AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books

We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the output — of large language models. Ironically, that’s what large language models themselves have had to do, and in order to ensure them a steady diet of manmade text, their owners are resorting to controversially destructive methods.

Suspicions first arose when book dealers noticed a spike in their income due to large orders from mysterious buyers for titles they assumed they’d never unload. Books on home oxygen treatment in Italy, marriage litigation in medieval England, Texas civil procedure in the twenty-tens, Swedish comedy in the sixties: these entities bought them all, and for whatever price the seller happened to be asking.

404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg tracked the path of one such book, which eventually wound up at a Las Vegas scanning facility run by Amazon. Though undergirded by advanced technology, the work done there is simple: digitize as many books as possible, then destroy them.

 

“In order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner,” Maiberg explained to NPR. Many are technically rare, albeit esoteric obscurities like vanity publications and old instruction manuals rather than first-edition classics. Humans may not value them, but LLMs do: their consumption forestalls “a problem called model collapse, where if an AI trains on AI training data, it gets worse.” Amazon and Anthropic have both been found to use the book-sacrificing method to harvest text, but every company with models to train needs a solution. All this makes for “an unusually on-the-nose example of digital technology devouring literary culture,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn puts it. But when you really have read the entire internet, perhaps extreme measures are inevitable.

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform (McSweeny's).]

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[ed. For young ones...The Book of Love (Monotones).]

On The Day Dolly Died

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Can We Be Honest?

The tricky side of the truth.

My first exposure to the work of philosopher Christian B. Miller came through his book The Character Gap, which came out in 2017. Have a gander at the cover; it’s sure to get your attention. Gandhi on one end of the spectrum, Hitler on the other. Where do I fall? Where do you fall? Our company, Full Focus, ran a book service for business leaders at the time, sharing two books a month. Business leaders need character, right? I eagerly shared it with our subscribers.

I’ve followed Christian and his work ever since, so I was excited to see his latest, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. As A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, where he heads up the Honesty Project, Christian has focused on ethics broadly, and honesty in particular, for many years. [...]

Given the amount of untruth we encounter on a daily basis, I wanted to talk with him about the challenges honesty faces in the world today.

Harry Frankfurt elevated the discussion of bullshit, most popularly in a 2005 book, On Bullshit, but even before that in a 1986 essay. Perhaps this is recency bias on my part—I remember being impressed by his book when it came out—like, “Wow, this is a new problem.” And it seems to have gotten worse—again, recency bias? What’s the state of bullshit in 2026, forty years after that initial essay?

I really liked Frankfurt’s famous essay when I first read it, and I still like it a lot today. It sheds a lot of philosophical light on the phenomenon of bullshit, and also has generated a fascinating literature extending his analysis to related notions like spin and horseshit.

But Frankfurt is working at the conceptual level. He’s not doing empirical assessment. And I am not either, so I am reticent to make any grand pronouncements about levels of BS today. I’d want to consult my colleague in the psychology department, John Petrocelli, who wrote a widely discussed book, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit.

From my armchair perspective as a philosopher, though, I completely agree with you. Bullshit involves making up things and yet presenting them as if they are factual, even though you don’t care about whether they are and instead are motivated by other considerations like self-interested gain.

In politics, without naming names, we seem to see this all the time today. Celebrities also have bigger platforms than ever before, and increasingly seem to make BS statements, perhaps to grow their celebrity status or to virtue signal. And strikingly, AI is producing waves of BS content, one notable instance of which is all the hallucinating going on of sources and citations. So I wouldn’t just chalk it up to recency bias.

When I think of honesty, I mostly regard it as a question of telling the truth. But as you point out, it includes a broad stroke of other concerns, including bullshitting, misdirection, cheating, hypocrisy, self-deception, even stealing. What’s the common thread? And why lump stealing in the mix?

Yes, I definitely have a broad conception of dishonest behavior, and thereby of corresponding forms of honest behavior. There are even more examples of dishonesty that could go on the list, like fraud. I add stealing as well, in order to capture ordinary thinking. Most people are going to say that someone who steals money from a retirement fund or a toy from a child, is not an honest person.

I have a bit of an abstract philosophical answer for what the common thread is. I say that you act honestly when you don’t intentionally distort or misrepresent the facts as you take them to be. For instance, if I told you in all sincerity that I am a grandmaster at chess, I am on purpose saying something that misrepresents what I know to not be the case. I am intentionally distorting the facts, as I see them, in my communication with you. An honest person wouldn’t do that.

Your definition of honesty involves not so much whether our beliefs are objectively true but whether we intentionally distort the facts as we understand them. So a person—and this explains at least half the tiffs on social media—can be both honest and wrong. Doesn’t this run the risk of substituting sincerity for truth?

That is an accurate depiction of my view. And it seems to me to be an unavoidable feature of how we think about honesty. Consider people thousands of years ago talking about the shape of the Earth. If they said the Earth was flat, they would have been honest back then, but objectively mistaken. If they were trying to pull a fast one on someone by saying the Earth was round, they would have been dishonest but correct. Honesty tracks the subjective truth, the truth as we see it, and not the truth as it really is.

So I have no problem saying that honesty is more closely aligned with sincerity than it is with the objective truth. The person 4,000 years ago was being sincere about the Earth being flat. And honest. But mistaken.

Flat-earthers, moon-landing denialists, chemtrailers, almost anything Candace Owens says—based on your definition, conspiracy theorists can be honest. Doesn’t that drag the moral burden upriver to how we form beliefs in the first place? Should we regard honesty as a separate virtue from epistemic humility and critical inquiry?

Yes, that’s correct as an implication of my view, and one that perhaps people will find controversial. But I am sticking to it for now.

