Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost

Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.

The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.

Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”

“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.

Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.

Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.

Until today.

“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.

“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”

The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological” reasons? (This is reminiscent of his comment that America should seize Greenland because it was “psychologically” important to him.) Does the commander in chief understand what he’s saying? More important, will Iran keep tons of highly enriched uranium under this new deal or not?

“The biggest thing,” Trump said today, is that “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” That’s fine, except that it didn’t have one before, either, and now it has an even greater incentive to get one. But nuclear issues are very complex and technical, so let’s move on to Trump’s comments about something less complicated: Middle Eastern politics.

Once again, the president seemed unable to comprehend either the situation or his own words. No one outside of the Trump administration has yet seen the final memorandum of understanding that Trump and the Iranians have signed, least of all, according to some reports, the Israelis. If the outlines of the deal are in line with the administration’s own talking points, it’s bound to cause serious agita in Jerusalem: The terms reportedly require a cessation of Israeli hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a tricky condition considering that Israel was not a party to the negotiations. This is probably why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that Israel would maintain its presence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria for “as long as necessary.”

Trump, in other words, is trying to deal away Israel’s right to defend itself, treating it less as a sovereign country and more as a kind of 51st U.S. state run by an annoying governor who needs to get with the program. But what if Iran’s proxy Hezbollah attacks Israel? According to the president, the Israelis need to calm down, and he minimized Hezbollah as “a little pinprick out there that constantly rears its head.” [...]

Trump has never shown very much concern about the conduct of Israeli military operations anywhere (including the war in Gaza, which he viewed primarily as a public-relations problem). But now that he needs to rein in Jerusalem at Tehran’s behest, he has taken the position that the Israelis are causing too much damage in Lebanon. And in a stunning reminder that alliances for Trump are only expedients, he pivoted to praising al-Sharaa and criticizing Israel, saying that if Israel “can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job.”

This kind of flip-flop illustrates Trump’s view of global politics: States are just a bunch of playing cards that he can rearrange at will, which makes watching him talk about foreign policy this way like watching someone cheating at solitaire. Even now, after many years as president, he is constantly frustrated to find out how little leverage he has when other nations refuse to abandon their own interests and do as he commands.

Trump’s comments about the Middle East may not make any sense, but one thing that has emerged in 4K clarity is that the only world leader who got pantsed worse than Trump in all of this was Netanyahu. No one should pity Israel’s prime minister: He brought this situation upon himself and his nation. Netanyahu, along with the Iran-war hawks in the United States, somehow thought that he could be smart or flattering or persuasive enough to avoid the inevitable burn that comes from trusting Donald Trump. Netanyahu refused to see that Trump, when it comes to self-interest, is as predictable as a sunrise: When something he’s involved with goes bad, he walks away and lets others suffer the chaos he’s created. [...]

None of this makes any sense, except as desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat. Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, but evidence is mounting that on the most important questions of war and peace, the president of the United States seems to be losing his grip on reality itself.

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. No coherent foreign policy other than to display American might and make Trump appear 'strong' (even if it's just taking out a few fishing boats). It really is that simple. See also: Introducing Peace 1.0™ (McSweeny's).]

Sarah Evans, Hyde Hill

via:

Guo Jinsheng

via:

The Birthday Party No One Wants

Why Americans aren't celebrating the semiquincentennial

Throughout our history, Americans of all stripes have crafted and recrafted the country’s origin story, fervently recommitting themselves to our nationalist mythology—and using it for their own purposes. Anniversaries have long been natural showcases for these narratives of continuity: at the centennial in 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Philadelphia to celebrate the past but used the event to unveil the futuristic new steam engine; that same year, suffragists revised their Declaration of Sentiments, a radical document advocating women’s rights that was also an homage to the country’s foundational text.

And so it should be astonishing, even to the most jaded or irate Americans, that so many are sitting out our 250th birthday party this July, rejecting both the obligatory ritual and the occasion for devotion or reclamation that the anniversary has represented in the past. In 2026, in the era of Donald Trump, it now seems that the tradition of consecrating our origins is a spent force.

This is in stark contrast with the bicentennial—the country’s last major birthday. 1976 was not an obvious time for patriotic celebration. Richard Nixon’s executive malfeasance and the failed militarism of the Vietnam War were fresh in memory. The generational revolt that dominated the sixties had ebbed, and the country was stuck in an interregnum—between the end of the New Deal order and the start of the neoliberal era. Yet back then, nostalgia seemed capable of meeting the moment: Americans observing the 200th anniversary turned enthusiastically to the founding. As the legal scholar Aziz Rana has noted, there was a “widespread public desire to close the book on the recent past and on critical interrogations of the actual national experience.” In 1976, celebrations of the deeper past were everywhere, from arts and educational programming to pure pageantry; virtually no American could have escaped them. And even many critics of the country seemed to share a hankering for an American consensus grounded in origins. In her censorious bicentennial address, the philosopher Hannah Arendt dwelled on the breakdown of recent years but implored Americans to live up to their “glorious beginnings two hundred years ago.”

Fifty years later, we are again facing chaos in the White House and a morass of global warfare. And we are again facing an interregnum: neoliberalism as we’ve known it has lost credibility, and there is no clear sense of what will replace it. But today’s mood is decisively different. The 250th anniversary falls during the ongoing perpetration and revelation of executive crimes and misdemeanors. Joe Biden did not turn out to be Gerald Ford: whatever bland tonic he offered the anxiety-ridden nation didn’t last (if it worked at all). Among the many ways that Trump has set himself apart from previous presidents is by adopting a nonchalant and shifting relation to the American past. Part of the reason may be that he is too palpably narcissistic to engage in ancestor worship: his interest in the 250th celebration seems to be as much about observing his own birthday, on June 14, as the country’s. He has put up statues of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin in the Rose Garden, but he mentions the founders and framers far less regularly than his immediate predecessors in either party. (His praise for other presidents is all over the map: he lionizes Andrew Jackson and William McKinley while also lauding Franklin D. Roosevelt.) Strikingly, he is a nationalist with little romantic investment in those who first launched the nation; to the extent that he’s nostalgic, it seems to be for the 1950s or the 1890s—not the 1770s.

