, a showcase for user-generated content. Its stars encouraged kids at home to send in their ideas, with Wayland ingeniously turning the show’s mailing address into a patter song, part rapped and part sung—“Box Three-Five-Oh, Boston, Mass., Oh-Two-One-Three-Four! Send it to ‘Zoom’!”—which seventies children committed to memory as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance.

The resulting content was resolutely low-tech. The Zoomers, as the child performers were known, demonstrated viewers’ recommendations for how to tie-dye a T-shirt, and how to play a homemade game called “cotton race,” in which two players, using flexible plastic straws, blew a cotton ball back and forth. On the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, the Zoomers obliged a girl’s request to perform “some of the old-time oldies,” via a medley of the Tin Pan Alley songs “Mairzy Doats,” “Flat Foot Floogie,” and “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” with musical and choreographic assistance from Wayland and Wilson, respectively.

Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-creator of “Sesame Street,” was enchanted by “Zoom” ’s pilot episode and quickly got behind the program, playing a significant role in insuring that it was, from the off, widely distributed via the PBS network. The half-hour show launched in 1972, airing once a week in most markets, usually in the early evening. The early nineteen-seventies were still an era of limited viewing options for children, particularly in the tween demographic, and “Zoom” zoomed to national prominence: a euphoric watch for preteens and an aspirational one for their little siblings. Life magazine, during the show’s first year on the air, described the program as “graduate school after Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

The striped shirts, born of budgetary necessity, became iconic, as did Ubbi Dubbi, the “Zoom”-popularized pig-Latin variant in which “ub” was inserted before the vowel sound in each syllable of a word, so that “Hello” came out as “Hub-ell-ub-o.” At its mid-seventies peak, the program was receiving twenty thousand letters a week from children at home, some suggesting ideas, others requesting a coveted Zoom Card, a postcard that, featured a color photograph of a cast member on one side and, on the other, step-by-step instructions for a crafts project or a game featured on the show. (This writer’s older sister nearly levitated with excitement when she received a Zoom Card offering guidance on D.I.Y. loom-weaving.)

Sarson insured that no “Zoom” cast stayed together for more than thirteen episodes—partly because some kids aged out of its demographic, and partly because he expressly wanted to avoid the performative show-biz poise of professional child actors. As such, Zoomers generally pulled no more than two thirteen-week shifts before being phased out via the “Goodbye Song,” in which the kids who were remaining bade farewell to those who were departing. Nonetheless, some Zoomers emerged as national celebrities during their abbreviated tenure on television. One was Bernadette Yao. A shy twelve-year-old who lived in Weston, Massachusetts, Yao harbored no aspirations to become a performer. On Saturdays, she attended a Mandarin-language class organized by the parents of local Chinese-American kids. “Somebody representing ‘Zoom’ called and asked if the children wanted to audition. Because my friends were going to the audition, I went along with them,” Yao said.

The audition involved passing an imaginary ball around and improv-ing an interaction with it. To her surprise, Yao and one other girl were advanced as “the finalists from the Chinese group,” she recalled, to participate in a more traditional audition that involved singing and acting. Yao was chosen for the second and third of three thirteen-week shifts in “Zoom” ’s second season, which ran from 1972 to 1973.

Given the rancorous school-busing protests that loomed in Boston’s future, Yao’s after-school commute to WGBH on Wednesdays—the day that “Zoom” held its rehearsals—represented an alternative reality to what was to come, closer to what Boston’s architects of desegregation had in mind. The station sent a cab to pick up Yao, but first the cab stopped in nearby Dover, where a black castmate, Leon Mobley, was attending school as part of metco, a voluntary Massachusetts program in which gifted and talented children from underserved urban neighborhoods were bused to schools in the prosperous suburbs.

Yao, who had barely interacted with black people up to that point in her life, became fast friends with Mobley, and with the other kid on their route, a white girl named Lori Boskin. “It was such a joyful thing,” Yao said. “It was just, like, ‘This is my other family.’ ”

“I was the first one to get picked up in the taxi, and we had a black driver, so he and I would listen to music and sing,” Mobley said. “Bernadette was so quiet, but I was friendly as hell. I would involve her in the songs and games that we played, and she came out of her shell. And Lori was funny and cool. We had some interesting cab rides, interesting conversations—even about the different dynamics in our families, because my father wasn’t around and Bernadette was really close to her father.”

This cab-ride routine repeated itself on Fridays, the days of “Zoom” tapings, which began at 6 p.m. and sometimes went all the way to midnight. (The taping day was chosen so that the Zoomers could sleep in the next morning.) Yao, Mobley, and Boskin would rev each other up for the taping, and arrive psyched “to get on our striped shirts, take off our shoes, and go into Studio A,” Yao said.

Beyond the exhilaration of performing, Yao was energized by working and playing in an environment where her opinion was sought out and respected. The daughter of parents who fled China shortly after the Communist Revolution of 1949, she came “from a background where we showed respect for the elders by calling them Auntie This or Auntie That. It was more like, ‘Be seen but not heard so much,’ ” she said. “But when we got to the studio, Christopher Sarson would always say, ‘Call me Chris.’ They wanted us to give our input.”

Yao said that “Zoom” also instilled in her a confidence and openness about her Chinese background. At school in Weston, where most of her classmates were Caucasian, she was shy about bringing in her lunch—noodles, pork and cabbage dumplings—“because people would make fun of me for the smell and the odd-looking greens,” she said. But one week the prompt for a “Zoom” Rap—as the program’s unscripted group discussions were called—was “What’s your favorite food?” By then, Yao had grown comfortable enough among her peers to reveal, to their shock, that she had never been to a McDonald’s or eaten pizza.

Mobley, who is currently the percussionist in the band of the blues-rock guitarist Ben Harper, was happy to receive a cultural education from his peers, and to offer some enlightenment of his own. “Oh, man, I got to know about Chinese culture, Jewish culture, Italian culture,” he said. During Barack Obama’s Presidency, Mobley travelled overseas as an arts envoy for the U.S. State Department. Even when he was young, Mobley had a diplomatic disposition, having had more experience moving among white and Asian children than his fellow-Zoomers had had among black kids. “We always got a bathroom break, and, I’m not going to name any names, but one boy, he asked me if my sperm was black!” Mobley said. “I started laughing like crazy. I wasn’t offended. I just found it hilarious. He was, like, ‘Why are you laughing?’ I was, like, ‘You don’t know? What makes you think I’m different from you?’ ” His “Zoom” experience had provided him with both the question and the answer.

Every Zoomer was asked to come up with a signature move or gesture to accompany his or her introduction in the program’s opening song. As the Season 2 cast members were figuring out what their signature moves should be, Yao despaired of not having one, and envied Boskin, a gifted gymnast whose move was a back walkover.

Yao spoke of her dilemma with her father, a research scientist and mechanical engineer, who suggested performing a visual trick with her arms. “It was from the Chinese opera. His father used to take him to performances when he was young,” she said. “It was a move that the warlords did with swords, like blades on a helicopter, going around and around, three or four times.” He taught Bernadette how to perform the move. Even minus the swords, her interlocking-elbow maneuver was visually arresting: it tricked the eye into believing that her forearms wrapped around each other as if bonelessly, her hands rapidly fluttering like hummingbird wings. Still, she harbored doubts about using “the arm thing,” as she still calls it, as her signature move. “I was, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m trying to be so Americanized, and here they see I’m coming from China. People are going to make fun of me.’ But I had nothing else.”

The next day, with the camera rolling, she prefaced her bit by cheerfully announcing, “I’m Berna-dette!” and then helicoptered her arms; WGBH looped in a psychedelic sound effect to accompany her movements. And, lo, a star was born. To the surprise of Yao and everyone at WGBH, her “arm thing” mesmerized her audience. A few weeks after the second season began airing, Sarson invited Yao to his office, where he emptied an enormous container of letters onto a desk. “We weren’t allowed to read the mail—we knew that there was mail, but we never saw it,” she said. “So this was unusual. And all the letters were, ‘How do you do that arm thing?’ ” “Zoom” subsequently devoted a segment to Bernadette in which, working slowly, she demonstrated to the viewing audience, step by step, how to do her arm thing.

Sarson, who calls himself the “Zoom Papa,” is now eighty-five years old, retired, and living in New Zealand. But he remains in touch with twenty-one of the original Zoomers who appeared on the program in its 1972–78 run. (WGBH revived the show for a second run, in 1999.) Every few years, he returns to Boston for a “Zoom” reunion, and was making preliminary plans for another one this year, before the coronavirus pandemic made the issue moot. “We’ve grown to love each other over the years, and we’re still in touch,” he said.

The now-adult Zoomers from both the seventies and nineties incarnations of the program are trying to re-conjure the show’s spirit during the coronavirus crisis. In coöperation with WGBH, they have convened on YouTube for a video series entitled “ZOOM Into Action,” in which cast members offer guidance for pandemic-era home crafts projects: Yao recently showed how to make a guitar out of an empty tissue box, a paper-towel tube, and rubber bands, and Tommy White, who was in the Season 1 cast of “Zoom,” demonstrated how to construct a tepee-like “fort” out of tightly rolled pieces of newspaper.

Today, Yao is a musician and holistic-health practitioner based in the Boston suburb of Lincoln. She composes music for yoga classes and for her own sound-healing workshops, which use singing, guitar strumming, musical bowls, and other forms of soothing sound to abet meditation. Normally, she holds these classes in person, at her studio in Lincoln, but, due to covid-19, she is currently offering private sessions online—via Zoom.

