Here Come the Beetles

The nearly 100-year-old Wailua Municipal Golf Course is home to more than 580 coconut trees. It’s also one of Kaua‘i’s most visible sites for coconut rhinoceros beetle damage.

Located makai of Kūhiō Highway, trees that would normally have full, verdant leaves are dull and have V-shaped cuts in their fronds. Some are bare and look more like matchsticks.

It’s not for lack of trying to mitigate the invasive pest. The trees’ crowns have been sprayed with a pesticide twice, and the trunks were injected twice with a systemic pesticide for longer term protection.

The Kaua‘i Department of Parks & Recreation maintains that even though the trees still look damaged, the treatments are working. Staff have collected 1,679 fallen, dead adult beetles over the last three years.

The most recent treatment, a systemic pesticide that travels through the trees’ vascular systems, was done in January 2025. While crown sprays kill the beetle on contact, systemic pesticides require the beetles to feed from the trees to die. The bugs eat the trees’ hearts — where new fronds develop — so it can take months for foliage damage to appear.

 

“The general public sees these trees that are damaged and thinks, ‘Oh my goodness they’re getting whacked,’ but in actuality, we need them to get whacked to kill (the beetles),” said Patrick Porter, county parks director.

But with the beetles continuing to spread around the island, the county is increasingly turning its attention to green waste, mulch piles and other breeding sites, where beetles spend four to six months growing from eggs to adults. A single adult female beetle can lay up to 140 eggs in her lifetime.

“The reality is if you don’t go after the larvae and you don’t go after your mulch cycle, you’re just pissing in the wind,” said Kaua‘i County Council member Fern Holland. “Because there are just going to be hundreds and hundreds of them hatching all the time, and you can’t go after all of them.” (...)

Last May, the County Council allocated $100,000 for invasive species and another $100,000 for CRB. It was the first time the county designated funds specifically to address the beetle.

Niki Kunioka-Volz, economic development specialist with the Kaua‘i Office of Economic Development, said none of that funding has been spent yet. They’re considering using it to help get the breeding site at the Wailua golf course under control, such as by purchasing an air curtain burner, a fan-powered incinerator of sorts to dispose of green waste. The burner could also be a tool for the broader community. (...)

In 2024, the county received $200,000 from the state Department of Agriculture. That money was used for a CRB outreach campaign, training CRB detection dogs and distributing deterrent materials. State funding was also expected to help the county purchase a curtain burner, but that plan fell through.

Earlier this month, state legislators threatened to cut invasive species funding from the newly expanded Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity over its slow progress in curbing threats such as coconut rhinoceros beetles.

“I’d like to see the pressure put on them to release the funds to the counties,” Holland said.

by Noelle Fujii-Oride, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Kevin Fujii/David Croxford/Civil Beat
[ed. Tough, ugly, able to leap sleeping bureaucrats in a single bound. See also: As Palm-Killing Beetles Spread On Big Island, State Action Is Slow (CB):]

***

It has been nearly two years since the first rhinoceros coconut beetle was discovered on Hawaiʻi island. And yet, despite ongoing concern by residents, the state is moving slowly in devising its response.

Seven months ago, the state’s Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity said it would begin working to stop the spread of CRB, within and beyond North Kona. But a meeting of the agency’s board Tuesday marked the first concrete step to do so by regulators. Now, as agriculture department staff move to streamline and resolve apparent issues in the proposed regulations, it will likely take until March for the board to consider implementing them.

Many of the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting, including residents of other islands, said that the state is lagging on its pledge to regulate the movement of agricultural materials while the destructive pest is spreading and killing both the island’s coconut palms and its endangered, endemic loulu palms.

The First Two Years

Before making landfall on Hawaiʻi island in 2023, the beetles spent almost a decade in apparent confinement on Oʻahu.

At first they appeared to be isolated to Waikoloa. Then, in March of last year, larvae and beetles were discovered at Kona International Airport and the state-owned, 179-acre Keāhole Agriculture Park, before spreading further.

In response, the county implemented a voluntary order to discourage the movement of potentially-infested live plants, mulch and green waste, and other landscaping materials such as compost from the area in June 2025. The order was described as “a precursor to a mandatory compliance structure” to be implemented by the state, according to a press release from the time. (...)

The board spent about an hour considering the petition and hearing testimony. And while many who testified made recommendations about actual protocol that might be put into place, the board merely voted to move forward in the process. So it’s not yet clear whether it will adopt the Big Island petitioner’s proposed rules or create its own.

If You Want That Tattoo Erased It’s Going to Hurt and It’s Going to Cost You

Colin Farrell’s had it done — many times. So have Angelina Jolie and Megan Fox. Heck, even Bart Simpson did.

Whether it’s Marilyn Monroe’s face, Billy Bob Thornton’s name, a sultry rose or even Bart’s partially inscribed homage to his mother, some tattoos simply have to go for one reason or many others.

But the process of taking them off is longer, much more costly and ouch — extremely more painful than getting them put on, according to professionals in the industry.

Also, due to health reasons, some souls who braved the ink needle, should be wary of the laser when having their body art erased or covered up.

Tattoos have been around for centuries

The oldest known tattoos were found on remains of a Neolithic man who lived in the Italian Alps around 3,000 B.C. Many mummies from ancient Egypt also have tattoos, as do remains from cultures around the world.

Tattoo removal likely is almost as old as the practice of inking and included scraping the skin to get the pigments off or out.

A more “civilized” method evolved in the 1960s when Leon Goldman, a University of Cincinnati dermatologist, used “hot vapor bursts” from a laser on tattoos and the skin that bore them.

Many choose tattoos to honor someone

A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center determined that 32% of adults in the United States have tattoos. About 22% have more than one, according to the survey.

Honoring or remembering someone or something accounts for the biggest reason Americans get their first tattoo. About 24% in the survey regret getting them.

Tracy Herrmann, 54, of Plymouth, Michigan, just west of Detroit, has eight tattoos and is in the process of getting four phrases, including “One step at a time,” “Surrender,” and “Through it all,” removed from her feet and arms.

She started inking up about six years ago and says she doesn’t regret getting tattoos.