Trump has many detractors, but if anything, liberals seem even less interested in reclaiming the founding spirit than their great foe. During Trump’s first term, many critical commentators coalesced around “normcore”—a return to the normalcy of the status quo ante, and a form of restorationist nostalgia. But in 2026, liberals are barely rousing themselves for this year’s ceremony of origins. In part, this may be thanks to a greater awareness of how the conditions that preceded Trump also produced him; the consensus seems to be that the only way out of our interregnum is through it, to something else and something new. And at a practical level, liberals’ attention is consumed by more immediate crises. In this regard, the mood of 1976 seems almost calm: Ford’s pardon of Nixon caused an uproar, but it pales in comparison with Trump’s constantly proliferating outrages. During the age of print newspapers and nightly broadcasts, even bad news didn’t have the same effect. For Americans now, glued to their feeds and screens and siloed by our fragmented information landscape, there is not enough emotional claim or free time to linger in political nostalgia. Both the seventies and today are examples of what political scientists call a “disjunction”—the failure of a political regime—but unlike in 1976, when the New Deal order had given way, the endlessly roiling turmoil of our current era is experienced as the result of one man’s caprice, not of shadowy structural forces apparently beyond anyone’s control. [...]

Increasingly less enamored of the founding, liberals and progressives seem happy to let Trump have all the claims on its memory he wants, even if—or just because—he uses them as occasions for spectacle. And these spectacles, such as a UFC cage match on the White House lawn, confirm that the flaws in the American union are simply too great to pretend that mindlessly ratifying the country’s original principles and promises will do the trick. Our need is not for restoration but for transformation.

For all the uncertainty of the 1970s, there was enough agreement across partisan lines to reform government. Republicans joined Democrats to oust Nixon, and responses to failed wars and presidential hijinks came from both sides of the aisle, with new arrangements intended to keep either from repeating themselves: the Ethics in Government Act, the Inspector General Act, and the Federal Election Campaign Act were established for politics at home; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the War Powers Resolution, and the prohibition of political assassination were meant to address malfeasance abroad. All have been eroded since, and no comparable legislation has been adopted in our time. In our present state of gridlock, it’s hard to imagine it will be.

The end of an interregnum can be identified only in retrospect. In 1976, the age of Reagan was already underway, ushering in a decisively new era. Now the country is once again trapped in an agonizing disjunction, and no party or politician has been programmatic or visionary enough to transcend it. American political regimes work in cycles. Partisan realignment or presidential leadership can set up new political orders, which last until their disintegration or entropy leads to a new shift. Our current interregnum has so far thwarted Trump’s own addled attempt to refound the country; he lacks enough popular support or a credible enough plan to do so. But the same is true, so far, of his bitterest enemies.

There is one glint of promise in the abstention from this summer’s anniversary. Watching Trump turn the country’s already hollowing rituals into truly empty gestures, Americans across the partisan spectrum see more clearly and in greater numbers the defunct religion in which so many have lost faith. And they see that nostalgia is not a strategy. Unlike in 1976, the emotional and intellectual plausibility of the American national mythology isn’t likely to survive the Trumpian pageantry this summer. The agonizing limitations of backward-looking resistance to Trump have already driven his enemies to invest less in that mythology in the first place. America, poised on the brink of something, knows it cannot go back to the future.

by Samuel Moyn, The Yale Review |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: The Story Wars: The Conflict Between Red and Blue America is a Clash of National Mythologies (Yale Review):]

***

There is no modern nation-state, after all, whose history is not rife with social injustice; with oppression based on race, class, and sex; with the violence of unjust wars. Our history is a dark and bloody ground in which slavery shares space with freedom, dispossession with progress, hatred with heritage. If there is anything admirable about America, it is not its supposed exception to these historical patterns but the persistence with which its people have struggled to amend injustice, relieve oppression, limit the exercise of state violence, and realize an extraordinarily broad and inclusive concept of nationality. If the dark side of U.S. history is the exploitation of land and labor by rampant capitalism and the rise of corporate oligarchy, its counterpart is the struggle for workers’ rights and environmental conservation and our determined efforts to strike a just and constructive balance between individual rights, corporate power, and the public good. It is because of that willingness to struggle, as much as for our achievements, that America has been the desired destination of immigrants from every country and culture on earth.

My Horrible, No Good Weekend at the UFC White House Fight

[ed. I didn't waste ten brain cells thinking about this 'celebration' - before or after. I guess it happened.]

If January 6th was violent projectile vomit then the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Freedom 250 event on the south White House lawn this weekend was the miserable subsequent spew of diarrhea from our sick electoral body. [ed. Yow.]

I spent the weekend ambling around the grounds that sit in the shadow of the Washington Monument, watching as it was transmogrified into a grotesque mishmash of a NASCAR rally and the Gathering of the Juggalos. America's vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump's birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy. The winning fighters received a special red, white, and blue raspberry "liberty juice" from Monster Energy to drink on camera and $425,000 worth of Trump's crypto tokens for their trouble.

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I've ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC's Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters.

I haven't experienced this level of profound pity for the average person attending an event since I used to report on crypto conventions. Which is appropriate, seeing as how Crypto.com was one of the high-level sponsors this weekend. At events like Ethereum Denver and Bitcoin Miami I met the same nice, normal-ish people looking for a good time, dropped seemingly unaware into a system designed to drain every last dollar out of them. If you are a UFC fan and you are reading this, please listen to me. I have now seen the machine up close. UFC CEO Dana White hates you. He doesn't even think you're a human being. [...]

On Saturday, we showed up early and still waited in line for nearly an hour in the blistering sun before we could get into the park. It got so bad that organizers started half-heartedly throwing water bottles at us. I joked that maybe the delays were because the TSA was running the security, only for my jaw to drop when we reached the gate and discover that, in fact, yes, the TSA was manning the metal detectors. Every guest also had to be searched by a Secret Service agent.

UFC reportedly paid $60 million to hold the fight at the White House. White, in a press conference on Sunday, said they would never do it again because of how expensive it was (they made about half the cost back in sponsorships). But it's unclear if they also paid for all the different law enforcement agencies to work the event. Aside from TSA and Secret Service, I spotted Homeland Security officers, US Park Police, DEA officers, the National Guard, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement. I am the last person to whine about the sanctity of law enforcement, but even I found it monstrous and depressing that our various law enforcement agencies were reduced to festival security.

Once we got into the Ellipse, there was shockingly little to do. You could take a photo in front of a WWE championship belt (both the UFC and the WWE are owned by the TKO Group), drink the aforementioned expensive alcohol, eat at a handful of food stands, take a photo with Monster Energy Drink booth babes, watch a guy rev a car in place at the RAM pop up, visit Meta AI's VR exhibit, and mindlessly stand in the field and watch Turning Point USA commercials play on a loop all day — complete with a Charlie Kirk voiceover. On the second day, they at least added a mechanical bull.

