In October of 1993, the California Milk Processor Board, with the help of the advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, launched a TV ad called “Aaron Burr,” about a history buff who couldn’t enunciate the answer to a trivia question because he had just eaten peanut butter and didn’t have a glass of milk to wash it down. It was the first of many Got Milk? advertisements, which most often featured celebrities with milk mustaches. Two years later, the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), the national promotion arm of milk processors like Dean Foods and HP Hood, licensed Got Milk? and distributed it nationwide. By the mid-nineties, ninety-one per cent of adults surveyed in the U.S. were familiar with the campaign.
Mattel made a special-edition Got Milk? Barbie in 1995 and a Hot Wheels Got Milk? dairy-delivery truck in 1998. The Got Milk? parodies have been so numerous—Got Jesus? Got Beer? Got Lube?—that the California Milk Processor Board made a poster of them in 2005 and offered it for free download. (The board didn’t think as highly of PETA’s parody, “Got Pus? Milk Does,” and threatened to sue the animal-rights organization for a trademark violation.) My favorite is the one I often see on the bumpers of pickup trucks in Vermont, where I live: Gut Deer?
But there has been a problem: Got Milk? didn’t actually get people to buy more milk. The daily consumption of fluid milk—as opposed to milk-based products like cheese, yogurt, and butter—has steadily declined from 0.96 cups per person in 1970 to 0.59 cups in 2011. There are lots of reasons for this. People have more drink options than ever: sodas, juices, waters, non-dairy milks, energy drinks. Milk prices have risen. Sales of cold cereal, which people often eat with milk, have fallen as people turn to quicker options like breakfast bars and Greek yogurt. Even the rebounding economy has played a part in recent years. When people eat out more often, it turns out that they drink less milk. Last year, things got particularly bad. “It was a call to attention,” Mark Stephenson, the director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Dairy Profitability, told me.
As of Monday, the Got Milk? campaign is pretty much dead. While California will still use it, MilkPEP has replaced the national campaign, somewhat unceremoniously, with Milk Life, made by the advertising agency Lowe Campbell Ewald. In the thirty-second TV spot for the new campaign, a boy and his mom chase a soccer ball, aided by milk propellers. A woman walking numerous large dogs deploys a milk parachute. A girl in a rock band windmills her guitar, à la Pete Townshend, and milk trails from her fingers in a dramatic arc. (Magically, none of these characters is drenched in the stuff that’s whirling around them.) Then, cue the tagline: “Start your day with the power of protein. Milk life.”
MilkPEP’s strategy is to shift from the whimsical Got Milk? campaign toward a more specific sales pitch based on milk’s protein content; half of all milk consumption happens in the morning, when people like to consume protein to “power through the day,” Julia Kadison, the interim C.E.O. of MilkPEP, told Advertising Age. She also said that protein is “really in the news and on consumer’s minds. But a lot of people don’t know that milk has protein, so it was very important to make that connection.” Or, as a statement on Lowe Campbell Ewald’s Web site puts it, Milk Life is trying “to show how starting your morning with milk can help power the potential of every day.”
The new direction sounds reasonable to Jessica Ziehm, the executive director of the New York Animal Agriculture Coalition, which advocates for dairy farms. Ziehm’s family milks six hundred head of cows on their farm in upstate New York. “People know milk and calcium go hand in hand,” she said. “People also need to know milk has a lot of protein.” I asked Ziehm what she thought of the new TV commercial. “It looks trendy,” she said, “and it’s too early to tell how it’s going to play with consumers, but anytime the processors increase sales, we increase sales.”
In a sense, Ziehm is right. Dairy farms sell their milk to processors, which then pasteurize, homogenize, and package it for sale to retail outlets. Processors and dairy farmers do have aligned interests—selling as much milk as possible. Up until about ten years ago, this meant that dairy farmers, through their own marketing organization Dairy Management Inc., helped pay for the Got Milk? campaign. But farmers stopped contributing because “they perceived that while Got Milk? was really visible, they didn’t believe it was moving the needle on milk,” Gary Wheelock, the C.E.O. of the New England Dairy Promotion Board, told me. Instead, farmers redoubled their efforts on research and development, along with corporate partnerships. One notable innovation that came out of that: round, resealable milk containers that, unlike square cartons, fit in car cup-holders. “It was only when corporations like McDonald’s started asking for this that processors made it available in plastic bottles,” Wheelock said.
