Anthony Bourdain Was the Best White Man

By Mallika Rao, New York Magazine

11 June 18

 

recently invited friends from America to India and my family showed them the sort of food tour worthy of an Anthony Bourdain production, of the exterior but mostly the interior, to borrow an important distinction made in so many episodes of No Reservations and Parts Unknown, the late TV host’s most famous shows — whether he’s in Iran, or in Maine. Bourdain understood that real life plays out in the home, where people feel comfortable, and where secret recipes come to life. My aunts treated my friends to the same curtain-unveiling, feeding them Jain food and Madhvist food, idlis and chutneys and steamed root vegetables and pickles prepared over the course of hours by a team of household help. My friends were visiting royalty, as Bourdain clearly is in every household into which he steps, his hosts’ expressions shifting from the hope on the face of the person wired to feel misunderstood — that he approve — to a realization that he’s one of them, that they can chill out because he gets it. He’s not a royal, but a subject of the same tyrannical forces, great at wisecracking about them. With my friends, too, one aunt confessed that she felt relieved about her hosting abilities because these guests weren’t white. In America, their nonwhiteness isn’t always obvious — the one, with parents from Iran; the other, his mother from Malaysia — but to my aunt the code written in them was clear: told in their names, their noses, their coloring. “I just feel they get it,” my aunt said to me as we walked into the street a few paces ahead of them, her tone making me wonder if she’d ever said something similar about me, her American niece, though I feel as Indian as anyone else.

We all know what it is to feel not quite right wherever you are, to look one way and feel another, to be sized up by others based on split-second guesswork — and that was the magnetism of a Bourdain show, that he made the act of living at a time of mass interaction look easy. When Bourdain went to Rajasthan in 2006, I was just leaving college. I hadn’t invited my first white friend to India, didn’t even know a white person who’d been to the country where I lived out every summer of my life since birth. The episode starts with a shot of the desert that could have been drawn by a Disney animator working off a text that would make Edward Said wince, but pretty soon you knew this wasn’t that kind of a production, because Bourdain was in the frame, sitting on a camel, a grin on his face and a joke out of his mouth about how he was never going to make it anywhere going this slow. Such breaks from protocol made me feel at ease bringing Bourdain to my home — because that’s inevitably how it felt when I watched him engage with brown folks and Indian accents, that he was my guest, my white friend, boyfriend even, in my ultimate fantasies. Simultaneously, he was me, the American niece who feels at home in India. He engaged without fetishizing, touristed with ease, in the way of a person who’s been toggling between identities so long, the act of meeting a stranger from a strange land is the only familiar feeling.

Everybody has a Bourdain story, it seems; and for a lot of nonwhite people in this country, those stories take place in the countries their parents left, and in the American enclaves where they settled. One of the tweets that went viral yesterday, after news of Bourdain’s passing by suicide, was from Jenny Yang, an American comic born in Taiwan and raised in California. “Bourdain never treated our food like he ‘discovered’ it,” Yang wrote. “He kicked it with grandma because he knew that HE was the one that needed to catch up to our brilliance. I wish so much for his legacy to take hold in western (mostly white) food media culture. What a loss. I’m so sad.” Twenty-eight thousand people and counting retweeted Yang’s tweet, a testament to the strain of alienation that runs through this country, where we are simultaneously in and out, heard and unheard, excited by the white man who finally makes us feel he gets it. I saw the tweet after a friend shared it, herself born in India and transplanted to Dallas some years after my own parents got to Texas and had me. She is a cook now, her aim the subtle but true marriage of all of her influences: Tamilian home cooking, Texas meat culture, hipster locavorism, suburban fast food. I saw her retweet and thought about how Bourdain made his way into all of our homes, talked to all our grandmas.

But the episode I remembered in that moment wasn’t set anywhere with brown people, but in Maine, an episode of No Reservations this same friend insisted we watch soon after it aired. We did, in a barely furnished Austin apartment, windows open from the heat, with the reverence of new priests at the altar. The episode takes Bourdain to Maine under the tutelage of his camera guy, Zach, who’s from the northern state. They hit up fancy establishments in Portland and Zach’s family home, where they eat “mystery” bear and moose meat, found in the freezer the way the rest of us rediscover old Amy’s boxes. But it’s a scene at a traditional bean supper that stays with me, where Bourdain eats off a paper plate with Zach’s home community. Watching the kids running around the cavernous space lined in long plastic tables, older people seated on their haunches and digging in, I felt I was watching a recasting of my own childhood, of lunches at the DFW Hindu Temple, where dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of members walk the hot pavement and eat homemade food, commune without saying much, but with the familiarity of family. I saw a country I thought I knew expose itself to me finally, in the safety of its own home. At one of the long tables, Bourdain talks to grandmas, but they’re not from Korea or Vietnam or India — they’re Zach’s, from Maine, and he asks them for stories about Zach. He knows they know more, about a man he spends most of his time with, than he does. Or they know different. Watching that scene years ago, I felt connected at the heart level, the “I’ll show you mine since you showed me yours” level, the “I know you won’t mistake me” level, to white people I didn’t know, for the first time ever. Watching it now, I think Bourdain connected to everyone at the heart level all the time.

Net Neutrality Is Officially Dead. Here's How You'll Notice It's Gone.

