Is there any contemporary field with lower standards than journalism?
Matt Yglesias finds an unspeakably unacceptable error about Sweden in an article in Foreign Policy by a man who won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2009:
There were 230 homicides in Sweden in 2009, compared with 143 in Washington, D.C., which has a population a bit more than half Sweden’s size.
I read this and thought “that could not possibly be true, Sweden’s murder rate cannot possibly be as high as Washington DC’s and its population is surely much large.” Yglesias points out:
In fact, there are 9.3 million people in Sweden and only 600,000 in Washington DC. In other words, Sweden has about fifteen times the population of Washington DC and less than
halftwice the murders. Stockholm is a bit larger than DC, and it’s murder rate of 3 per 100,000 in 2009 is way lower than DC’s murder rate of 24 per 100,000.
For God’s sake, Foreign Policy is a respected magazine and the jackass who wrote this article won a prize, as I pointed out. How on earth could they not have fact-checked this?
And this is not some minor point in the article: the entire point of the piece is that “Swedish exceptionalism” is coming to an end and that Stieg Larson’s novels and the rising crime rate are proof of it.
Where do we go from here? What does it take to get some basic fact-checking back into our national discourse?
If I had written or edited this article, I would right now be deciding between suicide and a career change. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true.
Martin
Um, politics?
SATSQ
Martin
Oh, and oil exploration?
Jesus, DougJ, did you even give that question 15 seconds of thought?
DougJ
@Martin:
Much higher, they have to win elections. Not even close. You really want to compare Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi to their journalism-world counterparts, I throw up in my mouth as I write this but you know who they are…Tom Friedman and David Brooks.
Alex K
I…
:(
You know, when I made the decision to major in journalism, 2 years ago, I was young and naive. Do-over plz?
DougJ
@Martin:
Still, not even close. I’m too drunk to describe why in sufficient detail but trust me.
Corner Stone
Yeah, but how many did Joe Sestak murder?
DougJ
@Alex K:
No! All the more reason for you to stay in the field!
Corner Stone
@DougJ:
I see your suspect claim and raise you.
Martin
@DougJ: But the standard of ‘winning elections’ would be the same as ‘staying employed’ to journalists. You’re suggesting a professional standard, not a self-preservation standard. The standard for politics would be to honestly serve the public interest. Wanna take another stab at this one?
Martin
@DougJ: I rest my case. Thankfully, in the same sentence you’ve proven that you meet the highest standard of blogging – post nothing unless drunk.
New Yorker
This is the kind of crap, along with Andy McCarthy’s book (and the drivel like it) that drives my wingnut uncle’s view of the world. If I tell him that Sweden is far safer than the US, I’m being “elitist”, and then he’ll rant about the evils of government spending while living comfortably retired on a generous public-sector pension.
Sigh……
New Yorker
I should add that if I back him into a corner with a question that wingnuts understand, like “what would you rather do, walk down a dark, empty street in Stockholm, or in Philadelphia?”, he never replies to my e-mail.
Egypt Steve
Is the “Orwell prize” a real prize or is that some sort of ironic anti-prize?
JPhillips
That’s why you aren’t an award winner. Instead of choosing between suicide and a new career he’ll only worry about which cocktail party to go to and which Clinton anecdote to tell.
Peter
What makes it even worse is that Yglesias uses “it’s” improperly in your second blockquote, thus managing to undercut his own indignation and prove your larger point even more completely all at the same time.
Ailuridae
In response to the post the entire for-profit education sector has lower standards for conduct than one could ever imagine. Routine admittance of people who have no legitimate chance to ever complete a degree, etc.
Alex K
@New Yorker:
You forgot to preface the question with: “If you ever want to see your car in one piece again, answer this:”
Sure, I could have put wife or dog or whatever, but my experience with wingnut uncles is that they don’t care much for other living things.
DougJ
@Peter:
As much of a dick as I am about “the car hit him and I”, I don’t think that its/it’s is such a big deal.
Martin
@DougJ: Wait, this is bullshit here. Obama and Pelosi compared to Friedman and Brooks? Since when is journalism confined to political journalism?