Beyond the TPUSA ads on the big screens, there was very little in the way of actual programming. On Saturday, there were some brief interviews with UFC fighters no one watched, the official weigh-in, which was bungled in ways we'll discuss in a sec, and a performance by the Zac Brown Band, where I watched what was quite possibly the worst guitar solo I've ever heard in my entire life. The night ended with, I'm not kidding, one single firework.

On Sunday, before the fight, there was a live taping of Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, which featured the Kick streamer Ninadrama, real name Nina Marie Daniele. The men in the crowd around me all started asking each other who she was. I'm not a prude and I am very aware that the entire weekend was based around a sport where men beat each other to a bloody pulp, but I, again, felt a bottomless pit of despair in my stomach looking around at all the families watching Paul and Daniele talk about how she should sell feet pics and why her Instagram followers keep making jokes about fingering her. Is this the best we can do? Is what we are? If Logan Paul's podcast is the result of 250 years of the American experiment then it was a failed experiment. [...]

Though I'm not sure the complete lack of amenities — and places to sit (I guess chairs are woke) — mattered to the UFC diehards that traveled from all over the world to watch the fight on Sunday night. I spoke to fans from across the US, Canada, and even further, none of whom seemed to be thinking particularly deeply about any of this. For what it's worth, they were all fairly nice. And the majority of them didn't even realize the event was connected to Trump's birthday until I reminded them. The big focus, instead, was gambling. Based on my own personal survey of attendees, it was split fairly evenly between FanDuel and DraftKings. And it seems like even the Trumps were trying to get in on the action. [...]

It wasn't just the question of "what is America" that loomed over the whole weekend for me, though. I also wondered whether this was all even worth it. Not just White's $60 million investment, but, also, Trump's continued endorsement of hypermasculine gutter culture. Can you feed a political movement with jalapeño vodka slams, Monster Energy Drinks, and potato chip skewers? The modern Republican Party has always been a coalition of vampiric aristocrats and a roving tailgate of redneck dopes, but at least the party of Reagan and Bush was smart enough to LARP as some mythic cowboy archetype. Do the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world think there is a path forward after Trump if they can capture the "guy who wears an Affliction T-shirt in the pool" vote?

As annoying as this weekend was, however, I actually think it's made me more optimistic about American politics than I've felt in a decade. I have seen what the combined power of Trump's oligarch cronies and their money can do. How weak and lazy it all is. How little impact and support $60 million buys them. A barren field, a sporting event that you had to buy Paramount+ to even watch, a bunch of "celebrities" no one's ever heard of, an undersold free event full of people who literally forgot it was Trump's birthday party!

by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Oiled-Up, Half-Naked Men Entertain President On 80th Birthday (Wonkette):]

***

Something around $30 million dollars was spent to turn the South Lawn of the White House into a giant cage fighting ring called “The Claw.” Behind it, on The Ellipse, was a small UFC festival. There was a large stage; scantily clad ring-girls; dumpy MAGA dudes in America-themed sleeveless T-shirts; bars shilling $12 Budweiser, $20 whiskey or tequila cocktails, $4 12 oz. cups of water; $25 burgers and kielbasas called “Giant Western Sausages”; portable chemical toilets; and two “free water” stations. There were two or three large stores offering a seemingly endless supply of UFC and Freedom 250 merchandise, like trading cards, T-shirts, hats, fingerless gloves and novelty championship belts. [...]

It should be noted that general admission tickets to the Fan Experience on the Ellipse were free, and seemingly given out at random to anyone who signed up on the UFC site. There were also some special VIP packages for deep-pocketed investors that ranged up to $1.5 million. [...]

But why not? It’s a goddamn UFC fight on the South Lawn! It’s like a grisly highway crash that backs up traffic for miles. Eventually, you creep close enough to submit to your lesser human instincts and gawk like a shaved ape when you finally pass the smoldering wreckage.

Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

Someone interrupted a livestreamed, employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week with an expletive-filled outburst about “being the company’s bitch,” according to a recording heard by WIRED. The individual then asked the people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit."

One of the presenters covered their face with their hands, according to a witness. (The speaker could not be reached for comment, and the meeting’s two leaders moved on with their technical talk after asking everyone to mute, though employees commented on the stream about the “spicy” start.)

The incident, which took place on a call open to thousands of employees, reflects growing frustration inside the company’s Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Three current employees tell WIRED there is widespread dissatisfaction with how Meta assembled the unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers and the drudgework they allege they have been assigned to improve AI models. Each spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

“It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

Another employee describes some of the tasks—generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they had been doing previously. But the new projects feel menial, and “almost all” employees seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee says.

Meta declined to comment for this story.

Applied AI isn’t the only unit where tensions are boiling over and contributing to what workers describe as record-low morale. The company’s AI-focused restructuring, which included 10 percent of the company, or 8,000 employees, being let go last month has generated extra work and stress throughout several divisions, including data center engineering and Instagram, several current and former employees tell WIRED.

Across the company, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop a recently launched initiative to monitor US employees’ clicks and keystrokes to generate AI training data. (The company has scaled back the program slightly, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions).

During a meeting this week open to all employees at Instagram, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the “difficult” and “brutal” environment created by the “insanity of this company” in the past few months, according to a recording heard by WIRED. Cox applauded Instagram employees for launching features and serving around 2 billion users amid what he compared to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we’re recording you.”

“It’s like what the fuck,” he said, drawing laughs, before repeating himself. “It is like what the fuck.” [...]

In an internal memo on Friday seen by WIRED, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that recent organizational changes had caused distress across Meta. “Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” he wrote. “As we navigate this period, I’m also focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible.” [...]

“Talented People”

Zuckerberg’s memo also addressed the allegedly dismal situation in Applied AI directly, referring to the unit by its acronym. He suggested the team was a waypoint, not a destination. “Work like AAI is critical to advancing our models and it lets very talented people contribute to those efforts while we create other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months as well,” he wrote.

Engineers selected for the unit have no choice but to join or leave the company, an unusual requirement for highly valued technical employees in Silicon Valley. That’s led some members of Applied AI to describe themselves as “draftees.”

The organization has grown in batches since early April. “It’s crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in,” an early member of Applied AI says.

Some employees are being asked to finish two tasks per week. These involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. Some of the work is meant to help develop AI agents that generate software or other outputs.

One worker describes the assignment as “mechanical and not creative,” and certainly “not using their full skill set and knowledge.” They feel they were hired to develop social media apps for billions of people, but now find themselves assembling data for hundreds of AI scientists to feed to computer chips.

Meta released pioneering open-weight AI models three years ago, but has had mixed results with subsequent releases. Applied AI is among several expensive initiatives Zuckerberg has spun up in hopes that the company can better compete in the growing market for AI services.