More recently, that partnership has resulted in McDonald’s offering milk, chocolate milk, or juice instead of soda as the advertised beverage options in Happy Meals, as part of its effort to promote more healthful options. “A chain like McDonald’s is big enough that you can actually see the effect in the numbers when they do that,” Stephenson told me.
The impact of Got Milk? is harder to gauge, but dropping it for something new is still a big risk. Got Milk? has practically become a brand of its own. Can Milk Life even come close? If only we had a milk-powered time machine.
Kirk Kardashian is the author of “Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm,” published in 2012 by the University Press of New England.
Photograph by Christopher Badzioch/Getty.
Last Saturday, a couple of days after Facebook announced that it would purchase the messaging app WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars, the servers that allow WhatsApp’s four hundred and sixty-five million global users to exchange mobile messages buckled, and for two hundred and ten minutes the service was down. In the fiercely competitive world of social-messaging apps, three and a half hours is enough time to do some damage. In the day after WhatsApp’s server outage, its biggest competitors, Telegram and Line, gained five million and two million new users, respectively. The shakeup illustrates the vulnerability of Facebook’s new service in a fickle, competitive marketplace: if you do only one thing for your customers, they can be unforgiving if you screw it up—especially if yours is a service that they can get elsewhere.
Telegram, which is essentially a WhatsApp clone, has received a lot of attention since the WhatsApp outage, but Line, which isn’t as well known in the U.S., is perhaps more interesting. Unlike WhatsApp, which has a simple interface, Line has built a loyal following by offering a more complex social-messaging service that allows users to exchange messages, play games, give status updates, and send digital stickers, photos, or short videos to friends. It was founded in June, 2011, and now has more than three hundred and sixty million users worldwide. In 2013, the analytics firm App Annie ranked it first in global sales of non-game iOS and Android apps.
Thanks to these non-messaging services, Line makes money, and lots of it. In 2013, the app generated more than three hundred and thirty million dollars in revenue for its parent company, the South Korea-based NHN Corporation, according to an earnings report. (WhatsApp made twenty million dollars in that period; Telegram, backed by the Russian millionaire Pavel Durov, is run by a nonprofit.) Sixty per cent of Line’s 2013 revenue came from selling gaming extras, like special powers or bonus levels to players of its popular free games Line Pop, Line Bubble, and Line Party Run. (In the games, players help their favorite Line characters collect candies, dodge obstacles, and “retrieve the stolen treasure from the boss.”) Another twenty per cent of Line’s 2013 revenue came from digital stickers, which are known as “stamps” to the legions of Japanese obsessed with the kawaii (cute) images. Some are free, while others cost a hundred and seventy yen (about $1.70) for a pack of forty. The characters include Brown, an adorable C.E.O. bear, and Cony, a rabbit intern; users can send them to friends to express a range of emotions—love, exhaustion, excitement, flatulence. At Line’s headquarters, on the twenty-seventh floor of an office building in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya neighborhood, the rooms are filled with giant, stuffed versions of Brown, Cony, and others.
In Japan, these characters have a practical appeal beyond their cuteness. They can help users express a range of thoughts and emotions quickly, without resorting to one of the Japanese language’s three written alphabets. This is particularly appealing for commuters on tightly packed trains who may simply want to send a kiss to their partner or decline a dinner invitation, citing exhaustion. (The Japanese language has a word—karōshi—for death from overwork.) Line’s expressiveness is a key to its success, according to Nobuyuki Hayashi, a Japanese author and I.T.-industry analyst. He believes that these characters can translate into success abroad for Line, not only in Asian countries like Taiwan and Thailand, where the app is already a dominant force, but also in European countries that have a long history of importing Japanese art, animation, and culture.
