The Looting of Science Fiction

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future.

In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across the stars. ‘That’s the goal!’ he concluded. ‘And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!’

It was a remarkable pitch selling the Pentagon a science-fiction vision. Of course, the fit is partial, incomplete. Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation was built on principles of equality and exploration for the sake of knowledge, not profit or military dominance. Musk took the aesthetic – big spaceships, alien encounters, epic adventures – and left its political foundation. You don’t have to be a Trekkie to know that, in Star Trek, capitalism, nationalism and militarism have been left behind. Musk wants the Enterprise, but reimagined for the military-industrial complex.

In 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to ‘Meta’, he took the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992), which imagines the ‘Metaverse’: a virtual reality where people’s avatars navigate digital space.

But Snow Crash is one of the sharpest satirical novels of the past half-century. Stephenson wrote it as a warning: his Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed. The federal government has disintegrated; corporate franchises govern daily life; even pizza delivery has been privatised into a Mafia-run operation. The novel’s protagonist is a pizza deliveryman and part-time hacker whose sword-fighting avatar in the virtual world is the only place where dignity is available to him. Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads.

Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy – where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services – echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, gave expression to this ethos in 2017 when he said: ‘We are the people who make fantasies real.’ It sounds inspiring, but it is important to know which parts of those fantasies they’re choosing, and which parts they’re leaving out. When Musk unveiled Tesla’s Cybertruck in 2019, he had already told investors what to expect: something ‘really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner’. Musk was selling survival gear for a collapsing world, a version of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not. [...]

Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. Those regulatory frameworks Andreessen wants to demolish emerged from hard-won lessons. The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded.

Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power. Tolkien built an entire mythology to make that argument.

In Tolkien’s novels, the palantíri are seeing-stones or crystal balls that allow their users to see across great distances. They sound like neutral tools, like surveillance technology. But they are devices of corruption: Saruman’s palantír connects him to Sauron and leads to his downfall; Denethor’s drives him to madness and suicide. The palantíri don’t just enable seeing – they enable manipulation and control by those who master them.

The US company Palantir Technologies provides analytics and surveillance tools to governments, militaries and ICE, US immigration and customs enforcement. Its name does political work: it transforms invasive tracking into mystical insight, casting algorithmic surveillance as wise foresight rather than systematic intrusion. In their book The Technological Republic (2025), Palantir’s CEO Alexander Karp and his legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska frame Palantir’s government work in martial terms: ‘We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors. To deny the human need for such affiliation has been a mistake.’ They position surveillance tools as fulfilling a fundamental human need for warrior brotherhood. The Tolkien reference provides the aesthetic authority; the distance from Tolkien’s actual moral vision provides the freedom to act without it. Naming a surveillance company after devices that corrupt and betray their users isn’t homage – it is the appropriation of aesthetic while rejecting the moral core.

William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced ‘cyberspace’, a term Gibson coined. Its protagonist, Case, is a hacker whose nervous system was damaged by former employers as punishment. Burned out and banned from cyberspace, he drifts through neon-soaked Chiba City as a ‘console cowboy’ with nowhere left to go. The novel’s cyberspace is owned and controlled by vast corporations; individual hackers are not heroes but tools, hired and discarded by interests they can barely see. Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian: a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion.

In September 1988, the software developer John Walker wrote an Autodesk internal white paper, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Beyond “User Interfaces”’, in which he outlined what he called a ‘cyberpunk initiative’: a proposal to build, within 12 months, a doorway into cyberspace. The project’s motto was blunt: ‘Reality isn’t enough any more.’

By 2025, the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI pump high-energy electronic dance music across their reception area, where easy chairs, scatter cushions and Swiss cheese plants create what the CEO Sam Altman calls a ‘comfortable country house’ rather than a ‘corporate sci-fi castle’. The chrome and grime of cyberpunk – the neon-soaked warning that the corporate capture of digital space would be brutal and dehumanising – has been replaced by Scandinavian furniture and artisanal coffee. Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ has been rebranded as cozy domesticity. The dystopia has not been avoided; it has been made comfortable enough to sign up for.