Zuckerberg noted in his memo that, unlike some other AI labs, “automating work” was not Meta’s primary focus. “The products we’ll build will range from much more personalized Instagram and Facebook experiences and glasses that help you throughout the day to better tools for small businesses to thrive and create jobs, and personal superintelligence agents that understand your goals and work 24/7 on your behalf to help in the ways you want,” he wrote.

by Paresh Dave; Zoë Schiffer, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Grillot/Getty Images
[ed. Dead company walking. Seems pretty clear (to me, anyway) that they don't have a clue what the company will look like in the future, just that they need to be in the AI space somehow - this after the dismal (and expensive) failure of the company's 'Metaverse' makeover.]

Mosquito Drones

[ed. Predictable. I remember Neal Stephenson describing drone swarms in his book The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. There may be some issues with outdoors applications but a swarm released into a building could be deadly (especially if payloads include a small shot of neurotoxin.]

Don’t Even Try to Play This Album in the Background

At times, the defining mood of the 2020s seems to be disassociation. The culture of these years will be remembered for lots of things that dulled and distracted the senses: easygoing country music, friendly AI chatbots, ketamine nasal sprays, conspiracy theories that were preferable to the truth, and droning podcasts about all of the above. Feeling is out; vibing is in.

But the case against this line of thinking is simple: Olivia Rodrigo.

In early 2021, the then–Disney star’s single “Drivers License” pierced the pandemic-weary zeitgeist like a geyser in a desert. The song’s soppy piano and screamed choruses served to interrupt the flow of any playlist by triggering the listener’s sympathy and, perhaps, alarm (Is she okay? Am I okay?). Her albums Sour (2021) and Guts (2023) flaunted clever wit and theater-kid poise with adventuresome work from the rock producer Dan Nigro—but the real asset was her ferocity. As she hopped between punk crunchiness and bedroom-pop intimacy, every trembling lyric was backed by palpable, well, guts.

Her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, makes that earlier work sound like kids’ stuff. That’s not to dismiss what she did before—she was bottling a particularly teenage form of spite, hot and thin like boiling water. Now that she’s all of 23 years old, the emotional brew is thicker and even messier. The album narrates what she has called her first “adult” relationship, and it was initially meant to be entirely made up of love songs. Then she and her guy broke up, and the work got darker. The result is a wild listening experience—so intense it verges on sickening.

She’s in unstable territory from the first moments of the lead track, “Drop Dead.” A synth riff evokes the wistfulness of a John Hughes movie, but it’s rhythmically shifty, like she’s about to bolt. Rodrigo sings about a first date in a slithering, secretive tone of voice—then starts stabbing one note over and over for the chorus. The effect is unnervingly happy. One imagines the narrator of the Proclaimers’ most maniacal hit undertaking their 500-mile journey with a double dose of Vyvanse.

Quite soon, Rodrigo is fully crashing out. “I feel right, I feel wrong, I feel totally insane,” she sings on the stunning “Stupid Song,” which sets the honeymoon phase to pulsing piano and galloping drums. The track apes the softly anthemic approach of U2, Coldplay, and the National—until all of that elegant uplift topples like an overly ambitious wedding cake. [...]

The starkly self-incriminating nature of those lyrics marks a nice evolution in the contemporary canon of heartbreak pop. Rodrigo came up under the influence of Taylor Swift, who taught a generation of singers how to write post-breakup disses lightly dashed with antiheroic confessions. But now Rodrigo is pulling at a thread underlying the modern crisis of young romance: the way that dating has become bound up with goal-seeking and social performance. The album opens with her stalking the perfect guy on her phone; midway through the track list, she has the relationship she dreamed of yet is still unable to feel secure. The villain isn’t only her man—it’s also “all the pretty girls in the foreground of my mind,” as she sings in “The Cure.”

As she explores these tensions, Rodrigo portrays herself as straining against the confines of her art form: She wants her man “more than any stupid song could ever say,” and she warns that “it’s too hard to describe this / In a way that feels honest.” But really, she’s quite adept at getting her point across, combining vivid anecdotes (a cry on the curb at LAX), fascinating inflections (full-abandon yodels, facetious sultriness), and highbrow crudity (“They say modern love’s a cruel endeavor / And to that I say, ‘Fuck it, whatever!’”). 

by Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube

[ed. She's smart and talented and is going to have a great career.]

via:

Telescope Ranching

[ed. Awesome. An example of the intrinsic economic value of undisturbed natural environments. A few more: eco-tourism, hunting and fishing lodges/preserves, photo-safari's; air taxi operations, outfitters, etc. etc. Many people just assume that if land isn't somehow 'developed' it's just sitting there, worthless. Then there are even worse ideas: like putting up a border wall/fence with miles of security and search lights to be installed at Big Bend National Park.]

Big Bend National Park is known as one of the outstanding places in North America for stargazing. In fact, it has the least light pollution of any other national park unit in the lower 48 states.

Qian Xuesen: "Father of Chinese Rocketry"; Deported Illegal Immigrant

Qian Xuesen (Chinese: 钱学森; December 11, 1911 – October 31, 2009; also spelled as Tsien Hsue-shen) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. He achieved recognition as one of America's leading experts in rockets and high-speed flight theory prior to his deportation to China in 1955.

Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934. He traveled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at the California Institute of Technology in 1936, received a doctorate in aeronautics and mathematics there in 1939, and became an associate professor at Caltech in 1943. While at Caltech, he co-founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was recruited by the United States Department of Defense and the Department of War to serve in various positions, including as an expert consultant with a rank of colonel in 1945. He became an associate professor at MIT in 1946, a full professor at MIT in 1947, and a full professor at Caltech in 1949.

During the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, the United States federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues and without any evidence of the allegations, he was stripped of his security clearance. He was given a deferred deportation order by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance in an effort to gradually make his technical knowledge obsolete. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. He left the United States in September 1955 on the American President Lines passenger liner SS President Cleveland, arriving in mainland China via Hong Kong.

Upon his return, he helped lead development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. He also played a significant part in the construction and development of China's defense industry, higher education and research system, rocket force, and a key technology university. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" and was nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.

In 1957, Qian was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served as a Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1987 to 1998.

He was the cousin of engineer Hsue-Chu Tsien, who was involved in the aerospace industries of both China and the United States. He is a cousin of the father of Roger Y. Tsien, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [...]