Line has faced challenges getting started in the U.S., where it only recently surpassed ten million users, and where it faces two big rivals in WhatsApp and Telegram. Both have deep-pocketed backers, and neither has yet shown interest in making money, which allows them to focus on growth. Line will have to figure out how to translate its characters, games, and stickers into an experience that more Americans want, but its enviable engagement in Asia—in Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan, more than eighty per cent of Line users are active every day, compared with Facebook’s sixty-one-per-cent daily engagement rate in the U.S.—could help it develop the kind of customer loyalty that would keep users from jumping ship after a short server outage.
The messaging service has another thing in common with WhatsApp, besides a lot of users: a big valuation. BNP Paribas S.A. recently valued Line at nearly fifteen billion dollars—not much lower than what Facebook spent to buy WhatsApp. A Line spokeswoman would not comment on a Reuters report that it may go public this year, but denied a Bloomberg story that claimed the Japanese telecom giant SoftBank was in talks with Line about purchasing a stake in the company. Meanwhile, at a Tokyo showcase on Wednesday, company executives unveiled a host of ambitious new ventures, including a service for businesses. The company also announced some new consumer features: a marketplace for user-created stickers and a voice-calling service, similar to Skype, that allows users to call landlines and cell phones. Voice calling is also, incidentally, the first feature that Facebook plans to add to WhatsApp.
Photograph: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg/Getty
Last week, the banking group BBVA bought a personal-banking startup called Simple for a hundred and seventeen million dollars. Simple is a banking service that bills itself as a kind of anti-bank—no overdraft fees, an easy-to-use Web site—with a relatively small, if loyal, user base. For people who had never heard of Simple, the deal raised questions about whether BBVA, which is based in Madrid but has operations around the globe, had made a wise decision.
At Simple’s offices, in Portland, Oregon, the co-founder and C.E.O., Joshua Reich, was contending with another question: How can a company that built a loyal following by lambasting annoying banking practices keep its soul after being bought by a big bank?
Simple is, essentially, a service to manage your bank account. A bank holds your money, but you use Simple to keep track it and to decide how to use it. But Simple feels like a bank, right down to the Simple-issued debit card. (For the actual banking part of its service, it previously partnered with Bancorp, where deposits are insured by the F.D.I.C., and will now rely on BBVA.)
The company started four years ago, when Reich, disgruntled about his own experience with banks—hidden fees, mistaken charges, and all the other items on familiar list of frustrations—teamed up with his friend and colleague Shamir Karkal. Their goal was to create a bank that, essentially, wasn’t god awful. They got some traction just by complaining about the status quo in tech circles and on Twitter. “People just loved the idea of a bank that didn’t suck and didn’t screw its customers over,” Karkal told the podcast Tomorrow’s Transactions, in 2012. In that first year or two, the company, then called BankSimple, had little in the way of actual products—just a bunch of tweets and a growing mailing list. Yet that was enough to inspire a kind of cultish following. They soon brought in Alex Payne, one of Twitter’s early engineers. Timing was on their side, too: although antipathy toward banks is, essentially, perennial, it was especially acute in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The problem was that using juvenile language to harangue existing banks isn’t actually a business model. Simple was able to partner with only one bank, Bancorp, and the buzz among consumers seemed to plateau; the company is hardly a household name. There was too much “focussing on how bad banks are instead of putting forward the great things Simple would do,” Penny Crosman, the editor of Bank Technology News, told me. Simple failed to corral an impressive number of customers, and profits remained elusive. (It currently has about a hundred thousand customers, and Reich points out that the company and its revenues have grown each year; a spokeswoman declined to say whether Simple is profitable.)
As Crosman noted last week, the purchase price means that BBVA paid about twelve hundred dollars a customer—far more than what banks are usually willing to pay in an acquisition (and a hundred and sixty-two times what Facebook has paid for WhatsApp’s users). “I can’t see how this is going to become a crown jewel for BBVA, the way ING Direct will for Capital One,” Crosman said, referring to Capital One’s purchase of the successful online bank ING Direct, in 2012. She worries as well that some of Simple’s talent will get laid off, because BBVA also has a capable design team and “a tech-savvy culture.”