Gibson himself registered the irony. In an interview with Wired magazine in 2012, he acknowledged that the cyberspace of Neuromancer – all corporate interests and information thieves – bore little resemblance to the early internet he failed to anticipate: the 1990s-2000s moment when a teenager in a bedroom could genuinely outcompete corporations, when the network felt briefly open and democratic. Gibson missed that phase entirely. But he was accidentally right about where things ended up. The corporate platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – that now dominate digital life are far closer to his original vision than to the participatory web that briefly flourished between them. Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

by Ali Rıza Taşkale, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Amazon

Paradise Revisited

The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.

On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”

On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.

Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—­up from $100 just two years ago—­and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.

The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—­discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—­as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.

Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.

The mythology of blinding-­inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—­the one that drove me here—­is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”

All of that should make him any writer’s hero.

The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—­although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a bio­security declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.

I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”

One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a direction­less youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.

During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ ­mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”

In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahren­heit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.

On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-­prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.

Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—­York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.

In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.” [...]

Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—­in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—­he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.

No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.

After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)

by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

The Power of Love

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will have peace."  - Various sources, including Jimi Hendrix and William Gladstone (British politician). And of course, Huey Lewis & the News.

Kissing daredevils in custody after scaling Empire State Building, getting engaged more than 1,400 feet over NYC (NY Post) - July 1, 2026.

via:

Jim Croce

[ed. A favorite.]

Dirk Stewen (German, b.1972). Stilleben Mit Gepunkteterlinie, Hamburg, 2014; and, Guitarre und Fruchtschale, Hamburg, 2014.
via:

The O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science

... and anything else Trump doesn’t like. Under a new proposal, Administration officials could deny government grants to any group or project on the ground that it didn’t fit the President’s agenda.

The list of tactics the Trump White House has used against its perceived enemies is nasty and brutish but certainly not short. It includes indicting them (James Comey, John Bolton), investigating them (Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Gavin Newsom), threatening to investigate them (Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen), and threatening to prosecute them (top election officials in all fifty states). The Administration has dispatched troops to cities the President doesn’t care for (Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland); sued universities that ticked him off (Harvard, U.C.L.A.); and withheld billions of dollars’ worth of funding from groups and projects that it deems “woke” or wasteful or not in line with Donald Trump’s priorities, whatever those at the moment happen to be.

Recently, the White House announced plans to codify its campaign of retribution. The proposal, which would dramatically increase the President’s power over how federal funds are given out, would hand Trump a “new cudgel” to “advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals,” a letter signed by all the Democrats in the Senate charged. “The stakes could not be higher” is how the legal website Lexology put it.

The proposal in question comes, not surprisingly, out of the Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025. Titled, innocuously enough, “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” it would replace the current guidance for signing off on government grants, which generally leaves the task to civil servants and peer-review panels. Instead, the final say would go to political appointees. All discretionary awards from the federal government would have to be assessed by senior Administration officials, who could deny them on the ground that they didn’t fit the President’s agenda. Grants could also be terminated at any time for the same reason.

The rules would affect hundreds of billions of dollars in funding disbursed by agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Transportation Department, to pay for everything from local dance performances to massive infrastructure projects. As Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, noted in a recent Substack post, “Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends.” The proposal, she added, would put the “entire financial partnership between the federal government and the states under political control, without an act of Congress.”

The O.M.B.’s stated rationale for the new rules is to “improve transparency, accountability and oversight for Federal awards.” But no one—and this includes Trump appointees—seems to be buying it. Trump’s nominee to be the O.M.B.’s deputy director, Hal Duncan, noted at his confirmation hearing last month that the proposal would enable the Administration to prevent federal money from supporting “divisive D.E.I. ideologies.” At the same hearing, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, accused the White House of trying “to turn the entire federal government into this one big slush fund to reward those aligned with the Administration and punish everyone else.” Among the many groups that have expressed concern about the changes are the National League of Cities, the School Superintendents Association, and the National Council of Nonprofits.

Research organizations have been particularly outspoken in their opposition to the O.M.B. proposal. “This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote recently. Among the proposed rules’ many provisions is one that would prohibit federal money from being used to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in many other countries. “By this guidance, America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station,” Colette Delawalla, who founded and heads the group Stand Up for Science, said in an interview. “The same goes for every type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring.”