Outside of rocketry, Qian had a presence in numerous areas of study. He was among the creators of systematics, and made contributions to science and technology systems, somatic science, engineering science, military science, social science, the natural sciences, geography, philosophy, literature and art, and education. His advancements in the concepts, theories, and methods of the system science field include studying the open complex giant system. Additionally, he helped establish the Chinese school of complexity science. His research advanced the discipline of engineering cybernetics, which emphasized the importance of design principles in practical engineering.

via: Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: unknown

[ed. Prelude to the post that follows (re: Gov. vs. Anthropic's Fable).]

American Government Takes Down Claude Fable

No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday.

Here we go again.

The Once And Future Fable

The United States Department of Commerce, as per a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, apparently in response to a narrow jailbreak identified by Amazon, has classified Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as being subject to US export controls. That explicitly means cutting off access to all ‘foreign nationals,’ even within the United States, even if they are Anthropic employees.

Given Anthropic has no means to verify citizenship at this time, that meant complete shutdown of the model, at least for the time being.

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

Dean W. Ball: I can’t tell if this is lawfare against Anthropic in particular or extreme national-security hawkery. Regardless, it is simply cartoonish.

The justification for this appears to be rather flimsy, at best, and based on lack of understanding of what even is a jailbreak or how defense in depth works.

Anthropic: We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5.

We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

That left Anthropic with no options but to entirely withdraw it from the market, at least for the time being, since they have no way to verify who is and is not a United States citizen. [...]

This Action And Its Implementation Are Absurdly Stupid

If you take the action at face value, rather than as an attempt to lash out at Anthropic, there is no way to pretend this is not deeply, deeply stupid.

Dean W. Ball: If this is true, it is just baffling. An administration whose posture is that we *should* export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban… Britain (and every other non-American on Earth)… from using our best models? I have no words.

zooko ⓩ: Judging from [the announcement], I imagine that some senior government official was shown a jailbreak—something they had never seen before and didn’t know about—and this was their kneejerk reaction.

Dean W. Ball: If implemented as this reporting suggests, Anthropic’s latest models would be subject to export controls to all *non-Americans,* including non-American nationals based in the US. This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models. [...]

What Happens Now?

It is a regular thing for the Executive Branch of the United States Government, these days, to issue declarations of policy that are, to use the technical term, absolutely bonkers and stunningly destructive with no reasonable way to implement them, often without stopping to realize what they are doing.

It is also a regular thing for them to then quietly walk those policies largely or entirely back, once the consequences become clear, leaving only relatively minor total devastation in their wake.

Alas, it is also a regular thing for them to leave at least a substantial portion of the new stupid and destructive policy in place indefinitely, and sometimes we keep all of it, or they even keep going further.

Or Anthropic could give the White House what it wants, no matter who is right about whether doing so makes any sense.

We are not short on examples of any of this.

One thing that must now be considered is that many employees of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, and other AI labs, are not United States persons.

Yo Shavit (OpenAI): Unless this changes, OpenAI researchers on visas need to plan for the fact they’ll probably lose access to internal models, and therefore their ability to do their jobs moving forward, sometime in the next couple months.

I hope the company acts to prevent that.

dave kasten: Uhhh so incidentally, does anyone have a plan to prevent all the non-US citizen AI scientists from going to join foreign labs after they get bored of playing Wordle at work for a month, or are we just sort of planning on having the greatest counterproliferation failure since we deported Qian Xuesen in 1955 and gave Mao a rocket program?

If we drive all foreign talent out of our AI labs, and otherwise actually go down the current road, that is one of the few things that could put China and other competitors back in the game in earnest, both slowing us down and speeding them up.

At Anthropic, Amanda Askell and Andrej Karpathy are examples of employees who suddenly are unable to work with Claude Mythos 5, even after Anthropic sorts out a new access control system.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

[ed. Who knows what axe is being grinded here, the stupidity appears to transcend logical analysis. See also: The Once And Future Fable #2 (Update):]

***

On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos.

It’s been a rough weekend. [...]

1. More details have come to light. There remains some fog of war, but we now have a rather good idea why Claude Fable and Mythos were, deeply stupidly, taken down.

2. A narrow jailbreak was discovered, of the type Anthropic warned in advance obviously existed. All demonstrated outputs are things GPT-5.5 can not only produce, but produce without any sort of jailbreak or bypass.

3. The White House demanded Anthropic take down Fable to ‘fix’ the situation, and did not listen when Dario tried to explain that there was no situation to fix.

When Anthropic did not do so, the White House hit them with an export restriction that they knew would force Fable and Mythos down for everyone.

A lot of nihilists are justifying this decision, and blaming Anthropic, all of whom are very much confirming that they adhere to Dean Ball’s portrait of the United States Government as a dying NPC hospice patient we have to properly placate with the proper vibes and genuflection so they don’t lash out at us. Except they equate this with strength and righteousness, because might makes right, power and vibes.

This is a fast developing story with a large speed premium, so I apologize for any errors, and for the structure likely not being ideal. We do the best we can.

What we do not know is:

1. What was motivating the government to make these decisions.

2. How deeply they were confused about how any of this works.

3. Whether they demanded and are demanding a narrow fix or a global fix. Narrow fix is probably easy. Global fix is probably impossible.

4. What they intend to do next and what they are trying to accomplish.

The good outcome would be that this is a terrible misunderstanding, a reflection of a panic reaction, which can be sorted out quickly, after which we can restore access. Or where they otherwise face enough pressure they quickly realize they made a mistake, or Anthropic can do something to quickly assuage their concerns even if it is dumb. There will still be a terrible precedent set, which comes with a lot of permanent damage to trust in American AI, to our business climate, to our ability to employ vital foreign AI talent, to America’s relationships to its allies, to the progress of Project Glasswing and our cyber security, and to the rule of law.

***

[ed. In addition, see: Seductive Salience (the inevitable politization of AI regulation).]

The Kissing Booth

The kissing booth was my daughter’s idea. Here’s how it was supposed to work. Ella and her friend Audrey would set up near the polling place at the Seventh-day Adventist temple. Their Get Out the Vote operation would rely on a repurposed lemonade stand they’d found in Audrey’s basement. Audrey’s mom once ran tech for a theater in Miami, and this lemonade stand was an impressive affair: a wooden counter with a framed opening above a painted wooden sign, looped with bright triangular flags cut out of felt. The sign used to say “Lemonade, 50¢” and below that “Save the Tigers!”

They repainted the sign to say #KissingBooth2024. Of course they didn’t need our help this time. They were fifteen. They traveled around the city on their own and understood precalculus. Their skin was incredible, even when they hadn’t slept enough, and their eyes were clear like marbles. Still, Ella sometimes complained about how she looked. I’d heard that the right response to this was always “You look beautiful.” No details. One weekend she emerged from her room dressed for a party in a lavender slip dress, her dark hair meticulously straightened, tiny dabs of silver glitter at the corner of each eye. I looked at her eleven-year-old brother, Ben, the only other person in the house, and saw him tear up.