Another question is whether Simple’s technology is truly game changing. Jim Bruene, an author and the publisher of the Online Banking Report, calls Simple “the Apple of banking,” with respect to design. It not only looks good but also aims to re-engineer how people interact with their money, for the better. On the Times’ Open blog, Andre Behrens wrote that Simple has done this by making banking feel like a game. The “aesthetics are just a baseline. Because what Simple actually wants to do is get you to play a game. The game is called ‘Master Your Finances,’ and you are Player 1.”
The flagship example of this is a feature called Safe to Spend. It subtracts your obligations—like upcoming bills, pending transactions, etc.—from your current balance, so that you know much money you can spend without falling into the red. Reich, a fast-talking Australian, picked up a marker and started sketching a graph illustrating typical earning and spending patterns. You get paid at the beginning of the month—high point on the graph—so you feel flush and you spend more freely. As the weeks go by, resources dwindle, and by the end of the month you’re eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. The oscillations show not only what makes money so stressful but also why people have so much difficulty spreading their resources over time.
Reich has data suggesting that providing customers with useful information, real-time notifications, and features like Safe to Spend has had a positive effect on personal finances. At a conventional bank, customers between twenty-five and thirty years old have a savings rate of between three and five per cent. Simple customers in that same demographic, by contrast, are saving at a staggering forty per cent. (This may, in part, be owing to the fact that Simple users are a self-selected crowd of intelligent geeks.)
While the banking world is wondering whether BBVA should have acquired Simple, some of Simple’s users have a different concern: that Simple sold its soul. Seated on a gray couch in a stuffy conference room, Reich said that the unhappy feedback from customers so far has taken the shape of “I thought I was worth more to you than twelve hundred dollars,” or some variation on that theme. If banks are awful, and if Simple is willing to be absorbed by a bank, it stands to reason—well, you get the idea.
“In the world of suck-itude and banks, it’s a long list before you get down to BBVA,” Reich said. This might sound like equivocation, but it’s a fair point. BBVA is recognized within the industry for being more pro-technology than many of its competitors. In a recent op-ed for the Financial Times, the bank’s executive chairman, Francisco González, articulated why banks must get with the technology program: “Some bankers and analysts think that Google, Facebook, Amazon or the like will not fully enter a highly regulated, low-margin business such as banking,” he wrote. “I disagree. What is more, I think banks that are not prepared for such new competitors face certain death.”
Some observers, including Felix Salmon, of Reuters, have sunny outlooks about the acquisition. Simple will remain a separate brand, and it has been promised a certain degree of autonomy. But Reich notes that another attractive aspect of the acquisition is that Simple will have the financial firepower to expand globally and to offer its customers a suite of financial products—mortgages, car loans, home-equity lines, etc.
As to whether the sale to BBVA is cause for celebration, the company’s office in Portland shows almost no signs of whatever late-night revelry might have taken place following the announcement. Except for this: taped over an old-fashioned sign that reads, “WHAT DO WE LOOK LIKE, A BANK?” someone affixed a piece of white paper, so the sign now reads, “WHAT DO WE LOOK LIKE, A STARTUP?”
Above, from left: Shamir Karka and Josh Reich. Photograph: PRNewsFoto/Simple/AP.
Bitcoin is having a bad day. Mt. Gox, once the world’s foremost bitcoin exchange, an online platform where people trade the digital currency for U.S. dollars, is gone—at least for now, and perhaps for good. Mt. Gox’s trading platform is offline, its Twitter account has been scrubbed, and its C.E.O., Mark Karpelès, has resigned from the board of directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, a trade group that promotes bitcoin adoption. Earlier this month, Mt. Gox suspended bitcoin withdrawals, citing technical problems that could allow for fraudulent transactions while a fix was implemented. To customers, that was worrisome enough, but in the past twenty-four hours the site first halted all trading activity and then vanished altogether, leading to rumors of insolvency and impending bankruptcy.