And yes, you are also right about belief formation. Once a person genuinely believes that, say, the Earth is flat, and they tell you they believe this in the course of ordinary conversation, then I would say they are being honest about that belief.

But there is still a separate question of how they came to form the belief in the first place. One way is self-deceptively, which would clearly be dishonest. Another way, though, is innocently, perhaps because they had a very sheltered upbringing and never heard anything contrary to the view in question. In that case, I wouldn’t fault their honesty when it came to either the formation or the communication of their belief. Their trust was misplaced, but they had no chance to know any better.

These are all matters of intellectual honesty, I would say. It is indeed distinct from epistemic humility and critical inquiry, although highly correlated with both of them. For instance, the intellectually honest person uses tools of critical inquiry to try to get at the truth. That is one means to exercising their intellectually honesty.

The broader upshot is that honesty comes in different flavors (moral, intellectual, and perhaps others too), and they all need to be promoted.

How much responsibility do we bear for self-deception?

That’s probably the hardest question you’ve given me. I am not an expert on the philosophy of self-deception (although probably on the practice of it!). But I suspect the answer is that we often bear a lot of responsibility. Suppose I believe that my best friend is not using drugs. But then a lot of evidence starts to pile up—erratic behavior, strange meetings, needle marks on his arms, etc. Yet I ignore all of this evidence simply because I want to continue to believe that he is not a drug-user. It was my choice to ignore all the evidence to the contrary, and I thereby bear responsibility for doing so. This is a failure of intellectual honesty.

But things get tricky, as they always do when thinking about self-deception. Sometimes we improperly discount counter-evidence. Sometimes we overstate supporting evidence. Sometimes we selectively attend to certain pieces of evidence and not others. Sometimes these things happen more consciously and other times more subconsciously. There are many complicating factors.

Lying is relatively infrequent compared to honesty, according to the research you cite, and a small group of prolific liars tend to dominate. (I’m sure we can all think of a few examples.) If there is a crisis in honesty, how should we think about it?

In chapter two, I cover some encouraging results in the empirical literature on honesty, focusing mainly on this research on lying frequency. So if there is an honesty crisis, it is not there. We will need to look elsewhere.

First of all, let me clarify what I mean by an honesty crisis. I think of it as any situation in society where dishonesty has become both (1) more appealing or incentivized, and (2) harder to detect. That’s a bad combination.

In the book, I focus on six areas of society where I see honesty crises arising: education with AI student cheating; audio and video media with deepfakes; relationships with chatrooms, Ashley Madison, and online pornography; politics with the sharing of fake news; religion with sermon plagiarism; and celebrity culture with social media. Oh, and by the way, this list isn’t meant to be exhaustive.

by Joel J. Miller, Miller's Book Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed

One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in the past year is Noam Scheiber’s “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.” Scheiber presents a series of incisively reported profiles of young people who did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse. Their discontent, Scheiber concludes, isn’t explicitly economic or cultural or political but, rather, is what happens when people with degrees realize that what they thought was a temporary postgraduate job will almost certainly become their career. There is no dream job coming; the bridge is the road and the final destination. Combine that realization with the harsh reality of retail jobs, plus a revival of class solidarity and labor politics—thanks, in part, to Bernie Sanders—and the result is a highly educated and credentialled political movement that has swept leftist candidates into office across the country.

This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances. Then there are the Great Disappointed, a younger set. They don’t have strong memories of the 2008 financial crash, as their millennial elders do, but they came of age during the pandemic and saw that seemingly invincible institutions could, in fact, sputter and fail when placed under duress. Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote.

Pundits have many things to say about Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed, and almost all of it is at least partially true. Given that these voters are mostly white college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and forty, they are indeed “privileged” in the most boring sense of that word. They probably do spend a lot of time online. Many of them live in historically Black or immigrant neighborhoods where rent is cheaper, at least until enough of them move in and start opening coffee shops that play Stereolab or whatever. Economically, they might not be particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives. They vote at a high rate for their age, which is why they need to be taken seriously.

Many skeptics see a contradiction in high-achieving, mostly white young voters employing rhetoric about labor and solidarity. Every big Election Night for the leftists comes with the same eye-rolling complaint from centrists and the right: “Oh, great, some gentrifiers who went to Sarah Lawrence are cosplaying socialism and pretending they’re working class.” But all voting blocs come with some supposed contradictions; poor, non-college-educated voters regularly prefer candidates who support tax cuts for billionaires, for example. What this usually means is that the apparent contradiction isn’t particularly relevant for those voters or very revealing about their preferences. And a whole lot of people under the age of forty-five no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out in a given year have much to do with a healthy economy. They are concerned with the consolidation of wealth, the price of housing, the cost of child care, and student debt. And, absent an upheaval of the entire political establishment in this country, they don’t really see why anything would get better, even if they might admit that things are not so bad for them personally right now.

There’s another term for people who make an O.K. salary at a normal job but sometimes struggle to afford housing and child care: the middle class. No term in American politics is quite as slippery or misshapen. I imagine that the majority of Subaru Socialists in their thirties would resist the label, even if they make the median household income for their neighborhood and work a steady job that allows them to put away a modest amount of money each month in a retirement account. This resistance comes from a variety of sources, but it’s largely cultural: “middle class” suggests cul-de-sacs in the suburbs, moderate politics, and a career. The manager of a Starbucks or an enterprising but disgruntled gig-economy worker might pull down enough money to land in the middle class, but they will not feel the homogenizing stability and somewhat stultifying comfort they likely associate with the phrase.

