29 Eylül 2016 Perşembe

Elvis Costello’s New York Soul

Elvis Costello’s New York Soul



Elvis Costello first saw Manhattan when he was 23. This was late 1977. He and his band, the Attractions, were coming down from New Haven on their first tour of the United States when the skyscrapers came into view.

“It was really like a jolt of adrenaline — it’s such a mythic skyline,” he said. “I’d only experienced that a few other times in my career. Another was when I first saw Shanghai: You feel like you’d been shot out of a rocket to another planet.”

Now he’s in his early 60s and sitting in a booth in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, seeming quite at home. He knows a bit about the place, too. He laments that the Oak Room, the cabaret where his wife, Diana Krall, had once performed, is gone and jokingly wonders whether Dorothy Parker could have afforded one of the suites that now bear her name ($424 a night).

Mr. Costello was in New York for a few days after playing the Newport Folk Festival in July. He’ll be back for three shows this fall — one Oct. 1 at Town Hall featuring his solo DeTour show, in which he ranges around his catalog, and the others on Nov. 6 and 7 at the Beacon Theater with his band the Imposters, focusing on his 1982 album, “Imperial Bedroom.”

Elvis and New York. The two have shared a long and deepening history since that first skyline jolt. There have been famous concerts and a legendary television appearance and recordings that included a late-career masterpiece. He marked his 50th birthday with concerts at Lincoln Center; his 60th with a show at Carnegie Hall; and the release of his 2013 album with the Roots, “Wise up Ghost,” with a performance at Brooklyn Bowl. He was in the city just after Sept. 11 and remembers how kind everyone was toward one another in those days.

In all, he has made 278 appearances in New York City. I was at roughly 25 of his shows, mostly as a deeply obsessed teenager, but at quite a few as an adult, too, and now I was sitting in that booth in the Algonquin pestering him about a longstanding theory of mine: that there is something in his music — caustic, smart, fast-talking, but with moments of deep compassion and sublime beauty — that is quintessentially New York. He made a habit early in his career of being in-your-face, maybe a bit of a jerk, characteristics some might associate with New Yorkers as well.

Never mind that he grew up in Liverpool and London and has lived in Dublin and now Vancouver, British Columbia. How else but with shared attitudes could a 13-year-old from Brooklyn latch on to a singer-songwriter-performer who peppers his lyrics with Britishisms (Vauxhall Viva, tuppenny ha’penny millionaire)?

The moment you meet a lifelong idol is transporting. Dressed in a blue suit jacket with small white polka dots, relaxed and enjoying the coolness of the lobby on a scorching hot day, Mr. Costello was game to knock around my theory, if at first not entirely convinced. We were both hard-pressed to come up with other examples of non-New Yorker musicians, artists or authors who conveyed the sense of the city without trying to, or even realizing they were.

As the conversation moved along, a rich stream of New Yorkiness did indeed reveal itself, both in Mr. Costello’s music and in his experiences, whether captured in song or his autobiography, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” (Blue Rider Press, 2015; out Oct. 11 in paperback). It even reached back to before he was born.

Mr. Costello made the first comparison to someone else famous — a transplanted New Yorker and a lifelong idol of his.

“John Lennon came to live here and volunteered the idea that he saw some equivalency between New York and Liverpool,” he said. “In a way, it was a heightened version, being a port. I felt at home the first time I came here.”

He was quickly on a roll.

“I didn’t drive a car until I was 38, so I liked any town you could walk around, and I never ever felt threatened. Maybe that was naïve of me, or maybe I didn’t venture far enough afield. People were generally not bothered by you. Why would they be bothered by you? It wasn’t as if I was wearing a gold suit.”

The young Mr. Costello had a firm handle on all the music scenes in the United States when he first arrived, and hungered to experience them. But he found many had faded; the only scene that really felt alive and happening was New York.

Vladimir Putin’s Outlaw State

Vladimir Putin’s Outlaw State



President Vladimir Putin is fast turning Russia into an outlaw nation. As one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, his country shares a special responsibility to uphold international law. Yet, his behavior in Ukraine and Syria violates not only the rules intended to promote peace instead of conflict, but also common human decency.

This bitter truth was driven home twice on Wednesday. An investigative team led by the Netherlands concluded that the surface-to-air missile system that shot down a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine in July 2014, killing 298 on board, was sent from Russia to Russian-backed separatists and returned to Russia the same night. Meanwhile, in Syria, Russian and Syrian warplanes knocked out two hospitals in the rebel-held sector of Aleppo as part of an assault that threatens the lives of 250,000 more people in a war that has already claimed some 500,000 Syrian lives.