The troubles at Mt. Gox could put in jeopardy the future of bitcoin, a kind of electronic cash that can be sent anywhere in the world without involving banks or credit-card companies. Units of the digital currency are stored in virtual “wallets,” either online or on computer hard drives, and can be traded for dollars, euros, and other national currencies through online exchanges. While critics believe there is a bitcoin bubble—its price rose last year from thirteen dollars to more than eleven hundred dollars—others think bitcoins could transform financial services and global commerce.
Mt. Gox is based in Tokyo, but so far Japanese authorities have declined to get involved. Japanese police have even removed protesters who were demonstrating outside Mt. Gox’s office for several days. “Bitcoin isn’t a currency; it works as an alternative to currencies, like gold,” a spokesman of the Financial Services Agency, Japan’s banking regulator, told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. “The FSA is in charge of currency-based services. Therefore, Bitcoin exchanges are not a subject to our regulatory oversight.”
Bitcoin business leaders are doing damage control. Fred Ehrsam, a co-founder of the bitcoin wallet and exchange platform Coinbase, along with the heads of five other companies, released a statement pledging to “lead the way” in coming up with consumer-protection measures after “this tragic violation of the trust of users of Mt. Gox.” The statement, published on the Web sites of Coinbase and the other big bitcoin companies, says that “responsible Bitcoin exchanges are working together and are committed to the future of Bitcoin and the security of all customer funds.” These companies include Bitstamp and BTC China, two of the world’s largest exchanges by trading volume.
Despite these assurances, the value of a single bitcoin plunged overnight, dropping as low as four hundred and five dollars, as listed on Coinbase, from six hundred and twelve dollars on Sunday. By 7:05 P.M. East Coast time on Tuesday, it had recovered to five hundred and fifty-one dollars. Even so, the cryptocurrency has lost more than half its value since the heady days of late November, when a single bitcoin briefly surpassed the value of an ounce of gold. Bitcoin’s market cap now stands at $6.39 billion, according to Winkdex, a new bitcoin price index from the venture capitalists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (who are better known for scrapping with Mark Zuckerberg over the ownership of Facebook).
All of this is red meat for bitcoin skeptics. But even the shock of Mt. Gox’s potential bankruptcy is unlikely to kill the digital currency, which has long since gone global. According to a report last month from the Law Library of Congress, bitcoin is being discussed and used in at least forty foreign nations, whose governments’ responses range from outright bans to a refusal to regulate it. American consumers are now using bitcoin to buy home goods from Overstock.com and electronics from TigerDirect. The second coming of Dutch tulip mania it is not.
More interesting, then, is to look at how Bitcoin might recover. Consider the features of this crisis: rampant speculation, the threatened collapse of a landmark company, the evaporation of value, a crisis of public confidence, business leaders banding together to save the day. We have been here before, and with the U.S. financial industry.
In 1907, before the creation of the Federal Reserve, the United States was an emerging market. When the copper magnate Fritz Augustus Heinze attempted to manipulate the stock of his company, United Copper, and failed, it triggered a run on banks, first in New York City and then nationwide, according to John Steele Gordon’s “The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000.” Stocks eventually lost nearly half of their value. Depositors showed up at the Manhattan headquarters of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, one of several suffering institutions, to demand their money. An auditor discovered that its coffers were empty, and the bank closed. “The bank’s president, Charles Barney, shot himself several weeks later, prompting some of the bank’s outstanding depositors to commit suicide as well,” Charles R. Geisst writes in “Wall Street: A History.”
John Pierpont Morgan took it upon himself to resolve the crisis, pledging millions of dollars of his own money to bail out failing institutions, and convincing other bankers and business leaders, including John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to do the same, Gordon writes. According to Geisst, Morgan also persuaded the U.S. Treasury to provide twenty-five million dollars in bailout funds (about six hundred and twenty-five million dollars in 2013 terms). Their actions brought an end to the financial contagion, and by December, 1909, stocks had surpassed their previous record high. But that wasn’t enough to save the status quo—that is, a market with no central bank. Six years after the “panic of 1907,” the government established the Fed, which would inject money into the market during times of low cash reserves. Decades later, the Securities Act of 1933 required issuers of securities to disclose information that potential investors might need as they decided whether to invest.