During one of the many iterations of her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris started talking about something she called an “opportunity economy” that would lift the “middle class” out of despair. I recall thinking that I had no idea who she meant by the middle class: was she talking about postal workers and teachers in the Midwest whose communities had been ravaged by opioids and deindustrialization? Was she talking about nurses in New Jersey who were being priced out of their homes?

Harris was probably trying to talk to Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed. Her policy proposals during the “middle-class” phase of her campaign involved federal assistance on down payments for a first home, child tax credits for parents of newborns, and help if you wanted to start a small business. They might have benefitted someone living in the suburbs of Detroit, for instance—someone who graduated from Michigan State, say, and cobbles together about sixty-five thousand dollars a year through a retail job and Uber driving but dreams of opening her own coffee shop and starting a family. If that person heard Harris talking about “the middle class,” would she have assumed that Harris was talking about her? [...]

The problem for the Democratic establishment is that the Subaru Socialist does not believe that Harris and those like her have any interest in helping her out, even if they advance a slate of proposals that will undeniably get her closer to opening that coffee shop and starting that family. This helps to explain why the Biden Administration gets so little credit from the left for an economic policy drafted by former Elizabeth Warren staffers, or why nobody seems to care that Lina Khan, who currently chairs the board of the New York City Economic Development Corporation under Zohran Mamdani, actually held a much more important position under Biden. Absent a truly transformative and well-marketed idea such as universal health care, there’s nothing an establishment candidate can do to satisfy the Subaru Socialists, because the bad deal they were sold as children—study, go to college, and you’ll find yourself in a better place than your parents—has led to a fundamental discontentment with the way things are.

by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. Sounds about right. See also: What if our biggest problems aren’t economic? (Noahpinion) which argues that most political fixes are usually economic in nature (healthcare reform, tax credits, inflation, class inequality, etc.) when dissatisfaction might be more about material scarcity. That is, a sense of longing for a more cohesive society that provides more opportunities for status, growth and respect (and not just nationally, but globally too, eg., Palestine). Basically, life-fulfillment issues.]

NFL Pro Bowl: Good Bye and Good Riddance

He was a salty old dog, the wrinkled skin on his bare torso stained and worn like a faded leather wallet. For the price of a Longboard Lager or three, this sketchy surf bum had a story to tell.

“Have you heard of the Beach Boys?” he asked, hoping to lure us in like a fisherman stalking an Ono offshore of Waikiki Beach, which happened to be the majestic setting in our field of vision. Duh, the looks on our faces said, but our uninvited table guest wasn’t waiting for the answer. His long, disjointed tale ended with him revealing that he was, in fact, the hidden “sixth — or actually seventh” member of the storied band.

And then, with a flourish, he burped so loudly that it almost spoiled a perfect sunset.

While understandably dubious of the claim’s legitimacy, John Elway took it all in with a bemused smile — and ordered up another round of sashimi and beers. The legendary quarterback was in the best mood ever as the sun disappeared under the Pacific Ocean on that late-January evening in 1998, about 72 hours removed from finally winning the Super Bowl on his fourth try.

It had been a whirlwind: Hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after leading the Denver Broncos to an upset of the Green Bay Packers in San Diego; going up the coast to Disneyland as part of the obligatory promotional campaign; returning to Denver for a parade; hopping on a flight to paradise. Upon landing in Honolulu, Elway and his head coach, Mike Shanahan, had come straight here, to the Barefoot Bar at Duke’s Waikiki, where the celebration would continue long past golden hour.

“I Get Around” might as well have blared from the beachfront speakers. Come to think of it, that probably happened, too.

When I think about the heyday of the Pro Bowl, which was officially eliminated Wednesday after a long, dubious decline, I marvel at the multitude of casual, unguarded moments that football’s biggest names routinely experienced upon leaving the continent. Getting swept up in poolside chess drama between the late, great San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau and future Los Angeles Chargers coach Jim Harbaugh is one of many examples near and dear to my heart.

Though Elway didn’t play for the AFC in that 1998 Pro Bowl — he withdrew with an ankle “injury” and was replaced by another future first-ballot Hall of Famer, Warren Moon — there was a reason he bothered to show up. In Hawaii, even on Oahu’s most storied and crowded beach, a superstar could blend in while being chatted up by the Seventh Beach Boy. And for one week each year, even a culture as regimented and hyper-serious as the NFL’s could channel some fun in the sun.

From 1980 to 2009, the Pro Bowl enjoyed an uninterrupted, three-decade run at rickety Aloha Stadium as the soothing capstone of the NFL season. Players acclimated to island time, cherished the collective exhale and staged a stripped-down showcase of their sport. Coaches wore flower-print shirts and leis and unfashionable shades. Viewers saw a low-stress spectacle that typically ramped up in the fourth quarter, when players started caring about the difference in checks (sometimes as little as a few thousand dollars) doled out to participants on the winning and losing teams.

For the league’s standout performers and their families, the week in Hawaii that immediately followed the Super Bowl was a reward for a job well done. And as word spread of Pro Bowl week’s breezy vibe, plenty of non-stars started paying their own way to join the party, too.

The late Russ Francis, a native Hawaiian who became an All-Pro tight end and Super Bowl champion during a standout career with the New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers in the 1970s and ’80s, put it this way when I interviewed him for a “Sports Illustrated” feature in 1996: “The Pro Bowl is a celebration of football. It’s the one time when players can let down their guard, enjoy their status and revel in the joys of their profession. It’s camaraderie and adventure — the way football used to be.”

Even when those adventures bordered on the farcical, nobody seemed to mind all that much. [...]