Russia has tried hard to pin the blame for the airline crash on Ukraine. But the new report, produced by prosecutors from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine, confirms earlier findings. It uses strict standards of evidence and meticulously documents not only the deployment of the Russian missile system that caused the disaster but also Moscow’s continuing cover-up.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, told The Times last week that his government is determined to bring both Russia and the individuals who fired the missile to justice.


Some Western officials have accused Russia of war crimes, charges that could be pursued through international channels, even if Moscow blocks a formal referral to the International Criminal Court. New sanctions against Russia also should be considered. Mr. Putin will undoubtedly fight any such action, using his veto on the Security Council, but whatever his response, the United States should lend its support to Ukraine’s quest for accountability.

There seems no holding Mr. Putin to account in Syria. For months he has pretended to negotiate on a political solution to a five-year-old civil war between his client, President Bashar al-Assad, and rebels backed by the United States and some Arab nations. But despite pleas from Secretary of State John Kerry, who has spent an enormous amount of time and effort negotiating two separate (and short-lived) cease-fires, Russian and Syrian forces, backed by Iranian ground troops, have continued the slaughter.

Over recent days, Mr. Putin has again shown his true colors with air attacks that have included powerful bunker-busting bombs that can destroy underground hospitals and safety zones where civilians seek shelter. On Sept. 19, Russia bombed an aid convoy, which like hospitals and civilians are not supposed to be targeted under international law.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kerry threatened to withdraw an American team from Geneva where the two sides had established a center to collaborate on a cease-fire. But that is likely to have little effect, and Mr. Kerry has few, if any, diplomatic cards to play.

President Obama has long refused to approve direct military intervention in Syria. And Mr. Putin may be assuming that Mr. Obama is unlikely to confront Russia in his final months and with an American election season in full swing. But with the rebel stronghold in Aleppo under threat of falling to the government, administration officials said that such a response is again under consideration.

Mr. Putin fancies himself a man on a mission to restore Russia to greatness. Russia could indeed be a great force for good. Yet his unconscionable behavior — butchering civilians in Syria and Ukraine, annexing Crimea, computer-hacking American government agencies, crushing dissent at home — suggests that the furthest thing from his mind is becoming a constructive partner in the search for peace.


28 Eylül 2016 Çarşamba

Health of the U.S. Economy Is a Matter of Debate

Health of the U.S. Economy Is a Matter of Debate 



Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton put forward sharply different portraits of the U.S. economy in their first face-to-face debate, offering voters a choice not only on the details of trade and tax policy but also on which assessment best reflects the state of the nation.

The Democratic nominee characterized the economy as improving—and nearing a turn toward breakout growth—from the past decade’s financial crisis and housing bust. Her Republican rival saw no such recovery. He described a country in steep decline, with aging infrastructure and jobs by the thousands flowing to Mexico and China.

Both have some ground to stand on in the current economic landscape.

On the upside, the economy has continued to add jobs at a steady clip, with a hiring streak that surpassed its previous record in March and is now at 70 straight months. The unemployment rate is below 5%, gas prices have fallen below $2.50 a gallon and home prices have recovered to last decade’s levels. Median household incomes rose 5% last year, the Census Bureau reported earlier this month, leaving them 1.6% below the 2007 level, before the last recession struck.

But economic growth, in the U.S. and abroad, has been sluggish since the last recession ended in 2009, with global central banks holding rates near zero to boost borrowing and consumption.

In the U.S., the homeownership rate has fallen to a 50-year low, and a large swath of Americans now say they worry their children won’t face the same opportunities for upward mobility that they did.

Even with recent gains in income, the typical male full-time worker earned around $150 less last year than in 1998, after adjusting for inflation.

One question now is which view of the economy will resonate most with voters this fall: one of a crippled nation in a “big, fat, ugly bubble,” as Mr. Trump said Monday, or one on the cusp of better times after nearly 15 years of mediocre growth.

The debate came at a time when gauges of consumer confidence are generally showing solid readings. The latest measure Tuesday from the Conference Board hit its highest point in nine years, a sign American households are emerging from the recession’s long shadow and could continue to support U.S. economic growth.