There are many differences between 1907 and 2014, and between the mainstream American financial industry and the bitcoin world. But there are similarities, too. Whether Mt. Gox is permanently closed, its troubles may hasten regulators’ efforts to draft oversight rules for digital-currency businesses. Last week, Benjamin Lawsky, the superintendent of New York’s department of financial services, answered questions on the social news site Reddit about his plans. In the meantime, surviving bitcoin businesses are rallying to “reestablish the trust squandered by the failings of Mt. Gox,” the joint statement reads.
Coinbase’s Ehrsam and many of his colleagues seem prepared to accept future regulations. They may even welcome them, because they could raise the barriers to entry for competing startups. Indeed, the companies’ joint statement says that because of the “critical custodial role” over assets that bitcoin businesses play on behalf of customers, “acting as a custodian should require a high bar.” What requirements do they have in mind? Security safeguards to prevent theft—“independently audited and tested on a regular basis”—also with sufficient reserves to function as commercial entities, disclosures to customers, and “clear policies to not use customer assets for proprietary trading or for margin loans in leveraged trading.” So far, so mainstream.
Soon after news of the Mt. Gox troubles broke, CoinDesk, a bitcoin news site, published a version of the statement from Ehrsam and his peers that included the sentence, “It does not appear to any of us that Mt. Gox followed any [of] these essential requirements as a financial services provider.” That sentence was removed from later versions of the statement. An anonymous document purporting to outline Mt. Gox’s internal comeback strategy has also since been leaked. All this leaves open the possibility that the exchange may rise from the ashes. To do so, according to the document, the company would jettison Karpelès as C.E.O. and rename itself Gox. Part of Mt. Gox’s plan to reduce its hundred and nineteen million dollars of liabilities allegedly involves “informing and asking selected Bitcoin main players for their help…. Injections in coin are most useful (enough to run the exchange) but some cash is also needed to not run a fractional reserve.”
As of now, the bitcoin community has no J. P. Morgan who has stepped forward publicly to pledge his own money in an attempt to rescue Mt. Gox. But deals could be struck behind the scenes. Whether or not Mt. Gox returns—and a brief statement newly posted to its otherwise empty Web site suggests that it might (transactions are closed “for the time being,” it says)—it’s hard to be entirely surprised by the events of the past twenty-four hours. “Bitcoin is absolutely the Wild West of finance, and thank goodness,” Erik Voorhees, the founder of the bitcoin startup Coinapult, said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine last year. “It represents a whole legion of adventurers and entrepreneurs, of risk takers, inventors, and problem solvers. It is the frontier. Huge amounts of wealth will be created and destroyed as this new landscape is mapped out.”
Brian Patrick Eha is writing a book about the global phenomenon of bitcoin for Portfolio, a division of Penguin Random House. He is a former editor at Entrepreneur.com and a freelance journalist who lives in New York.
Photograph by Stephen Lam/Reuters.
In December, the novelist Alexander Chee mentioned in an interview that he likes to write on trains. “I wish Amtrak had residencies for writers,” he said, referring to the programs that house, and sometimes feed, artists so that they can focus on their work. Someone repeated the quotation on Twitter, and others followed. The chorus included Jessica Gross, a freelance writer. Amtrak got in touch with Gross with an offer—a test run of Chee’s idea, involving a free trip from New York to Chicago and back again.
Gross, a twenty-eight-year-old who has written for the Times and other publications, had dim but sweet memories of a childhood journey on that very same route, the Lake Shore Limited, with her father and brother. “Is this a joke?” she replied on Twitter. “Because that sounds awesome.” It was not a joke. Soon, Gross was on e-mail with Amtrak’s social-media director, Julia Quinn, to plan a reprise of that trip—alone this time and with a plan to spend it writing.