Of course, even before the O.M.B. proposal was published, on the Friday after Memorial Day, the White House was finding plenty of ways to undermine science. Last year, the Administration terminated or froze nearly eight thousand research grants. Federal judges have ordered many of them to be reinstated; still, roughly a third, totalling some 1.4 billion dollars, have yet to be released, and may be gone for good.

For the current fiscal year, Trump proposed slashing the budget for the National Science Foundation by more than half. Congress rejected the cuts and essentially held N.S.F. funding flat; the Administration has responded by simply refusing to disburse the funds. According to the website Grant Witness, this year the N.S.F. is on track to make the lowest number of grants in more than half a century—roughly seventeen hundred. Meanwhile, the agency has been operating without a director for the past fifteen months. (Trump has nominated a financier with no scientific expertise to lead it, but the Senate has yet to confirm him.) And, in April, the President abruptly fired all twenty-two members of the N.S.F.’s science advisory board. It was dismantled just as it was working to finish an analysis showing that China has overtaken the U.S. as the leader in key scientific fields. The turmoil at the agency has affected scientists—and budding scientists—across the disciplines: recently, M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, reported that the school’s graduate enrollment has declined by about twenty per cent. “It’s a loss for the nation,” Kornbluth said in a videotaped message to the campus. “When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures.”

The O.M.B. is aiming to finalize the new regulations by October 1st. (This is the case even though the office has already received more than ninety thousand comments on them and, under the law, is supposed to respond to all significant points before they can take effect.) It’s no accident that Vought wants the proposal enacted before the midterms; this would allow the Administration to continue to terrorize grant recipients even if Democrats gain control of Congress and start to exercise real oversight. 

by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Julia Koblitz on Unsplash
[ed. Making America Dumb Again. See also: The Trump Administration's Existential Threat to Scientific Research (Dresner); MAGA's attack on science is even worse than it looks (Smith); Gold Standard Lysenko (Gellman); and, Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule (Ginexi).]

***

[ed. How to submit comments: "Through social media, video calls, Substacks and petitions, scientists, universities and groups representing them have called for a flood of public comments. They’ve shared resources listing objectionable provisions they’ve identified in the more than 400-page proposal. They’ve provided online guides to the public on how to write comments pushing back on specific changes that would affect them." ~  Comments Flood OMB Proposal to Cement Political Control of Grants (Inside Higher Ed).]

The Hotness Curve

The Hotness Curve (how age changes a woman's appeal). (Aella - Knowingless)

Images: uncredited

[ed. Two and Five.]

RunPee

RunPee: know when to run and pee during a movie.

Image: RunPee

[ed. You tell your folks you're a tech entrepreneur, developing exciting new apps that'll make you incredibly rich. Details: vague.]

The Most Effective Attacking Run at this World Cup

And why it works so well.

Heading into its quarter-finals, the 2026 World Cup had seen more than 90,000 passes, with close to 1,800 of those leading to chances on goal, and 2,367 shots, 280 of which found the back of the net.

These are some of football’s most quantifiable actions, simple to both track and evaluate their effectiveness because they involve the most important piece of equipment in the sport. The ball.

Naturally, players who move the ball closer to goal or are involved in possession sequences that end up in opportunities to score can be seen as impacting the game, the value of their actions derived from tangible outcomes.

But football is not a static sport. And as players move, they interact; swapping positions, creating spaces for others and dragging opponents into other areas of the pitch.

So what about decisions and movements without the ball, those that indirectly affect possession plays by creating that extra second of time and space for team-mates?

Developments in the quality and the availability of tracking data mean that some of football’s key off-ball movements are well-integrated into public analysis. But there is still ground to break when it comes to evaluating the secondary effects of off-ball runs on a wider scale: which ones are the most quietly effective, and who performs them best?

Using in-house data, FIFA’s Football Performance Insights team have noticed a trend.