On the field, the action was typically far from idyllic, but the games got reasonably good ratings and served as a gentle bedtime tuck-in for the sport after a long, draining season. The league started messing with the Pro Bowl, however — beginning in 2010, when the powers that be moved it over to the mainland (Miami) and shifted it into the Sunday slot between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl — and the vibe quickly degenerated.

Though the game returned to Hawaii in 2011 and stayed there through 2016 (aside from a 2015 interlude in Arizona), the Pro Bowl quickly lost its luster and any sense of legitimacy. It essentially jumped the shark in 2012, when the action looked so bogus that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell publicly threatened to cancel the event if players didn’t start trying.

Two years later the league scrapped the AFC vs. NFC format in favor of a silly draft between Hall of Fame honorary captains (beginning with Rice and Sanders), creating a sense of confusion among consumers. In 2019, former Cowboys tight end Jason Witten, as part of ESPN’s broadcast crew, unwittingly broke the trophy in half while congratulating AFC stars Patrick Mahomes and Jamal Adams, providing a fitting metaphor for the state of the event.

By 2023 the NFL gave up any pretense of staging an actual game, replacing the Pro Bowl with a skills competition that culminated with a flag football. On Wednesday, the league officially pulled the plug, and few (if any) tears were shed.

I’m not shedding any, either. Change is part of life. The Pro Bowl had its blessed run in the island sun but was not destined to last forever.

by Michael Silver, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images
[ed. Glad this debacle has finally been killed off. Still, there were moments. Teams would sometimes practice at my old high school football field (McKinley HS) in Honolulu. Got to see big Jim Plunkett throwing bullets, and Lynn Swann running routes and making catches. After one game I almost got OJ Simpson's chin strap but at the last moment he gave it to the kid next to me, saying he'd promised it to him. Chris Collinsworth was there one year and had a good game. But it was always just a play show, an embarassment with coaches wearing outrageous Aloha shirts, bedecked in leis, and more often than not just joking around between plays, barely paying attention. So yeah, don't think anyone will miss it. See also: The NFL finally put the Pro Bowl out of its misery. It was time (Athletic):]

***

The National Football League finally cried uncle on the Pro Bowl, and, of all things, the petrified remains of LIV Golf quickly came to mind.

Just more evidence that no matter how much money and power are behind it, you cannot sell a meaningless, watered-down product to consumers even as insatiable as sports fans. The mighty NFL proved over the years it can sell just about anything to just about anyone, except the Pro Bowl, which should have been eulogized a long time ago. [...]

It’s stunning the Pro Bowl actually survived for more than 70 years in a sport defined by violence, the long-term toll taken on players’ bodies and brains, and this unassailable fact:

You can play worthwhile football at only one speed — full. [...]

And in the dead of winter, it used to be pretty cool to absorb those televised scenes from Hawaii and to see Bill Belichick huddling with his strange AFC bedfellow, Peyton Manning.

But whatever redeeming qualities remained were sacrificed when the Pro Bowl became the Pro Bowl Games, and when the main event became a flag football contest that ultimately included a sixth alternate at quarterback.

They Said It Could Not Be Done

They said that it could not be done, he said just let me try.

They said, “Other men have tried and failed,” and he answered, 

“But not I.”

They said, “It is impossible,” he said, “There is no such word.”
He closed his mind, he closed his heart to everything he heard.

He said, “Within the heart of man, there is a tiny seed.
It grows until it blossoms, it’s called the will to succeed.
Its roots are strength, its stem is hope, its petals inspiration,
Its thorns protect its strong green leaves, its grim determination.

“Its stamens are its skills which help to shape each plan,
For there’s nothing in the universe beyond the scope of man.”

They thought that it could not be done, some even said they knew it,
But he faced up to what could not be done, and he couldn’t bloody do it!

~ Benny Hill

[ed. Yes, that Benny Hill.]

Lake Whatever

Trump executive order changes name of Lake Ontario to Lake America

Image: Al Drago/UPI

[ed. The childish stupidity is mind-boggling. Even after everything else. Thanks again, voters.]

Daniel Hsu
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A Future of Programmable Medicine

What if instead of editing a harmful gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal chemists, who heroically navigate maybe the hardest field in biomedicine. Rather, what I mean is this. A biologist might have a clear hypothesis about how to stop a disease, such as: blocking a particular protein will lower blood cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. Naturally enough, the biologist would like to test that hypothesis. But there is no magic button to switch off this protein; something physical has to do the blocking. Usually, that thing is a small chemical carefully designed to be administered into the body, bind to the protein, block it – and do nothing else. In practice, this almost never goes as planned, which is a major reason most drugs fail in clinical trials.

It’s worse than this: medicinal chemists struggle to come up with ways to interact with most proteins at all. The majority of human proteins are considered ‘undruggable’, meaning that none of the small molecules we can currently synthesize can effectively bind to them, either because those proteins lack a convenient pocket for drugs to attach to or because they are ‘intrinsically disordered’, with little coherent structure. Drug discovery ends up focusing on the minority of targets that are druggable, like the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because that’s where the light shines.

Even for those targets, success is far from guaranteed. A drug that works in the lab might be broken down in the body before it reaches its target protein, interfere with other proteins and cause toxic side effects, or fail to be absorbed and distributed to the right tissues. Our ability to predict what small molecule drugs will do in the body is so poor that even if the drug works, it might be for a different reason than originally hypothesized!

But what if, instead of spending years optimizing small molecule chemistry to treat just one disease, and all that work merely delivering a sharp reminder that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, there really was a magic button to switch off any gene we chose? In that case, we could treat not just high cholesterol but dozens of deadly diseases, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes to Huntington’s disease.

Welcome to the world of siRNA therapy.