In his iconic essay about travelling on a cruise ship, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” David Foster Wallace quotes from an earlier piece of cruise-ship literature by the memoirist Frank Conroy: “Bright sun, warm still air, the brilliant blue-green of the Caribbean under the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.” Nice writing, but Wallace had a problem with it: it turned out that Conroy had gone on his cruise for free and had been paid by Celebrity Cruises to write his piece. (In Conroy’s words, to Wallace: “I prostituted myself.”) There was “real badness” in this affair, Wallace writes, in part because it involved a commercial enterprise persuading one of the most admired writers in the nation to tout its product, “and to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal.” (This is punctuated with a great, Wallacean footnote: “E.g. after reading Conroy’s essay on board, whenever I’d look up at the sky it wouldn’t be the sky I was seeing, it was the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.”)
Gross’s situation was different from Conroy’s in a couple of ways. Amtrak is largely government-funded, though it operates as a for-profit enterprise. Also, it would cover Gross’s travel but wouldn’t pay her for writing. Still, there were similarities. While Amtrak was processing the tickets, Gross got an e-mail from Emily Mannix, a public-relations representative who works with Amtrak. “We’d love for you to share any content that [you] find along the way with your social networks, and then have you do a Q&A for the Amtrak blog,” Quinn wrote. “How does that sound?” Gross replied, a couple of minutes later, “Sure!” When she thought about it a little more, though, she felt weird about the request. She called Mannix and explained that she wanted to make sure this wasn’t a deal where she had to write about Amtrak in exchange for the free seat. No, Mannix said, it was nothing like that. If she felt an “organic” desire to talk about the trip, she should go ahead, but there was no requirement. Gross felt alright with that—and with the Q. & A. request—and accepted.
Less than two weeks later, she boarded a sleeper cabin on the Lake Shore Limited, complete with a tabletop that doubled as a chessboard and a seat that doubled as a toilet. She slept, met some people, talked to her father on the phone. She also tweeted (“My preoccupation with whether the two people dining next to me are a May-December couple or father/daughter is troubling”) and shared some photos (her cabin, some spindly trees, a snowy street corner in Buffalo). And she wrote a blog post, which The Paris Review has now published. Its subject is train travel—in particular, how nice it is:
I’ve always been a claustrophile, and I think that explains some of the appeal—the train is bounded, compartmentalized, and cozily small, like a carrel in a college library. Everything has its place. The towel goes on the ledge beneath the mirror; the sink goes into its hole in the wall; during the day, the bed, which slides down from overhead, slides up into a high pocket of space. There is comfort in the certainty of these arrangements. The journey is bounded, too: I know when it will end. Train time is found time. My main job is to be transported; any reading or writing is extracurricular. The looming pressure of expectation dissolves. And the movement of a train conjures the ultimate sense of protection—being a baby, rocked in a bassinet.
I called Gross on Sunday evening to talk about her trip. I confessed that when I read those well-wrought sentences, I recalled Wallace’s concerns about Conroy’s cruise piece. How did she feel about using her evident talent, and her precious writing hours, for a piece that promoted Amtrak’s commercial goals? (She also let Amtrak use one of the photos she had taken on her trip, to accompany the Q. & A. with her that it published in January.) Gross reminded me that she had been interested in train travel since childhood and said she might have written about it even if she hadn’t gone on the Amtrak-sponsored trip. “Everything I wrote felt very genuine,” she said. She pointed out that she had disclosed to readers the nature of the trip and that her piece hadn’t been wholly glowing. The trip lasted “thirty-nine hours in transit—forty-four, with delays,” she wrote.
On the latter point, Amtrak didn’t seem to mind. Gross sent the piece to her contacts there after its publication, and Amtrak shared it on Twitter, noting that this “all started with a simple tweet to us.” Others—writers, journalists, train-travelling laymen—chimed in about how much fun this had all been. Two days later, Quinn revealed that Amtrak would continue the residency program.