Compared to previous World Cups, they have spotted that possessions including an off-ball run which targets the inside channels and the space in behind the opposition defence are leading to successful actions more frequently. In other words, attacking the gap between the widest defender and the centre-back nearest to them with a forward run is increasingly valuable.

Compared to the previous World Cup four years ago, possession sequences that include such a movement in the 2026 tournament are leading to around 2.7 shots on goal per 30 minutes of ball-in-play time — an increase of around 34 per cent.

Those runs are effective because they cause tension in the opponents’ defence. Most often, that full-back will have their eye on a winger, while the centre-back on that side will be tracking the striker.

A run from deep through that gap means one or the other has to leave their current player to follow it — and in the time it takes for the defenders to decide which of them should do that, the attacking player, with their forward momentum, has already stolen a march.

Here is an example from the round of 32, as England seek to break down a compact DR Congo defence, who are sitting a little deeper to try to get to extra time...

by Thom Harris, The Athletic |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/The Athletic

No Great Loss

Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it. 

I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.

We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.

Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.

Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made. [...]

He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.

Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.

He was no patriot. [...]

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

by Steve Schmidt, The Warning |  Read more:

Image: Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
[ed. Pretty much says it all. Everything you hate about Washington and politicians. I'd only add the same epitaph his golf buddy Trump used on the occasion of Robert Mueller's death: "Good... He can no longer hurt innocent people." See the official NY Times obit here. BBC here.]

The Decline of Deviance 2

In The Decline of Deviance, I argued that:

Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s.

This is both good (less crime) and bad (less innovation).

Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.

Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all time. Lots of folks have chimed in with hypotheses, critiques, and good old-fashioned internet dunks, so let’s see if we can take this idea one level deeper, and weave something out of all these loose threads.

That’s right: we’re doing a sequel to the post about how there are too many sequels.

THE KIDS STOPPED SMOKING AND NOBODY CARED

The most common response I got was: “how awful!”

(The trends, not the post itself, although that too sometimes.)

To most folks, the decline of deviance is a turn for the worst. Previous generations got to live through artistic golden ages, while we have to suffer through an era where there are four different movies that are all, technically, Spider-Man 2.[...]

But this response misses half the post, and the most important point.

In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed. 10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point. About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant. Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.

Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared. And not because of anything we did on purpose! We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more. No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity. This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.

How does this great, unearned victory make us feel? Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything. We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.

Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win? Can we at least try to reverse-engineer how some of these trendlines ended up going in our preferred directions, so we can make more of them do that?

I, too, would like to see a movie that is not Spider-Man 2. But I also appreciate that I can watch it safely in my home without fear of being attacked by pregnant teenage criminals.

THE INTERNET DIDN’T DO IT

Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”. Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved. Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation. We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.

Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect. A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007. Instagram only launched in 2010, which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone, and long after most of these trends were already in motion.

So I don’t think the internet is the killer, but I do think it’s an accessory after the fact. In particular, I think the internet accelerated three trends that don’t get much attention. I’m going to call them cultural carcinization, de-frictioning, and the flat-Earth problem.

1. CULTURAL CARCINIZATION

In nature, apparently, being a crab is a good way to be. Several independent evolutionary lineages have ended up with crab-like body plans, a process called carcinization.

Culture can carcinize too, not in the sense that we all turn into crabs, but in the sense that we converge on a small set of strategies. If you’ve ever played a “social deduction” or “hidden role” game like Werewolf, Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, or Secret Hitler, you’ve seen this happen in real time. Things start out wild and unpredictable as people get a feel for the rules. But everyone’s tactics have to evolve because each gambit can only work once (“If you’re the Secret Hitler, raise your hand right now!”). If you play long enough with the same group, eventually you’ll end up with a handful of maneuvers that continue to be viable even after they’re known, often because they’re difficult to pull off. At this point, the game becomes both extremely competitive and extremely repetitive. This is what cultural carcinization looks like.

The faster we can communicate, the faster we culturally carcinize. When information only travels as fast as humans can walk or horses can run, it takes a long time for any given strategy to play itself out. As we acquire steamships, railroads, telephones, and airplanes, the pace of the game picks up, and tactics have to turn over faster and faster. By the time we get the internet, it’s like every human on Earth is playing Secret Hitler a million times a day. (Except some people are not-so-secretly Hitlers.) Strategies appear and go out of date almost instantaneously until we all end up in a Nash equilibrium, where there’s no way for anyone to get the upper hand anymore.