“Maybe a different choice, maybe,” Herrmann said following her fourth tattoo removal session at Chroma Tattoo Studio & Laser Tattoo Removal in Brighton, Michigan.

“There was a period in my life that I felt I needed some extra reminder,” Hermann said. “I thought I would just embrace the period in my life, so that helped and then just to surrender and give it over to God. So, half of them were really, really pivotal to getting me over a hump in my life.”

Boredom among reasons to remove tats

Herrmann says the four getting lasered are part of her past and that’s where she wants them to stay.

“Now, I just want to move forward and go back to the original skin I was born with,” she said. “But the other four I’m going to keep. They still mean a lot to me, but they’re more hidden.”

Reasons for getting a tattoo removed are as varied and personal as the reasons for getting them in the first place, says Ryan Wright, a registered nurse and owner of Ink Blasters Precision Laser Tattoo Removal in Livonia, Michigan.

“A lot of people, when they get a new tattoo that makes some of their old tattoos look bad they get (the older tattoos) removed or reworked,” Wright said.

Chroma owner Jaime Howard says boredom plays a role, too.

“They got a tattoo off a whim and they’re like ‘hey, I’m really bored with this. I don’t want this anymore,’” Howard said. “It’s not about hating their tattoo, it’s about change for yourself.”

Like snapping a ‘rubber band’ on your skin

Howard and Wright, like many who perform laser removals, use something called a Q-switching, or quality switching, laser. It concentrates the light energy into intense short bursts or pulses.

“It’s very painful. Nine out of 10,” Wright said. “It kind of feels like a rubber band being snapped on your skin with hot bacon grease.”

Howard has had some of her tattoos removed and admits the procedure is painful.

But “you get through it,” she said. “A couple of days later you’re still feeling the sunburn, but it’s OK. If you want it bad enough, you’ll take it off because that’s what you want.”

Light heat from the laser breaks the ink into particles small enough to be absorbed by the body and later excreted as waste.

It’s not a “one and done.” Wright said. Tattoo removal can take eight to 12 treatments or more. A new tattoo can go over the old one once the skin has had time to sufficiently heal.

Howard consulted with Herrmann as her fourth session at Chroma began. They spoke about the previous session and how far along they were with the ink removal. Both then donned dark sunglasses to protect their eyes from the brightness of the laser. Herrmann winced. Seconds later, it was done. But she still has more sessions ahead.

“Oh gosh, it’s a 10 when you’re getting it done,” Herrmann said of the pain. “It’s pretty intense. It’s doable. I know price is sometimes an issue, but it’s worth it.”

Removal can be costly

Howard says the minimum she charges is $100 per session. Wright says that on a typical day he does about a dozen treatments and that cost depends on the square-inch size of the tattoo.

“The cost is really the technology in the laser,” Wright said. “It’s not like a time thing. Most treatments are under a minute. You’re paying for the technology and the person who knows how to use the technology. You can damage the skin if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

by Corey Williams, AP |  Read more:
Image: the author

What is College For in the Age of AI?

When I left for college in the fall of 1991, the internet era was just beginning. By sophomore year, I received my first email address. By junior year, the first commercial web browser was released. The summer after graduation, I worked as a reporter at the Arizona Republic covering the internet’s rise in our everyday lives, writing about the opening of internet cafés and businesses launching their first websites. I was part of an in-between class of graduates who went off to college just before a new technology transformed what would define our careers.

So when Alina McMahon, a recent University of Pittsburgh graduate, described her job search to me, I immediately recognized her predicament. McMahon began college before AI was a thing. Three and a half years later, she graduated into a world where it was suddenly everywhere. McMahon majored in marketing, with a minor in film and media studies. “I was trying to do the stable option,” she said of her business degree. She followed the standard advice given to all undergraduates hoping for a job after college: Network and intern. Her first “coffee chat” with a Pitt alumnus came freshman year; she landed three internships, including one in Los Angeles at Paramount in media planning. There she compiled competitor updates and helped calculate metrics for which billboard advertisements the company would buy.

But when she started to apply for full-time jobs, all she heard back — on the rare occasions she heard anything — was that roles were being cut, either because of AI or outsourcing. Before pausing her job search recently, McMahon had applied to roughly 150 jobs. “I know those are kind of rookie numbers in this environment,” she said jokingly. “It’s very discouraging.”

McMahon’s frustrations are pretty typical among job seekers freshly out of college. There were 15 percent fewer entry-level and internship job postings in 2025 than the year before, according to Handshake, a job-search platform popular with college students; meanwhile, applications per posting rose 26 percent. The unemployment rate for new college graduates was 5.7 percent in December, more than a full percentage point above the national average and higher even than what high-school graduates face.

How much AI is to blame for the fragile entry-level job market is unclear. Several research studies show AI is hitting young college-educated workers disproportionately, but broader economic forces are part of the story, too. As Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s chief education-strategy officer, told me, AI isn’t “taking” jobs so much as employers are “choosing” to replace parts of jobs with automation rather than redesign roles around workers. “They’re replacing people instead of enabling their workforce,” she said.

The fact that Gen-Z college interns and recent graduates are the first workers being affected by AI is surprising. Historically, major technological shifts favored junior employees because they tend to make less money and be more skilled and enthusiastic in embracing new tools. But a study from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab in August showed something quite different. Employment for Gen-Z college graduates in AI-affected jobs, such as software development and customer support, has fallen by 16 percent since late 2022. Meanwhile, more experienced workers in the same occupations aren’t feeling the same impact (at least not yet), said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist who led the study. Why the difference? Senior workers, he told me, “learn tricks of the trade that maybe never get written down,” which allow them to better compete with AI than those new to a field who lack such “tacit knowledge.” For instance, that practical know-how might allow senior workers to better understand when AI is hallucinating, wrong, or simply not useful.

For employers, AI also complicates an already delicate calculus around hiring new talent. College interns and recent college graduates require — as they always have — time and resources to train. “It’s real easy to say ‘college students are expensive,’” Simon Kho told me in an interview. “Not from a salary standpoint, but from the investment we have to make.” Until recently, Kho ran early career programs at Raymond James Financial, where it took roughly 18 months for new college hires to pay off in terms of productivity. And then? “They get fidgety,” he added, and look for other jobs. “So you can see the challenges from an HR standpoint: ‘Where are we getting value? Will AI solve this for us?’”