I spoke with Quinn on Monday, and she told me, “This is the most organic form of advertising for us—different people on our trains and exposing their audience to what long-distance train travel is like.” She said Amtrak hopes to make “a more formalized announcement” about the residency program later this week but has some early ideas about how it will work. It hopes to offer at least two residencies per month, to people selected by a group including Amtrak employees and representatives from the “community of writers.” (She also noted, “We are a for-profit organization, so we are definitely determining when the best time is to send these people. I’m not going to send all of the residents in May, June, and July during our peak system, when we could be selling those tickets.”) Quinn told me that she expects the program to seek a diverse range of residents and to consider the size of an applicant’s social-media following: “We want this to be mutually beneficial, so we would like some people with some built-in audience,” she said. While she doesn’t expect Amtrak to require residents to write positively about their trip—or mention it at all—she added, “Obviously my hope would be that as we work with some of these people, they’re so moved by the experience, that they’re compelled to tell their audiences about Amtrak long-distance train travel.”
I told Quinn about Wallace’s essay and asked whether some of his criticisms might apply to this situation. “You raise very valuable points,” she said. “Is this is a disingenuous program? I would say no, in that this wasn’t something that was thought up in our last marketing brainstorm, like, How can we bring buzz for Amtrak? This was something that was thought up by the writing community, and we happened to be in the position to offer them a vehicle. It’s their writing powered by Amtrak.”
The life of a writer can be difficult and unstable. Paychecks for freelance gigs arrive infrequently, if at all. Book advances are rarely large enough to let an author quit a day job. Nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and government branches like the National Endowment for the Arts try to give authors some resources while they write—grants, fellowships, residencies. Amtrak is one of a couple of commercial entities that have been experimenting with residency programs of their own: recently, the Standard Hotel in the East Village joined with The Paris Review to offer a free three-week stay (estimated value: ten thousand dollars) to the author Lysley Tenorio, who was named a writer-in-residence. Some people have argued persuasively that this sort of thing is a positive development. Isn’t this a better use of corporate funds than many others? Doesn’t it bring a much-needed source of new funding to the art world? Plus, they point out, aren’t there potential conflicts of interest with any funder—including the government, a university, or a nonprofit? As long as writers aren’t obliged to promote the enterprise in return, what’s the problem?
Chee, the writer who proposed the Amtrak residency in the first place, is a friend of mine. He wrote much of his first novel on the F train in New York, on his way to and from work at a midtown steakhouse. (Additional full disclosure: I’m also friendly with Tenorio and have attended traditional artists’ residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, to which I’ve made small—double-digit—donations.) While Amtrak was planning Gross’s trip, it was also working on one for Chee, in May—a three-day voyage from New York to Portland, Oregon. When I asked Chee whether he felt a commercially sponsored residency could be problematic, he replied, in an e-mail, “Well, it could be—if there were conditions. But there weren’t.” Referring to Quinn, he said, “She didn’t ask me for one thing other than possibly to conduct an interview at the end.” (He showed me his exchange with her, which confirmed the lack of quid pro quos. In one e-mail, he wrote, “I also wanted to add that if there’s a social media aspect to this that you’d like me to consider, I’m happy to cooperate.” He added, “I’d be happy to blog the trip, as well as perhaps write about it for some of the places I write for.” Quinn replied: “We’d love to have you cover your trip via social, but also want you to feel free to unplug and write about your experience post trip. After you have traveled we’d also love to do a quick interview with you for the Amtrak blog.”)
Chee seemed enthusiastic about the momentum that has gathered around his idea. He is teaching in Austin this semester, and after classes end he will fly to New York, where he lives, and board a series of trains to reach Portland. He doesn’t have plans to write about the experience in any concrete form, though he expects he will mention it on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, “in the diaristic mode I usually do when I travel anywhere.” It will be summertime; the bare-branched trees and slushy streets from Gross’s photos will have been replaced by rolling grass and dun-colored hills. But the train cabin itself might feel familiar—the ideal space for a writer, like a carrel in a college library.
Photograph by Brian Snyder/Reuters.