The Conference Board’s consumer-confidence index increased to a seasonally adjusted 104.1 in September from an upwardly revised 101.8 in August, the business research group said. That was its highest level since August 2007, which marked the start of the financial crisis that led to the severe 2007-09 recession.

The September confidence surge “suggests that the presidential election campaign is not having a detrimental effect on sentiment,” said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics.

During the debate, Mr. Trump dismissed signs of stronger growth as a mirage. “The only thing that looks good is the stock market, but if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that’s going to come crashing down,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton talked about how bad off the country was when President Barack Obama took over in 2009, and how far things have come. “We have come back from that abyss, and it has not been easy,” she said. “So we’re now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy.”

What It’s Like to Fight Online Hate

What It’s Like to Fight Online Hate



Brittan Heller has a hard job. The Anti-Defamation League’s first director of technology and society, she’ll be working with tech companies to combat online harassment. The magnitude of her task became clear as soon as the A.D.L. announced her hire earlier this month, when she was deluged with anti-Semitic and sexist attacks. In a recent interview, Ms. Heller talked about what companies can do to stop online abuse and how her personal experiences have informed her, and offered advice for others dealing with harassment online.

How did the Anti-Defamation League decide they needed to hire someone to work with tech companies against harassment?

People wanted a focus on tech and combating online hate for years, but recently there’s been an increase in online hate. A good personal example of this is that they put out a press release announcing my position and they made an announcement on Twitter as well. Within minutes of A.D.L. announcing this position, I opened up my Twitter feed and I found hateful symbols, I found echoes and swastikas and green frogs and people discussing my death. Within hours it became enhanced with statements of Holocaust denial, and within days it’s become ad hominem attacks based on Jewish stereotypes and misogyny. At this point it’s not surprising anymore that this occurs, but the speed of it, and the ferocity of it — that I think is shocking.

There were two events that people at A.D.L. really took notice of. There was Julia Ioffe’s piece about Melania Trump, that resulted in an online and offline campaign of hatred directed against her, and there was a coordinated campaign by white supremacist groups which resulted in death threats and really severe online abuse. Additionally, Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times tweeted a piece about the election and he got similar threats and online abuse. A.D.L. was very concerned that this kind of toxic environment would prompt self-censorship by journalists and really impact public discourse long after the election.

How much is the Trump campaign to blame for the recent rise in online harassment?

A.D.L. is a nonprofit organization, therefore we do not support any particular political party and we do not endorse or reject candidates for office. That said, A.D.L.’s work encompasses fighting bigotry of all kinds, and we encourage all candidates to call out hate. We’ve been on record engaging with members of the Trump campaign, trying to encourage them to emphasize that hate has no place in the public sphere.

What are social networks already doing to fight harassment? What could they be doing better?

A.D.L. is actually an inaugural member of the Twitter Trust and Safety Council which looks at issues of cyber hate. A.D.L. issued best practices that were supposed to counter online hate in 2014 and they were endorsed by Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Twitter.

I’ve seen an increased emphasis on companies developing technology that helps to identify greater percentages of problematic content proactively, but I think the problem there is the mind-boggling volume. It’s not really realistic to assume that a filter or artificial intelligence would be able to review and eliminate hate in real time.

I think there’s a few things the companies can do when they’re faced with this onslaught. First they need to communicate outrage. They have a corporate voice, and they can use this to say that cyber hate is really contrary to their vision of connecting all people. They can ensure that their terms of service and their community guidelines are clear, and more than this they can really improve enforcement and do it transparently. They can offer simplified and user-friendly mechanisms for flagging this content. Going beyond companies, people in Silicon Valley and beyond can promote counter-speech initiatives, grassroots responses or having public persons who are willing to speak out and be a voice for tolerance.

You experienced online harassment in law school. How did your personal experience shape your thinking on this issue?

It was instrumental in making me realize that this issue should be a priority. The reason I went to law school is that I wanted to focus on accountability for crimes that targeted people based on their race or their ethnicity or their gender. When I became a victim of cyber harassment, I really felt what it was like to be targeted online for my gender and my race and my ethnicity, and more than that I felt how terrifying it can feel to be threatened and how powerless this type of abuse can make you feel, especially when it’s coming from anonymous sources.

What advice would you give to people who are going through online harassment?

First, I’d say you’re not alone. Part of the power that the harassers have is they like to make people feel isolated, and sometimes part of the ongoing harm of these kind of crimes is that you feel like there’s no meaningful way for you to fight back, there’s no way for you to adequately speak out against what’s happening to you.