No, the pinnacle of journalism would be those individuals that win their highest award – so you compare Obama and Pelosi to Pulitzer winners – who have national notoriety in their field and among their peers. But guys like James Inhofe are among the top 100 politicians in the country, simply based on the size of the ‘prize’ they’ve won. He’s your comparison to a Brooks or Friedman.
tofubo
What does it take to get some basic fact-checking back into our national discourse?
the fourth estate :: is not unequal to :: the fifth column
hope this helps
Mike
Speaking of fact-checking … when Yglesias writes that “Sweden has about fifteen times the population of Washington DC and less than half the murders” doesn’t he mean that 230 is less than DOUBLE 143? There’s nothing worse than snarky media critics who can’t do math.
DougJ
@Ailuridae:
Yeah, what is the deal with that privatization of Swedish schools stuff he talks about?
For the record, I’ve been to Sweden and it is too much of a soshulist utopia for me. I don’t like it that much. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to lie about it as this guy does.
Peter
@DougJ: We all have our grammatical bugbears. I’m cursed with a low tolerance for most of them, especially that one. It’s just so fucking basic. It’s like making an eloquent, impassioned argument with spinach between your teeth. And B.O.
washington state
Washington state has a population of around 6,500,000 per the us Gov : http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53000.html.
Did the author mistake the state’s numbers for DC’s? And, yes the editor should have picked it up…..
DougJ
@Martin:
Tom Friedman won three Pulitzer prizes. If we use the standard of Pulitzers, he is certainly Obama or Pelosi. If you like, we can sub Kathleen Parker in for Bobo since she won a Pulitzer this year.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Martin: I hate to break it to you, but Robin Givhan of the WaPo has a Pulitzer and has certainly achieved national notoriety (most recently for her bizarre piece on Elena Kagan’s leg-crossing habits). I think Doug’s point still holds.
jl
I don’t think the current Foreign Affairs mag is your George F. Kennan’s Foreign Affairs. ‘Managing the Global Economy’ is part of their current self-identified portfolio of interests, according the Wikipedia, and I have seen some pretty wingy conservative economics coming from the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes it.
Edit: Don’t think Kennan never edited the magazine, but he published some of its most influential articles there.
de stijl
Per a recent Red State post “facts” don’t have to be true, they just have to be “in the ballpark.”
When you’re off by a factor, you’re no longer in the ballpark.
Brian J
Without reading anything else of what those guys wrote besides what is up there, the author of the Foreign Policy article is probably describing the greater D.C. metro area in some fashion. A quick use of Google sends us to Wikipedia, which tells us that the number is about 5.3 million. That’s not exactly half, although it’s not exactly clear what he considers to be the D.C. metro area, if that is in fact what he’s describing.
This doesn’t make his error any less glaring, but it probably explains where he’s coming from with the “half” claim.
DougJ
@jl:
It’s Foreign Policy. I don’t know that much about the magazine except that, in general, I have found the quality of the articles I have read to be very high.
Except that I know very little about foreign policy issues, to maybe the articles I read and liked were all based on erroneous statistics.
DougJ
@Brian J:
But there are probably more murders in the metro area.
max hats
Foreign Policy is a magazine whose quality far, far underperforms its pedigree. It is not a very good magazine, and its articles are often amateurish to the point of embarassment.
It is, however, a great place to learn the valuable lesson that esteemed academics are not necessarily intelligent.
MikeJ
@DougJ: I work in Sweden every now and then, usually for a month or two at a time. Most of my contacts[1] there are Brits who have married blonde goddesses. I’ve found that when every guy in the country looks like Thor, god of thunder, being not particularly tall and dark rather than blond makes you exotic to the locals.
Sweden is a good place.
[1] I can now read a newspaper and get the gist of a story written in Swedish, but I miss all nuance. [2] Therefore I have english speaking people to deal with.
[2] You may read the lack of nuance into the the story of sexual conquest later in the post in the way that amuses you most.
Warren Terra
@Alex K:
We desperately need more conscientious (and, dare I say it, idealistic) journalists, and I hope you will be one. And there are (money-losing) magazines that publish the work of conscientious and idealistic young journalists. Especially (but not only) if you go down that route, you’ll be paid like crap for your hard work and your job security will be a joke, all of which looks a lot like empirical evidence that we don’t especially want conscientious and idealistic journalists. But we certainly need them.