The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely. Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos. Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.

2. DE-FRICTIONING

We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.

Each new media technology reduces this friction. CDs, TiVo, satellite radio, streaming—they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away? Well, in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian artists named Komar and Melamid surveyed people around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country. The results looked like this:

The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop. But I don’t think this is because humans yearn for crap and kitsch. I think it’s because no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it. If you cater to people’s raw, undeveloped preferences, sure, you’re going to take them to Sloptown. But people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them. [...]

This is Komar and Melamid’s second lesson: if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike. And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone. I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around. Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.

In a frictionless environment, however, this never has to happen. The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard. Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe? How about 30 million more of those? How about an anteater licking a watermelon? Will that keep your attention for another three seconds? Wait, don’t go yet!! We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!

3. THE FLAT-EARTH PROBLEM

People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”. That did become possible, but it didn’t become desirable. Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone? Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country?

Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck. This is the flat-Earth problem.

It’s easy to see these effects if you know where to look. Because Hollywood wants to sell movies in every market, they’re willing to do everything from editing out laundry clotheslines that make a country look “too backward” to pretending that Freddie Mercury wasn’t gay. [...] 

AM I JUST UNCOOL?

While some folks blamed the internet for the decline of deviance, other people denied the decline entirely.

One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. For example, a blogger named Jenn claims that I am too uncool and out of touch to understand the cultural innovation happening in new forms of media like YouTube and Roblox. “Before I take a ‘culture is stagnating’ take seriously,” Jenn writes, “I want to see proof of work by the critics.” She concludes: “The culture is fine. Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.” (Return of the Obra Dinn is a video game.) [...]

Pettiness aside, I think Jenn’s claim is plausible: the older you get, the less access you have to the most interesting parts of culture. If you think things are stagnating, you’re just admitting that you aren’t getting invited to the cool parties anymore. Plus, old folks can’t stop themselves from seeing the past through rose-colored glasses—in survey after survey, people think pretty much everything in culture just happened to peak when they were between four and twelve years old:

(source: YouGov via The Washington Post)

But things get a little more complicated when you separate people’s responses by age. When you first glance at this YouGov survey, it seems like every generation strongly prefers the music from their own childhood:

But look a little closer. The responses from Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation all have a clear peak flanked by much smaller hills. Millennials’ preferences, on the other hand, are more spread out. And Gen Z’s preferences are basically a plateau—they’re almost equally likely to nominate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

We can’t know whether this is an age effect that they’ll grow out of—maybe every generation was culturally omnivorous when they were younger, and their tastes only calcified when they got older. But I doubt it. For all you Gen X’ers out there, did you spend your teenage years spinning your parents’ Perry Como records until you suddenly switched to Led Zeppelin in adulthood?

Besides, Jenn’s age argument cuts both ways. Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience. When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you. You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s. You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times. You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.

It’s reasonable to be skeptical of any narrative of decline—I did my PhD on why people perceive declines that haven’t actually happened. But (a), unlike most of those spurious nostalgic fantasies, the decline of deviance has both pros and cons. And (b), there are so many weird phenomena here and they need explaining, not just waving away.

For instance— [...]

NO MORE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Another theory that readers put forward: the deviance got scarce because life got hard. Nobody can do cool art anymore because everything is too expensive: housing, college, supplies, etc.

I think this is probably wrong. I suspect that it’s always been hard to be an artist, and previous generations were simply more willing to starve for it—not because they were braver, but because the difference between starving and not-starving used to be much smaller. [...]

You don’t have to go that far into the past to find a kind of poverty that feels foreign today. I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs.They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke. I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous. Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.

That’s not because dire poverty became less glamorous—it was never glamorous!—but because it became uncommon. When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk. When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.

The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay. If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm. If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else. But that manuscript in your desk drawer is less enticing when you can have PTO and dental and an annual international vacation where you get to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have any strangers in it. [...]