“I feel that I benefitted from being surrounded by all these amazing minds, creative and genius minds—the adults and the kids,” she said, of her original “Zoom” experience. “The people at WGBH were very forward-thinking. It was a unique time, a time whose spirit I am not seeing as much now, unfortunately. It’s sad to see how divisive everything is. I had more hope for a smoother integration of different races, different classes, different abilities, being able to live in harmony.” Yao upholds Sarson and his colleagues as “a group of young and courageous producers and writers and experimenters” whose approach remains applicable today. “They really had something there,” she said, “and I hope we see it in the future.”

This piece is adapted from “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America,” which will be published, by Simon & Schuster, on May 12th.

Source:The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/come-on-and-zoom-zoom

Every day will be Black Friday with non-stop sales throughout the summer

This summer, pretty much everything will be on sale.

As stores start to reopen in certain states, they’ll be working through a bottleneck of inventory unlike any they’ve seen before.

“There’s probably five times as much excess inventory out there than we’ve ever seen,” UBS analyst Jay Sole told Business Insider.

Stores will be working through piles of clothing that they were trying to sell back when stores were forced to shutter in March. Since clothing is inherently so tied to the seasons, stores will want to get rid of that inventory right away — and that means discounting.

“It’s not easy to sell Easter dresses in August or September,” Sole said.

Apparel retailers ran similarly deep discounts online throughout April when stores were closed across the US. That trend is likely to continue in brick-and-mortar stores once they’re fully open again, in an event comparable to Black Friday.

In April, while all of its stores were closed, Gap was offering deep discounts online.

While low prices will be welcomed by consumers — especially those who are less economically secure than they were before the coronavirus pandemic hit — retailers are typically reluctant to discount their products. Discounts can be damaging to their brand, and if promotions get too deep, stores are no longer making much money on their goods.

Clothing companies have few options for moving inventory aside from heavy discounting. Some may decide to pack away basics that are less seasonal and bring them back to stores next year. Manny Chirico, the CEO of PVH, which owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, said during an earnings call on April 2 that the company would consider such a solution.

Retailers can also consider adapting production cycles, especially when it comes to “seasonless” items, like clothes for exercise, for example.

“Typically people will buy that at any time of the year,” Sole said. “So there’s no need to discount that product, because even if there’s a little bit too much inventory right now, chances are what they can do is just stop making new yoga pants until they’ve sold all the ones that they have on hand.”

Simeon Siegel, a managing director at BMO Capital Markets, said there’s reason to believe the promotional period won’t last for months and months.

“[Some] companies all stopped ordering and making goods and clothes during this time period. So essentially, unlike any other crisis, companies were able to put their lives and their businesses on hold,” Siegel said.

After a period of heavy discounting, things could be back to normal, he said. But, that all depends on whether people will feel safe enough to go to stores, as well as whether their budget will allow for discretionary purchases.

“I think that the duration of the duration of the stay at home mentality is going to dictate inventory focus,” Siegel said.

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

Sea level—perpetual flux. There is a micromillimetre on the surface of the ocean that moves between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and neither. Every known life-form exists in relation to this layer. Above it, the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs. Below it, the world of water, depth, and pressure. The deeper you go, the darker, the more hostile, the less familiar, the less measured, the less known.

A splash in the South Pacific, last June, marked a historic breach of that world. A crane lowered a small white submersible off the back of a ship and plonked it in the water. For a moment, it bobbed quietly on the surface, its buoyancy calibrated to the weight of the pilot, its only occupant. Then he flipped a switch, and the submarine emitted a frantic, high-pitched whirr. Electric pumps sucked seawater into an empty chamber, weighing the vessel down. The surface frothed as the water poured in—then silence, as the top of the submersible dipped below the waterline, and the ocean absorbed it.

Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom.

Sunlight cuts through the first thousand feet of water. This is the epipelagic zone, the layer of plankton, kelp, and reefs. It contains the entire ecosystem of marine plants, as well as the mammals and the fish that eat them. An Egyptian diver once descended to the limits of this layer. The feat required a lifetime of training, four years of planning, a team of support divers, an array of specialized air tanks, and a tedious, thirteen-hour ascent, with constant decompression stops, so that his blood would not be poisoned and his lungs would not explode.

The submersible dropped at a rate of about two and a half feet per second. Twenty minutes into the dive, the pilot reached the midnight zone, where dark waters turn black. The only light is the dim glow of bioluminescence—from electric jellies, camouflaged shrimp, and toothy predators with natural lanterns to attract unwitting prey. Some fish in these depths have no eyes—what use are they? There is little to eat. Conditions in the midnight zone favor fish with slow metabolic rates, weak muscles, and slimy, gelatinous bodies.

An hour into the descent, the pilot reached ten thousand feet—the beginning of the abyssal zone. The temperature is always a few degrees above freezing, and is unaffected by the weather at the surface. Animals feed on “marine snow”: scraps of dead fish and plants from the upper layers, falling gently through the water column. The abyssal zone, which extends to twenty thousand feet, encompasses ninety-seven per cent of the ocean floor.

After two hours in free fall, the pilot entered the hadal zone, named for the Greek god of the underworld. It is made up of trenches—geological scars at the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates—and although it composes only a tiny fraction of the ocean floor, it accounts for nearly fifty per cent of the depth.

Past twenty-seven thousand feet, the pilot had gone beyond the theoretical limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells collapse at greater depths.) After thirty-five thousand feet, he began releasing a series of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly seven miles of water was pressing on the titanium sphere. If there were any imperfections, it could instantly implode.

The submarine touched the silty bottom, and the pilot, a fifty-three-year-old Texan named Victor Vescovo, became the first living creature with blood and bones to reach the deepest point in the Tonga Trench. He was piloting the only submersible that can bring a human to that depth: his own.

For the next hour, he explored the featureless beige sediment, and tried to find and collect a rock sample. Then the lights flickered, and an alarm went off. Vescovo checked his systems—there was a catastrophic failure in battery one. Water had seeped into the electronics, bringing about a less welcome superlative: the deepest-ever artificial explosion was taking place a few feet from his head.

If there were oxygen at that depth, there could have been a raging fire. Instead, a battery junction box melted, burning a hole through its external shell without ever showing a flame. Any instinct to panic was suppressed by the impossibility of rescue. Vescovo would have to come up on his own.

For more than a year, the team trying to reach the deepest point in every ocean faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they invented. 

Seven miles overhead, a white ship bobbed in Polynesian waters. It had been built by the U.S. Navy to hunt Soviet military submarines, and recently repurposed to transport and launch Vescovo’s private one. There were a couple of dozen crew members on board, all of whom were hired by Vescovo. He was midway through an attempt to become the first person to reach the deepest point in each ocean, an expedition he called the Five Deeps. He had made a fortune in private equity, but he could not buy success in this—a richer man had tried and failed. When the idea first crossed his mind, there was no vehicle to rent, not even from a government. No scientist or military had the capacity to go within two miles of the depths he sought to visit. Geologists weren’t even sure where he should dive.

Vescovo’s crew was an unlikely assemblage—“a proper band of thieves,” as the expedition’s chief scientist put it—with backgrounds in logistics, engineering, academia, and petty crime. Some on board had spent decades at sea; others were landlubbers. For more than a year, they faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they had invented for the job. They discovered undersea mountain ranges, collected thousands of biological samples that revealed scores of new species, and burned through tens of thousands of gallons of fuel and alcohol.

In 1969, when Vescovo was three years old, he climbed into the front seat of his mother’s car, which was parked on a hill outside their house. He was small and blond, the precocious, blue-eyed grandson of Italian immigrants who had come to the United States in the late nineteenth century and made a life selling gelato in the South. Vescovo put the car in neutral. It rolled backward into a tree, and he spent the next six weeks in an intensive-care unit. There were lasting effects: nerve damage to his right hand, an interest in piloting complex vehicles, and the “torturous compulsion,” he said, to experience everything he could before he died.

Victor Vescovo made a fortune in private equity, but he couldn’t buy success in this—a richer man had tried and failed.

He grew up reading science fiction, and aspired to be an astronaut; he had the grades but not the eyesight. As an undergraduate, at Stanford, he learned to fly planes. Afterward, he went to M.I.T., for a master’s degree in defense-and-arms-control studies, where he modelled decision-making and risk—interests that later converged in overlapping careers as a Reserve Naval Intelligence officer and a businessman. Vescovo was deployed as a targeting officer for the NATO bombing of Kosovo, and, as a counterterrorism officer, he was involved in a hostage rescue in the Philippines. He learned Arabic and became rich through finance and consulting jobs, and, later, through a private-equity firm, Insight Equity, in the suburbs of Dallas, where he lives.

Vescovo started going on increasingly elaborate mountaineering expeditions, and by 2014 he had skied the last hundred kilometres to the North and South Poles and summited the highest peak on every continent. He had narrowly survived a rock slide near the top of Mt. Aconcagua, in the Argentinean Andes, and had come to embrace a philosophy that centered on calculated risk. Control what you can; be aware of what you cannot. Death, at some point, is a given—“You have to accept it,” he said—and he reasoned that the gravest risk a person could take was to waste time on earth, to reach the end without having maximally lived. “This is the only way to fight against mortality,” he said. “My social life was pretty nonexistent, but it just wasn’t a priority. Life was too interesting.” He grew his hair down to his shoulders, and touched up the color, even as his beard turned white. On weekends, he used his private jet to shuttle rescue dogs to prospective owners all over the U.S. At sea, according to members of his expedition team, he spent hours in his cabin alone, playing Call of Duty and eating microwaved macaroni and cheese.

But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” While Shackleton was missing in Antarctica, a member of his expedition cabled for help. Winston Churchill responded, “When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins.”