“You’re crying!” Ella crowed.

“No I’m not,” Ben said, turning to hide it. I don’t think he knew why he was upset.

Audrey’s mother, Jen, and I had some concerns about the kissing booth from the beginning—namely, predation, germs, and public opinion. Also something else that was harder to put into words. But when we raised the first issue with our daughters, they became defensive.

“You think we can’t decide what to do with our own bodies,” Ella suggested. “You think it’s ‘inappropriate.’”

Audrey looked smug. “That’s what I said they’d say.”

“This is a big city . . .” Jen began.

I tried to help. “It would be different if—”

“If we lived in the suburbs?” Ella glanced at Audrey, incredulous.

Audrey shook her head in disgust. “See?”

Jen and I insisted that we would have the same concerns about a suburban kissing booth. We’d already agreed it never would’ve occurred to us to do something like this at their age, because it was a different political moment—and also a different kissing moment. Most of the teenagers we knew, including our own daughters, didn’t seem to be kissing anyone. They gently mocked the ones who were, as if the sort of dating our generation had done—the pairing up and sneaking out, the baseball metaphors—was a quaint vestige of the past. Maybe they were right. When our daughters first became teenagers, we’d been eager to show them the movies of our adolescence. We’d made popcorn and settled onto the couch, but it hadn’t taken long for them to be appalled or for us to be ashamed. How could we be nostalgic for those days?

That fall, I started running in the park. I could do this at night, while the kids finished their homework. I couldn’t help with homework the way I used to, because everything had changed: long division was now short division, the atom was an electron cloud, and Pluto—which had seemed so far away as to be unassailable—was just a lump of rock and ice in the Kuiper Belt. “Don’t use the algorithm!” Ben warned. “It’s not allowed!” Ella, meanwhile, studied the modern Middle East and didn’t have a single textbook. She had some tasks that had to be done with AI and others for which those programs were expressly forbidden. So I went for a run.

I had time to run during the day, too, especially with the kids spending half of each week at their father’s new apartment. But there was something about the halo around the lights in the park at night, especially if it was drizzling, and the adrenaline I got from needing to stay alert. Also from doing something that was supposedly inadvisable. [...]

If I ran during the day, I listened to a podcast, occasionally one about parenting. There were helpful tips for talking to your teenager: for example, when she said something offensive—such as “All the girls in my grade are bitches” or “You are exactly like Grandma”—I could say, “Let’s try that again,” or “I don’t think that came out the way you meant it.” This hadn’t been supereffective in practice, but I may not have had the right inflection. The psychologist’s voice was low and soothing, and sometimes I found myself letting one episode run into the next, even when the topics weren’t relevant to my children. “My Teen Is into Sports Betting . . . Help!” Or: “My Daughter’s Nude Selfie Got Out. What Do We Do Now?” Each one was like a little pat on the back—nope, not my problem.

Eventually, I did have to listen to the divorce episode, though. The worst things you could do, it turned out, weren’t moving the kids frequently back and forth or running out of money or lying. The worst things were (1) having fights in front of them and (2) criticizing the other parent. I was three-quarters of the way through my run—in the middle of the hill—when Dr. Lisa Damour dropped this bit of wisdom, and I slowed to a walk. Ordinarily, I hated to do that because afterward it felt as if I hadn’t run at all, as if I were a failure.

One saturday that September, I met Drew at the door when he brought Ben home. For a while after we’d separated the previous spring, I would tidy up before he arrived. Drew is an architect and we’d always argued about the apartment, about the extent to which external order was tied to more fundamental issues. The fundamental issue might have been that we disagreed about which issues were fundamental. This time, though, I hadn’t bothered. His eyes moved over the living room, the laundry on the couch, and my empty coffee mug on the table. Mugs. I gave Ben a hug, inhaling his yeasty smell. I used to be relieved when the kids went on short school trips, to the museums in D.C. or camping upstate, but now that they were with their father a few nights a week, I counted the days until they got home. I had to be careful about saying “home”—because Drew said that the apartment he’d had for five months was now equally their home. “OK,” I agreed, “language is important.” That made him roll his eyes.

Ella was at volleyball practice and wasn’t going to be back at my place for a while, so it was a good time to discuss some things. Not a great time because Ben was right there in the kitchen, getting his favorite snack: a slice of Muenster cheese wrapped around a dill pickle.

“Did you know that the bar-headed goose is one of the highest-flying migratory birds?”

“Nope,” I said.

“But the Rüppell’s griffon vulture can fly even higher. One flew seven miles above the earth and hit a plane.”

“Was it OK?”

“No,” Ben said. “It got sucked into the engine. That was in the 1900s.”

“Oh, well, the 1900s,” said Drew. “Ella said to tell you she’d be here by six.”

“How’s she doing?” I didn’t mean to suggest that she wouldn’t be doing well after three days with her father. I was only trying to steel myself for whatever was coming when she got back. Her moods were various and spectacular.

“She called me an effing a-hole,” Drew said. “And so I’m just wondering where she heard that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Who’s been calling you an effing a-hole most recently?”

“Hilarious,” Drew said. “This was after I bought her the tickets, by the way.”

“You bought her the tickets?”

I think he brought up the a-hole thing just to pass along this piece of information, because we had definitely settled on not buying the tickets for Ella, because the cost was excessive and because it felt like a bribe. We had talked about not letting Ella manipulate us into things simply because we felt guilty about our separation.

“She’s so excited,” Ben said from the kitchen. “She hugged Dad, and then she called Rachel.”

Drew looked nervous. “Rachel said that it was the event of the decade, and that if she didn’t go, she would always regret it.”

“Is Rachel paying for the tickets?”

Drew sighed. “Can you leave Rachel out of it?” Then he lowered his voice, as if this were a much larger apartment and the kitchen weren’t steps from the front door. “She’s been acting perfectly toward the kids—do you know how hard that is to find?”

“She’s the needle in the haystack.”

There was a story I made up for the kids when they were little about two children who go into a closet on a rainy day and come out in a magic land. (OK, not totally made-up.) The magic land is ruled by the Balloon Witch. Early on in the story, one of the children finds a golden needle and slips it into the pocket of her overalls. At the end of the story, she uses it to poke the Balloon Witch, who zooms and buzzes around the room until she’s just a piece of rubber on the floor.

“She’s really trying,” Drew said.

“A for effort.”

“Fuck you,” Drew said.