I would not let the harassment take your voice away. You can talk to family, teachers and friends about what you’re experiencing and what you’ve seen. You can be a support for other people experiencing the same thing, and you can call out people who are trying to incite hate online. Also, educate yourself. Look at the terms of service or community guidelines for the type of platforms and social media that you’re using, and find out what kind of site that company wants to run. Most say that they don’t wish to host hateful content.

"Music Confounds the Machines"

"Music Confounds the Machines"



Everyone's talking about the great speech T Bone Burnett gave as the keynote address to AmericanaFest yesterday. If you missed it, here's the transcript (posted with permission from the Americana Music Association):

I have come here today first to bring you love. I have come here to express my deep gratitude to you for your love of music and of each other. And, I have come here to talk about the value of the artist, and the value of art.

When Michaelangelo was painting the great fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, he came under intense criticism from various members of the church, particularly the Pope's Master of Ceremonies — a man named Cesena — who accused him of obscenity. Michaelangelo’s response was to paint Cesena into the fresco in the lowest circle of hell with donkey ears and a serpent coiled around him devouring, and covering, his nether regions, so to speak.

Cesena was incensed and went to the Pope demanding he censor Michaelangelo for this outrage, and the Pope said, “Well, let’s go have a look at it.” So, they went down to the chapel, and when the Pope stood in front of the fresco, he said to Cesena, “You know, that doesn’t look like you at all.”

See, the Pope didn’t want to jack around with Michaelangelo. Michaelangelo was making things that were going to last for hundreds of years. His stuff was going to outlive the Pope’s ability to do anything about it, so the Pope bowed to the inevitable. The Pope was afraid of a painter.

The painter could create another dimension between Heaven and Earth. Flat ceilings seemed to come down into the room in three dimensions. He painted rooms where priests and the church could sit and be transported to- and engulfed in- a higher realm, learning ancient stories- thoughts kept alive over centuries. And he did it by mixing together things he found laying around on the ground- sand and clay and plants. He was a fearsome alchemist.

Art is not a market to be conquered or to bow before.

Art is a holy pursuit.

Beneath the subatomic particle level, there are fibers that vibrate at different intensities. Different frequencies. Like violin strings. The physicists say that the particles we are able to see are the notes of the strings vibrating beneath them. If string theory is correct, then music is not only the way our brains work, as the neuroscientists have shown, but also, it is what we are made of, what everything is made of. These are the stakes musicians are playing for.

I want to recommend a book to you — The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul.

John Wilkinson, the translator, in his 1964 introduction, describes the book this way — “The Technological Society is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and surpassing those values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all technological difference and variety is mere appearance.” This is the core of the dead serious challenge we face.

The first nuclear weapon was detonated on the morning of July 16, 1945, at 5:29 and 45 seconds.

At that moment, technocrats took control of our culture.

Trinity was the code name of that explosion. It was an unholy trinity.

Technology does only one thing- it tends toward efficiency. It has no aesthetics. It has no ethics. It’s code is binary.

But everything interesting in life- everything that makes life worth living- happens between the binary. Mercy is not binary. Love is not binary. Music and art are not binary. You and I are not binary.

Parenthetically, we have to remember that all this technology we use has been developed by the war machine- Turing was breaking codes for the spies, Oppenheimer was theorising and realising weapons. Many of the tools we use in the studio for recording- microphones and limiters and equalizers and all that- were developed for the military. It is our privilege to beat those swords into plowshares.

We live in a time in which artists are being stampeded from one bad deal to another worse deal. No one asks the artists. We are told to get good at marketing. I have to say- and I think I probably speak for every musician here- that I didn’t start playing music because I sought, or thought it would lead to, a career in marketing.

And, as we are being told that, our work is being commoditized — the price of music is being driven down to zero.

I am working with a group called C3, the Content Creators Coalition run by Roseanne Cash and Jeffrey Boxer to develop an Artists Bill of Rights. Jeffrey is here today to meet afterward with anyone who wants to get into this. The first right artists have is the right to determine what medium they work in. The second is the right to set the price of their work.

Every person worthy of the name atist, from Rembrandt to Paul Cesanne to Picasso to Jackson Pollack

From William Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to James Baldwin and Jack Kerouac

From Bach to Stravinski to Mahler to John Adams

Every one of those artists made art that to be understood, the world had to change.

They did not adapt to the world, the world had to adapt to them.

The technocrats suggest we crowd source.

I suggest we not.