A century later, adventurers tend to accumulate ever more meaningless firsts: a Snapchat from the top of Mt. Everest; in Antarctica, the fastest mile ever travelled on a pogo stick. But to open the oceans for exploration without limit—here was a meaningful record, Vescovo thought, perhaps the last on earth. In 1961, John F. Kennedy said that “knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.” Yet, in the following decades, the hadal trench nearest to the U.S. became a dumping ground for pharmaceutical waste.

In September, 2014, Vescovo sent an inquiry to Triton Submarines, a small manufacturer in Vero Beach, Florida. He noted that he was a jet and helicopter pilot familiar with the “procedure-driven piloting of complex craft,” and outlined what became the Five Deeps Expedition.

Patrick Lahey, the president of Triton, took up scuba diving when he was thirteen years old, and discovered that he felt more at home underwater than he did on land. The muted silence, the slow, deep breaths—diving forced him into a kind of meditative state. “I love the feeling of weightlessness,” he told me. “I love moving around in three dimensions, instead of two.” Lahey attended commercial diving school, to learn underwater welding and construction for dams, bridges, and oil-and-gas installations. “Just about anything you might do out of the water you could do underwater,” he said. “You bolt things, you cut things, you weld things together, you move things, you recover things.” Water conducts electricity, and sometimes, he added, “you can feel it fizzing in your teeth.”

In 1983, when he was twenty-one, he carried out his first submarine dive, to fourteen hundred feet, to inspect an oil rig off the coast of Northern California. He was profoundly affected by the experience—to go deep one hour and surface the next, with “none of the punitive decompression,” he said. By the time Vescovo contacted him, Lahey had piloted more than sixty submersibles on several thousand dives. An expedition leader who has worked with him for decades told me that he is, “without question, the best submarine pilot in the world.”

Patrick Lahey, the president of Triton Submarines. “It wasn’t really a business decision,” one of his engineers said, of the creation of the Limiting Factor. “He wanted to build this. Giving up was not an option.” 

Lahey co-founded Triton in 2007. The business model was to build private submersibles for billionaires, including a Russian oligarch and a member of a Middle Eastern royal family. (In the years leading up to the first order, Lahey used to be laughed at when he attended boat shows; now there are companies that build support vessels for yachts, to carry helicopters, submarines, and other expensive toys.) But his deeper aspiration was to make other people comprehend, as Herman Melville wrote, in “Moby-Dick,” that in rivers and oceans we see “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” After a few dives, many of Lahey’s clients started allowing their vehicles to be used for science and filming.

Vescovo didn’t care if Lahey sent him to the bottom of the ocean in a windowless steel ball; he just wanted to get there. But Lahey declined to build anything that didn’t have a passenger seat, for a scientist; a manipulator arm, for collecting samples; and viewports, so that the occupants could appreciate the sensation of submergence. Such features would complicate the build, possibly to the point of failure. But Lahey has a tendency to promise the reality he wants before he’s sure how to deliver it. “It wasn’t really a business decision,” a Triton engineer told me. “He wanted to build this. Giving up was not an option.” Lahey saw Vescovo’s mission as a way to develop and test the world’s first unlimited hadal exploration system—one that could then be replicated and improved, for scientists.

Vescovo flew to the Bahamas, and Lahey took him for a test dive in Triton’s flagship submersible, which has three seats and is rated to a depth of thirty-three hundred feet. The third seat was occupied by an eccentric British man in his thirties, named John Ramsay, who didn’t seem to enjoy the dive; he was preoccupied with what he didn’t like about the submersible—which he had designed.

“I never really had a particular passion for submarines,” Ramsay, who is Triton’s chief submarine designer, told me. “I still don’t, really.” What he does love is that he gets to design every aspect of each machine, from the central frame to the elegant handle on the back of the hatch. Car manufacturers have entire teams design a seat or a fender, and then produce it at scale. But nearly every Triton submarine is unique; Ramsay determines how he wants things to be, and a dozen or so men in Florida start building.

Ramsay, who works out of a spare bedroom in the wilds of southwest England, has never read a book about submarines. “You would just end up totally tainted in the way you think,” he said. “I just work out what it’s got to do, and then come up with a solution to it.” The success or the failure of Vescovo’s mission would rest largely in his hands.

“If Victor dies, and it’s your fault, you’ve got to kill yourself,” he told his wife, Caroline.

“Would you, though?” she replied.

“Of course!”

The Limiting Factor is the only vehicle “that can get to the bottom of any ocean, anytime, anywhere,” Rob McCallum said.

A submariner thinks of space and materials in terms of pressure, buoyancy, and weight. Air rises, batteries sink; in order to achieve neutral buoyancy—the ability to remain suspended underwater, without rising or falling—each component must be offset against the others. The same is true of fish, which regulate their buoyancy through the inflation and deflation of swim bladders.

Ramsay’s submarines typically center on a thick acrylic sphere, essentially a bubble; release it underwater and it will pop right up to the surface. But acrylic was not strong enough for Vescovo’s submersible. At the bottom of the deepest trench, every square inch would have to hold back sixteen thousand pounds of water—an elephant standing on a stiletto heel.

Ramsay settled on titanium: malleable and resistant to corrosion, with a high ratio of strength to density. The pressure hull would weigh nearly eight thousand pounds. It would have to be counterbalanced by syntactic foam, a buoyant filler comprising millions of hollow glass spheres. For the submarine to stay upright, the foam would have to go above the hull, providing upward lift—like a hot-air balloon, for water. “As long as the heavy stuff hangs in balance below the buoyant stuff, the sub will always stay upright,” Ramsay explained.

The hull required the forging of two slabs of titanium into perfect hemispheres. Only one facility in the world had a chamber that was sufficiently large and powerful to subject the hull to pressures equivalent to those found at full ocean depth: the Krylov State Research Center, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Lahey attended the pressure test. There was no backup hull; an implosion would end the project. “But it worked—it validated what we were doing,” Lahey told me.

It was the middle of summer, 2018, in South Florida, and Triton’s technicians were working fifteen hours a day, in a space with no air-conditioning. Lahey paced the workshop, sweating, trying to encourage his team. The men who were building the world’s most advanced deep-diving submersible had not attended Stanford or M.I.T.; they were former car mechanics, scuba instructors, and underwater welders, hired for their work ethic and their practical experience. The shop foreman used to be a truck driver. The hydraulics expert had a bullet in his abdomen, from his days running cocaine out of Fort Lauderdale, in the eighties. One of the electricians honed his craft by stealing car radios, as a teen-ager. (“I was really good at it,” he told me.) Lahey, for his part, said that he was named—and later exonerated—by the federal government as an unindicted co-conspirator in a narcotics-trafficking operation involving a Soviet military submarine and a Colombian cartel.

Every major component of Vescovo’s submarine had to be developed from scratch. The oil-and-gas industry had established a supply chain of components that are pressure-rated to around six thousand metres—but that was only half the required depth. Before assembling the submarine, the Triton team spent months imploding parts in a pressure chamber, and sending feedback to the manufacturers. “You’re solving problems that have never existed before, with parts that have never existed before, from venders who don’t know how to make them,” Ramsay said.

The rest of the expedition team was on a ship docked in the harbor at Vero Beach, waiting. Vescovo remained at home in Dallas, training on a simulator that Triton had rigged up in his garage. On Lahey’s recommendation, he had hired Rob McCallum, an expedition leader and a co-founder of EYOS Expeditions, to inject realism into a project that might otherwise die a dream.

For every Vescovo who goes to the South Pole, there is a McCallum making sure he stays alive. (McCallum has been to Antarctica a hundred and twenty-eight times.) “I love it when clients come through the door and say, ‘I’ve been told this is impossible, but what do you think?’ ” he said to me. “Well, I think you’ve just given away your negotiating position. Let’s have a glass of wine and talk about it.”

McCallum—who is trim but barrel-chested, with a soft voice and a Kiwi accent—grew up in the tropics of Papua New Guinea, and became a polar guide. He is a trained medic, dive master, firefighter, aircraft pilot, and boat operator, a former New Zealand park ranger who has served as an adviser to the Norwegian Navy. He speaks three Neo-Melanesian languages, and can pilot a Zodiac boat standing up, in sixteen-foot waves. He is the subject of a “Modern Love” column, in the Times. (“My father warned me about guys like you,” the author recalls telling him, before marrying him anyway.) McCallum and his associates have discovered several high-profile shipwrecks, including Australian and American warships and an Israeli military submarine. A few months ago, he showed me on his computer an object on a sonar scan, which he believes to be Amelia Earhart’s plane.

Rob McCallum, the expedition leader. “I love it when clients come through the door and say, ‘I’ve been told this is impossible, but what do you think?’” he said. 

Vescovo asked what McCallum required from him. “The first thing I need is for you to triple the budget,” he replied. He also shot down several of Vescovo’s proposals, from the antiquated (no alcohol or spouses on board) to the insane (installing fake torpedo tubes on the bow; bringing his dog to the deepest point on earth).

Five oceans, five deeps—a journey around the world and to both poles. McCallum explained that the expedition would have to be anchored by the polar dives. The likely dive spot in the Arctic Ocean is covered by ice for much of the year, but there is a two-week dive window, beginning in late August. The Antarctic, or Southern Ocean, dive could be done in February, the height of summer in that hemisphere. The team would have to avoid hurricane season in the Atlantic, and monsoon season in the Pacific, and otherwise remain flexible, for when things inevitably went wrong.

Lahey persuaded Vescovo to buy the U.S.N.S. Indomitable, a two-hundred-and-twenty-foot vessel that he had found at a drydock in Seattle. It was built as an intelligence-gathering ship, in 1985, and spent much of the next fifteen years prowling the world’s oceans, towing an undersea listening device. “It was owned by the Navy but operated by civilians,” McCallum told me. He winked. “I didn’t say C.I.A.—I just said civilians.” Vescovo renamed it the Pressure Drop, for a spaceship from the “Culture” series of science-fiction novels, by Iain M. Banks.