As William James wrote 100 years ago:

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. [...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

The difference is that today we don’t despise people who elect to be poor, I think, because we don’t know any of them.

THE DECLINE OF DEVIANCE, THE RISE OF TOLERANCE

Many people asked some version of, “Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance?” After all, even if you wanted to be deviant today, how would you do it? [...]

So no doubt part of the decline of deviance is an increase in tolerance. But I think it, too, can be explained by the rise of mass prosperity.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that nations get rich when they build inclusive economic and political institutions. Oligarchs and aristocrats fear any growth or reform that they can’t control, which in practice means basically all growth and reform. (“We do not desire at all that the great masses shall become well off and independent,” once remarked Frederick Gantz, an imperial flunky of Francis I of Austria. “How could we otherwise rule over them?”) If the plebs and the serfs can get a bit of money and power, however, it kicks off a virtuous cycle. Once people have some cash and influence, it becomes bad business and bad politics to shut them out—if you won’t engage with them, someone else will, and your more open-minded rivals will eventually out-compete you.

This process takes a long time, it’s uneven, and it’s not close to being completed. However, a few generations of semi-inclusive institutions have created a much wider spectrum of acceptable lifestyles. If you want to live in a polyamorous, genderless vegan witch commune, you can order your nutritional yeast on Amazon, trade memes with your friends on Tumblr, and vote for Democrats who think your choices are a-ok. If you want to live in a neoreactionary monarchist compound where you stockpile weapons and hunt bears, you can buy your guns at Wal-Mart, read posts on TruthSocial, and vote for Republicans who are on board with all of it. As long as you have money to spend and ballots to cast, someone can get ahead by catering to you.

(Case in point: one of the “platinum sponsors” of the New York City Pride Parade is Deutsche Bank.)

This is a good thing. Inclusive institutions make everybody better off, except for the few cleptocrats who used to live in palaces while everyone else lived in shacks.

The downside is that every corner of culture gets commercialized. Reading comic books, listening to death metal, piercing body parts other than your ears—these used to be legitimately countercultural acts that distanced you from polite society and bonded you to an alternative community. Now you can do all these things at the mall. The Hot Topic-ization of culture means that anything new and interesting gets co-opted and mass-produced, thus draining it of everything that made it cool in the first place.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Images: Mr. Mastrioianni; Joanna M. Wolfe; YouGov/WaPo; YouGov

Chat GPT-Voice

A new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction, now powering ChatGPT Voice. (OpenAI).]

[ed. Yeah...pretty dorky video, but you get the picture. Here's another one highlighting the voice/language translator.]

Introducing Plan A

A Is For America

It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they’re all things like “regulate a little more” or “regulate a little less” or “react to things as they come up”. This won’t be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you’re aiming for, and it’s increasingly clear that people can’t even visualize what AI going well could look like. What would it take to honestly tell our children that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country’s finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn’t that a problem?

It’s a total coincidence that Plan A comes out the week after America’s 250th birthday. It was supposed to come out earlier, but got delayed. Then it was supposed to come out later, but got pushed forward.

Still, the saying goes “A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives exactly when he means to.” And if anyone qualifies as wizards, it’s Daniel Kokotajlo and his team of forecasters at the AI Futures Project. I previously wrote about Daniel’s eerie accuracy over the 2021 - 2025 period. Since then, they’ve gained worldwide fame for their AI 2027 scenario, which predicted the rise and quick takeover of coding agents in early 2026, plus something like the fight over Fable1.

Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future. It describes the best course of action that Daniel and the AI Futures Project can come up with, and what would happen if we took it.

“Really? You got America a policy paper for its 250th birthday? Doesn’t America already have enough policy papers?” Sort of, but it’s not exactly a policy paper. It starts in a timeline similar to that of AI 2027, on track for a poorly-controlled intelligence explosion that either ends the world or dooms it to permanent techno-oligarchy. But this time, America is blessed with some extra foresight and determination, and makes only good choices (all non-Americans behave naturally, including trying to thwart America when incentivized to do so). It gives a year-by-year description of this best-of-all-possible-worlds, from now through 2040, as predicted by the best AI forecasters alive, with over a dozen supplements explaining all the implementation details.