“La, la, la!” Ben yelled from the kitchen. “I can’t hear you!”

Since I hadn’t secretly bought expensive concert tickets or used the f-word in front of our son, I decided to take the opportunity to be the grown-up in the room. “Even though we don’t love being a couple anymore, we do love parenting you together!” I called after Ben, who was running down the hall.

“Don’t use your podcast-lady voice,” he shouted back.

Drew said the separation was my fault. He said he had tried and tried but I didn’t want to work on the marriage. That’s why he’d had the affair—the at-first-only-emotional affair—with the woman he met on the discreet married dating app Ashley Madison. I hadn’t heard of Ashley Madison before I learned about the emotional affair, and at first I thought Drew was having an affair with someone named Ashley Madison. I have to admit I was a tiny bit relieved when I discovered that her name was Rachel and she was a marketing executive in New Jersey.

I told Drew I was glad we’d talked about the affair before it became an actual affair, when it was mostly just texting. But I said that I also thought written conversations could be more intense than in-person ones. He said he didn’t find that to be true, but he wasn’t surprised I thought so, since it had always been obvious to him that I liked books more than people—except for the kids. Even when the books weren’t that good! He said he could stand being third in my affections but not 312th. I wondered at the time how he’d come up with that number, and how many books I actually did prefer to Drew—honestly, three hundred and change wasn’t so many if you were starting with the classics. But I said I knew what he meant, which annoyed him even more. Another of my problems, according to Drew, was that I could always see things from someone else’s point of view and so I failed over and over again to take a side.

by Nell Freudenberger, The Yale Review |  Read more:
Image: Yanmiao / iStock

[ed. See also: When Does a Divorce Begin? (Yale Review).]

Coastal Grandmother

Imagine Diane Keaton unpacking her farmers’ market bags. It’s all about relaxed, mature luxury, featuring pottery, hydrangeas and at least one bowl of lemons

Name: Coastal grandmother.

Age: Just incredibly well preserved?

Appearance: Easy, breezy, laid-back yet immaculate, with warm neutrals, lots of linen and coastal vibes.

“Coastal vibes” would be a terrible police photofit description. You know what I mean.

Not really, but your granny sounds nice. We’re not talking about her: she lived in a council house in Cinderford. This is about a platonic “coastal grandmother” ideal, the cinema trope turned TikTok microtrend, birthed by the influencer Lex Nicoleta. It’s about adopting the aesthetic of a type of older heroine, usually played by Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep and probably directed by Nancy Meyers, the queen of romcoms (It’s Complicated; Something’s Gotta Give), in aspirational domestic settings.

I see (I don’t). It’s easy: coastal grandmother means relaxed, mature luxury, as lightly worn as the cashmere sweater over your shoulders as you unpack your farmers’ market purchases from your Provençal shopper in a kitchen the size of the O2.

So coastal grannies are rich? It’s more about a comforting fantasy than hard cash, a leisurely, fulfilling life in a beautiful place. Imagine wandering through your bounteous garden picking “arugula” and basil (pronounced bay-sil) for the unpretentious kitchen lunch for 20 you’re hosting: that’s CG.

It doesn’t sound very seasidey: where’s the Mr Whippy and the arcades? Coastal is a state of mind. If you’re struggling, don’t worry: like a latterday Peter York, Nicoleta has spent two months and nearly 50 videos deconstructing the signifiers of coastal grandmotherhood in forensic detail, from hydrangeas to antique ginger jars. She even distinguishes between east coast (pottery and crisp white button-down shirts) and west coast (pilates and dirty martinis) CGs.

And why are we talking about it? Because #coastalgrandmother has gone viral. The hashtag has 7.6m views on TikTok and climbing. It probably doesn’t hurt that Netflix has just announced a new Nancy Meyers film, too.

Huh? Why do the youth want to emulate fictional boomers? Well, would you rather engage with the roiling chaos and existential terror of 2022, or cosplay Meryl Streep fixing a lobster salad in her sun-soaked kitchen, to the soundtrack of nearby waves, a crisp sancerre by her side, as Javier Bardem repaints her garden pottery studio? I thought so.

OK, but I’m not a grandmother and I’m nowhere near the sea. No problem. You can get the vibe anywhere with fresh flowers, “cosy” music (there’s a 79-track CG Spotify playlist), taper candles and the all-important bowl of lemons.

The what now? Nicoleta insists CGs need at least one bowl of lemons: “practical and aesthetically pleasing”.

Do say: “Get cosy in the rattan chair and I’ll fix you a bloody mary; my heirloom tomatoes are gorgeous right now.”

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Halfpoint Images/Getty Images
[ed. I know, I know... this microtrend is four years old already. We've probably moved on to 'Pool Hall Grandpa' or something else by now. I'd never heard of it though until I read this: ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion', which, in reality, is a much more interesting essay than I would've expected or cared about. Give it a read.]

The Last Great Wilderness

Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea.

If you want to follow in the footsteps of the great explorers, forget the moon and Mars: the ocean floor is where the real action is. The deep ocean, the part that’s deeper than 200 metres, covers about 66% of the Earth’s surface. Most of it has never been surveyed in detail. Even less has been seen up close. If the current rate of observation continues, a complete visual survey of the ocean floor will take about 5m years. [...]

The deep ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth. It is also in many ways the most extreme, home to crushing pressures, extremes of heat and cold, and a near total absence of sunlight. Animals inhabiting this midnight world tend to be equally extreme. It is a menagerie that abounds in superlatives: the largest, the oldest, the blackest, the most luminous. But those are only the ones we know about. Most of the animals dwelling in the benthos, the true deep, remain unknown to science. Virtually every scientific expedition to reach this zone of darkness returns with new species in tow. In the past year, scientists have discovered more than 1,100 new marine species. Among them are a ghost shark (not really a shark), a ping-pong ball sponge (which does look like a cluster of ping-pong balls), a number of luridly coloured worms and a floating something that resembles a tiny jet plane made out of pale pink jelly, and which scientists have not yet been able fit into any of the primary categories of animal life. [...]

For over 50 years, would-be industrialists and entrepreneurs have floated the idea of mining the ocean floor, but without much happening in practice. But in our search for new sources of metals needed for batteries and microchips, we may now be on the cusp of destroying the world’s largest – and strangest – ecosystem before we get a chance to understand it.

by Jacob Mikanowski, The Guardian | Read more:

Images: Jim Maragos/AP; Nekton Ocean Census/Schmidt Ocean Institute

You Can Make Free Money on Polymarket. If You Know Math.

Betting is fundamentally about risk: You might win or you might lose. But what if you could always win?