The Arctic-dive window was fast approaching, and it seemed unlikely that the submersible would be ready. “That’s when Patrick Lahey’s overflowing optimism went from being an incredible, endearing personality trait to being a huge issue,” Stuart Buckle, the Pressure Drop’s captain, said. “Every day, Patrick would say, ‘Oh, yes, it’ll be ready in one or two days.’ And then two days pass, and he’d say, ‘It’ll be ready in two days.’ ”

The final step in building a submarine is to put it in a swimming pool or in the water at a marina. “You need to know how much it weighs and how much it displaces,” Ramsay said, because the average density of the craft and its passengers must be equal to that of the water in which it is submerged. “You’ve only calculated the volume of each object through computer models, which can’t possibly represent the actual thing, with all its tolerances. Things are a bit bigger, things are a bit smaller, cables are fatter.”

But there was no time to do this before loading it onto the ship and setting off for sea trials, in the Bahamas. They left Florida without knowing how much the submarine displaced. “It had never even touched the water,” Ramsay said. “It was just ‘Right, off we go. Let’s see if it works.’ ”

When Stuart Buckle, the captain of the Pressure Drop, first walked up its gangplank, he wondered why Triton had chosen the ship. The hull was watertight, but there were holes in the steel superstructure, and every functional component had been stripped.

SEA TRIALS

“When people talk about sea trials, they always think about testing a ship or testing a sub,” McCallum told me. “But, really, what you’re doing is you’re testing people. You are testing systems, processes, conditions, and teams.”

Buckle, the captain, dropped anchor near Great Abaco Island, in the Bahamas, and immediately became alarmed by the Triton crew’s cavalier approach to safety. He had grown up in the Scottish Highlands, and gone to sea when he was seventeen years old. “Me and my guys were trying to adjust from the oil-and-gas industry, where you need a signed bit of paper to do anything, and to go out on deck you have to have your overalls, hard hats, goggles, earmuffs, and gloves,” Buckle said. “Whereas a lot of the Triton guys were used to walking around in shorts and flip-flops, like you watch on ‘American Chopper.’ They were grinding and drilling and using hydraulic awls, looking at it, sparks flying everywhere, not wearing safety glasses or anything. To them, if something catches fire, it’s funny—it’s not an issue.”

Vescovo named the submarine the Limiting Factor, for another spaceship from the “Culture” series. It was secured to a custom-built cradle, which could be rolled backward on metal tracks, to lower the sub into the ocean from the aft deck of the ship. During launch operations, the Triton crew attached it to a hook that hung down from a crane, known as an A-frame, shaped like an enormous hydraulic swing set. Buckle had asked Vescovo to buy a larger A-frame—one that was “man-rated” by a certification agency, so that they could launch the submersible, which weighs around twenty-six thousand pounds, with the pilot inside and the hatch secured. But there was no time to install one. So the Triton crew lowered the empty submersible into the water, and the ship’s crew, using a different crane, launched a Zodiac boat over the starboard side. McCallum climbed into the Zodiac, and drove the pilot to the sub as it was being towed behind the ship.

The ship had no means of tracking the submarine underwater. “Once he left the surface, I had no idea where he was,” Buckle said. “All we had at that point was one range.” Buckle could see, for example, that the Limiting Factor was five hundred metres away, but he didn’t know in which direction. “As long as that number was getting bigger, that meant he wasn’t surfacing directly under me,” he said. “If it just kept getting smaller and smaller, I’m in trouble.”

“The thing about driving a ship is that unless you know how to drive a ship you never see the bad stuff,” McCallum told me. “It’s only when the captain’s going ‘Christ, that was close!’ that you go ‘Really? Was it?’ ”

Other incidents were unambiguous. “I was seeing Triton guys bouncing up the ladders without holding the handrails, wanting to jump on top of things while they were still swinging from the crane,” Buckle recalled. Ropes failed, deck equipment snapped under stress. “One of the big ratchet hooks blew off the top of the hangar, and missed Patrick’s head by that much,” McCallum said, holding his fingers a couple of inches apart. “Just missed him. And he wasn’t wearing a helmet, so that would have killed him.”

Lahey piloted the sub on its earliest dives—first to twenty metres, then fifty, then a thousand. Electronic systems failed. The hatch leaked. Emergency lights malfunctioned, and drop weights got stuck. Pre-dive checklists labelled several switches “inoperable.” Post-dive checklists noted critical components lost and fallen to the seafloor.

“In a sea trial, you’re trying to break stuff—you’re trying to work out where your weakest link is,” McCallum said. “It’s incredibly demoralizing. You never feel as if you’re making any meaningful forward progress.” Each morning, he delivered a pre-dive briefing to members of the ship and submarine crews. “Don’t be disheartened by the long list of things that broke,” he told them. “Rejoice, because those are things that are not going to fail in the Southern Ocean—and if they did fail in the Southern Ocean we’d be fucked.”

On the sub’s earliest dives, electronic systems failed, the hatch leaked, and drop weights got stuck.

On September 9, 2018, Patrick Lahey piloted the Limiting Factor to the bottom of the Abaco Canyon, more than three miles down. It was the ninth time that the submersible had been in the water. Everything worked. The next day, Lahey repeated the dive, with Vescovo as the lead pilot. When they reached the bottom, Vescovo turned on the control unit that directs the manipulator arm. Something wasn’t right. He and Lahey glanced at each other. “Do you smell that?” Lahey asked.

“Yes.”

There was a puff of smoke in the capsule. Vescovo and Lahey grabbed the “spare air”—scuba regulators, with two-minute compressed-air cannisters—so that they wouldn’t pass out while preparing the emergency breathing apparatus. A circuit breaker tripped, automatically switching off the control unit for the manipulator arm, and the acrid smell dissipated. Lahey, who was training Vescovo to handle crises underwater, asked what they should do.

“Abort the dive?” Vescovo said.

“Yes.” They were two hours from the surface.

Ramsay and Tom Blades, Triton’s chief electrical designer, had devised numerous safety mechanisms. Most systems were duplicated, and ran on separate electrical circuits, in case one of the batteries failed. The thrusters could be ejected if they became entangled; so could the batteries, to drop weight and provide buoyancy. The five-hundred-and-fifty-pound surfacing weight was attached by an electromagnet, so that if the sub lost electricity it would immediately begin its ascent. There was also a dead-man switch: an alarm went off if the pilot failed to check in with the ship, and if he failed to acknowledge the alarm the weights would automatically drop.

John Ramsay, the principal designer of the Limiting Factor, has never read a book about submarines. “You would just end up totally tainted in the way you think,” he said.

After the Limiting Factor’s manipulator arm fell off, “Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,” Lahey said, about the submarine’s chief electrical designer. “There was literally a jumper cable running through the pressure hull.”

“Whenever we had any significant failure of some kind, the only thing that mattered was why,” Vescovo said. “If you can identify the problem, and fix it, what are you going to do? Give up? Come on. That didn’t even cross my mind. Maybe other people get freaked out. I’ve heard of that happening. But if you’re mountain climbing and you fall, are you not going to climb again? No. You learn from it, and keep going.”

By the middle of September, the sea trials had given way to “advanced sea trials”—a euphemism to cover for the fact that nothing was working. The Arctic Ocean dive window had already passed. Buckle was especially concerned about the launch-and-recovery system. The cranes were inadequate, and poorly spaced. One of the support vessels, which had been selected by Triton, was eighteen years old, and its rubber perimeter was cracking from years of neglect in the Florida sun. “I was pretty pissed off at that point,” Buckle told me. “I had put my guys in a difficult situation, because they were trying to compensate for structural issues that you couldn’t really work around. You can only piss with the dick you’ve been given.”

McCallum redesigned the expedition schedule to begin with the Puerto Rico Trench, in the Atlantic Ocean, in December, followed by Antarctica, in early February. The adjustment added cost but bought time.

When Alan Jamieson, the expedition’s chief scientist, contacted Heather Stewart, a marine geologist with the British Geological Survey, and told her that Vescovo wanted to dive to the deepest point of each ocean, she replied that there was a problem: nobody knew where those points were.

Most maps showing the ocean floor in detail are commissioned by people looking to exploit it. The oil-and-gas and deep-sea-mining industries require extensive knowledge, and they pay for it. But, with a few exceptions, the characteristics of the deepest trenches are largely unknown. As recently as the nineteen-sixties, ocean depths were often estimated by throwing explosives over the side of a ship and measuring the time it took for the boom to echo back from the bottom.

“Most marine science is gritty as fuck,” Alan Jamieson, the chief scientist, said. “It’s all the weird vessels we end up on, the work of hauling things in and out of the water.”

It may appear as if the trenches are mapped—you can see them on Google Earth. But these images weren’t generated by scanning the bottom of the ocean; they come from satellites scanning the top. The surface of the ocean is not even—it is shaped by the features beneath it. Trenches create mild surface depressions, while underwater mountain ranges raise the surface. The result is a vaguely correct reading—here is a trench!—with a ludicrous margin of error. Every pixel is about five hundred metres wide, and what lies below may be thousands of feet deeper or shallower than the satellite projects, and miles away from where it appears on the map.

Vescovo would have to buy a multibeam echo sounder, an advanced sonar mapping system, to determine precise depths and dive locations. He chose the Kongsberg EM-124, which would be housed in a massive gondola underneath the ship. No other system could so precisely map hadal depths. Vescovo’s purchase was the very first—serial number 001.

When Jamieson contacted Heather Stewart, a marine geologist, and said that Vescovo wanted to dive to the deepest point of each ocean, she replied that there was a problem: nobody knew where those points were.

That November, Buckle sailed the Pressure Drop to Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, to have the EM-124 and a new starboard crane installed. But there was still no time to order a man-rated A-frame—its purchase, delivery, and installation would require that they miss the Antarctic dive window, adding a year to the expedition. “He’s a wealthy dude, but he’s not like Paul Allen or Ray Dalio,” Buckle said of Vescovo. “He hasn’t got that kind of money. This is a huge commitment of his resources.”

Stewart prepared a list of possible dive locations, which earned her a spot on the expedition. For others, participation was largely a matter of luck. Shane Eigler had started working at Triton the previous year, after Kelvin Magee, the shop foreman, sent him a Facebook message asking if he’d like to build submarines. They had met in the two-thousands, after Eigler had saved up enough money by growing marijuana to pay for dive lessons. Magee was his instructor. Later, Eigler worked as a car mechanic. “Building submarines—this shit is exactly the same as cars, just different components,” Eigler told me.

On December 14th, the Pressure Drop set off for the Puerto Rico Trench, from the port of San Juan. “Been feeling a little queasy ever since we got underway,” Eigler wrote that night, in an e-mail to his wife. It was his first time at sea.

In the beginning, the ship had no means of tracking the submarine underwater. “Once he left the surface, I had no idea where he was,” Buckle said.

THE STARTING GUN

Vescovo and Lahey went for a test dive down to a thousand metres. It was Lahey’s last chance to train Vescovo in the Limiting Factor before he would attempt an eight-thousand-metre dive, solo, to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench. A scientific goal for the expedition was to collect a rock sample from the bottom of each trench, so Lahey switched on the manipulator arm.

Seconds later, on the Pressure Drop, a transmission came up from below. “Control, this is L.F.,” Lahey said. “We have lost the arm. It has fallen off.”

It was December 17th. After surfacing, Vescovo and Lahey walked into McCallum’s office, toward the stern of the ship. “Patrick was under immense pressure that would have crushed almost anybody else I know,” McCallum said. “He had applied a huge amount of his team’s intellectual capital to this project, at the expense of all other projects, and yet things were just not quite where they needed to be.”

Vescovo called off the expedition. “I think I’m just going to write this whole thing off as bad debt,” he said. The manipulator arm had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and there was no spare.

Lahey begged for more time. “Give my guys one more day,” he said. Vescovo relented, and went up to his cabin. No one saw him for the next thirty-two hours. “The more time I spend with Victor, the more I think he is Vulcan in his decision-making but not in his emotions,” Buckle told me. “He’s one of those guys who has a veneer of calm, but then probably goes into his cabin and screams into his pillow after he’s been told the fifth bit of bad news that day.” (Vescovo denies screaming into his pillow.)

Lahey pulled his team into the submarine hangar. “Do you think you can fix this fucking thing?” he asked.

Blades noted that the loss of the manipulator arm had freed up an electrical junction box, creating an opportunity to fix nearly everything else that was wrong with the electronics. “Basically, Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,” Lahey explained. “There was literally a jumper cable running through the pressure hull, tucked behind Victor’s seat.”

On December 19th, Vescovo climbed into the Limiting Factor and began his descent. “The control room was just packed, and you could cut the atmosphere with a knife the entire way down,” Stewart told me. “Patrick was just in his chair, ear to the radio, just wringing sweat.”

At 2:55 P.M., Victor Vescovo became the first person to reach the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, eight thousand three hundred and seventy-six metres. It was his first solo dive, and it was flawless.

That night, “Victor was wandering around, drinking out of a bottle of champagne,” McCallum said. “It was the first time we’d seen Victor relax. It was the first time we’d seen Victor touch alcohol. And from that point we knew we were going to take this around the world.”

“Puerto Rico was the starting gun,” Vescovo told me. “The Southern Ocean was the forge.”

 

THE FORGE

Waves are local—the brushing of the ocean by the wind. Swells roll for thousands of miles across open water, unaffected by the weather of the moment.

On January 24, 2019, the Pressure Drop set off from the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, to dive the South Sandwich Trench, the deepest point of the Southern Ocean. Buckle and his crew had loaded the ship with cold-weather gear, and provisions for more than a month. There was a five-thousand-mile journey ahead of them, and the ship could barely go nine knots.

“Captain, can I have a word?” Peter Coope, the chief engineer, asked. “Is this ship going to be O.K.?”

“Yes,” Buckle replied. “Do you think I would invite on board all the people I like working with most in the world, and then sail us all to a certain death?”

But Buckle wasn’t so sure. A year earlier, when he’d first walked up the gangplank, he wondered why Triton had chosen this ship. The Pressure Drop hadn’t been in service in several years. The hull was watertight, but there were holes in the steel superstructure, and the shipyard had stripped every functional component. The steering system had been wired in reverse; turn one way and the ship went the other. “It’s a classic case of people who have spent a lot of time on boats thinking they know boats,” Buckle told me. “I’ve spent a lot of time on planes, but if Victor said, ‘I want to buy a 747,’ I wouldn’t go up and say, ‘Yes, that one is great—buy that one.’ I’d get a pilot or a flight engineer to do it.” Buckle’s first officer recalled, “The ship was fucking breaking apart.”

After the purchase, Buckle and a small crew of mostly Scottish sailors spent two months living near a dock yard in Louisiana, refitting and repairing the ship. “Stu took a huge risk—not only for himself but for all his officers,” McCallum told me. “He handpicked the guys, pulled them off of very well-paying oil-and-gas jobs, and got them to follow him to bumfuck nowhere.” In the evenings, Buckle and his crew drank beer on the top deck, and tossed pizza slices to alligators in the bayou. The ship came with no manuals, no electrical charts. “It was just a soul-destroying, slow process,” Buckle said.

Now Buckle was steering the Pressure Drop into the Southern Ocean, the site of the most reliably violent seas in the world. After a few nights, Erlend Currie, a sailor from the Orkney Islands, shoved a life jacket under the far side of his bunk, so that the mattress would form a U shape, and he wouldn’t fall out.

“You get these nasty systems rolling through, with just little gaps between them,” McCallum told me. McCallum has seen waves in the Southern Ocean crest above ninety feet. He had carefully mapped out a dive window, between gales, and brought on board an ice pilot and a doctor. “If something goes wrong, there’s no port to go to, and there’s no one to rescue you,” he said.

Albatross trailed the ship for the first several days. Soon they disappeared and the crew began seeing whales and penguins. “Filled with trepidation, we steamed into the teeth of the area where, on the old maps, they used to write, ‘Here Be Monsters,’ ” Vescovo told me.

Cassie Bongiovanni and her sonar assistants ended up mapping an area of the ocean floor about the size of Texas, most of which had never been surveyed.

On the forecastle deck, in the control room, a cheerful, brown-haired Texan named Cassie Bongiovanni sat before four large monitors, which had been bolted to the table. Bongiovanni, who is twenty-seven years old, was finishing a master’s degree in ocean mapping at the University of New Hampshire when Rob McCallum called and said that he needed someone to run a multibeam sonar system for one and a half laps around the world. She graduated at sea while mapping Vescovo’s dive location in the Puerto Rico Trench.

As the head sonar operator, Bongiovanni had to make perfect decisions based on imperfect information. “The sound is generated from the EM-124, housed inside the giant gondola under the ship,” she said. “As it goes down, the width of each sound beam grows, so that in the deepest trenches we’re only able to pick up one point every seventy-five metres or so.” In these trenches, it takes at least seven seconds for sound to reach the bottom, and another seven seconds to return. In that gap, the ship has moved forward, and has pitched and rolled atop the surface of the sea. Bongiovanni also had to account for readings of sound speed at each dive site, as it is affected by variations in temperature, salinity, and depth.

The purchase and installation of the EM-124 cost more than the ship itself, but its software was full of bugs. Each day, Bongiovanni oscillated between awe and frustration as she rebooted it, adjusted parameters, cleaned up noisy data, and sent e-mails to Kongsberg, the maker, to request software patches. The expedition wasn’t merely the first to dive the South Sandwich Trench but the first to map it as well.

Steve Chappell, a Triton mechanic, was one of a few crew members assigned the role of “swimmer,” leaping into the water and disconnecting the towline from the Limiting Factor before it descended.

Buckle positioned the ship over the dive site. A Triton mechanic named Steve Chappell was assigned the role of “swimmer,” meaning that he would balance atop the Limiting Factor as it was lowered into the water, and disconnect the towline before it went down. He wore a dry suit; polar waters can rapidly induce involuntary gasping and vertigo, and even talented swimmers can drown within two minutes. For a moment, he lay on a submarine bucking in the middle of the Southern Ocean, fumbling with wet ropes, fingers numb. Then a Zodiac picked him up and took him back to the Pressure Drop, where he warmed his hands by an exhaust vent. Vescovo started the pumps, and the Limiting Factor began its descent.

Dive protocols required that Vescovo check in with the surface every fifteen minutes and announce his depth and heading and the status of his life-support system. But, after forty-five hundred metres, the communications system failed. The ship could still receive Vescovo’s transmissions, but Vescovo couldn’t hear the replies.

Aphids and krill drifted past the viewports. It is customary to abort a dive thirty minutes after losing communications, but Vescovo knew that he might never have another chance to reach the bottom of the Southern Ocean, so he kept going. He liked the sensation of being truly alone. Sometimes, on the surface, he spoke of human nature as if it were something he had studied from the outside. Another hour passed before he reached the deepest point: seven thousand four hundred and thirty-three metres. The point had never been measured or named. He decided to call it the Factorian Deep.