Weeks after Stanford’s study was released, another by two researchers at Harvard University also found that less experienced employees were more affected by AI. And it revealed that where junior employees went to college influenced whether they stayed employed. Graduates from elite and lower-tier institutions fared better than those from mid-tier colleges, who experienced the steepest drop in employment. The study didn’t spell out why, but when I asked one of the authors, Seyed Mahdi Hosseini Maasoum, he offered a theory: Elite graduates may have stronger skills; lower-tier graduates may be cheaper. “Mid-tier graduates end up somewhat in between — they’re relatively costly to hire but not as skilled as graduates of the very prestigious universities — so they are hit the hardest,” Maasoum wrote to me.

Just three years after ChatGPT’s release, the speed of AI’s disruption on the early career job market is even catching the attention of observers at the highest level of the economy. In September, Fed chair Jerome Powell flagged the “particular focus on young people coming out of college” when asked about AI’s effects on the labor market. Brynjolfsson told me that if current trends hold, the impact of AI will be “quite a bit more noticeable” by the time the next graduating class hits the job market this spring. Employers already see it coming: In a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, nearly half of 200 employers rated the outlook for the class of 2026 as poor or fair, the most pessimistic outlook since the first year of the pandemic.

The upheaval in the early career job market has caught higher education flat-footed. Colleges have long had an uneasy relationship with their unofficial role as vocational pipelines. When generative AI burst onto campuses in 2022, many administrators and faculty saw it primarily as a threat to learning — the world’s greatest cheating tool. Professors resurrected blue books for in-classroom exams and demanded that AI tools added to software be blocked in their classes.

Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.

What feels like a sudden, unexpected dilemma for Gen-Z graduates has only been made worse by several structural changes across higher education over the past decade.

by Jeffrey Selingo, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Intelligencer; Photos:Getty

Frito Pie

Not quite nachos, and not quite pie, this comforting casserole is a cheesy and crunchy delight that is thought to have roots in both Texas and New Mexico. In its most classic (and some might say best) form, a small bag of Fritos corn chips is split down the middle, placed in a paper boat and piled high with chili, topped with cheese, diced onion, pickled jalapeños, sour cream and pico de gallo, then eaten with a plastic fork. (It is often called a “walking taco,” because it’s eaten on-the-go, at sporting events and fairs.) This version is adapted to feed a crowd: The Fritos, Cheddar and chili — made with ground beef, pinto beans, taco seasoning and enchilada sauce — are layered in a casserole dish, baked, then topped with a frenzy of fun toppings. For maximum crunch, save a cup of Fritos for topping as you eat.

Ingredients

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
1 pound ground beef, preferably 20-percent fat
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 (1-ounce) packet taco seasoning (or 3 tablespoons of a homemade taco seasoning)
2 (15-ounce) cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 (19-ounce) can red enchilada sauce (or 2½ cups of homemade enchilada sauce)
2 (9-ounce) packages or 1 (18-ounce) package Fritos, 1 cup reserved for serving (8 to 10 cups)
8 ounces shredded Cheddar (about 2 cups)
Diced white onion, sliced scallions, pickled jalapeños, sour cream or pico de gallo, or a combination, for serving (optional)

Preparation 

Step 1: Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Coat a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with cooking spray.

Step 2: In a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed skillet, heat the oil over medium-high. Add the beef and onion, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat is browned and the onion is translucent, 8 to 10 minutes. Lower the heat if the meat is browning too quickly.

Step 3: Sprinkle the taco seasoning over the meat mixture and pour in ¾ cup of water; mix well. Bring to a simmer and cook until the liquid thickens and coats the pan, scraping up any browned bits, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the beans and enchilada sauce, stirring until combined. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes.

Step 4: Assemble the pie: Sprinkle half of the Fritos in the prepared baking dish, followed by half of the Cheddar. Cover with all of the meat filling. Finally, add the remaining Fritos (minus the reserved cup) and Cheddar.

Step 5: Bake until the cheese is melted and bubbly, 7 to 10 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes, then add the desired toppings to the casserole, or spoon into individual bowls and have eaters top as they please. Add reserved Fritos for more crunch, if desired.

by Kia Damon, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
[ed. Forgot about these. Should be great for Seattle's upcoming Super Bowl win.] 

Anne Zahalka - The Mathematician

via:

Greg Girard - Hong Kong Cafe, Vancouver, Canada, 1975

via:

On the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship

To love is to be human. Or is it? As human-chatbot relationships become more common, the Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the psychotherapist Esther Perel about what really defines human connection, and what we’re seeking when we look to satisfy our emotional needs on our phones.

Spiegelman: ...I’m curious about how you feel, in general, about people building relationships with A.I. Are these relationships potentially healthy? Is there a possibility for a relationship with an A.I. to be healthy?

Perel: Maybe before we answer it in this yes or no, healthy or unhealthy, I’ve been trying to think to myself, depending on how you define relationships, that will color your answer about what it means when it’s between a human and A.I.

But first, we need to define what goes on in relationships or what goes on in love. The majority of the time when we talk about love in A.I. or intimacy in A.I., we talk about it as feelings. But love is more than feelings.

Love is an encounter. It is an encounter that involves ethical demands, responsibility, and that is embodied. That embodiment means that there is physical contact, gestures, rhythms, gaze, frottement. There’s a whole range of physical experiences that are part of this relationship.

Can we fall in love with ideas? Yes. Do we fall in love with pets? Absolutely. Do children fall in love with teddy bears? Of course. We can fall in love and we can have feelings for all kinds of things.

That doesn’t mean that it is a relationship that we can call love. It is an encounter with uncertainty. A.I. takes care of that. Just about all the major pieces that enter relationships, the algorithm is trying to eliminate — otherness, uncertainty, suffering, the potential for breakup, ambiguity. The things that demand effort.

Whereas the love model that people idealize with A.I. is a model that is pliant: agreements and effortless pleasure and easy feelings.