@Peter:
Yglesias is well known for the constant flow of typos, grammatical errors, and homonyms with which he lards his posts. That many readers, even persnickety people like me, read him despite these frequent irritations is a testimonial to his qualities as a blogger. I think he is one of the very best, almost always putting up a couple of really good posts every day.
Corner Stone
@MikeJ: I’m…uh..
I…
Tell me more?
Bill E Pilgrim
Yglesias makes a fairly large error in his piece as well, saying that the passage you quote is what the author “concludes the article” with.
In fact, that’s only page one (FPs page links seem to be a bit of a fail, you have to really hover over the precise center of the page number link for it to activate the link cursor, so it’s easy to think you’re on the second page already when you aren’t) and there’s an entire second page, which includes passages like this:
And the piece actually concludes with this, not with the quote from Yglesias:
It doesn’t change your point that the error Yglesias cited is a serious one, but it seems more an error about DC than about Sweden. Moreover the idea that the author’s overall point is that Sweden is becoming some sort of hell hole is a bit less clear if you read both pages, which Matt didn’t.
Steeplejack
@New Yorker:
And of course his defense would be that he earned it. I have a middle-aged acquaintance who rails against government spending and “give-aways,” including the recent health-care reform, all while enjoying his own V.A. health care, which he “earned” because he was in the service for about four years 25 or 30 years ago.
kwAwk
You really need to relax dude. It is one article with one bad piece of information.
PeakVT
What
doeswill it take to get some basic fact-checking back into our national discourse?I’m not sure, but it’s probably similar to what it will take to get people to stop voting Republican, or denying peak oil, or watching American Idol.
Triassic Sands
Damn, don’t you know that facts aren’t facts unless they say what we want them to say and mean what we want them to mean?
According to a fellow I once knew, a Swede has a fifty-fifty chance of being murdered in his or her lifetime. How is that possible you ask? Simple. Either a Swede will be or won’t be murdered. Two possible outcomes and only one will happen, ergo a 1 in 2 chance of being murdered.
Actually, this fellow didn’t really say that about Swedes — I was just adapting his statistical methods to murder in Sweden. What he actually said was “you have a fifty-fifty chance of dying in surgery in a hospital.” Either you die or you don’t. See, fifty-fifty.
I imagine that individual went on to get a job working for a Republican representative or senator. If so, that might help explain GOP economics.
MikeJ
@Corner Stone: I’m just saying if you want to get laid there you either need to be incredibly good looking or as charming as I am. And I’m as charming as a motherfucker.
jl
@DougJ: Um, yes. right, I do believe you are correct.
I should have started my holiday getaway a few hours sooner. I read Foreign Policy but by the time I googled it, it turned into Foreign Affairs in my head.
So I tried again. Wikipedia Samuel Huntington says Foreign Policy, so I imagine it has certain agendas.
But maybe better not to trust anything I saw until June 1, 2010.
DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Well, I didn’t mean this to be about defending Matt Yglesias. And as Peter pointed out, MY making stupid errors also too only proves how far gone things are.
But, yeah, he’s not the most careful.
Martin
@DougJ:
@Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people):
Ah, fuck…
Corner Stone
@MikeJ:
Well, I don’t have anything against ladies with children. So, trans atlantic flight 101, here I come!
RSA
As far as I can see, leaving Brown’s argument aside, his numbers seem to be right. The DC metro area, as Brian J points out, has about 5.3 million people, consistent with Brown; if the numbers on the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department web site are similarly for the metro area, it’s also what Brown says it is, 143.
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: I agree, my point wasn’t really about comparing who made more errors, only that the particular error that Yglesias made in missing an entire page did color how the article read, at least somewhat.
Overall I agree that people in the US, particularly the right, grossly exaggerate stories they come across that seem to show that Europe is becoming as violent as the US, as a way of trying to claim that “gun control” doesn’t work.
The FP writer wasn’t quite as negative about Sweden as reading only that first page led Matt to believe, was really my point.
DougJ
@RSA:
Those aren’t for the Metro Area, those are just for DC proper. I looked at that too.
Remember, a particular police department, even if it calls itself “Metro” isn’t going to be policing DC and Fairfax and Prince George, etc.
kommrade reproductive vigor
If I had written or edited this article, my publisher would leave me in a room with a loaded gun and expect me to do the honorable thing.
MikeJ
@Corner Stone: SAS is one of the few airlines that does fish well inflight.
robertdsc
I’m with you 100%.
de stijl
@Brian J:
Granted, the FP author (Andrew Brown) may have used the DC MSA pop in his math, but the murder total cited is for DC proper.
I have a theory that is just so wild it may be true: Orwell Prize guy (btw, I’ve cited the name of his journalistic prize in a totally non-ironic manner) got hooked by a random stat he read somewhere that aligned so tightly with his worldview and he forgot to check the source and the facts.
Confirmation bias is a harsh mistress, but she is very, very revealing.
Bill E Pilgrim
@MikeJ:
Somehow even though I knew what you meant I had an image of an airliner trailing a fishing line across the Atlantic when I first read that.
RSA
Ah, my mistake.
slag
@de stijl:
Must. Defy. Laws of physics!
Corner Stone
@MikeJ: You’ve given me something to consider here. Thank you.
PeakVT
@RSA: You can see the metro area numbers in this article. The total for 2009 was 296.
Nazgul35
Why are you surprised?
They haven’t seemed to “investigate” the uses of a simple Google search….
Jay
“…the entire point of the piece is that ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ is coming to an end and that Stieg Larson’s novels and the rising crime rate are proof of it.”
As an American with Swedish ancestors, I have to say that, as long as we’ve got the Swedish Chef, we’ll be fine.
DougJ
@PeakVT:
Thanks.
That is about what I would have guessed. That means that the murder rate for the DC metro area was about 2.5 times that of Sweden which is about what one might guess (based on the fact that the murder rate for the US is about 2.5 – 3 times that of Sweden).
Silver Owl
When slop journalism is gourmet here and making our messed up elite seem like the best tasting slugs and what we offer, did you expect anything better?
We have a very serious problem with fucked up beyond repair adults in positions they have absolutely no business being in.
Mark S.
I don’t understand why this is supposed to be a dis.
The article on the whole has a blame the darky immigrants vibe to it. It’s really something I’d expect to read in National Review or the Weekly Standard.
Yutsano
@Mark S.: Actually I read the whole piece and I have no idea what the author is trying to say. I can tell he’s just itching to look for an anti-social state angle, but he just can’t find it, so he goes for anti-immigrant resentment (notice he conveniently forgets to mention if the immigrant involved in the parking space assault was an European immigrant or from somewhere else) but comes up with a “general sense” and one anecdote. The whole article is basically space filler that really doesn’t say much of anything, especially when he seems to undercut his supposed cautionary tale in his last sentence.
Warren Terra
@PeakVT
@DougJ
Don’t those numbers mean that while the DC rate is still an order of magnitude more than all-of-Sweden’s, the DC suburbs have a rate about half that of all-of-Sweden’s?
Jon H
Another goof:
“When Swedish car makers go bust, the state does not bail them out. Volvo is now owned by a Chinese company, and Saab by a Dutch maker of sports cars.”
Volvo was previously owned by Ford, and Saab by GM. If Sweden didn’t bail them out it’s probably because they assumed the money would just flow directly to Ford and GM and accomplish nothing for Swedish jobs.
In short, this strikes me as being a rather misleading, incomplete account of what happened.
DougJ
@Warren Terra:
No, they don’t. They mean the DC suburbs have a slightly higher rate than Sweden.
You can crunch the numbers yourself but roughly 296 – 143 = 153. Times two is 306. More murders than Sweden. And time two isn’t accurate because it’s less than half the population once you take out DC proper.
I’m tired and drunk and I can do this in a comment on a blog post, why can’t this Orwell prize winning idiot do it in a piece he was paid to write.
Yutsano
@DougJ: Cause you is a professional math wiz?
In all seriousness, it is very sloppy work. To be honest, the article reads more like a hastily assembled blog post rather than a serious piece of journalism in a highly respected magazine. And I still really can’t get the author’s point.
mclaren
DougJ, give the guy a break. He’s only one of forty million journalists in America, a nation with more than 900 million people, and magazines like Furring Polity are published 30 times a year with 15,000 pages per issue.
How on earth can you expect anyone to fact-check all that volume of information?
To quote the great British prime minister Wilt Chamberlain, we need peace in our time — peace between bloggers and journalists. Ever since the Cold War ended in 1492, the field of journalism has been in chaos. To make matters worse, the rise of the internet in the 1890s has devastated magazines because (as you well know) the electricity leaking out of all those luminiferous ether cables is likely to electrocute people unwise enough to try to read magazines or newspapers nowadays.
President O’Hara is known for a lot more than his short stories — he’s known for his level-headedness, a trait that you, as a physiologist with a protectorate in the hard sciences really ought to emulate.
Ever since Magellan circumcised the globe with a 70 foot clipper, we’ve had these kinds of actuarial errors in newspapers, so let’s just all take a deep breath and step back and recognize that this is just the way the ball crumbles.
Ailuridae
@Jon H:
More importantly, despite their ownership, not being wholly Swedish at the time of the auto (actually credit but w/e) crisis the Swedish government gave combined guarantees to Volvo and Saab the equivalent of 2.3 Euros (where is the Euro symbol by the way?) or 3.5B USD. Assuming Yglesias numbers are right that means that the Swedish people per capita stake in their auto bailouts is significantly higher than the corresponding per capita numbers in the US.
I doubt my math is wrong but feel free to double check 3.5B/10M people >>> (any reasonable estimate for the size of the US auto bailout/300M people
Right?
Ailuridae
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7777395.stm
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Article link for post 66
mclaren
The author seems to be trying to claim that Sweden has gotten more violent and less middle class while America has gotten less violent and more middle class.
This is flatly and obviously false, as the following statistics show:
“We’re all Swedish now?”
Oh, really?
Number of political scandals since 1945:
United States – 53
Sweden – 2
Number of poitically motivated demonstrations, strikes, riots and armed attacks over 30 years:
United States – 4258
Sweden – 33
Voter participation:
United States – 49%
Sweden – 86%
Average hours spent watching TV per day:
United States – 7
Sweden – 2
News as a percentage of all TV programming:
United States – 35%
Sweden – 2%
Average paid vacation per year:
United States – 12 days
Sweden – 25 days
Energy units of coal burned annually:
United States – 458
Sweden – 2.5
Forests cleared (thousands of cubic yards):
United States – 808,461
Sweden – 84,612
Total CFCs emitted annually (in millions of tons):
United States – 332
Sweden – 4
C02 released per person per year:
United States – 5.8 million tons
Sweden – 1.8 million tons
Armed robberies per 100,000 people:
United States – 221
Sweden – 49
Murder rate for males 15-24 per 100,000 people:
United States – 24.4
Sweden – 2.1
Number of annual handgun murders:
United States – 8915
Sweden – 19
Percentage of households with a gun:
United States – 29%
Sweden – 4%
People per police officer:
United States – 459
Sweden – 328
Teen abortions per 1,000 teenagers:
United States – 44.1
Sweden -19.6
Percentage of sexually active single 15 to 19 year olds using birth control:
United States – 56%
Sweden – 79%
Percentage of families headed by a single parent:
United States – 8%
Sweden – 3.2%
Percent of all children born out of wedlock:
United States – 21.5%
Sweden – 46.4%
Death rate of 15-to-24 year olds (per community of 200,000 per year):
United States – 203
Sweden – 109
Premature Death (years of life lost before the age of 64 per 100 people):
United States – 5.8 years
Sweden – 3.8
Infant Mortality Rate (per 1,000 live births):
United States – 10.4
Sweden – 5.9
Death rate of 1-to-4 year olds (per community of 200,000 per year):
United States – 101.5
Sweden – 64.7
Percent of population covered by public health care:
United States – 40%
Sweden – 100%
Size of Middle Class:
United States – 53.7%
Sweden – 79.0%
Percent of population below the poverty line:
United States – 17.1%
Sweden – 5.3
Children under the poverty level:
United States – 22.4%
Sweden – 5.0
Percent of Union Membership in Workforce:
Sweden – 85.3%
United States – 16.4%
Source: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/8Comparison.htm
Inequality of income (higher = more unequal, as of 2007):
United States 15.9
Sweden 6.2
Household debt as a percentage of disposable income (2010):
United States – 138%
Sweden – 134%
Source: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2008/02/07/americans_arent_the_only_peopl/
According to Wolfram Alpha:
Annual government surplus – Sweden: 4.8 billion per year as of 2010
Annual government deficit – America: 1,000 billion per year as of 2010
Total credit card debt:
United States – 8.059 trillion dollars (40% of world volume)
Sweden – 180.3 billion dollars
Prison inmates per 100,000 inhabitants (as of 2003):
United States – 652
Sweden – 59
Pooh
Stieg Larson’s novels are quite good, however…
Mr. Svinlesha
Doesn’t a of population 600000 sound a bit low for Washington, D.C.? And I find the idea that Stockholm is slightly larger than Washington to be suspect as well.
Generally Stockholm, the largest city in Sweden, is said to hold about 1 million. Gothenburg, second largest, has about 500, 000. I thought Knoxville Tn. was slightly larger, population-wise, than Gothenburg, and surely Washington D.C., the capital of the US, is significantly larger than Knoxville?
Mr. Svinlesha
According to this site:
http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-Metro.html
The population of Washington, D.C., is 5,358,130.
Stockholm is 1,889,945 (about twice my estimate), but that’s taking into account the entire “county.”
DougJ
@Mr. Svinlesha
See the discussion above about metro areas.
Mr. Svinlesha
Oh.
Never mind.
RSA
@PeakVT: Thanks. That’s the info I was looking for (but couldn’t find).
Nutella
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Anglo-Saxon mainstream??!!???
FP magazine is obsessed with that their imaginary Anglo-Saxon ideal. I wish they would just use the word ‘Aryan’ instead since that’s what they mean.
Another famous load of crap from FP in 2004 explained to us that Mexican immigrants will destroy America because they are not English-speaking Protestants like the good immigrants from Ireland and Germany who came here in the 19th century.
That was by Samuel P. Huntington, a famous bigot who was a co-founder of Foreign Policy magazine and a professor at Harvard.
FP is not a respected magazine, at least not by me, and everyone who reads it needs to remember its racist history.
MikeBoyScout
I’m stuck between believing professionalism and pride in quality workmanship has deteriorated in all fields, and in believing the changes (advances) in communication technology have proliferated the reality of our species to fail at a faster rate.
Nutella
@Nutella:
I should have said, everyone who reads FP needs to remember its past and present racism and contempt for historical accuracy.
toujoursdan
Also, part of the problem with comparing crime statistics between countries is that the legal codes and reporting methods are different.
Sweden counts murders against Swedish citizens committed abroad in its statistics. From what I understand these crimes are still filed in Sweden even if the crime isn’t committed there. This allows the police to investigate them, often in coordination with foreign agencies.
That isn’t the practise in the U.S.
JamesP
Having read Andrew Brown for some years, I think there’s a lot of projection going on here. For one thing, he’s pretty far from being “anti-social-state” – he’s full of praise for Sweden (where he lived for years, and speaks the language) on many occasions. Certainly nothing in his Guardian column or blog would suggest that. Fishing in Utopia is a good book, and deserved the prize – that he made a sloppy mistake in a piece is a shame, but hardly the journalistic mark of Cain. (And it’s something that FP should have picked up on.)
Ash
I do think it’s a bit of a bad idea for liberals to uphold the idea that Scandinavians are so superior, considering they have a relatively homogeneous mix of white people and super white people and some other people and a smallish population.
Gary K
But didn’t you notice the error in Yglesias when you quoted him? He wrote “less than half” when he ought to have written “less than twice.” At his own site he has now noted and corrected the error.
OmerosPeanut
It all rests on your definition of “a bit more.” For some, that might be on the order of 0-5% more, for others it’s closer to 1500%.
ToMAYto, toMAHto.
LanceThruster
Truthiness has supplanted facts long ago. Good thing too as the budgets for traditional media are a little thin these days.
Remember, it’s not what’s true, but what you know in your gut that’s true.
DougJ
@Gary K:
I knew what he meant so it didn’t register with me.