Silencing genes

The story of siRNA begins in 1990, when the scientists at the DNA Plant Technology Corporation in California were trying to figure out why their petunias turned white. They had actually been trying to make their petunias darker, by adding an extra copy of the gene for an enzyme that produces pigment. Presumably, adding an extra copy of a gene for an enzyme would mean more enzyme and therefore more pigment. But somehow, the extra copy eliminated the enzyme’s production, rather than boosting it. They named this baffling effect ‘cosuppression’. Subsequent work by other researchers revealed its cause: a special kind of RNA molecule, siRNA, had interfered with the enzyme’s production. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello later won a Nobel prize for this discovery.

Biologists had already known about RNA for several decades. Similar to DNA, RNA is a complex molecule built from a chain of smaller building blocks that encode genetic information. But the two differ in one important detail: the building blocks of RNA have one extra oxygen atom compared to DNA (hence its name, ribonucleic acid, as opposed to DNA’s ‘deoxy’-ribonucleic acid). This oxygen is prone to chemical reactions that can break RNA molecules. DNA is stabler and is therefore used to store genetic information in all multicellular life. RNA molecules tend to be short-lived, and take many different forms within cells, carrying instructions, helping to assemble proteins, regulating genes, and catalyzing reactions. And while DNA is ‘double-stranded’, with two linked strands of building blocks twisting into its famous helix shape, RNA often exists as just one strand.

DNA contains the instructions for making proteins, from the enzymes that digest food to the keratin and collagen that form our hair and skin. But to get from DNA to protein, the genetic code is first transcribed into an intermediate RNA molecule, called ‘messenger RNA’ or mRNA, which is then translated into protein. If the mRNA is destroyed, the protein won’t be built.

That’s exactly what siRNA, or ‘small interfering RNA’, does: it’s a short strand of RNA that interferes with the production of protein by destroying mRNA. An siRNA molecule binds to a piece of mRNA with a matching sequence, like a kind of barcode, and targets it for destruction by the cell’s gene-silencing machinery, which cuts the mRNA into pieces.

siRNA also explains what happened in the petunias. Adding an extra copy of the pigment-producing gene triggered the petunias to develop siRNA targeting that sequence, and because the newly introduced gene and the original gene shared the same sequence, both were silenced, the flowers lost their pigment and turned white. This is a naturally occurring process: siRNA is used to ‘silence’ unwanted genes, such as those of viruses that have entered the cell. But we can also use it to artificially block the production of proteins that cause disease.

by Jacob Witten, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects

A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive.

“Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation, and a staggering share of that spending is consumed by administrative middlemen, soaring drug prices, and emergency care for conditions that should have been treated earlier and for less,” said senior author Alison Galvani, the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at YSPH and the director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis. “Medicare for All strips out those sources of waste while providing everyone with healthcare, saving over a trillion dollars and 114,000 lives every year.”

The model identified five major sources of savings: lower pharmaceutical prices, Medicare-level payments to providers, reduced administrative overhead, less fraudulent billing, and fewer avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Even under more conservative assumptions about drug prices and fraud reduction, the researchers projected that the savings would reach at least $663 billion a year. Both figures account for an estimated $304 billion in additional spending to meet unmet medical needs, reimburse care that now goes unpaid, and provide universal dental coverage.

A universal healthcare policy would also save tens of thousands of lives, the researchers project. They estimate that adequate coverage for all could avert about 62,863 deaths annually — and that nearly half, or 29,631, would be among people who already hold insurance. These are the underinsured: the more than 45 million working-age adults whose deductibles and cost-sharing put care beyond financial reach anyway. Reversing coverage rollbacks and other health policies enacted since 2025 would avert a further 51,311 deaths each year, the researchers project, bringing the annual total to 114,174.

The study builds on findings Galvani, co-author Meagan Fitzpatrick, and other colleagues published in The Lancet in 2020, which projected that universal health care would save $450 billion and more than 68,000 lives annually. The larger estimates in the new study reflect ballooning health expenditures, a widening gap between commercial and Medicare payment rates, and new estimates on recent policy changes and the underinsured.

by Alison Galvani PhD, Yale School of Public Health |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Or we could give it all to Pistol Pete and enjoy more fireworks over Iran.]

Hannelie Coetzee (South African) - Hyena Clan V, 2023
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Flock You

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[ed. In Texas, a sheriff’s deputy used 83,000 Flock ALPRs to find a woman who had allegedly had a medication abortion, at the behest of her abusive partner. See also: The IJ Database of ALPR Abuse (IJ); and, Flock Safety Camera Appeared Overnight Aimed at His House (Yahoo News).]

The Medium Eats the Message

[ed. Expectations of privacy in communications are dead.]

You owe your belief that your mail is private, that no one should read it without your permission, to a British schoolteacher named Rowland Hill, whose 1837 pamphlet, Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, changed mail forever. Even your vague trust that your electronic mail (texts, Signal chats, email) is private, you owe to Hill, because even your Signal chats bear the traces of his policy of prepaid anonymity.

Hill saw postal delivery as wasteful and expensive. The price varied, depending on distance and number of sheets, and it was paid by the recipient, who could just refuse to accept. Hill began collecting sad stories of failure: urgent letters sitting for weeks at the postmaster’s, parents pawning clothes to pay for a letter from a child. Instead, Hill proposed, why not have the sender pay in advance, a flat rate, with a stamp (one penny). Parliament liked the idea and this is how the mail has worked since January 10, 1840 (though the price of stamps has naturally gone up).

As Hill predicted, everyone started sending letters, now that it was affordable. Mail volume doubled in the first year, from about 76 million to about 169 million. Volume passed 300 million by 1850 and kept climbing for a century and a half, peaking in 2004–05 at about twenty billion a year. It is about seven billion now. The US adopted pre-paid stamped mail in 1847.

More importantly your mail was now private. Under the old system, clerks counted sheets to figure the price, which meant handling and close inspection. An envelope counted as a sheet of paper, so most people folded their letters and sealed them with wax. In 1845 Hill’s brother Edwin, with a stationer named Warren De La Rue, patented an envelope-folding machine. By the end of the decade in the US and the UK everyone was using envelopes (which are officially called “covers”).

The envelope, or cover, gave you the presumption of privacy, legally. In the US, the Post Office Act of 1792 had already forbidden postal officials to open letters except when they couldn’t be delivered. In 1878 the Supreme Court included the sealed letter under the Fourth Amendment. Ex parte Jackson held that letters and sealed packages could only be opened with a warrant. [...]

Everyone sent email like they sent mail: candidly, embarrassingly, filled with gossip, complaints, things a spouse isn’t supposed to know about, dirty jokes. The privacy of email seems to be just as sacred. Congress had extended wiretap protection to electronic mail early, in 1986, on the theory that a message in transit was like a letter in transit. A system administrator could read your mail but was not supposed to. Such invasions of privacy became firing and disciplinary offenses.

Email feels personal and private to people. It works 99% of the time, unless someone’s bulk email list is wrong. You don’t get email that isn’t yours. Your address is a string: local part, @, domain. Some people have had the same address now for decades.

But very early on came the junk mail problem. In August 2002 Paul Graham published “A Plan for Spam,” and within two years the presumption of email privacy ended. Most people have no idea about this history. Graham was mad about the sheer amount of spam. The idea was software to filter your email by word phrases to separate out the junk. At first the software was just for you to put on your computer. Within a year, email providers were putting the software on the channel. There was no big announcement. Getting rid of spam seemed worth it.

Enter Gmail in April 2004. Google was transparent about the idea they’d read your email to funnel you appropriate ads. Privacy groups were appalled. A California state senator, Liz Figueroa, introduced a bill to block it. European organizations asked the British and German governments to investigate. Google shrugged and said scanning your mail is what antivirus and anti-spam software already do. What are you complaining about? By 2013, defending a wiretap suit in federal court, Google argued that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties. Having your email scanned is expected in the ordinary course of business.

And yet people kept sending emails as if they were private. In 2003, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made public roughly half a million internal Enron emails. Everyone just chatting away candidly like people in every organization do. The Sony hack in 2014 showed that nothing changed, as do the emails in the Epstein files: plain language, real names, embarrassing remarks. In the latter case, there are people who really should have known better.

A sent message exists in at least four places: the sender’s outbox, the sender’s server, the recipient’s server, and the recipient’s inbox. Corporate servers may hold mail for decades. Brokers must keep business email three to six years under SEC Rule 17a-4; federal agencies keep senior officials’ email permanently under the Federal Records Act. Once a lawsuit is anticipated, any deletion becomes an offense. Nothing in the postal system worked this way. Undeliverable mail went to Washington and eventually was burnt.

Everything changed again in November 2022 with ChatGPT, which saw a hundred million users within two months. Everyone was chatting just like on email, presuming privacy.

There’s no envelope with an LLM. There is no routing layer separate from interpretation; there’s no channel distinct from message. In this case the medium not only is the message it also eats the message, to turn it into training data.

When you’re prompting ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSeek there is no other party. Sender, carrier, addressee—the singularity is the point where three collapse into one. You are not sending a message through anything to anyone. The LLM is the addressee and you are desiring your message to be read and replied to.

On a July 2025 podcast Sam Altman said out loud that people talk about the most personal things in their lives to ChatGPT, that young people especially chat with it like it was a therapist or a life coach, asking for relationship advice. But unlike therapists, lawyers, or doctors, none of it is protected by privilege. Should there be AI privilege? [...]

Interpretation is the service with LLMs, not delivery. The model cannot not read and digest everything you send. That is the whole point. (And this is why I am deliberately impersonal in my extensive LLM engagement.)

And now agents. The postal system, with its categories of sender, carrier, recipient, never anticipated this. As Tyler Cowen and Sonia Farrell Pearson point out in their recent piece “Capitalizing Untethered AI Agents,” “the thing deciding and the thing being blamed come apart.” You authorized the agent to complete a task but you may not have authorized it to write a particular letter. Were a court to compel disclosure of your agent’s communication, who is the author?

Your agent may have contracted with vendors who did not know they were contracting with an agent. The recipient has no way to know who sent the message.

Is your agent a third party? If it is, then nothing is private per Smith v. Maryland. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If it is not, it’s a tool, an extension of you, like your pen or your hard drive. Giving instructions to your agent is like talking to yourself. Of course the “tool” runs on OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s servers…

by Hollis French, Anecdotal Value |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. And Edward Snowden is still exiled in Russia.]

The Ordinary Sublime of the American Diner

We had our first taste of pecan pie. Good lord. Do the Americans know how lucky they are to live with these everyday indulgences? Pecan pie is part of the ordinary sublime of American life. It knocks English apple crumble into a cocked hat. Apple crumble can be superb, with a crunchy topping, preferably with the sort of spice mix one associates with Christmas, mince pies, and mulled wine (and a pinch of cumin to go with the cinnamon), and perhaps some pear to balance the apple and squares of dark chocolate, but it is still the old world’s idea of a good time.

Pecan pie, served hot, à la mode, in a diner that looks older than my grandmother—that’s luxury, that’s life in the movies, that’s America. Apple crumble is for weekends, Sunday lunch, something you make at home. Whoever heard of a restaurant serving apple crumble like the ladies of the village used to make it? By contrast, pecan pie is for everyone, every day, whenever you feel like it. No Englishman ever asked a friend if they wanted to go for a serving of crumble the way Americans go out for coffee and a slice of pie.