By April Glaser, Slate

11 June 18

Net neutrality is officially dead. Here’s how you’ll notice it’s gone.

onday, June 11, is the first day of the post–net neutrality internet. In December, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the Obama-era rules that prohibit internet companies from slowing down or speeding up access to certain websites, but it took about six months for the repeal to get a signoff from the Office of Management and Budget and for the new rules to be published in the federal register. Beginning, well, now, your internet access could—emphasis on could—feel dramatically different than it did yesterday.

Under the new network neutrality rules, internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are allowed to throttle traffic that travels over their network or even block access to entire websites as long as the companies alert subscribers in their terms of service that they reserve the right to do so. But since most people in the United States don’t have more than one or two internet providers to choose from for broadband service, if users don’t wish to accept those terms, many won’t have anywhere else to go for their internet. Without net neutrality rules stopping them, internet providers will also be able to charge websites a fee to reach users faster.

Those internet providers stand to win the most from the net neutrality repeal, since they’ll be able to operate what is essentially a two-way toll, collecting money from both subscribers and websites that want priority access to users. Already-powerful, deep-pocketed companies that can afford to pay for the fast-lane service like Facebook or Yelp could wind up in a position to set the price, relegating smaller companies, nonprofits, or struggling news organizations to what is, in effect, a slower internet.

The FCC’s move to rescind the Obama-era open-internet protections, however, is facing serious challenges, both from multiple lawsuits expected to be filed in the coming days against the repeal as well as from Congress, where Democratic lawmakers have led an effort to undo the FCC’s actions. In May, every Senate Democrat and three Republicans—Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted to reverse the net neutrality repeal with a Congressional Review Act resolution, which is used to overturn or eliminate a federal agency’s action. Congressional Republicans have used the same process to reverse more than a dozen regulatory actions since Donald Trump won the election in 2016—but those were rules passed under President Obama. In order for the resolution to go into effect, a simple majority in the House also has to vote to undo the repeal, and President Trump has to sign it. But in the House, Republicans outnumber Democrats 235–193, meaning more than 20 Republicans would have to get on board if every Democrat voted in favor.

Advocacy organizations that opposed the net neutrality repeal, like the National Hispanic Media Coalition and Free Press, are also planning to sue, as well as a coalition of 22 state attorneys general, over what they claim was a corrupt rulemaking process in the months leading up to the final vote. Although more than 23 million comments were submitted on the net neutrality repeal, the overwhelming majority of which in favor of keeping the open internet regulations, many of those comments were faked, submitted using stolen identities and the names of dead people, or filed by bots, not people. Hundreds of thousands of comments were filed using Russian email addresses, which were mostly in favor of rescinding the internet rules. The FCC’s online public input system was even hit last year by a mysterious cyberattack, which is currently the subject of an ongoing federal investigation. The FCC is required by law to hold a fair process for collecting feedback from the public when passing major new regulations, which the agency’s nonelected commissioners are supposed to use to inform the writing of new rules and help ensure the agency is acting in the interest of the public. But with so many problems with the comment process, those planning to sue the FCC may have a strong case that the agency’s push to undo the net neutrality protections wasn’t aboveboard.

Still, just because the FCC is going to get sued doesn’t mean a judge will issue an injunction, and in the interim, internet providers will be able to throttle traffic and block access to websites as they wish. While it’s unlikely internet providers are going to significantly change your internet experience overnight or in any overt way anytime soon, companies may well start to toy with connection speeds in more elusive ways. If Comcast, for example, makes a special deal to speed up their customers’ access to Netflix, that change in load times may be subtle. But it will still give Neflix an added boost over a competitor like Hulu, inspiring its subscribers to jump ship. If the New York Times loads faster than your local newspaper’s website, it may be a reason for you to stop checking in regularly on its hometown reporting. If Yelp always loads even just a little faster than your favorite restaurants’ websites tend to, those local businesses could see such a dip in traffic that they eventually decide to abandon their private website all together and host everything on Yelp. But at first, users might not notice what’s happening, allowing internet providers to make the argument that an internet without network neutrality isn’t as big a deal as some advocates have made it out to be.

These examples may be the worst-case scenario for what might happen in the near future, but they’re by no means as bad as it could get. Take what happened in one particularly egregious scenario in Canada in 2005, when the telecom Telus blocked access to a union website that promoted a labor strike against the internet provider. Then there was what happened in 2012 in the U.S., when AT&T announced it would block U.S. users’ access to FaceTime on iPhones unless they paid for a higher data plan; the company reversed course after consumer advocates sent complaints to the FCC. With the new FCC rules, though, companies will be able to do any of these things as long as they say they might in their terms of service.

The internet is already massively concentrated, with just a few platforms commanding the majority of people’s time online. Once those entrenched powers can start to set the price for priority service, they stand to become even more powerful. Those smaller websites that are taking longer to load may slowly start to disappear too, and the great promise of the internet—that there’s no telling what someone might create next—may become an even more distant dream.

So be on the lookout Monday and over the next few weeks for notices from your internet service provider with changes to your terms of service. If you get an email from Comcast saying it’s updated its policies, don’t immediately delete it. Take a look: Nestled inside may well be the first strikes against net neutrality. But the fight to bring the internet rules back from the dead is still ongoing. In order for those working for a more open internet to have any chance at success, users are going to have to continue to care and speak out about why open internet protections matter to them—even, perhaps especially, if it’s not immediately clear anything has changed.