That night, Alan Jamieson, the chief scientist, stood on the aft deck, waiting for biological samples to reach the surface. “Most marine science is gritty as fuck,” he told me. “It’s not just ‘Look at the beautiful animal,’ or ‘Look at the mysteries of the deep.’ It’s all the weird vessels we end up on, the work of hauling things in and out of the water.” Jamieson, a gruff, forty-two-year-old marine biologist, who grew up in the Scottish Lowlands, is a pioneer in the construction and use of hadal landers—large, unmanned contraptions with baited traps and cameras, dropped over the side of a ship. In the past two decades, he has carried out hundreds of lander deployments in the world’s deep spots, and found evidence of fish and critters where none were thought to be. Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves.

There were five landers on board. Three were equipped with advanced tracking and communications gear, to lend navigational support to the sub underwater. The two others were Jamieson’s—built with an aluminum frame, disposable weights, and a sapphire window for the camera, to withstand the pressure at depth. Before each dive, he tied a dead mackerel to a metal bar in front of the camera, to draw in hungry hadal fauna. Now, as he studied the footage, he discovered four new species of fish. Amphipods scuttled across the featureless sediment on the seafloor, and devoured the mackerel down to its bones. They are ancient, insect-like scavengers, whose bodies accommodate the water—floating organs in a waxy exoskeleton. Their cells have adapted to cope with high pressure, and “they’ve got this ridiculously stretchy gut, so they can eat about three times their body size,” Jamieson explained. Marine biologists classify creatures in the hadal zone as “extremophiles.”

The following night, one of Jamieson’s landers was lost. “Usually, things come back up where you put them, but it just didn’t,” Buckle said. “We worked out what the drift was, and we then sailed in that drift direction for another three or four hours, with all my guys on the bridge—searchlights, binoculars, everyone looking for it. And we just never found it.”

On the Arctic and Antarctic dives, the swimmers wore dry suits; polar waters can induce gasping and vertigo, and even talented swimmers risk drowning within two minutes. 

The second one surfaced later that night. But during the recovery it was sucked under the pitching ship and went straight through the propeller. By now, there was a blizzard, and the ship was heaving in eighteen-foot waves. “I lost everything—just fucking everything—in one night,” Jamieson said. Vescovo suggested naming the site of the lost landers the Bitter Deep.

The Pressure Drop set off east, past a thirty-mile-long iceberg, for Cape Town, South Africa, to stop for fuel and food. Bongiovanni left the sonar running, collecting data that would correct the depths and the locations of key geological features, whose prior measurements by satellites were off by as much as several miles. (Vescovo is making all of the ship’s data available to Seabed2030, a collaborative project to map the world’s oceans in the next ten years.) Meanwhile, Jamieson cobbled together a new lander out of aluminum scraps, spare electronics, and some ropes and buoys, and taught Erlend Currie, the sailor from the Orkney Islands, to bait it and set the release timer. Jamieson named the lander the Erlander, then he disembarked and set off for England, to spend time with his wife and children. It would take several weeks for the ship to reach its next port stop, in Perth, where the Triton crew would install a new manipulator arm.

At the time, the deepest point in the Indian Ocean was unknown. Most scientists believed that it was in the Java Trench, near Indonesia. But nobody had ever mapped the northern part of the Diamantina Fracture Zone, off the coast of Australia, and readings from satellites placed it within Java’s margin of error.

The Pressure Drop spent three days over the Diamantina; Bongiovanni confirmed that it was, in fact, shallower than Java, and Currie dropped the Erlander as Jamieson had instructed. When it surfaced, around ten hours later—the trap filled with amphipods, including several new species—Currie became the first person to collect a biological sample from the Diamantina Fracture Zone.

PIRATES

The Java Trench lies in international waters, which begin twelve nautical miles from land. But the expedition’s prospective dive sites fell within Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone; according to U.N. conventions, a country has special rights to the exploration and exploitation of marine resources, as far as two hundred nautical miles from the coast. McCallum had spent much of the previous year applying for permits and permissions; he dealt with fifty-seven government agencies, from more than a dozen countries, in order to plan the Five Deeps.

For several months, the Indonesian government ignored McCallum’s inquiries. Then he was bounced among ten or more agencies, to which he sent briefing materials about the submersible, the ship, the crew, and the mission. Between the Atlantic and the Antarctic dives, Vescovo flew to Jakarta to deliver a lecture, and he offered to bring an Indonesian scientist to the bottom of the trench. But when the ship arrived in Bali McCallum still hadn’t received permission to dive.

Officially, this meant that the team could not carry out any scientific work in the Java Trench. But the international law of the sea allows for the testing of equipment, and, after Java, the next set of dives, in the Pacific Ocean, would be the deepest of all. “So we tested the sub a few times,” McCallum said, smiling. “We tested the landers, we tested the sonar—we tested everything.”

The Java Trench is more than two thousand miles long, and the site of violent seismic activity. Surveys in the northern part show evidence of landslides, from the 2004 earthquake that triggered a tsunami with hundred-foot waves that killed a quarter of a million people across Southeast Asia. Farther south, satellites had detected two deep pools, several hundred miles apart. The Pressure Drop mapped both sites, and Bongiovanni discovered that, in fact, the deepest point was between them, in a small pool that had previously gone unnoticed. It may be a new rupture in the ocean floor.

Buckle positioned the Pressure Drop over the pool, and turned off the ship’s tracking and communications equipment. McCallum hoisted a pirate flag. The climate was tropical, eighty-six degrees, the ocean calm, with slow, rolling swells and hardly a ripple on the surface. On the morning of April 5, 2019, the Triton crew launched the Limiting Factor without incident, and Vescovo dived to the deepest point in the Java Trench.

Mountaineers stand atop craggy peaks and look out on the world. Vescovo descended into blackness, and saw mostly sediment at the bottom. The lights on the Limiting Factor illuminated only a few feet forward; the acrylic viewports are convex and eight inches thick. Whatever the true topography of the rock underneath, hadal trenches appear soft and flat at the deep spots. Flip a mountain upside down and, with time, the inverted summit will be unreachable; for as long as there has been an ocean, the trenches have been the end points of falling particulate—volcanic dust, sand, pebbles, meteorites, and “the billions upon billions of tiny shells and skeletons, the limy or silicious remains of all the minute creatures that once lived in the upper waters,” Rachel Carson wrote, in “The Sea Around Us,” in 1951. “The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

Vescovo spent three hours at the bottom, and saw a plastic bag through the viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had captured an image of a soda can. Scientists estimate that in thirty years the oceans will hold a greater mass of plastic than of fish. Almost every biological sample that Jamieson has dredged up from the hadal zone and tested in a lab has been contaminated with microplastics. “Does it harm the ability of these animals to feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” McCallum said. “We don’t know, because we can’t compare one that’s full of microplastics with one that’s not. Because there aren’t any.”

The walls of trenches are filled with life, but they were not Vescovo’s mission. “It’s a little bit like going to the Louvre, putting your running shoes on, and sprinting through it,” Lahey said. “What you really want to do is to go there with someone who can tell you what you’re looking at.” The next day, Vescovo told Lahey that he could take Jamieson to the bottom of the trench. “I don’t want to go to the deepest point, because that’s boring,” Jamieson said. “Let’s go somewhere really cool.”

After a series of failures, Vescovo came close to calling off the expedition. “I think I’m just going to write this whole thing off as bad debt,” he said.

Four and a half miles below the ship, the Australia tectonic plate was being slowly and violently subsumed by the Eurasia plate. Bongiovanni had noticed a staircase feature coming out of a fault line, the result of pressure and breakage on a geological scale. It extended more than eight hundred feet up, beyond vertical, with an overhang—an outrageously difficult dive. Lahey would have to back up as they ascended, with no clear view of what was above the sub.

The hatch started leaking during the descent, but Lahey told Jamieson to ignore it—it would seal with pressure. It kept dripping for more than ninety minutes, and stopped only at fifteen thousand feet. “I fucking told you it would seal,” Lahey said.

The Limiting Factor arrived at the bottom just after noon. Lahey approached the fault-line wall, and headed toward some bulging black masses. From a distance, they looked to Jamieson like volcanic rock, but as Lahey drew closer more colors came into view—brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, and blues, cloaked in hadal darkness. Without the lights of the submarine, the colors may never have been seen, not even by creatures living among them. These were bacterial mats, deriving their energy from chemicals emanating from the planet’s crust instead of from sunlight. It was through this process of chemosynthesis that, billions of years ago, when the earth was “one giant, fucked-up, steaming geological mass, being bombarded with meteorites,” as Jamieson put it, the first complex cell crossed some intangible line that separates the non-living from the living.

Lahey began climbing the wall—up on the thrusters, then backward. Jamieson discovered a new species of snailfish, a long, gelatinous creature with soft fins, by looking through a viewport. The pressure eliminates the possibility of a swim bladder; the lack of food precludes the ossification of bones. Some snailfish have antifreeze proteins, to keep them running in the cold. “Biology is just smelly engineering,” Jamieson said. “When you reverse-engineer a fish from the most extreme environments, and compare it to its shallow-water counterparts, you can see the trade-offs it has made.”

The wall climb took an hour. When the last lander surfaced, Jamieson detached the camera and found that it had captured footage of a dumbo octopus at twenty-three thousand feet—the deepest ever recorded, by more than a mile.

The Pressure Drop set off toward the Pacific Ocean. McCallum lowered the pirate flag. Seven weeks later, Jamieson received a letter from the Indonesian government, saying that his research-permit application had been rejected, “due to national security consideration.”

By the end of the expedition, the ship and submarine crews had so perfected the launch and recovery that, even in rough seas, to an outsider it was like watching an industrial ballet.

A DAILY FLIGHT TO THE MOON

Buckle sailed to Guam, with diversions for Bongiovanni to map the Yap and Palau Trenches. Several new passengers boarded, one of whom was unlike the rest: he had been where they were going, six decades before. Hadal exploration has historically prioritized superlatives, and an area of the Mariana Trench, known as the Challenger Deep, contains the deepest water on earth.