Spiegelman: I think that’s so interesting — and exactly also where I was hoping this conversation would go — that in thinking about whether or not we can love A.I., we have to think about what it means to love. In the same way we ask ourselves if A.I. is conscious, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be conscious.

These questions bring up so much about what is fundamentally human about us, not just the question of what can or cannot be replicated.

Perel: For example, I heard this very interesting conversation about A.I. as a spiritual mediator of faith. We turn to A.I. with existential questions: Shall I try to prolong the life of my mother? Shall I stop the machines? What is the purpose of my life? How do I feel about death?

This is extraordinary. We are no longer turning to faith healers, but we are turning to these machines for answers. But they have no moral culpability. They have no responsibility for their answer.

If I’m a teacher and you ask me a question, I have a responsibility in what you do with the answer to your question. I’m implicated.

A.I. is not implicated. And from that moment on, it eliminates the ethical dimension of a relationship. When people talk about relationships these days, they emphasize empathy, courage, vulnerability, probably more than anything else. They rarely use the words accountability and responsibility and ethics. That adds a whole other dimension to relationships that is a lot more mature than the more regressive states of “What do you offer me?”

Spiegelman: I don’t disagree with you, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I would say that the people who create these chatbots very intentionally try and build in ethics — at least insofar as they have guide rails around trying to make sure that the people who are becoming intimately reliant on this technology aren’t harmed by it.

That’s a sense of ethics that comes not from the A.I. itself, but from its programmers — that guides people away from conversations that might be racist or homophobic, that tries to guide people toward healthy solutions in their lives. Does that not count if it’s programmed in?

Perel: I think the “programming in” is the last thing to be programmed.

I think that if you make this machine speak with people in other parts of the world, you will begin to see how biased they are. It’s one thing we should really remember. This is a business product.

When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object.

Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people.

So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them.

Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.

We have to remember that. It helps.

Spiegelman: That’s so interesting.

Perel: That’s the guardrail...

Spiegelman: Yeah. This is so crucial, the fact that A.I. is a business product. They’re being marketed as something that’s going to replace the labor force, but instead, what they’re incredibly good at isn’t necessarily being able to problem solve in a way where they can replace someone’s job yet.

Instead, they’re forming these very intense, deep human connections with people, which doesn’t even necessarily seem like what they were first designed to do — but just happens to be something that they’re incredibly good at. Given all these people who say they’re falling in love with them, do you think that these companions highlight our human yearning? Are we learning something about our desires for validation, for presence, for being understood? Or are they reshaping those yearnings for us in ways that we don’t understand yet?

Perel: Both. You asked me if I use A.I — it’s a phenomenal tool. I think people begin to have a discussion when they ask: How does A.I. help us think more deeply on what is essentially human? In that way, I look at the relationship between people and the bot, but also how the bot is changing our expectations of relationships between people.

That is the most important piece, because the frictionless relationship that you have with the bot is fundamentally changing something in what we can tolerate in terms of experimentation, experience with the unknown, tolerance of uncertainty, conflict management — stuff that is part of relationships.

There is a clear sense that people are turning to A.I. with questions of love — or quests of love, more importantly — longings for love and intimacy, either because it’s an alternative to what they actually would want with a human being or because they bring to it a false vision of an idealized relationship — an idealized intimacy that is frictionless, that is effortless, that is kind, loving and reparative for many people...

Then you go and you meet a human being, and that person is not nearly as unconditional. That person has their own needs, their own longings, their own yearnings, their own objections, and you have zero preparation for that.

So, does A.I. inform us about what we are seeking? Yes. Does A.I. amplify the lack of what we are seeking? Yes. And does A.I. sometimes actually meet the need? All of it.

But it is a subjective experience, the fact that you feel certain things. That’s the next question: Because you feel it, does that makes it real and true?

We have always understood phenomenology as, “It is my subjective experience, and that’s what makes it true.” But that doesn’t mean it is true.

We are so quick to want to say, because I feel close and loved and intimate, that it is love. And that is a question. (...)

Spiegelman: This is one of your fundamental ideas that has been so meaningful for me in my own life: That desire is a function of knowing, of tolerating mystery in the other, that there has to be separation between yourself and the other to really feel eros and love. And it seems like what you’re saying is that with an A.I., there just simply isn’t the otherness.

Perel: Well, it’s also that mystery is often perceived as a bug, rather than as a feature.

by Esther Perel and Nadja Spiegelman, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Cartoontopia/Futurama via

Why Even the Healthiest People Hit a Wall at Age 70

Are we currently determining how much of aging is lifestyle changes and interventions and how much of it is basically your genetic destiny?

 

[Transcript:] We are constantly being bombarded with health and lifestyle advice at the moment. I feel like I cannot open my social media feeds without seeing adverts for supplements or diet plans or exercise regimes. And I think that this really is a distraction from the big goals of longevity science. This is a really difficult needle to thread when it comes to talking about this stuff because I'm a huge advocate for public health. I think if we could help people eat better, if we could help 'em do more exercise, if we could help 'em quit smoking, this would have enormous effects on our health, on our economies all around the world. But this sort of micro-optimization, these three-hour long health podcasts that people are digesting on a daily basis these days, I think we're really majoring in the minors. We're trying to absolutely eke out every last single thing when it comes to living healthily. And I think the problem is that there are real limits to what we can do with health advice. 

So for example, there was a study that came out recently that was all over my social media feeds. And the headline was that by eating the best possible diet, you can double your chance of aging healthily. But I decided to dig into the results table. The healthiest diet was something called the Alternative Healthy Eating Index or AHEI. And even the people who are sticking most closely to this best diet, according to this study, the top 20% of adherence to the AHEI, only 13.6% of them made it to 70 years old without any chronic diseases. That means that over 85% of the people sticking to the best diet, according to this study, got to the age of 70 with at least something wrong with them. And that shows us that optimizing diet only has so far it can go. 

We're not talking about immortality or living to 120 here. If you wanna be 70 years old and in good enough health to play with your grandkids, I cannot guarantee that you can do that no matter how good your diet is. And that's why we need longevity medicine to help keep people healthier for longer. And actually, I think even this idea of 120, 150-year-old lifespans, you know, immortality even as a word that's often thrown around, I think the main thing we're trying to do is get people to 80, 90 years old in good health. 'cause we already know that most people alive today, when they reach that age, are unfortunately gonna be frail. They're probably gonna be suffering from two or three or four different diseases simultaneously. And what we wanna do is try and keep people healthier for longer. And by doing that, they probably will live longer but kind of as a side effect. 

If you look at photographs of people from the past, they often look older than people in the present day who are the same age. And part of these are these terrible fashion choices that people made in the past. And we can look back and, you know, understand the mistakes they've made with hindsight. But part of that actually is aging biology. I think the fact that people can be different biological ages at the same chronological ages, something that's really quite intuitive. All of us know people who've waltzed into their 60s looking great and, you know, basically as fit as someone in their 40s or 50s. And we know similar people who have also gone into their 60s, but they're looking haggard, they've got multiple different diseases, they're already struggling through life. 

In the last decade, scientists have come up with various measures of what's called biological age as distinct from chronological age. So your chronological age is just how many candles there are on your birthday cake. And obviously, you know, most of us are familiar with that. But the idea of biological age is to look inside your cells, look inside your body, and work out how old you are on a biological level. Now we aren't perfect at doing this yet, but we do have a variety of different measures. We can use blood tests, we can use what are called epigenetic tests, or we can do things that are far more sort of basic and functional, how strong your grip is declines with age. And by comparing the value of something like your grip strength to an average person of a given age, we can assign you a biological age value. And I think the ones that are getting the most buzz at the moment within the scientific community, but also all around the internet, are these epigenetic age tests. 

So the way that this works is that you'll take a blood test or a saliva sample and scientists will measure something about your epigenome. So the genome is your DNA, it's the instruction manual of life. And the epigenome is a layer of chemistry that sits on top of your genome. If you think of your DNA is that instruction manual, then the epigenome is the notes in the margin. It's the little sticky notes that have been stuck on the side and they tell the cell which DNA to use at which particular time. And we know that there are changes to this epigenome as you get older. And so by measuring the changes in the epigenome, you can assign someone a biological age. 

At the moment, these epigene clocks are a really great research tool. They're really deepening our understanding of biological aging in the lab. I think the problem with these tests as applied to individuals is we don't know enough about exactly what they're telling us. We don't know what these individual changes in epigenetic marks mean. We know they're correlated with age, but what we don't know is if they're causally related. And in particular, we don't know if you intervene, if you make a change in your lifestyle, if you start taking a certain supplement and that reduces your biological age. We don't know whether that actually means you're gonna dilate or whether it means you're gonna stay healthier for longer or whether you've done something that's kind of adjacent to that. And so we need to do more research to understand if we can causally impact these epigenetic measures. (...)

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are gonna be hugely, hugely important in understanding the biology of aging. Because the body is such a complicated system that in order to really understand it, we're gonna need these vast computer models to try and decode the data for us. The challenge is that what machine learning can do at the moment is it can identify correlations. So it can identify things that are associated with aging, but it can't necessarily tell us what's causing something else. So for example, in the case of these epigenetic clocks, the parts of the epigenome that change with age have been identified because they correlate. But what we don't know is if you intervene in any one of these individual epigenetic marks, if you move it in the direction of something younger, does that actually make people healthier? And so what we need to do is more experiments where we try and work out if we can intervene in these epigenetic, in these biological clocks, can we make people live healthier for longer? 

Over the last 10 or 15 years, scientists have really started to understand the fundamental underlying biology of the aging process. And they broke this down into 12 what are called hallmarks of aging. One of those hallmarks is the accumulation of senescent cells. Now senescent is just a biological technical term for old. These are cells that accumulate in all of our bodies as the years go by. And scientists have noticed that these cells seem to drive a range of different diseases as we get older. And so the idea was what if we could remove these cells and leave the rest of the cells of the body intact? Could that slow down or even partially reverse the aging process? And scientists identified drugs called it senolytic drugs. 

These are drugs that kill those senescent cells and they tried them out in mice and they do indeed effectively make the mice biologically younger. So if you give mice a course of senolytic drugs, it removes those senescent cells from their body. And firstly, it makes them live a bit longer. That's a good thing if you're slowing down the aging process, the basic thing you want to see. But it's not dragging out that period of frailty at the end of life. It's keeping the mice healthier for longer so they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. The mice are also less frail. They basically send the mice to a tiny mouse-scale gym in these experiments. And the mice that have been given the drugs, they can run further and faster on the mousey treadmills that they try them out on. 

It also seems to reverse some of the cognitive effects that come along with aging. So if you put an older mouse in a maze, it's often a bit anxious, doesn't really want to explore. Whereas a younger mouse is desperate to, you know, run around and find the cheese or whatever it is mice doing in mazes. And by giving them these senolytic drugs, you can unlock some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these mice just look great. You do not need to be an expert mouse biologist to see which one has had the pills and which one hasn't. They've got thicker fur. They've got plumper skin. They've got brighter eyes. They've got less fat on their bodies. And what this shows us is that by targeting the fundamental processes of aging, by identifying something like senescent cells that drives a whole range of age-related problems, we can hit much perhaps even all of the aging process with a single treatment. 

Senescent cells are, of course, only one of these 12 hallmarks of aging. And I think in order to both understand and treat the aging process, we're potentially gonna only treatments for many, perhaps even all of those hallmarks. There's never gonna be a single magic pill that can just make you live forever. Aging is much, much more complicated than that. But by understanding this relatively short list of underlying processes, maybe we can come up with 12, 20 different treatments that can have a really big effect on how long we live. 

One of the most exciting ideas in longevity science at the moment is what's called cellular reprogramming. I sometimes describe this as a treatment that has fallen through a wormhole from the future. This is the idea that we can reset the biological clock inside of our cells. And the idea first came about in the mid 2000s because there was a scientist called Shinya Yamanaka who was trying to find out how to turn regular adult body cells all the way back to the very beginning of their biological existence. And Yamanaka and his team were able to identify four genes that you could insert into a cell and turn back that biological clock. 

Now, he was interested in this from the point of view of creating stem cells, a cell that can create any other kind of cell in the body, which we might be able to use for tissue repair in future. But scientists also noticed, as well as turning back the developmental clock on these cells, it also turns back the aging clock, cells that are given these four Yamanaka factors actually are biologically younger than cells that haven't had the treatment. And so what scientists decided to do was insert these Yamanaka factor genes into mice. 

Now if you do this in a naive way, so there's genes active all the time, it's actually very bad news for the mice, unfortunately. because these stem cells, although they're very powerful in terms of what kind of cell they can become, they are useless at being a liver cell or being a heart cell. And so the mice very quickly died of organ failure. But if you activate these genes only transiently, and the way that scientists did it the first time successfully was essentially to activate them at weekends. So they produced these genes in such a way that they could be activated with the drug and they gave the mice the drug for two days of the week, and then gave them five days off so the Yamanaka factors were then suppressed. They found that this was enough to turn back the biological clock in those cells, but without turning back the developmental clock and turn them into these stem cells. And that meant the mice stayed a little bit healthier. We now know that they can live a little bit longer with this treatment too.

Now the real challenge is that this is a gene therapy treatment. It involves delivering four different genes to every single cell in your body. The question is can we, with our puny 2020s biotechnology, make this into a viable treatment, a pill even, that we can actually use in human beings? I really think this idea of cellular reprogramming appeals to a particular tech billionaire sort of mentality. The idea that we can go in and edit the code of life and reprogram our biological age, it's a hugely powerful concept. And if this works, the fact that you can turn back the biological clock all the way to zero, this really is a very, very cool idea. And that's what's led various different billionaires from the Bay Area to invest huge, huge amounts of money in this. 

Altos Labs is the biggest so-called startup in this space. And I wouldn't really call it a startup 'cause it's got funding of $3 billion from amongst other people, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Now I'm very excited about this because I think $3 billion is enough to have a good go and see if we can turn this into a viable human treatment. My only concern is that epigenetics is only one of those hallmarks of aging. And so it might be the case that we solve aging inside our individual cells, but we leave other parts of the aging process intact. (...)

Probably the quickest short-term wins in longevity science are going to be repurposed existing drugs. And the reason for this is because we spent many, many years developing these drugs. We understand how they work in humans. We understand a bit about their safety profile. And because these molecules already exist, we've just tried them out in mice, in, you know, various organisms in the lab and found that a subset of them do indeed slow down the aging process. The first trial of a longevity drug that was proposed in humans was for a drug called metformin, which is a pre-existing drug that we prescribe actually for diabetes in this case, and has some indications that it might slow down the aging process in people. (...)

I think one of the ones that's got the most buzz around it at the moment is a drug called rapamycin. This is a drug that's been given for organ transplants. It's sometimes used to coat stents, which these little things that you stick in the arteries around your heart to expand them if you've got a contraction of those arteries that's restricting the blood supply. But we also know from experiments in the lab that can make all kinds of different organisms live longer, everything from single-cell yeast, to worms, to flies, to mice, to marmoset, which are primates. They're very, very evolutionarily close to us as one of the latest results. 

Rapamycin has this really incredible story. It was first isolated in bacteria from a soil sample from Easter Island, which is known as Rapa Nui in the local Polynesians. That's where the drug gets its name. And when it was first isolated, it was discovered to be antifungal. It could stop fungal cells from growing. So that was what we thought we'd use it for initially. But when the scientists started playing around with in the lab, they realized it didn't just stop fungal cells from growing. It also stopped many other kinds of cells as well, things like up to and including human cells. And so the slight disadvantage was that if you used it as an antifungal agent, it would also stop your immune cells from being able to divide, which is obviously be a bit of a sort of counterintuitive way to try and treat a fungal disease. So scientists decided to use it as an immune suppressant. It can stop your immune system from going haywire when you get an organ transplant, for example, and rejecting that new organ. 

It is also developed as an anti-cancer drug. So if it can stop cells dividing or cancer as cells dividing out of control. But the way that rapamycin works is it targets a fundamental central component of cellular metabolism. And we noticed that that seemed to be very, very important in the aging process. And so by tamping it down by less than you would do in a patient where you're trying to suppress their immune system, you can actually rather than stopping the cell dividing entirely, you can make it enter a state where it's much more efficient in its use of resources. It starts this process called autophagy, which is Greek for self-eating, autophagy. And that means it consumes old damaged proteins, and then recycles them into fresh new ones. And that actually is a critical process in slowing down aging, biologically speaking. And in 2009, we found out for the first time that by giving it to mice late in life, you could actually extend their remaining lifespan. They live by 10 or 15% longer. And this was a really incredible result. 

This was the first time a drug had been shown to slow down aging in mammals. And accordingly, scientists have become very, very excited about it. And we've now tried it in loads of different contexts and loads of different animals and loads of different organisms at loads of different times in life. You can even wait until very late in a mouse lifespan to give it rapamycin and you still see most of that same lifespan extension effect. And that's fantastic news potentially for us humans because not all of us, unfortunately, can start taking a drug from birth 'cause most of us were born quite a long time ago. But rapamycin still works even if you give it to mice who are the equivalent of 60 or 70 years old in human terms. And that means that for those of us who are already aged a little bit, Rapamycin could still help us potentially. And there are already biohackers out there trying this out for themselves, hopefully with the help of a doctor to make sure that they're doing everything as safely as possible to try and extend their healthy life. And so the question is: should we do a human trial of rapamycin to find out if it can slow down the aging process in people as well? (...)

We've already got dozens of ideas in the lab for ways to slow down, maybe even reverse the age of things like mice and cells in a dish. And that means we've got a lot of shots on goal. I think it'll be wildly unlucky if none of the things that slow down aging in the lab actually translate to human beings. That doesn't mean that most of them will work, probably most of them won't, but we only need one or two of them to succeed and really make a big difference. And I think a great example of this is GLP-1 drugs, the ozempics, the things that are allowing people to suddenly lose a huge amount of weight. We've been looking for decades for these weight loss drugs, and now we finally found them. It's shown that these breakthroughs are possible, they can come out of left field. And all we need to do in some cases is a human trial to find out if these drugs actually work in people. 

And what that means is that, you know, the average person on planet earth is under the age of 40. They've probably got 40 or 50 years of life expectancy left depending on the country that they live in. And that's an awful lot of time for science to happen. And if then in the next 5 or 10 years, we do put funding toward these human trials, we might have those first longevity drugs that might make you live one or two or five years longer. And that gives scientists even more time to develop the next treatment. And if we think about some more advanced treatments, not just drugs, things like stem cell therapy or gene therapy, those things can sound pretty sci-fi. But actually, we know that these things are already being deployed in hospitals and clinics around the world. They're being deployed for specific serious diseases, for example, where we know that a single gene can be a problem and we can go in and fix that gene and give a child a much better chance at a long, healthy life. 

But as we learn how these technologies work in the context of these serious diseases, we're gonna learn how to make them effective. And most importantly, we're gonna learn how to make them safe. And so we could imagine doing longevity gene edits in human beings, perhaps not in the next five years, but I think it'll be foolish to bet against it happening in the next 20 years, for example. 

by Andrew Steele, The Big Think |  Read more:

Image: Yamanka factors via:

[ed. See also: Researchers Are Using A.I. to Decode the Human Genome (NYT).]

Anna Desnitskaya

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Football Won’t Be Forever

Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere.

For millions of people, football Sundays (and Saturdays) structure the week. For millions more, football represents everything that feels excessive, violent, or backward about American culture.

What makes football so hard to talk about is that none of these interpretations feels fully wrong or right. The game is violent, but also beautiful. It’s deeply commercial, yet genuinely communal. It’s hyper-engineered, obsessively optimized, ruthlessly controlled, while also delivering moments of genuine unpredictability that no scripted entertainment can match.

The writer Chuck Klosterman has spent much of his career thinking about how mass culture works, why certain things take hold, and what they reveal about the people who love them. In his new book, Football, he turns that lens on the most dominant cultural object in American life.

Klosterman is especially interested in football as a mediated experience. After all, it’s a game that most fans have never played, can’t meaningfully simulate, and only encounter through television. And yet we can’t get enough of it. Why is that? And why is it that football, of all things, continues to function as one of the last true monocultural rituals in a fragmented media landscape? (...)

You’re a football fan, but this book isn’t a love letter to the game. What were you trying to do?

I say it’s not a love letter because I think when people write about something they love, especially something they’ve loved for a long time, there’s an impulse to justify that love. To persuade the reader that this thing deserves the emotional weight the writer has given it. That’s not really what I’m interested in doing.

I approach football the same way I approach music or movies or any other subject I write about. It’s just criticism. I’m trying to understand what the thing is doing, how it works, and why it exists the way it does.

I’ve been thinking about football unconsciously for 40 years and more deliberately for at least 20. At some point it occurred to me that football is going to matter less in the future than it does now. That’s not a judgment. That’s just what happens to large cultural objects. Everything eventually recedes.

And when that happens, people are going to try to explain retroactively why football mattered so much. They’ll tell neat stories about violence or capitalism or distraction or American decline. And I think those explanations will mostly be wrong, or at least incomplete.

So what I wanted to do was describe what football means while we’re still living inside it. While it still feels normal and necessary rather than strange and historical. It’s almost like writing an obituary before the subject has died. (...)

Why football, though? Why does it dominate culture so completely?

A lot of it comes down to historical timing and structural compatibility.

Football emerges in the late 19th century, right after the Civil War, and it carries a metaphorical relationship to organized conflict. It’s a simulation of war, without all the death and geopolitical consequences. That metaphor is baked into the game at a very deep level.

Then television arrives, and football turns out to be perfectly suited for it. The stoppages, the structure, the anticipation between plays, the way action unfolds in short bursts, all translate beautifully to broadcast.

You describe the game as generating a sensation of chaotic freedom inside an environment of total control. How does that happen?

Football is one of the most engineered experiences people routinely engage with, even if they don’t think about it that way. Every play is designed in advance. It’s encoded into a language that only a small group of people fully understands. It’s transmitted through headsets, wristbands, and signals. It’s rehearsed endlessly during practice. And it has to be executed within very strict time constraints.

Behind every snap, there’s all this hierarchy. Coaches, coordinators, analysts, trainers, medical staff, league officials, rules committees. It’s a deeply bureaucratic system. In a lot of ways, it’s almost corporate. Everything is planned, regulated, and optimized.

And then the ball is snapped, and all of that structure suddenly recedes. For a few seconds, what you see feels spontaneous. Twenty-two people collide, react, adjust, and improvise in real time. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, even though you know it’s happening inside a very rigid framework.

That contrast is where the power comes from. You get unpredictability without existential risk. You get chaos that’s bounded. The play might fail or succeed, but the system itself is stable. There’s a beginning and an end. The whistle will blow. The next play will come.

I think that mirrors how a lot of people want to experience the world more generally. Most people don’t actually want true chaos. They want the feeling of danger without real danger, the feeling of freedom without losing the structure that makes life manageable.

Would football be as entertaining if there wasn’t this continual possibility that someone will get hurt?

I don’t think people want to see anyone get hurt. Football isn’t a blood sport in that sense. But risk matters. Meaning requires stakes.

It’s like climbing Everest. People don’t climb it because they want to die. But the fact that death is possible gives the act significance. If football eliminated serious risk entirely, it would become something else.

That’s why safety rule changes provoke such strong reactions. On the surface, those reactions sound crude. But they’re pointing at a real tension between safety and meaning.

by Sean Illing with Chuck Kloserman, Vox | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times
[ed. With rising interest and fan support for flag football these days, will it ever be a viable alternative given that (controlled) violence and risk are such fundamental elements of the game? Maybe, if we start to see participation at younger ages start to decline.]

William Gropper (American, 1897-1977), Night Life

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Nduduzo Makhathini

Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis

Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.

Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the border patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.

Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.

Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.

I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.

David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.

We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.

The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.

Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.

I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.

Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?

French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.

One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.

The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)

Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.

Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.

And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”

I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.

Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)

Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?

French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?