We were in a diner in Bethesda, complete with the original fixtures and fittings, surrounded by people eating country fried steak, chicken tenders, and pancakes for lunch, with a jukebox at the table that no longer plays, and those Maxwell House coffee pots that are found in the old diners that have seen generations come and go. The wooden booths are reminiscent of the origins of fast food and diners: the railway carriage restaurant. They are reminiscent, too, of church pews. All along 16th Street NW, which you drive out of DC to get up to this corner of Maryland, there are the sort of churches that made America: large, level, open, well-lit, from the Protestant tradition where everyone is on a level. Diners are still, just about, America’s secular churches. Every man is a success in a diner: equal among eaters.

When I went to New York for work, and regretted the lack of time to do anything real, I got up early, went to a quiet diner run by a wizened old man on Second Avenue, and read the New York Times with my refill. In Boston, more than a decade ago, we walked through the ice-cold air to find the diner we were recommended. Police officers were eating muffins and everyone had those characteristic blue-and-white coffee cups. In Wisconsin, I travelled from Milwaukee to Madison to Taliesin, and whenever I could, I went to a diner. Whatever else we remember of America, we will always remember the Gettysburg Family Restaurant.

If there is a “real America” (though why Manhattan and the DMV are not always considered to be the “real America” is beyond me: if these are not the heart of a certain idea of America, with their (what?) twenty-million people, I cannot think what is), you will find it in these diners. Blue jeans, tattoos, happy children, friendly-busy waiters and waitresses, laminated menus, eggs any way you like ’em, a waffle on the side, families out for lunch, locals, road trippers, everything all day, the dignity of a booth no matter how little you have to spend, coffee you don’t have to wait for, period crockery, the hum of conversation and the clang of the kitchen, paying the cashier at the register, blueberry pie, peanut soup, maple bacon, the good old American hamburger, side salads, fried cheese, baked chicken, any combination you want, daily specials, and everything just like mother used to make it. America the way we remember her, the way we imagine her, the way she still sometimes can be.

And hot pecan pie, à la mode: a small plate of delight for anyone with $4.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: Lee Cartledge on Unsplash

Les frères Chapuisat, “Pierre philosophale” (2013)
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Doublet x Beta Post Tuna Head Bag, AW26

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Pre-Columbian Masks
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Inside the Modern Sports Media Ecosystem

Up until just the past decade or so, sports media felt relatively straightforward. Journalists covered games, broadcasters delivered live action, and fans consumed content through a handful of established channels. That world still exists, but it is no longer the full picture.

Today’s sports media ecosystem is layered, interconnected, and constantly evolving. Traditional media brands now coexist with club media teams, independent creators, analytics specialists, and commercial partners, all competing for the same audience attention.

The result is an industry that offers more entry points than ever before, yet demands a deeper understanding of how the system truly works.

To build a career in sports media today, it is no longer enough to ask, “How do I become a journalist?” The better question is: “Where do I fit within the ecosystem?”

A multi-trillion-dollar industry that runs on attention

Understanding sports media starts with recognising its scale. The broader entertainment and media sector continues to expand globally, reaching roughly $2.9 trillion in revenue in 2024 and projected to grow steadily toward $3.5 trillion by the end of the decade.

Sport sits at the heart of that growth. Media rights, advertising, sponsorships, and digital engagement are now primary revenue drivers, meaning storytelling is no longer just editorial work; it is economic infrastructure. Brands, leagues, broadcasters, and platforms are all fighting to capture and monetize fan attention in an increasingly fragmented landscape.

The global sports market itself continues to grow rapidly, with projections suggesting steady expansion driven by investment, infrastructure, and digital innovation.

For newcomers, this is the first major insight: sports media is no longer a single profession. It is an ecosystem of roles shaped by business models, technology, and audience behaviour.

The rise of the distributed media model

One of the most significant shifts of the past five years has been the breakdown of traditional media boundaries. Streaming platforms, social video, and direct-to-consumer channels are redefining how stories reach fans. Streaming now dominates a majority of viewing time in many markets, reflecting a massive behavioural shift away from linear television.

At the same time, legacy broadcasters are reinventing themselves. ESPN’s move toward a direct-to-consumer streaming model, for example, illustrates how even the biggest brands must adapt to cord-cutting and changing fan expectations.

This transformation has reshaped the media ecosystem into a network rather than a hierarchy. Instead of a single editorial gatekeeper deciding which stories matter, content now flows across multiple platforms simultaneously, from live broadcasts and newsletters to TikTok clips and podcast interviews.

For those entering the industry, this means career paths are no longer linear. A sports media professional might write articles, produce short-form video, manage athlete content, and collaborate with commercial teams, often within the same role.

Who actually tells sports stories today?

Look behind any major sports narrative in 2026 and you will find a diverse mix of contributors.

Journalists and editors still play a vital role, shaping narratives and maintaining editorial standards. But they now operate alongside club media departments producing documentary-style content, communications teams managing messaging, analysts turning data into storytelling assets, and independent creators building niche audiences.

Technology has accelerated this diversification. Generative AI tools, analytics platforms, and social media dashboards allow smaller teams to produce content at scale, creating new opportunities but also raising the bar for skills and adaptability.

The ecosystem is therefore less about job titles and more about functions. Someone entering sports media might begin as a writer but gradually evolve into a hybrid role that combines reporting, content strategy, and audience engagement.

Why the ecosystem feels more competitive (and more open) than ever

There is a paradox at the heart of modern sports media.