Enter prediction markets, sites that let users bet on pretty much anything. Most of those users lose. But a savvy few have made a fortune using basic math.

Prediction sites like Polymarket and Kalshi offer many of the same markets. And usually, they post the same odds.

But sometimes the odds diverge — like in these markets about the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.

In March, Kalshi had Gavin Newsom’s odds of winning at 29 percent, but Polymarket had them at 24 percent. These disparities are good news, if you’re gambling.

Taking both sides of the same bet is usually a wash. But not when there’s a price disparity.

In the example with Mr. Newsom, imagine you bought “Yes” on Polymarket, for 24 cents, and also “No” on Kalshi, for 71 cents.

If Mr. Newsom wins, then Polymarket owes you a dollar.

If he loses, then Kalshi owes you a dollar.

One of these bets must be a winner — so you’re guaranteed to make a dollar. But because of the disparity, you’ll only have spent 95 cents on the bets.

If this sounds like printing money, that’s because it basically is. It’s called “arbitrage,” long a favorite strategy of quantitative traders trying to juice profits from the stock market with minimal risk. You buy something at a cheap price, and simultaneously sell it at a more expensive price. It’s a win-win.

Some bettors are now using the same strategy to rake in thousands of dollars from online prediction sites. Moving quickly, they can take advantage of price gaps between exchanges like Polymarket and Kalshi, or even between the prediction sites and sports-betting sites like DraftKings and FanDuel. The wider the spread, the bigger the potential profit.

Ryan Noel, 25, has built a career arbitrage-betting (or “arbing,” as he calls it) during sports games. He regularly makes more than 1,000 arbitrage bets per week on prediction sites like Polymarket, Kalshi, Novig and ProphetX, in addition to online sportsbooks, he said.

“Software shows me the price of every sort of market at the same time,” said Mr. Noel, who started arbing in late 2023, while working as an actuary, before quitting his job last year. So far, the strategy has netted him more than $1 million, he said. “I don’t care about sports at all. I think watching sports is the most boring thing you can do with your time. I’m a mathematician.”

Math skills are essential — but so are the right tools, said Aidan Gawlowski, a Chicago-based college student who started arbing last year before coding his own software to hunt down prediction-market price discrepancies. Mr. Noel buys software from OddsJam, Pick the Odds and Bookie Beats that tracks price changes across thousands of markets, flagging the possible arbitrage.

“I figured out that there was this opportunity,” said Mr. Gawlowski, 21, who said he started betting when he was 14. “You’re mathematically guaranteed to make money.”

Some moneymaking opportunities last longer than others. The arbitrage with Mr. Newsom? It existed, unexploited, for weeks. During that period, you could’ve bought “Yes” on Polymarket and “No” on Kalshi, for a roughly 3 percent profit. (The probability spread of around five percentage points, minus Kalshi’s transaction fee.)

But there are a couple of reasons that opportunity was an anomaly. For one, the market doesn’t resolve for two years. That’s a long time to tie up money you could invest elsewhere, said Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School at Penn. There’s also additional risk that some bets carry more than others: What if the election gets weird, and the sites don’t agree on what defines a Newsom nomination? Then, you might lose both sides of your bet.

That was enough to deter Mr. Noel and Mr. Gawlowski, who spend most of their time arbing on sports. There are loads of sites that let users bet on sports, meaning more chances for price discrepancies. And during games, odds must constantly update to keep up with live developments. That process takes time, which can translate into arbitrage opportunities.

“You can make a significant amount of money on a big N.B.A. day,” Mr. Gawlowski said. During sports games, Mr. Noel’s price-tracking programs catch an arbitrage opportunity every minute or so, he said.

These discrepancies often emerge when casual users, betting based on vibes, move a market just a hair out of alignment. Then arb bettors pounce, and their actions end up evening the odds across the sites again.

Taking advantage of these short-lived opportunities is hard enough for you and me. But the window is closing even for bettors like Mr. Noel and Mr. Gawlowski, as big financial institutions get in on the action with automated bots that can trade faster than any human. [...]

“Back in 2022, these arbitrage opportunities would last 30 seconds,” said Alex Llewellyn, 36, a professional sports bettor. “These days I execute bets in two to five seconds. And instead of 8 percent arbs, you generally see 4 to 5 percent.” [...]

Prediction sites, awash in Wall Street money and bots, are heading toward the same fate as other major financial markets. One-tenth of the top one percent of accounts on Polymarket rake in more than two-thirds of the profits, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

“You’re not betting against Joe Schmo anymore,” said Alex Monahan, the founder of OddsJam. “You’re betting against a quant firm with infinitely better technology than you.”

by Evan Gorelick and Katherine Chui, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Forget the opioid crisis - so yesterday. These days everybody's got a gambling addiction. Here's a different form of arbitrage: Net Gain (NYT):]

***

For the first game of the N.B.A. finals, my friends and I went to a bar offering a deal that seemed too good to be true: If the Knicks won, the bar would cover every customer’s tab, up to $100.

As tipoff approached, young people variously clad in starched button-downs and Brunson jerseys galloped from nearby Midtown offices for a chance at free booze. The line snaked around the block, and the bouncer made a show of blocking the front entrance. People screeched at one another. My buddy, already inside, shooed me in through a side door. (I heard someone whine, “Why does he get to go in?”)

Three hours later, when the Knicks overcame a 14-point deficit to take down the Spurs, strangers in the crowd were hugging and high-fiving. Outside, a passing garbage truck honked its horn in celebration. The entire city seemed to be shouting with joy. And at the Jeffrey, which bills itself as a neighborhood spot for “craft beer, cocktails and bites,” 726 beers, 385 cocktails and 175 smash burgers were on the house.

Over the hedge

When someone hands you a freebie, by all means: Take it. But you and I both know there ain’t no such thing as a truly free lunch. So while downing drinks, I kept asking myself whose money I was taking.

Turns out, it belonged to Kalshi users who’d bet on San Antonio — in other words, deadbeats and turncoats who had it coming. (Kidding! Kind of.) Before the game, the bar’s owner, a 50-year-old corporate lawyer, had used the prediction market to bet $5,000 on the Knicks. Since the Spurs were the favorites, that position netted him around $8,000 when New York prevailed — enough to cover nearly everything the crowd had consumed. If the Knicks had lost, the bar would’ve been out the $5,000, but it could have covered its losses with all those drinks and smashburgers. (Plus the free publicity — you’re welcome.)

Clemens Bewer (German, 1820 – 1884), Muse with a Lyre (also known as Erato, Muse of Love Poetry) (1867)

via:

via:

Don't Feed the Ducks

Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)

How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.

via: