Dognosis

At a former pomegranate farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru, a team of specially trained dogs is doing something that some of the world's most sophisticated medical machines cannot — detecting multiple types of cancer from a single breath, at early stages, for two dollars a test.

Dognosis, the Indian startup behind this system, published the results last week of its Phase 2 clinical trial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology — the world's most influential cancer journal — making it the largest study of its kind ever conducted and placing canine-based diagnostics firmly into the mainstream of medical science.

What Dognosis Does

The company was co-founded by Akash Kulgod, who built on his Honours thesis at Berkeley, and Itamar Bitan, who brings a decade of Special Ops K9 training experience from Israel. What the two founders realised was that the solution to early cancer detection had been living in our homes the whole time — the dog's nose, a product of fifteen millennia of co-evolution with humans, can detect the faint chemical trace of cancer in breath at a resolution that machines, algorithms, and laboratory tests have never come close to matching.

Therefore, Dognosis is building an ultra-affordable, non-invasive breath-based multi-cancer early detection test that combines trained dogs' exceptional olfactory abilities with brain-computer interfaces and machine learning to create quantitative signatures of disease.

How the Test Works

The test is straightforward: a person breathes normally into a cotton face mask for 10 minutes. The mask is sealed, stored, and later evaluated by trained detection dogs at a central laboratory. Each sample is assessed independently by at least three dogs and their assessments are combined using an advanced Bayesian statistical model that weighs each dog's track record and the participant's background information. No blood is drawn, no scan is needed, and no fasting is required.

 
The Science: What the Dogs Are Smelling

The dogs are detecting changes in volatile organic compounds — substances produced by the body when diseases like cancer are present. These VOCs create a unique odour signature or volatilome that trained dogs can identify, just as they are trained to detect explosives and drugs.

According to Dognosis, over 40 double-blind trials published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that dogs can detect various diseases, including different types of cancer, with high accuracy, and this ability is now well-established in scientific literature spanning journals including Nature and The Lancet.

The Phase 2 Trial: What It Found

According to the paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study was conducted across six hospitals in Karnataka — three each in Hubballi and Bengaluru — in an assessor-masked, multi-centre case-control format. A total of 3,275 participants were enrolled, with 1,773 used for training and 1,502 for testing. The test cohort included 283 treatment-naïve, biopsy-confirmed cancer cases spanning seven major cancer groups and 1,219 controls including healthy volunteers.

The Phase 2 data showed 91% accuracy in detecting cancer-associated VOC breath signals across seven cancer groups, with accuracy stable across cancer types as well as in early stages — when detecting cancer early matters the most. The study was conducted in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs, a UK-based charity and world leader in canine bio-detection research. 

"We've known for over two decades that dogs are capable of detecting multiple types of cancers with high accuracy," said Akash Kulgod, chief executive officer of Dognosis. "The challenge has always been building a system around canine olfaction that is reproducible, scalable, and aimed at a clinical problem worth solving."

"Multi-cancer risk stratification from a single breath sample in countries like India is that problem, and this study shows that it can be done," Kulgod said.

 
Why It Matters

The rise of multi-cancer early detection tests and AI-powered imaging has created an acute need for effective first-tier screening, which breath-based testing is uniquely positioned to fulfil — particularly in low- and middle-income countries where expensive imaging infrastructure remains out of reach for the majority of patients.

At $2 per test, Dognosis's system costs a fraction of existing screening tools, many of which also fail to detect cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages.

by NDTV Profit News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Garland Jeffreys

 

Tuesday Night Mix

 

[ed. I used to have a Saturday Night Mix but eventually gave it up. Got too hard to find good new music every week.]

Amazon’s Alexa+ Now Produces AI-Generated ‘Podcasts’ Featuring Chats Between Two Robot ‘Co-Hosts’

The podcast sector suddenly may have a big new player: Amazon‘s Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant.

Alexa has been answering billions of users’ queries since it was first released in 2014. Now Amazon is positioning Alexa+’s extended answers on any number of different topics as “podcasts,” completely compiled using AI, the company announced Monday.

Seemingly to dispel the notion that these “podcasts” will be AI audio slop, Amazon emphasized that it has deals with major news organizations to ensure “accurate, real-time news and information.” Those include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico and USA Today; publications from Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox Media; and more than 200 local newspapers across the U.S.

In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss “the latest music releases.” A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. “The monoculture is just gone,” a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been “stoner metal,” indie pop and experimental hip-hop music “all dropping on the same Friday,” and adds, “That’s not chaos — that’s the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.” [...]

It’s not the first AI-generated podcast system out there: Google’s NotebookLM AI tool last year added the ability to autogenerate a podcast of sorts based on a collection of notes and information using a synthetic voice. That prompted a lawsuit from former NPR “Morning Edition” host David Greene, who alleged that Google copied his voice without permission.

To use Alexa Podcasts, users can simply tell Alexa what topic they’re curious about and “it does the rest in minutes.” Alexa+ will provide an overview of what it plans to cover, and let you adjust the length and direction before it generates the podcast. When your episode is ready, you’ll get a notification on your Echo Show device and the Alexa app.

Alexa Podcasts is available to Alexa+ customers in the U.S. Amazon said it is also “thinking about how you’ll be able to create different types of custom audio on demand, from personalized news briefings to content based on the information and documents you want to share. This is just the beginning of a whole new way to learn, stay informed, and consume content that fits into your life.”

by Todd Spangler, Variety |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Thank god. I can only imagine the world's been crying out for more podcasters; especially AI fake ones. This'll probably be a continuing trend: a new story every month with some new profession being threatened or replaced. Slow boiling for frogs.]

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers

Today feels like the end of an era for jazz fans. Something has changed—that’s the pervasive mood right now. And things will never be like they were before.

Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.

I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.

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Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.

 

The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.

That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.

In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.

Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans

We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.

But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.

When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.

You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.

I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.

If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.

Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.

Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences. [...]

First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.

And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: YouTube

[ed. The beat goes on. Sonny famously used to practice nearly every day at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, in NY. I read they're now thinking of renaming it the Sonny Rollins Bridge. Sounds good to me.]

Why Japanese Companies Do So Many Different Things

Consider Toto.

If you spend much time in American public bathrooms, or rather if you’re simply a particularly attentive patron of American public bathrooms, you’ll probably have noticed Toto’s toilets at some point or another: they’re distinguished by a quite memorable serif-font “TOTO” logo. Toto toilets aren’t quite dominant in American bathrooms, since they have healthy competition from our homegrown toilet champions American Standard and Kohler—though Toto is doing better and better as Americans start to fall in love with the bidet-toilet—but globally Toto is the world’s largest manufacturer of toilets and bidets. And in its home country of Japan, Toto is simply everywhere: 80 percent of Japanese homes contain a Toto bidet-toilet.

And if you’re a longtime Toto shareholder—maybe an investor with a particular interest in bathroom fixtures—this has been a wonderfully lucrative year for you. Toto’s stock is up 60 percent year to date; in just the last few weeks, it’s risen by 30 percent. Toto is doing better than ever: its net profit, in the first quarter of 2026, was up 230 percent year over year.

But Toto’s remarkable year doesn’t have much to do with toilets or bidets. Toto might have been founded in the 1910s to “provide a healthy and civilized way of life” through affordable toilets, and in the decades since might have become the global leader in the bathroom game. But Toto also does a lot of other things. Toto manufactures not just bidets and toilets but also bathroom tiles, prefabricated bathroom modules, faucets, modular kitchens, photocatalytic coatings for buildings, and assistive equipment for the elderly. And, most importantly, Toto has a very lucrative sideline in the fabrication of memory chips.

Since 1988, in a once-obscure corner of the company called the “advanced ceramics division,” Toto has been producing a very particular component called the electrostatic chuck, or the “e-chuck.” The e-chuck is a sort of high-precision ceramic plate, about the size of a steering wheel, that uses electrostatic force to hold a silicon wafer perfectly flat and thermally stable while memory chips are etched into it with bombardments of plasma. Making these components is extraordinarily difficult, since the ceramic body needs to have near-zero particle generation and be polished to submicron flatness: and this means that there are only a few companies in the world that are capable of manufacturing e-chucks reliably. Almost all of them—Shinko Electric, NGK, Toto, Kyocera, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, Niterra—are based in Japan.

For most of its history, the advanced ceramics division was a rounding error on Toto’s balance sheet: the money maker, as it had been since the 1910s, was the toilet and bidet business. But we’re in a new era. Demand for AI is exploding, meaning that demand for the high-bandwidth memory that AI data centers require is exploding, meaning that demand for memory chips is exploding, meaning that demand for e-chucks is exploding. And so Toto’s advanced ceramics division is suddenly the company’s largest business, generating the majority of its operating profit. Toto’s leadership, suddenly awash in AI-driven revenue, announced that they would double down by investing hundreds of millions in expanded electrostatic chuck production: the toilet company had become, quite unexpectedly, a supplier to the semiconductor supply chain.

The Toto story is a fun and interesting illustration of corporate diversification and how strange bets can pay off. But that type of diversification—a toilet company that also produces photocatalytic coating and high-precision components for semiconductors—isn’t really unique to Toto. Practically every company in Japan seems to do a thousand very different things.

Consider, for example, Kyocera, another one of the e-chuck makers. Kyocera was founded in 1959 as a producer of ceramic insulators for cathode-ray tubes; today it manufactures not only industrial ceramics but also printers, smartphones, ballpoint pens, kitchen knives, solar PV modules, lens components, industrial cutting tools, automotive camera modules, electronics components, semiconductor packaging, biocompatible tooth and joint replacements, UV-LED curing systems, LCD systems, medical products, and lab-grown gemstones. Or another e-chuck maker. Sumitomo Osaka Cement, as you might have been able to deduce from the name, produces cement and ready-mixed concrete; but it also produces optical components, measuring instruments, industrial ceramics, artificial marine reefs, cosmetics and nanoparticle materials.

And this degree of diversification extends to many of Japan’s most famous companies. Yamaha, for example, manufactures pianos, motorcycles, guitars, drums, boats, snowmobiles, ATVs, audio equipment, golf clubs, tennis rackets, home appliances, specialty metals, molding and bonding equipment for semiconductors, and industrial robots. Hitachi makes nuclear reactors, power grids, railway systems, elevators, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, medical imaging devices, data storage, IT consulting, and industrial machinery. Even a company as simple as Oji, Japan’s largest paper company, has been drawn into the production of disposable diapers, functional films, adhesives, cellulose nanofibers, and wood-based EUV photoresists; and it also operates a hotel, an airport catering business, a concert hall, and an insurance agency.

All of which is to say: Japanese companies do a lot of things.

There are, of course, other countries with companies that “do lots of things”: much of Indian economic life, for example, is defined by the sprawling activities of a few large business clans—the Adanis, the Ambanis, the Tatas, the Birlas. But India is a relatively poor country with a low level of economic specialization, and the sprawling conglomerates that dominate its economy focus on relatively simple things like cement, steel, ports, and telecommunications. Japan, by contrast, is a wealthy, developed society—by one measure, the most economically complex country in the world. What’s striking about Japanese companies is not that they do lots of different things but rather that they do them very well. There are all sorts of high-precision inputs—the e-chuck being just one example—that are produced virtually only by Japanese firms.

This is very different from how most wealthy countries operate. American firms, for example, tend to prioritize focus above all else: it would be bizarre for an American paper mill to also operate a concert hall and an airport catering business, or for American Standard or Kohler to somehow have something to do with semiconductors. Even a country like Germany, which matches Japan in its depth of high-precision firms, has nothing like Japan’s corporate diversification. Only a few large conglomerates, like Siemens, have anything approaching the lateral breadth of the Japanese firm. South Korea—whose economic system was not coincidentally modeled off the Japanese one—does have a few chaebol conglomerates, like Samsung and SK, that truly do as many things as Japanese companies. But these are economy-dominating, state-entangled megafirms, cultivated as national champions by Korean industrial policy. They look nothing like, say, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, which is hugely diversified despite being relatively small. (“Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!”)

So why are Japanese companies like this? Why do they do so many different things? And how do they manage to do so all those different things so well?

Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it’s inherent in how they’re structured. The form of the corporation that we know and love in the United States—specialized, market-oriented, governed by shareholders—is just one form that the corporation can take; but it’s not the only way to coordinate capital and labor in a successful and profitable way. The protean corporations of Japan are best understood as a different species of thing altogether: better at some things, worse at others, but still highly adapted to their particular environment. And the things that they’re very good at turn out to be extraordinarily helpful for all sorts of things in which American companies tend to struggle.

by David Oks, Website |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Guardrails (What Guardrails?)

It is the most overused metaphor of Trump 2.0 (along, perhaps, with “Trump 2.0”). If you are worried that this administration has careened out of control — gutting the federal work force, threatening allies, starting wars, militarizing American cities, emasculating NATO, knocking down chunks of the White House, proposing that taxpayers foot the bill for a $1.8 billion political slush fund — then the failure of “guardrails” is your constant lament.

“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Kamala Harris warned late in her failed 2024 campaign. The guardrails are “made of Jell-O,” a host for MSNOW complained as he considered Trump’s first year back in office. And Democrats pitch all manner of legislation as essential “guardrails” around the powers and the personality of the 47th president.

What “norms” were to Trump’s first term, “guardrails” are to his second. We’ve gone from “Can he do that?” to “What can stop him?”

The problem is that guardrails — their presence or absence, their strength or deterioration — are a limiting way to imagine restraints on executive power. Even as they supposedly protect us from the overreach of our leaders, guardrails risk reducing the rest of us to spectators. A guardrail suggests that some trustworthy sage of long ago (James Madison is a favorite) has inspected the road and erected sensible boundaries. No need to worry; there’s a guardrail.

Except sometimes there isn’t; or sometimes it’s weak. Or sometimes the only way to make a guardrail go from metaphor to reality is to become one yourself. [...]

The ultimate paper guardrail in the United States is the Constitution, our owner’s manual. This one really is paper; you can visit the National Archives in Washington and see those four brittle and handwritten pages in a hermetically sealed case pumped with argon gas. (Yes, it’s a guardrail with its own guardrails.)

We know the main constitutional guardrails: powers split among the three branches of the federal government; the guardrails of federalism, that is, of powers shared between the states and the national government; and the Bill of Rights, which basically became a condition for skeptical state conventions to ratify the whole thing.

The verbs of the Constitution’s preamble burst with self-assurance — establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, secure the blessings of liberty — but different passages cut in unexpected directions. For example, the stipulation in Article I, Section IV, that the “times, places and manner” of elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof” is a vital democratic guardrail when, say, an American president who has just lost re-election pressures state officials to “find” more votes in his favor. But how protective of democracy is this guardrail when those state legislatures gleefully redraw congressional districts so that politicians choose their voters and not the other way around?

Even the Constitution’s principal author was not sure that the document was adequate to the task before it. In Federalist 48, Madison wondered whether these mere “parchment barriers” were strong enough to sustain the Republic in the face of “the encroaching spirit of power.”

This singular piece of parchment has endured for more than two centuries and has come to be regarded as the sacred text of our civic religion. Tom Paine even referred to the Constitution as America’s “political bible,” and its most famous passages are often recited aloud, with devotional reverence. [...]

There has been a standoff in recent decades over proper constitutional interpretation. On one side stands originalism (and its ne’er-do-well cousin, textualism); on the other is an evolving, so-called living Constitution. I’m partial neither to an originalist interpretation, with its overtly ideological intentions, nor to a living Constitution, with its almost vibes-based jurisprudence. More attractive is the notion of a “working” Constitution, as Jack Rakove put it in “Original Meanings,” his 1996 history of the Constitution’s beginnings.

Rakove wrote that “Americans have always possessed two Constitutions, not one: the formal document adopted in 1787-88, with its amendments; and the working Constitution comprising the body of precedents, habits, understandings and attitudes that shape how the federal system operates at any historical moment.”

This does not necessarily mean that the Constitution is becoming a wiser version of itself every day, but simply that the document becomes real when it encounters the world it means to govern. In Federalist 37, Madison seems to agree: “All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.”

The law is obscure and equivocal until it is put in action, which means that our paper guardrails aren’t real until they are tested. You don’t really know how strong the railing is until something smashes against it.

In their 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize two political ideas — two guardrails — that are crucial to sustaining democracy: institutional forbearance and mutual toleration.

Politicians display institutional forbearance when they exercise restraint in the use of even their legitimate powers, not deploying them in full for temporary advantage, if only because someday a rival will come into power and do likewise. And mutual toleration means that politicians consider their opponents legitimate participants in the public arena, not existential enemies who must be vanquished at all costs.

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published the book, both guardrails were already under stress in American politics. Today, they’ve been overrun.

Mutual toleration has nearly vanished — politicians and supporters from one side see their opponents on the other as evil, as destroyers of all they hold dear. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021, while Democrats invariably describe Trump as an “existential threat” to American democracy. Absent mutual toleration, the stakes are always at the highest pitch: National survival requires partisan victory.

Institutional forbearance has also deteriorated beyond recognition. The Department of Justice investigates and indicts a president’s political enemies and insulates the president and his family and businesses from tax inquiries. Immigration enforcement agents descend upon neighborhoods, workplaces and schools, detaining, raiding and even killing in the name of mass deportation. A self-styled Department of Government Efficiency takes a chain saw to the federal work force, eviscerating U.S. foreign assistance along the way. And a president is granted, via a generous Supreme Court, presumptive immunity for whatever “official acts” he commits on the job.

After all, why exercise forbearance when you finally wield the power to do what you’ve always wanted to do? When they get in the way of pet projects and partisan interests, high-minded ideas are easily disregarded by those in power. Consider Vice President JD Vance’s dismissiveness toward the American creed — he argues that people will fight for a place and a home, not for mere “abstractions” — even though the oath of office he swore was to defend the Constitution itself, that piece of paper so packed with abstractions.

The individuals who serve as democratic guardrails are those who uphold oaths, who challenge us to live up to our parchment barriers, who give all those other guardrails flesh.

One such flesh-and-blood American guardrail died recently, a man whose lengthy record in public life was unfairly downgraded during his final years. His name was Robert Swan Mueller III, and his case is illustrative of how we’ve come to regard constraints on presidential behavior, and on those tasked with investigating it.

by Carlos Lozada, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Evolutionary Quandaries

xkcd via: here/here

Jeremy Miranda, Post-Partridge Family, Pre-L.A. Law, 2026

via:

Is TikTok Art?

Short-form content gets a bad rap these days. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts — all of it nothing but brainrot and digital dopamine, a modern “hypodermic needle,” in the words of Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke.

This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.

But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.

Kids don’t just spend time on social media because they are screen junkies who can’t read. That would be too easy. They spend time on social media, in large part, because social media has become brilliantly, absurdly, unprecedentedly, entertaining.

Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.

So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.

1) The vocation vlogger

Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”

Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”

Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.

This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.

As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.

2) The craftsman

A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.

Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.

The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.

Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.

Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.

And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.

The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.

3) The comedian

A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.

Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.

How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.

The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.

As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.

It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.

Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.

I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.

4) The aestheticist

Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.

But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.

Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.

The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.

What is art?

New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.

When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”

In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.

Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.

But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.

Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film. TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.

The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.

In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.

The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.

by Maibritt Henkel, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Lots of links. If you want something a little longer with a lovely Chinese woman and beautiful scenery (and crazy skills), see Liziqui (YouTube). Channel here.]

Shane Mauss | Trips: Second Dose

Psychedelic experiences are famously hard to describe. So comedian Shane Mauss didn’t just describe them—he built a way to show them. 

In TRIPS: Second Dose, Shane dives into ayahuasca, DMT, and ketamine, translating hyperspace, out-of-body experiences, and cosmic rodeos into big laughs and bigger perspective. Filmed inside the 360° immersive madness of Meow Wolf Denver, the visuals are mixed and synced live by Michael Strauss, fusing 25 years of concert/festival visuals with work from 20+ visionary artists curated by Shane.

[ed. Pretty funny and great graphics. I've always wondered why more comedians haven't followed the Cheech and Chong formula from decades ago.]

Doctors, This Is Why Our Patients Are Using ChatGPT

Several months ago, I got the results back from some routine blood tests, and let’s just say several numbers were a tad too high. My doctor advised “continued diet and exercise” and signed off on the results.

For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.

So, I did what everyone does in this day and age: I turned to artificial intelligence. With low expectations, I typed my lab results into ChatGPT.

As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would.

I had always assumed the “human side” of medicine was the part A.I. couldn’t touch. Sure, I know doctors are turning to A.I. to help them break bad news, since patients seem to find messages crafted by bots more empathetic than those written by doctors. But, in practice, what I thought really mattered was that a person was delivering that care.

The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow. [...]

As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.

I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.

It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.

Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.

The reality is, many patients are already consulting A.I. Doctors can keep fearing or condemning those interactions, or they can figure out how to support people using A.I. tools for their health care — cautiously, with clear guardrails. I would never tell patients to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a diagnosis, but perhaps I would suggest they use it to make sense of a new condition or keep up with routine screenings — or translate “diet and exercise” into steps that actually fit into their lives, as I did. At the same time, we need safeguards built into these systems to protect people from real harm from dangerous advice.

My experience with the chatbot has already shifted how I interact with patients in the E.R., with only minutes to piece together fragments of their circumstances. When a patient asks the same question repeatedly, I try to listen for what’s behind it. Maybe she’s not after more medical facts.

by Dr. Helen Ouyang, NY Times | Read more:
Image: María Medem
[ed. I had this exact experience a month or so ago. Asked for a full blood workup to see if there were any problems. Called back two weeks later for results. No answer. Waited another week and went to the clinic in person to make sure my first request hadn't somehow gotten lost in the bureaucracy (which happens, frequently). Except, this time I was smart enough to ask for a print-out of my lab results. Again, after receiving no response from my doctor, I took a picture of the results, uploaded them to Anthropic's Claude and asked it to interpret them. At first I got the standard disclaimer that it doesn't do diagnoses, but then I asked it to just interpret the results so I'd know what all the coding meant, the various ranges of acceptability etc., and it gave me a detailed response. Much better than I'd ever gotten from doctors before who'd mostly just say (if they responded at all) "oh yeah, everything looks ok, some things look a bit high, but others ok". And that's it. No explanation or guidance on anything, like follow-ups were a burden (that couldn't be billed for an office visit). I'll always use AI from now on to evaluate my results. Doctors (and hospitals) have brought this upon themselves.]

Price's Law

Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists. That’s insane.

Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem.

This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for

What Is Price’s Law?

In 1963, a physicist named Derek J. de Solla Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention.

He noticed something strange: the distribution of productivity wasn’t a bell curve as you’d expect… it wasn’t even close.

It followed a completely different mathematical pattern.

Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output

• In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research

• On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation

Price discovered this while analyzing scientific citations. In any given field, a small fraction of researchers generated half of all cited papers. The rest still published, but their work barely got noticed.

The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.

Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

In corporate America, Price’s Law shows up with eerie precision. Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.

Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.

In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity. Most stars are dim, unremarkable red dwarfs.

A handful of blue giants blaze so bright they illuminate entire stellar neighborhoods. (Scientifically known as a Power Law distribution)

In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.

The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.

And this is not a coincidence or rigged systems or unfair advantages (though those exist too).

This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.

And if you’re building a personal brand or a one-person business, understanding this law might literally save you.

by Kaguura Gichuru, The Write Path |  Read more:

Image: via

Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids

I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.

I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.

People Don’t Let Kids Do Things

As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:

1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.

2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.

Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store

• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents

• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them

• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)

• 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)

• 71% have not used a sharp knife

Lenore Skenazy: During that visit, I was told that children could never be left alone, inside or outside the home—EVEN IN THEIR OWN BEDROOMS—until they were 13 years old. Social Services said specifically that I had to be in each room with them at all times until they were 13. That investigation ended without incident. …

When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.

“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”

Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”

There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.

Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]

Let Your Children Play

Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.

We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.

Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.

Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus

shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)

is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.

The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.

Don’t Fear The CPS

And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.

And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):

MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.

Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.

This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.

It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.

… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!

Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.

Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.

do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.

you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.

you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?

yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.

Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents

One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.

One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.

This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.

Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.

having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: X

Ry Cooder

 

 

[ed. Ry Cooder, 1970 - 1987. Can't recommend this 11-cd boxed set highly enough. Almost listened to the whole damn thing last night in one shot.]

Ranked Choice Voting Delivered What Alaskans Wanted

Takeaways

• Ranked choice ballots allow voters to express nuanced political opinions across party lines. Voters can back their favorite candidate without spoiling an election for their second-favorite.

• In Alaska’s first ranked choice elections in 2022, Democrat Mary Peltola won and held the state’s US House seat with cross-partisan support from Nick Begich voters. In a 2024 rematch, Begich (a Republican) won a majority with support across parties.

• Alaska’s top-four ranked choice system doesn’t favor one party over another—but it does encourage candidates to consider how their campaign might win broad support.

***

In 2022, former Alaska State Representative Mary Peltola made history: she became the first woman to represent Alaska in the US House, the first Democrat to hold the seat in half a century, and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in the chamber. Importantly, she was also the first person to win a statewide ranked choice election in Alaska.

Some Republicans, including Peltola’s challengers Nick Begich and former Governor Sarah Palin, cried foul. The late US Representative Don Young, a Republican, had held the seat for half a century. Ranked choice voting, they fumed, must have been a ploy to elect Democrats.

Results from across the country indicate otherwise. Ranked choice voting doesn’t help members of one party or another; it elevates candidates with broad popular support among voters.

Sightline’s analysis of ballot data from the Alaska Division of Elections spells out a similar narrative: one of a Democrat with cross-partisan appeal in 2022, and of a Republican who captured a majority of hearts and minds during a conservative surge in 2024.

The August 2022 Special Election: Mary Peltola’s landmark win

A somber development gave Alaskans an early taste of the top-four primaries and ranked choice voting they adopted in 2020. Don Young, Alaska’s long-time US representative, passed away in March of 2022. His absence teed up a heated contest: in the first test of Alaska’s top-four primary, 48 hopefuls appeared on the June special primary ballot to serve the rest of Rep. Young’s term.

Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, independent Al Gross, and Democrat Mary Peltola secured the top four spots; but when Gross dropped out of the running, Alaska’s first ranked-choice contest came down to two Republicans and one Democrat.

Mary Peltola led the field with 40 percent of first-choice votes. Palin followed with 31 percent of the vote. Begich was a close third with 28 percent. No one candidate won a majority of votes, so election officials eliminated Begich, the lowest-performing—and allocated his votes to voters’ second-place rankings. Overall, Peltola had more support than Palin.

Immediately, some Republicans lashed out at ranked choice voting. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for one, scoffed at the notion that an election in which 60 percent of voters picked Republican candidates first could produce a Democrat. Sarah Palin shared the same sentiment: “It’s effectively disenfranchised 60 percent of Alaska voters.”

Cotton and Palin ignored the core tenet of ranked choice voting: it gives voters a chance to express nuanced political opinions. And Alaskans did.

Begich voters were not necessarily hardcore Republicans

In short, Begich voters liked Begich; not all of them liked Palin.

Animated chart by Sightline Institute using official results from the Alaska Division of Elections.

Only half of Begich voters ranked Palin second on their ballots. Nearly a third of Begich voters—29 percent—cast bipartisan ballots with Peltola second, enough to put the Democrat over the threshold. Some 21 percent of voters had no second-choice preference, so their votes did not transfer.

Begich voters supporting Peltola wasn’t a fluke. The cast vote record, an anonymized data set showing how voters filled out their ballots, revealed that 27 percent of his supporters cast ballots for non-Republicans in the gubernatorial primary as well. Peltola, a low-profile and moderate Democrat, had a similar degree of cross-partisan appeal for some Alaskans who liked Begich.

But what about those 21 percent of Begich voters who had no second-place preference? If every one of those voters had picked Palin, she would have prevailed over Peltola, but if they had picked their second choices in the same proportions as the other Begich voters, Peltola still would have won.

More to the point, not ranking anyone second is a legitimate choice for voters. After all, Alaskans for Better Elections found that 85 percent of August voters thought ranked choice voting was “simple.” Begich-only voters could have ranked if they chose to do so, but they decided against expressing a preference between Peltola or Palin.

Begich and Palin turned against each other, and some voters followed suit

Palin’s withered support among Begich voters may have had roots in a venomous campaign. Begich called Palin a “quitter” and “intellectually deleterious.” Palin told her supporters that Begich was “full of bull.” Trading insults throughout the campaign didn’t exactly endear their bases to one another. Voters aren’t inclined to dole those rankings out to candidates they’ve come to hate.

In fairness, the Republicans were simply following an outdated campaign playbook. Attacking and undermining other candidates had long been a winning strategy in Alaska’s often divided pick-one, plurality winner elections prior to reform. But ranked choice voting encourages candidates to build bridges rather than burn them. If candidates can’t be a voter’s first choice, they can still appeal to be their second.

While Begich and Palin were snapping at each other, Peltola was snapping selfies with them. Her “Fish, Family, Freedom” slogan was upbeat and nonpartisan. She maintained a respectful tone when discussing her opponents, and they reciprocated—Palin even called her a “sweetheart.”

Perhaps if the Republicans had followed Peltola’s friendly lead and encouraged their supporters to rank one another, they could have drummed up enough support to keep the seat in Republican hands. Instead, they salted the earth.

by Al Vanderklipp and Jay Lee, Sightline Institute | Read more:
Image: Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via ZUMA Press Wire

[ed. Ranked choice voting works (even if Begich eventually slimed his way into Congress on Trump's coattails in 2024). Mary's running again, this time to oust another Trump yes-man, Dan Sullivan in the Senate. I don't support all of her policies, but at least they're well reasoned and not just rubber stamps for whatever Trump dictates. Please contribute to her campaign if you value independent thinking. See also: Five Ways Election Reform Has Revamped Alaska Politics (Sightline).]

Samurai vs. Squatters: Reclaiming California Property Owners' Stolen Homes

Across the Golden State, uninvited occupants have taken over countless residential properties and then refused to vacate. Homes undergoing renovations, vacant rental units, and even whole apartment buildings have fallen prey to squatters. Once they move in squatters are very difficult to dislodge. The legal process to remove them is expensive and can take months or years.

In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.

Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that's more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters.

"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.

It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.

According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters.

If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.

Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.

The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.

But with reforms stalled in the state legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.

On the streets, it's samurai versus squatters.

Why Won't California Police Remove Squatters? 'It's a Civil Matter.'

Though aggregate numbers are hard to come by, squatting appears to be on the rise in California. The state's housing cost crisis has helped produce the nation's largest population of homeless and housing-insecure people—many of whom are willing to take on the risks of squatting.

High home prices and an arduous eviction system have also helped make squatting a lucrative scam. Owners will often pay squatters exorbitant sums in "cash-for-keys" agreements to reclaim their valuable real estate.

Meanwhile, property owners who call the police about a squatting situation will receive a near-universal response from law enforcement: "It's a civil matter," meaning, "It's not our problem."

Responding officers often feel they lack the competence to tell on the spot whether someone is an illegal squatter or a lawful occupant. They are thus eager to avoid the legal liability that would come from charging a lawful occupant with a misdemeanor trespassing offense.

Police "have been told in training: If somebody says, 'I live here,' leave them alone. Why risk the lawsuit of removing somebody from a house that they may lawfully occupy?" says Sidharda Lakireddy, who manages a few hundred units in the Bay Area and has dealt with multiple squatting situations.

Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the first instinct of many police officers is to avoid getting involved.

Devlin Creighton tells the story of a squatter who moved into a rental unit he owns in San Jose just a few hours after he managed to convince the previous squatting occupant to leave in a cash-for-keys arrangement.

When the police showed up at the property, they initially told Creighton he'd have to follow the months-long civil eviction process to get his squatter out.

"I'm like, 'She's not going to live here for three months for free. She got here today!'" Creighton recalls telling the officers. "The police, these new guys, were like, 'Well, you know, it's not our job. We're crime. This is civil.'"

Fortunately for Creighton, a more seasoned police sergeant soon arrived who was more willing to hear his side of the story. Creighton's new squatter couldn't answer the sergeant's basic questions, such as "What is your address?" and "When's trash day?" So he forced her to leave. But if the sergeant hadn't been willing to hear Creighton out, the property owner would have had no choice but to go to civil court.

Having to go through a court process to remove a squatter isn't inherently unreasonable. Most states treat squatting as a civil matter to be handled by the courts. California's civil courts move slowly, however. The civil eviction process also enables squatters to claim a long list of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that can stretch a case out for months or longer.

Some lawyers openly sell themselves to potential clients based on their ability to stretch out the eviction process in court. "When it comes to you, the landlord is not stepping on a cockroach; he is stepping on a landmine," reads one eviction defense attorney's website which claims that fighting an eviction in court can prolong one's occupancy for years. "All during the [civil eviction process], you are paying no rent," it says.

The experience some landlords have removing squatters shows this landmine claim is not a bluff.

How Long Does It Take to Remove a Squatter in California?

Zachary, a landlord who owns seven units in the Los Angeles area and who asked only to be referred to by his first name because he fears retaliation from squatters, learned just how lengthy and expensive the civil court process can be when a longtime tenant died in January 2025.

When Zachary went to reclaim the unit, he found four strangers already inside.

"They definitely looked disheveled," he says. "They were people who lived out of suitcases. Their clothes weren't well-kept."

The men showed Zachary a letter claiming they were subtenants of the deceased. They claimed they had a legal right to take over the unit after that person's death.

Zachary's lease with his deceased tenant explicitly forbade subletting, making this claim a legal nonstarter. But when the squatters refused to leave and police refused to eject them, Zachary was forced to file for an eviction in Superior Court of Los Angeles County in February 2025.

Zachary describes the following months as a nightmare. In response to his eviction filing, the new occupants of his home countersued him. They produced phony documents purporting to show they were legal tenants being harassed after they raised habitability issues with the unit. While Zachary waited for a court hearing on the case, his squatters also allegedly moved in several more occupants who proceeded to trash his units, do drugs on the property, and menace his legitimate tenants—some of whom moved out.

The squatters also demanded $50,000 in compensation for the emotional and financial toll that Zachary's "illegal" eviction efforts had caused them.

When a hearing on Zachary's eviction complaint and his squatters' counterclaims was finally held in late March 2025, the judge ruled in his favor in a matter of minutes. Through appeals and hardship claims, however, the squatters managed to delay their actual eviction for another two months.

When Zachary finally reclaimed the apartment in late May, "It was really in disarray. They had left needles and rotting food. They had a cat that had made a mess in there. It was really a terrible scene."

After they'd left, Zachary found out more about who his squatters were. In the papers of his deceased tenant, there was a request for a restraining order against the squatters. That request described how his former tenant had met the squatters on a dating app and agreed to let them stay in his spare bedroom for a week when they claimed to have nowhere else to go.

When his former tenant finally asked them to leave, the document said, they blackmailed him: The squatters said they'd accuse him of rape if he called the cops to kick them out.

Per the restraining order statement, Zachary's former tenant did eventually call the cops on the squatters. The police did not believe their claims of being raped, but they also told Zachary's former tenant that they couldn't remove the squatters without a court order. An officer encouraged the former tenant to file for a restraining order instead.

California's tenants' rights advocates, who uniformly oppose any efforts to expedite the removal of squatters, would describe Zachary's experience as an example of the system working as intended: A property dispute was raised, and after a few months of process, the legal owner was able to reclaim his unit.

But during the time it took for that process to play out, the squatters were able to exploit procedural protections designed to safeguard tenants' rights to menace actual tenants and destroy Zachary's property.

Zachary estimates he spent $14,000 on fees to lawyers and to Squatter Squad, a Los Angeles–based outfit that handled direct negotiations with the squatters, served them legal documents, and helped secure the unit when it was finally vacated. He had to pay another $43,000 to fix the damage the squatters had done to the unit. He also lost rent on both the squatter-occupied unit and on those neighboring units that were vacated because of the squatters' disruption.

Given the costs and ordeal, it's unsurprising other property owners in desperate situations would turn to solutions outside of the court system, such as katana-wielding men in black leather coats.

by Christian Britschgi, Reason | Read more:

Image: Christian Britschgi/Midjourney
[ed. California.]