On January 23, 1960, two men climbed into a large pressure sphere, which was suspended below a forty-thousand-gallon tank of gasoline, for buoyancy. One of them was a Swiss hydronaut named Jacques Piccard, whose father, the hot-air balloonist Auguste Piccard, had designed it. The other was Don Walsh, a young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, which had bought the vehicle, known as a bathyscaphe, and modified it to attempt a dive in the Challenger Deep.

The bathyscaphe was so large that it had to be towed behind a ship, and its buoyant gasoline tank was so delicate that the ship couldn’t travel more than one or two miles per hour. To find the dive site, sailors tossed TNT over the side of the ship, and timed the echo reverberating up from the bottom of the trench. There was one viewport, the size of a coin. When the bathyscaphe hit the bottom, stirring up sediment, “it was like looking into a bowl of milk,” Walsh said. A half century passed before anyone returned.

The bathyscaphe never again dived to hadal depths. Jacques Piccard died in 2008. Now Don Walsh, who was eighty-eight, walked up the gangway of the Pressure Drop. It was a short transit to the Mariana Trench, across warm Pacific waters, over six-foot swells.

Above the Challenger Deep, Vescovo pulled on a fire-retardant jumpsuit, and walked out to the aft deck. A gentle wind blew in from the east. Walsh shook Vescovo’s hand. Vescovo climbed into the Limiting Factor, carrying an ice axe that he had brought to the summit of Mt. Everest.

Hatch secured, lift line down, tag lines released, towline out—pumps on. Vescovo wondered, Is the sub able to handle this? He didn’t think it would implode, but would the electronics survive? The thrusters? The batteries? Besides Walsh and Piccard, the only other person to go to the bottom of the Challenger Deep was the filmmaker James Cameron, in 2012. Multiple systems failed at the bottom, and his submersible never dove deep again.

The depth gauge ticked past ten thousand nine hundred metres, thirty-six thousand feet. After four hours, Vescovo started dropping variable ballast weights, to slow his descent. At 12:37 P.M., he called up to the surface. His message took seven seconds to reach the Pressure Drop: “At bottom.”

Outside the viewports, Vescovo saw amphipods and sea cucumbers. But he was two miles beyond the limits of fish. “At a certain point, the conditions are so intense that evolution runs out of options—there’s not a lot of wiggle room,” Jamieson said. “So a lot of the creatures down there start to look the same.”

Vescovo switched off the lights and turned off the thrusters. He hovered in silence, a foot off the sediment bottom, drifting gently on a current, nearly thirty-six thousand feet below the surface.

That evening, on the Pressure Drop, Don Walsh shook his hand again. Vescovo noted that, according to the sonar scan, the submarine data, and the readings from the landers, he had gone deeper than anyone before. “Yeah, I cried myself to sleep last night,” Walsh joked.

The Triton team took two maintenance days, to make sure they didn’t miss anything. But the Limiting Factor was fine. So Vescovo went down again to retrieve a rock sample. He found some specimens by the northern wall of the trench, but they were too big to carry, so he tried to break off a piece by smashing them with the manipulator arm—to no avail. “I finally resorted to just burrowing the claw into the muck, and just blindly grabbing and seeing if anything came out,” he said. No luck. He surfaced.

Hours later, Vescovo walked into the control room and learned that one of the navigation landers was stuck in the silt. He was in despair. The lander’s batteries would soon drain, killing all communications and tracking—another expensive item lost on the ocean floor.

“Well, you do have a full-ocean-depth submersible” available to retrieve it, McCallum said. Lahey had been planning to make a descent with Jonathan Struwe, of the marine classification firm DNV-GL, to certify the Limiting Factor. Now it became a rescue mission.

When Lahey reached the bottom, he began moving in a triangular search pattern. Soon he spotted a faint light from the lander. He nudged it with the manipulator arm, freeing it from the mud. It shot up to the surface. Struwe—who was now one of only six people who had been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep—certified the Limiting Factor’s “maximum permissible diving depth” as “unlimited.”

The control room was mostly empty. “When Victor first went down, everyone was there, high-fiving and whooping and hollering,” Buckle said. “And the next day, around lunchtime, everyone went ‘Fuck this, I’ll go for lunch.’ Patrick retrieves a piece of equipment from the deepest point on earth, and it’s just me, going, ‘Yay, congratulations, Patrick.’ No one seemed to notice how big a deal it is that they had already made this normal—even though it’s not. It’s the equivalent of having a daily flight to the moon.” McCallum, in his pre-dive briefings, started listing “complacency” as a hazard.

The crew quickly became accustomed to the expedition’s achievements. “No one seemed to notice how big a deal it is that they had already made this normal—even though it’s not,” Buckle said. “It’s the equivalent of having a daily flight to the moon.”

Vescovo was elated when the lander reached the surface. “Do you know what this means?” McCallum said to him.

“Yeah, we got the three-hundred-thousand-dollar lander back,” Vescovo said.

“Victor, you have the only vehicle in the world that can get to the bottom of any ocean, anytime, anywhere,” McCallum said. The message sank in. Vescovo had read that the Chinese government has dropped acoustic surveillance devices in and around the Mariana Trench, apparently to spy on U.S. submarines leaving the naval base in Guam; he could damage them. A Soviet nuclear submarine sank in the nineteen-eighties, near the Norwegian coast. Russian and Norwegian scientists have sampled the water inside, and have found that it is highly contaminated. Now Vescovo began to worry that, before long, non-state actors might be able to retrieve and repurpose radioactive materials lying on the seafloor.

“I don’t want to be a Bond villain,” Vescovo told me. But he noted how easy it would be. “You could go around the world with this sub, and put devices on the bottom that are acoustically triggered to cut cables,” he said. “And you short all the stock markets and buy gold, all at the same time. Theoretically, that is possible. Theoretically.”

After a maintenance day, Lahey offered to take John Ramsay to the bottom of the trench. Ramsay was conflicted, but, he said, “there was this sentiment on board that if the designer doesn’t dare get in it then nobody should dare get in it.” He climbed in, and felt uncomfortable the entire way down. “It wasn’t that I actually needed to have a shit, it was this irrational fear of what happens if I do need to have a shit,” he said.

Two days later, Vescovo took Jamieson to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They returned with one of the deepest rock samples ever collected, after Vescovo crashed into a boulder and a fragment landed in a battery tray.

Buckle started sailing back to Guam, to drop off Walsh, Vescovo, and the Triton crew. “It’s quite mind-blowing, when you sit down and think about it, that, from the dawn of time until this Monday, there were three people who have been down there,” he said. “Then, in the last ten days, we’ve put five more people down there, and it’s not even a big deal.”

The Pressure Drop, anchored in the Svalbard archipelago. The least-known region of the seafloor lies under the Arctic Ocean.

t was early May, and there was only one ocean left. But the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean was covered by the polar ice cap, and would remain so for several months. The Pressure Drop headed south, toward Tonga, in the South Pacific. Bongiovanni kept the sonar running twenty-four hours a day, and Jamieson carried out the first-ever lander deployments in the San Cristobal and Santa Cruz Trenches. “The amphipod samples are mostly for genetic work, tracking adaptations,” he told me. The same critters were showing up in trenches thousands of miles apart—but aren’t found in shallower waters, elsewhere on the ocean floor. “How the fuck are they going from one to another?”

Bongiovanni mapped the Tonga Trench. The sonar image showed a forty-mile line of fault escarpments, a geological feature resulting from the fracturing of an oceanic plate. “It’s horrendously violent, but it’s happening over geological time,” Jamieson explained. “As one of the plates is being pushed down, it’s cracking into these ridges, and these ridges are fucking huge”—a mile and a half, vertical. “If they were on land, they’d be one of the wonders of the world. But, because they’re buried under ten thousand metres of water, they just look like ripples in the ocean floor.”

Bongiovanni routinely stayed up all night, debugging the new software and surveying dive sites, so that the Limiting Factor could be launched at dawn. “Day Forever,” she dated one of her journal entries. “Sonar fucked itself.” Now, before taking leave, she taught Erlend Currie, who had launched Jamieson’s makeshift lander in the Diamantina Fracture Zone, how to operate the EM-124.

“When you give people more responsibility, they either crumble or they bloom, and he blooms,” Buckle said. In the next month, Currie mapped some six thousand nautical miles of the ocean floor, from the Tonga Trench to the Panama Canal. “Erlend’s doing a good job,” another officer reported to Bongiovanni. “He’s starting to really talk like a mapper. He just hasn’t quite learned how to drink like one.”

NORWEGIAN CANDY

Iboarded the Pressure Drop in Bermuda, in the middle of July, seven months into the expedition. The crew had just completed another set of dives in the Puerto Rico Trench, to demonstrate the equipment to representatives of the U.S. Navy and to the billionaire and ocean conservationist Ray Dalio. (Dalio owns two Triton submarines.) Vescovo hoped to sell the hadal exploration system for forty-eight million dollars—slightly more than the total cost of the expedition. During one of the demonstrations, a guest engineer began outlining all the ways he would have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCallum said, smiling. “But you didn’t.”

We set off north, through the turquoise waters of the Gulf Stream. It would take roughly three weeks, without stopping, to reach the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean. But the Arctic dive window wouldn’t open for five more weeks, and, as Vescovo put it, “the Titanic is on the way.” For several nights, I stood on the bow, leaning over the edge, mesmerized, as bioluminescent plankton flashed green upon contact with the ship. Above that, blackness, until the horizon, where the millions of stars began. Sometimes there was a crack of lightning in the distance, breaking through dark clouds. But most nights the shape of the Milky Way was so pronounced that in the course of the night you could trace the earth’s rotation.