The very thing an artist does is figure out what he likes.

The technocrats — the digital tycoons, the iTopians — look down on artists. They have made all these tools and they think we should be grateful — subserviant even — and use their flimsy new tools happily to make them ever more powerful. But we can make art with any thing. We don’t need their tools. Music confounds the machines.

So the iTopians have controlled the medium and the message for a generation now. And they are making a complete hash of things. The clearest and most pervasive proof of this is the psychedelic political season we are in, which we can see playing out in every election around the world.

Before the atom bomb, we had begun to project idealized versions of people up on screens, while the people whose images were projected would hide behind the screens, knowing they could never measure up.

After the atom bomb, we have automated that process. On facebook, everybody is a star. The idealistic, lysergic promise of the 1960’s has been mechanized, allowing us to become ever more facile conterfeiters.

The mask has become the face.

Malcolm Muggeridge said that the kingdom Satan offers a man is to the kingdom of God as a travel poster to the place it depicts.

This internet technology that has been so wildly promoted as being the key, the final solution, to our freedom, has become our prison. What the false prophets of the internet said would replace governments and nation states and commerce, and create a free world of community and sharing, has led instead to a consolidation of wealth and power that makes the monopolies of the early 2oth Century- Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie- look weak and ineffective.

Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Media Lab has apologized for his part in creating what he calls a “fiasco”. Tim Berners Lee, who diagrammed the schematic for our current internet on a napkin, said at Davos last year that the internet needs to be rearchitected.

Our 21st Century communication network, regarded by its early adherents with a religious fervor, has been turned into a surveillance and advertising mecnanism. The World Wide Web is just that- a web that ensnares everyone who uses it.

Artists must not submit to the demands, or the definitions of, the iTopians.

Lastly, I am here to speak specifically about American music.

This country has been led by artists from Thoreau and Emerson through Walt Whitman to Woody Guthrie, through Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, to Presley and Dylan to The Last Poets and Kendrick Lamar. The Arts have always led the Sciences. Einstein said that Picasso preceded him by twenty years. Jules Verne put a man on the moon a hundred years before a rocket scientist did. Medieval stained glass windows are examples of how nanotechnology was used in the pre-modern era. Those artists were high technologists, and many other things- they were aestheticians, ethicists, conjurers, and philosophers, to name a few.

They took risks. Risks a technocrat could never take. Artists risk everything in everything they do. Risk is what separates the artist from the artisan. Art is not a career, it is a vocation, an inclination, a response to a summons.

We, in this country, have defined ourselves through music from the beginning- from Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier in the Revolutionary War, to The Star Spangled Banner in the War of 1812, to John Brown’s Body and the Battle Hymn of the Republic in the Civil War, to the incredible explosion of music of the last century that was called Jazz, or Folk Music, or Rock and Roll, or Country Music- because although our music has taken many different paths, it is all of a piece and a most important part of our national identity- of US.

Music is to the United States as wine is to France. We have spread our culture all over the world with the soft power of American music. We both have regions- France has Champagne, we have the Mississippi Delta. France has Bordeaux, we have the Appalachian Mountains. France has Epernay, we have Nashville. Recorded music has been our best good will ambassador. The actual reason the Iron Curtain fell, is because the Russian kids wanted Beatles records. Louis Armstrong did more to spread our message of freedom and innovation than any single person in the last hundred years. Our history, our language, and our soul are recorded in our music. There is no deeper expression of the soul of this country than the profound archive of music we have recorded over the last century.

This is the story of the United States: a kid walks out of his home with a song and nothing else, and conquers the world. We have replicated that phenomenon over and over. We could start with Elvis Presley, but we could add in names for hours- Jimmie Rodgers, Rosetta Tharpe, Johnny Cash, Howlin Wolf, Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Aretha Franklin, Jack White, Dr. Dre. That is the American Character. That is Johnny Appleseed.

At last year’s MusicCares tribute to Bob Dylan, Jimmy Carter said, “There’s no doubt that his words of peace and human rights are much more incisive and much more powerful and much more permanent than any president of the United States.” I believe that is undeniable.

That’s who the artists are. We can’t forget that.

So, in conclusion, there is this sense that the technocrats are saying, “Look, we’re just going to go ahead and do this, and we’ll sort it all out later.” As they did with the atom bomb.

As artists, it is our responsibility to sort it out now.

Barnett Newman said, “Time passes over the tip of the pyramid.” By that he meant that there is a lot of room at the bottom of the pyramid to put things, but that as time passes, gravity washes them down into the sand. But if you put something right on the tip of the pyramid, it stays there.

We aspire to put things on the tip of the pyramid. That is our preference- our prefered medium.

Digital is not an archival medium.

Technology is turning over every ten years. Their technologies don’t and won’t last.

Our art — if we do it right — will.

After a Disappointing Debate, Trump Goes on the Attack

After a Disappointing Debate, Trump Goes on the Attack




Donald J. Trump lashed out on Tuesday in the aftermath of a disappointing first debate with Hillary Clinton, scolding the moderator, criticizing a beauty pageant winner for her physique and raising the prospect of an all-out attack on Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities in the final stretch of the campaign.

Having worked assiduously in recent weeks to cultivate a more disciplined demeanor on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump cast aside that approach on Tuesday morning. As Mrs. Clinton embarked on an ebullient campaign swing through North Carolina, aiming to press her newfound advantage, Mr. Trump vented his grievances in full public view.

Sounding weary and impatient as he called into a Fox News program, Mr. Trump criticized Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor, for asking “unfair questions” during the debate Monday evening, and speculated that someone might have tampered with his microphone. Mr. Trump repeated his charge that Mrs. Clinton lacked the “stamina” to be president, a claim critics have described as sexist, and suggested that in the future he might raise Mr. Clinton’s past indiscretions.

Defying conventions of political civility, Mr. Trump leveled cutting criticism at a beauty pageant winner, Alicia Machado, whom Mrs. Clinton held up in Monday night’s debate as an example of Mr. Trump’s disrespect for women.

Mr. Trump said on Fox he was right to disparage the former Miss Universe because of her weight.

“She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem,” said Mr. Trump, who was the pageant’s executive producer at the time.

Mrs. Clinton has already been broadcasting an ad highlighting crude remarks from Mr. Trump about women; she answered his taunts about her marriage with a rhetorical shrug, telling reporters Mr. Trump was free to run whatever kind of campaign he preferred. On board her campaign plane, she plainly relished her moment of apparent triumph, and poked fun at Mr. Trump’s morning lamentations.





Interpreting the U.S. Presidential Race for Chinese: It’s Not Really Like ‘House of Cards’

Interpreting the U.S. Presidential Race for Chinese: It’s Not Really Like ‘House of Cards’



As Election Day approaches in the United States, the Chinese are paying closer attention to the selection of the next president.

Government censorship, the language barrier and an unfamiliarity with American political conventions have left many Chinese confused about the process. Many seem to have derived their sense of how the system works from “House of Cards,” the Netflix series about an unscrupulous politician who stops at nothing, not even murder, to scheme his way to power. The show was enormously popular in China.

Last year, You Tianlong, a Chinese doctoral student in justice studies at Arizona State University, co-founded a podcast called Xuanmei, or “U.S. Election,’’ aimed at younger, urban Chinese. Mr. You and his partners — Hua Jianping, who writes on American politics, and Zhuang Qiaoyi, who holds a master’s degree in international relations from Syracuse University — and their guests discuss topics that have ranged from voter registration to how campaign managers tap into data to advance candidates’ prospects.

An estimated 70,000 people listen the podcasts every month. In August, Mr. You published “Get Elected: A Very Short Introduction to the U.S. Presidential Election” (Taihai Publishing House, Beijing) with Mr. Hua and Lin Yao, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

In an interview, Mr. You explained that the Chinese are more interested in the United States presidential election than ever, but don’t always understand it.

What do Chinese get wrong about the American political process?

I feel that the biggest misunderstanding is that many Chinese take “House of Cards” too seriously. American politics is complicated, even for Americans. For many Chinese, it’s just too confusing. So people take a shortcut. “House of Cards’’ is so real for them that it filters their impressions of American politics.

Another misunderstanding is derived from the negative propaganda many Chinese have absorbed over the years, that is, that American politics is controlled by money or big capitalists and that politicians are just puppets controlled by capitalists. It’s possible that there are serious problems in American politics. But as far as plutocratic politics is concerned, it’s not as bad as people in China imagine.

On the other hand, some liberal intellectuals in China believe that the United States is good in every way. Its political system is good and its people’s voices are heard. They attribute every achievement of the United States to its superior political system.

I feel that many Chinese aren’t really observing American politics as much as they’re projecting their own biases onto American politics.

Are people in China are better informed about the presidential election than four or eight years ago?