This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.

One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.

Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)

French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.

That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.

But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.

by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux

Seahawks Win NFC Championship - In Pictures

Seahawks Win NFC Championship and the Super Bowl Might Be Easier

[ed. What a game. Something I'd like to highlight here are staff photographers for the Seattle Times who consistently produce amazing photos each week, especially Jennifer Buchanan and Dean Rutz. For another 70 or so pictures see: Photos: Seahawks beat Rams in NFC Championship thriller (there's a small paywall/subscription notice but you can get around it just by clicking on the photo behind the msg).

They Ransacked the US Capitol and Want the Government to Pay Them Back

Yvonne St Cyr strained her body against police barricades, crawled through a broken Senate window, and yelled “push, push, push” to fellow rioters in a tunnellike hallway where police officers suffered concussions and broken bones.

She insisted she did nothing wrong. A federal judge sentenced her to 30 months in prison and imposed $2,270 in financial penalties for her actions at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, declaring: “You have little or no respect for the law, little or no respect for our democratic systems.”

St Cyr served only half her sentence before President Donald Trump’s January 2025 pardon set her and almost 1,600 others free.

But her story doesn’t end there. St Cyr headed back to court, seeking a refund of the $2,270. “It’s my money,” the Marine Corps veteran from Idaho said in an interview with The Washington Post. “They took my money.” In August, the same judge who sentenced her reluctantly agreed, pointing to a legal quirk in her case.

“Sometimes a judge is called upon to do what the law requires, even if it may seem at odds with what justice or one’s initial instincts might warrant. This is one such occasion,” U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wrote in an opinion authorizing the first refund to a Jan. 6 defendant.

The ruling revealed an overlooked consequence of Trump’s pardon for some Jan. 6 offenders: Not only did it free them from prison but it emboldened them to demand payback from the government.

At least eight Jan. 6 defendants are pursuing refunds of the financial penalties paid as part of their sentences, according to a Post review of court records; judges agreed that St Cyr and a Maryland couple should be reimbursed, while five more are appealing denials. (St Cyr and the couple are still waiting to receive their payments, however.) Others are filing civil lawsuits against the government seeking millions of dollars, alleging politically tainted prosecutions and violations of their constitutional rights. Hundreds more have filed claims accusing the Justice Department, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies of inflicting property damage and personal injuries, according to their lawyer.

The efforts are the latest chapter in an extraordinary rewriting of history by the president and his allies to bury the facts of what happened at the Capitol, sustain the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and recast the Jan. 6 offenders as victims entitled to taxpayer-funded compensation.

“Donald Trump and the DOJ want taxpayers to reimburse a violent mob for the destruction of the U.S. Capitol. The Jan. 6 nightmare continues,” said Rep. Joe Morelle (D-New York), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the Capitol’s security and operations.

The pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol caused almost $3 million in damage, according to a 2022 estimate by the Justice Department. The losses included smashed doors and windows, defaced artwork, damaged furniture, and residue from gas agents and fire extinguishers. Defendants were sentenced to more than $1.2 million in restitution and fines, according to a tally by The Post.

But the government recovered less than $665,000 of those court-ordered payments, according to a source with firsthand knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) are pushing legislation — backed by some law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 — to block government payouts to rioters. Without any Republican co-sponsors, the legislation is not expected to proceed.

“The audacity of them to think they didn’t do anything, or to think that they’re right and then get their money back,” said former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, who attended the sentencing of St Cyr and other Jan. 6 offenders. “It’s frustrating and it should not happen. They should have to pay more.”

Stacy Hager, a 62-year-old former warehouse supervisor, made his first trip to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 rally. The lifelong Texan wasn’t that interested in politics before, but he was certain that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Wearing a Trump hat and waving the Texas flag, Hager took photos and videos of himself roaming through the Capitol. He was convicted on four misdemeanor charges related to disorderly conduct and trespassing; he paid $570 in penalties and served seven months in prison, a punishment he describes as totally unjust and “a living hell.”

Hager still believes, fervently, that fraud marred the 2020 vote and that Trump won, though no new evidence has surfaced to contradict the findings of Justice Department officials, cybersecurity experts and dozens of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“You tell me why I shouldn’t be entitled to getting my money back,” Hager said. “The government took money from me for doing the right thing, for standing up for the people’s vote. That’s the reason we were there — for a free and fair election.”

About one month after Trump’s pardon in January 2025, Hager was the first of the Jan. 6 defendants to ask for his money back, court records show. “It’s a principle thing,”...

While the charges and punishments vary, the defendants seeking refunds share one legal quirk: All of them were appealing their convictions when Trump pardoned them on Jan. 20, 2025. After the pardon, courts vacated their convictions and dismissed their indictments following requests from federal prosecutors, as the Justice Department that once prosecuted the Jan. 6 defendants now takes their side. (...)

In the most far-reaching effort on behalf of Jan. 6 offenders, Missouri lawyer Mark McCloskey is trying to build support for a government-backed compensation panel, similar to the fund that has distributed billions of dollars to families of victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. McCloskey attracted national attention in 2020 when he and his wife pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their home; they pleaded guilty to firearms charges but were pardoned by the Missouri governor.

McCloskey said he has advocated for the Jan. 6 fund in four meetings with Justice Department officials, including Ed Martin, the director of a unit tasked with investigating Trump’s political opponents.

Martin, who helped plan and finance Trump’s rally that preceded the rampage through the Capitol, has said publicly that he supports “reparations” for Jan. 6 defendants.

Trump also has expressed support for government payouts. Asked about compensating Jan. 6 offenders in a March 2025 Newsmax interview, Trump said: “Well, there’s talk about that. … A lot of the people in government really like that group of people. They were patriots as far as I was concerned.”

by Beth Reinhard, Ellie Silverman and Aaron Schaffer, Washington Post/MSN |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Roaches gotta roach.]

Reflections on the 'Manosphere'

Andrew Tate Is the Loneliest Bastard on Earth

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

***

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s. (...)

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention. (...)

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

by Katherine Dee, Default Blog |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Pathetic bunch of losers. Includes some truly cringe videos I've never seen before.]