The air turned foggy and cold. Buckle steered out of the Gulf Stream and into the waters of the North Atlantic, a few hundred miles southeast of the port of St. John’s, Newfoundland. After midnight, everyone gathered on the top deck and downed a shot of whiskey—a toast to the dead. We would reach the site of the Titanic by dawn. At sunrise, we tossed a wreath overboard, and watched it sink.

A few years ago, Peter Coope, Buckle’s chief engineer, was working on a commercial vessel that was affixing an enormous, deepwater anchor to an oil rig off the coast of Indonesia. The chain slipped over the side, dragging down one side of the ship so far that the starboard propeller was in the air. Water poured into the engine room, where Coope worked. It was impossible for him to reach the exit.

British ship engineers wear purple stripes on their epaulets. Many of them think of this as a tribute to the engineers on the Titanic, every one of whom stayed in the engine room and went down with the ship. Now Coope, whose father was also a chief engineer, resolved to do the same. “I saw my life blowing away,” Coope recalled. “People say it flashes in front of you. I was just calm. I felt, That’s it—I’ve gone.” The bridge crew managed to right the ship after he had already accepted his fate.

The next day, Vescovo piloted the Limiting Factor down to the Titanic, with Coope’s epaulets, and those of his father, in the passenger seat. The debris field spans more than half a mile, and is filled with entanglement hazards—loose cables, an overhanging crow’s nest, corroded structures primed to collapse. (“What a rusting heap of shit!” Lahey said. “I don’t want the sub anywhere near that fucking thing!”) Large rusticles flow out from the bow, showing the directions of undersea currents. Intact cabins have been taken over by corals, anemones, and fish.

That evening, Vescovo returned the epaulets, along with a photograph of him holding them at the site of the wreck. Coope, who is sixty-seven, had come out of retirement to join this expedition—his last.

The Pressure Drop continued northeast, past Greenland and Iceland, to a port in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago about six hundred miles north of Norway. Huge glaciers fill the inlets, and where they have melted they have left behind flattop mountains and slopes, crushed and planed by the weight of the ice. Most of the archipelago is inaccessible, except by snowmobile or boat. The population of polar bears outnumbers that of people, and no one leaves town without a gun.

McCallum brought on board two EYOS colleagues, including a polar guide who could smell and identify the direction of a walrus from a moving ship, several miles away. By now, McCallum had adjusted the expedition schedule ninety-seven times. The Pressure Drop set off northwest, in the direction of the Molloy Hole, the site of the deepest point in the Arctic Ocean. The least-known region of the seafloor lies under the polar ice cap. But scientists have found the fossilized remains of tropical plants; in some past age, the climate was like that of Florida.

It was the height of Arctic summer, and bitterly cold. I stood on the bow, watching Arctic terns and fulmars play in the ship’s draft, and puffins flutter spastically, barely smacking themselves out of the water.

The sun would not set, to disorienting effect. When I met John Ramsay, he explained, with some urgency, that the wider, flatter coffee cups contained a greater volumetric space than the taller, skinnier ones—and that this was an important consideration in weighing the consumption of caffeine against the potential social costs of pouring a second cup from the galley’s single French press.

Ice drifted past; orcas and blue whales, too. Buckle sounded the horn as the ship crossed the eightieth parallel. One night, the horizon turned white, and the polar ice cap slowly came into view. Another night, the ice pilot parked the bow of the ship on an ice floe. The Pressure Drop had completed one and a half laps around the world, to both poles. The bow thruster filled the Arctic silence with a haunting, mechanical groan.

Bongiovanni and her sonar assistants had mapped almost seven hundred thousand square kilometres of the ocean floor, an area about the size of Texas, most of which had never been surveyed. Jamieson had carried out a hundred and three lander deployments, in every major hadal ecosystem. The landers had travelled a combined distance of almost eight hundred miles, vertically, and captured footage of around forty new species. Once, as we were drinking outside, I noticed a stray amphipod dangling from Jamieson’s shoelace. “These little guys are all over the fucking planet,” he said, kicking it off. “Shallower species don’t have that kind of footprint. You’re not going to see that with a zebra or a giraffe.”

The earth is not a perfect sphere; it is smushed in at the poles. For this reason, Vescovo’s journey to the bottom of the Molloy Hole would bring him nine miles closer to the earth’s core than his dives in the Mariana Trench, even though the Molloy is only half the depth from the surface.

On August 29th, Vescovo put on his coveralls and walked out to the aft deck. The ship and submarine crews had so perfected the system of launch and recovery that, even in rough seas, to an outsider it was like watching an industrial ballet. The equipment had not changed since the expedition’s calamitous beginnings—but the people had.

“This is not the end,” Vescovo said, quoting Winston Churchill. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

He climbed inside the Limiting Factor. The swimmer closed the hatch. Vescovo turned on the oxygen and the carbon-dioxide scrubbers. “Life support engaged,” he said. “Good to go.”

For the first few hundred feet, he saw jellyfish and krill. Then marine snow. Then nothing.

The Triton crew piled into the control room. Lahey found a box of licorice from Svalbard, took a bite, and passed it around. “Just fucking heinous,” he said, grimacing. “Who the fuck makes candy like that? Tastes like frozen shit.”

There was a blip on the communications system. For a moment, the room went silent, as Vescovo called in to report his heading and depth. Then Kelvin Magee, the shop foreman, walked into the control room.

“Try it, Kelvin, you bastard!” Lahey said. “It’s from Svalbard. It’s local. It’s a fucking Norwegian candy.”

“Get it while there’s still some left!”

“It’s that ammonium chloride that really makes it—and that pork gelatine,” Buckle said.

“Pork genitals?”

McCallum stood quietly in the corner, smiling. “Look at these fucking misfits,” he said. “They just changed the world.”

“Filled with trepidation, we steamed into the teeth of the area where, on the old maps, they used to write, ‘Here Be Monsters,’ ” Vescovo said.

Source:The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea

 

THE 2020 PAYMENTS ECOSYSTEM: The trends driving growth and shaping the future of the payments processing industry explained

ecosystem 4x3

The Payment Processing Industry Overview

The power dynamics in the payments industry are changing as businesses and consumers shift dollars from cash and checks to digital payment methods. Cards dominate the in-store retail channel, but mobile wallets like Apple Pay are seeing a rapid uptick in usage.

At the same time, e-commerce will chip away at brick-and-mortar retail as smartphones attract a rising share of digital shopping. Digital peer-to-peer (P2P) apps are supplanting cash in the day-to-day lives of users across generations as they become more appealing and useful than ever.

And change is trickling down into bigger industries long-dominated by cash and check, like remittances and business-to-business payments.

In response, providers are scrambling for market share. Skyrocketing consolidation that creates mega-giants is forcing providers to diversify in search of new volume.

Future of Payments

New entrants, especially from big tech, are threatening the leads of giants. And as payments become increasingly effortless, new types of fraud are threatening data security and privacy.

While demand for richer payments offerings is creating opportunities across the space, it’s also leaving the industry in search of ways to adapt to change that is putting trillions in volume and billions in revenue up for grabs.

The Payments Industry Explained

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence examines the payments ecosystem today, its growth drivers, and where the industry is headed. It begins by tracing the path of an in-store card payment from processing to settlement across the key stakeholders. That process is central to understanding payments, and has changed slowly in the face of disruption.

The report also forecasts growth and defines drivers for key digital payment types through 2024. Finally, it highlights three trends that are changing payments, looking at how disparate factors, such as new market entrants and surging fraud, are sparking change across the ecosystem.

The companies mentioned in this report are: ACI Worldwide, Adyen, Amazon, American Express, Apple, Bank of America, Braintree, Bento for Business, Capital One, Citi, Diebold Nixdorf, Discover, Earthport, Elavon, EVO, Facebook, First Data, Fiserv, FIS, Global Payments, Goldman Sachs, Google, Green Dot, Honda, Ingenico, Intuit, JPMorgan Chase, Kabbage, Macy’s, Mastercard, MICROS, MoneyGram, NatWest, NICE, NCR, Oracle, Paymentus, PayPal, Rambus, Remitly, Ria, Samsung, SiriusXM, SF Systems, Square, Stripe, Synchrony Financial, The Clearing House, Target, Tipalti, Toast, Transfast, TSYS, Venmo, Verifone, Vocalink, Visa, Walmart, Wells Fargo, WePay, Western Union, Xoom, Zelle

Payment Industry Trends

Here are some of the key takeaways from this report:

  • In-store payment methods are still on the rise in the US, comprising 89% of retail volume this year. Credit and debit cards continue to lead the segment, as cash and check usage slowly ticks downward. But surging contactless penetration is set to bring mobile in-store payments to prominence for the first time in the years ahead.
  • Surging e-commerce will eat away at in-store payments’ share of overall retail. PCs will continue to lead the way, but smartphones will inch closer to being the top channel for purchasing, in turn driving growth. At the same time, new payment tools, like voice assistants, wearables, and even cars will begin to give consumers even easier ways to pay.
  • The digitization of payments isn’t just contained to retail, though, with mobile P2P payments, digital remittances, and digital business payments continuing to blossom as change spreads through the ecosystem.

In full, the report:

  • Traces the path of an in-store card payment from processing to settlement across key stakeholders.
  • Discusses emerging alternatives to card payments.
  • Examines the shifting role of key categories of providers as the ecosystem digitizes and matures.
  • Forecasts growth in key categories, including in-store payments, e-commerce, mobile P2P payments, remittances, and B2B payments.
  • Identifies three trends set to shape payments in 2020 and evaluates what changes the ecosystem is set to undergo.

Source:Business Insiders

https://www.businessinsider.com/payments-ecosystem-report