On one hand, the industry is expanding, with new platforms and monetisation models opening doors. On the other, traditional newsroom jobs have become less stable due to restructuring, consolidation, and the rise of automation.

This tension is shaping how careers are built. Rather than relying solely on a single employer or traditional pathway, many professionals now develop their own personal platforms while collaborating with organisations on specific projects.

The competition for fan attention has intensified as well. Deloitte’s outlook highlights how sports organisations must innovate constantly, using data, digital experiences, and storytelling to remain relevant.

For newcomers, this means opportunity exists, but only for those willing to understand the full ecosystem rather than focusing on one narrow entry point.

Technology isn’t replacing storytelling

Artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation are changing how content is created and distributed, but they are not removing the need for human storytellers. Instead, technology is redefining what storytelling looks like.

AI tools can now generate highlights, automate commentary, and personalise content for millions of fans at once. Yet the demand for authentic voices, original reporting, and compelling narratives remains strong because connection (not just information) drives engagement.

At the same time, social platforms and streaming ecosystems allow creators to reach audiences directly. Digital distribution and data-driven advertising are enabling more personalised experiences, which in turn increases the need for media professionals who understand audience behaviour and narrative strategy.

The modern ecosystem therefore rewards those who can combine storytelling instincts with digital awareness.

What this means for people entering the industry

The biggest shift in 2026 is not technological, it is structural. The sports media ecosystem is no longer defined by a single career path. Instead, it resembles a network of interconnected roles that blend journalism, production, marketing, and communication.

by Sports Media Huddle |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Keith Allison

[ed. See also: The Role of a Sports Producer in Live Broadcast Production (SVG);  Understanding the Key Players in Audiovisual Production (JN); and, Sports commentator (Wikipedia).]

China’s View of America Has Changed From Alarm to a Shrug

There is no shortage of Western commentary on US President Donald Trump’s second term. What’s missing is an honest account of how 1.4 billion of us in China see it – or at least how China’s officials and scholars do, since that’s who I can speak for here. I’ve spent a decade watching that view change, from real alarm in 2017 to something closer to a shrug today.
Four things now count as consensus among Chinese scholars. One, Trump is undermining America’s alliance system. His first term rattled Washington’s furniture. His second is dismantling the house. He has purged the civil service, stretched executive power, taxed friend and foe alike, and gutted America’s contribution to global public goods.

He appears to be governing for the next election, not the next generation – and this is speeding up the arrival of a multipolar world.

Two, hostility to China is bipartisan in Washington, but Trump’s version comes with a price tag, which we find oddly reassuring. When tariffs on Chinese goods hit 145 per cent last year, American retailers, farmers and manufacturers howled, inflation bit and the White House backed into a truce. The lesson we draw: his toughness is a negotiating tactic, not a crusade. That leaves room to manage the relationship.

Three, pressure has been a poor substitute for actual containment. The 2018 trade war spooked Chinese firms. By 2026, the mood has flipped. Turns out sanctions are quite good at building the thing they’re meant to prevent.

Chinese chipmakers have scaled up mature 28-nanometre production. Home-grown chip-design software now holds a quarter of the domestic market. Solar panels and electric vehicles have found new buyers across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. America’s share of China’s trade shrank.

Four, the real contest is in governance, and time is on China’s side. American policy lurches with every election. China’s five-year plans, for better or worse, tend to survive them. America still leads in technology and firepower, but we’re betting that policy continuity and industrial scale will keep narrowing the gap.

Add those four up and what you get is less an argument than a mood – of relaxed, quiet confidence.

Eight years ago, China absorbed Trump’s tariffs and improvised. Now it hits back with tools – export controls on rare earths, a blacklist of “unreliable” foreign firms, tariffs of our own on energy – while building alternatives to Washington-led institutions through Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Belt and Road Initiative. It has gone from rule-taker to rule-shaper.

China is not trying to beat the United States. It is trying to improve the lives of its people, hit what we call “common prosperity” and complete national rejuvenation, by which we mean restoring China to what we see as its rightful place in the world.

That is both the official and our genuine position. Winning was never the goal. But if you improve your country enough, for long enough, overtaking the country that used to be ahead is simply what ends up happening.

In wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles, Chinese firms now account for more than half of global capacity, output and exports. The country has built the world’s largest ultra-high-voltage grid and energy storage system, which is how it moves power from where the sun and wind are to where the people are. A state-run satellite network monitors carbon emissions, giving global, high-precision coverage. China has become the country that sets the standard for what a green transition looks like.

In AI, America still leads on chips and the underlying algorithms, but China claims the lead on deployment: government services, smart manufacturing and smart cities. In space, the comparison we Chinese scholars like to draw is with Starlink – commercial, narrow, built for coverage – against China’s broader, state-run programme: crewed missions, lunar exploration, the BeiDou satellite network and the Tiangong space station. [...]

There are caveats. America still has the deepest capital markets, the best universities, and decades of accumulated research. China still lags in precision manufacturing and some industrial software; external pressure is squeezing its exports in the short term; and the wider geopolitical picture remains genuinely unstable. I’ll admit these caveats read a little like the fine print below an advert for something you didn’t need.

Ten years ago, many of us held an admiring, almost idealised view of America. That’s gone.

We credit America’s historical contribution to the modern world. We also see, clearly now, 20 years of financial excess, winner-takes-all politics and social fracture. The Trump years have been a blessing in disguise: the pressure stings now, but it is forcing China to fix its weaknesses faster. We don’t reject competing with America. We’d rather China compete without conflict, and coexist.

by Wang Wen, South China Morning Post |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

[ed. A rational, coordinated national policy in action. Unfortunately, not ours.]