This is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better.

I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be.

(related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: AI Futures Project

[ed. Important. Here's that link again: AI 2040: Plan A. See also: Plan A: Suggestions For Further Work (AI Futures Project). Also: What Should Be Done (Hyperdimensional). And especially, Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A (DWV).]

They’re the Best-Dressed Golfers in the World, and They’re Just Getting Started

The year is 2026, and the driving range at Riviera Country Club is packed with the best female golfers in the world for the United States’ national open. They’re wearing pleated pants, sweater vests and knitted polo shirts. Some are in ruffled skirts, others Bermuda shorts; a few are sporting long sleeves, others tank tops.

The No. 1 player in the world, Nelly Korda, is wearing a U.S. Men’s National Team soccer jersey, and Ina Kim-Schaad, the Mid-Amateur champion, has already gone viral for her wide-leg, high-waisted trousers, argyle cardigan and matching neck scarf.

What we’re seeing at events such as the U.S. Women’s Open and this week’s Evian Championship is only the beginning, and the women’s golf fashion space still has a long way to go in terms of variety, function and style. But those within the industry agree there is a window of opportunity, as companies are finally gathering the resources and utilizing the avenues needed to take off.

“It was just amazing to get the outpouring of support that I did,” Kim-Schaad, a former Wall Street trader turned sports psychologist, says. “And I do think that does signal, to some degree, that there is that craving for something different.”

There comes a time in every woman’s experience in golf when her attire is called into question. Whether it is the length of her skirt or the amount of her shoulders that is showing, country clubs and golf organizations have been policing women’s clothing since the moment they deigned to let women enter.

Professional players are increasingly buying into fashion choices that take full advantage of the freedom Michelle Wie West led the charge for during her LPGA playing days, from a creative and comfort standpoint. Now, the questions are shifting from “Is that allowed?” to “Where’d she buy that?”

You’d think it was the other way around. But the PGA Tour has more stringent attire policies than the LPGA Tour. Male touring professionals on the PGA Tour are required to wear long pants during competition and may wear shorts during practice rounds only if they are “knee-length, tailored and neat in appearance.” There is a 3-by-5-inch limit on logo size. The women on the LPGA are not subject to the same restrictions regarding their apparel or sponsorship logos.

The LPGA’s dress code is exactly one sentence: “Players are expected to dress in a professional manner and reflect a positive image to the public.”

Stephen and Erica Malbon, the couple behind the streetwear-inspired golf clothing company Malbon Golf, are never surprised when one of Jason Day’s splashy outfits gets flagged by the governing bodies in men’s golf. At the 2024 Masters, Augusta National famously asked Day to remove his sweater vest. So Malbon has naturally gravitated more heavily toward women’s golf fashion in recent years. Those same rules do not apply, and Malbon Women, with popular Englishwoman Charley Hull as its lead athlete, has been growing faster in popularity than they ever expected.

“The PGA (Tour) is like the no-fun police,” Stephen Malbon says. “The LPGA is like, be who you are, have fun, play and just get out here. I love that about women’s golf. The men look like sh– compared to the women, and it’s because the men can’t look good. What are you going to do with a polo and pants?”

As the women’s game has grown recreationally, so, too, has its fashion ecosystem. According to the National Golf Foundation, women account for 60 percent of the growth in on-course participation in the U.S. since 2019, aided by the sport’s boom during the pandemic. There are a record number of female golfers in the country, 7.9 million, topping the previous record of 7.1 million set in 2006, before participation dipped from 2007 to 2011 due to the recession.

“I think there’s been a trickle-down effect of OK, it’s not just old white guys playing golf anymore,” Erica Malbon says. “From our perspective in the industry, we want to make clothes that show people’s personalities, make a better offering for them to play golf and also feel fashionable and like themselves.” [...]

...]

Mastering women’s golf attire goes beyond keeping up with current styles or trends. It can be successful only if it prioritizes function while also providing options for differing preferences.

The sporting goods powerhouse considered new details, from certain silhouettes creating unwanted tan lines to the way a skirt drapes when a woman bends over to pick up her tee.

Any female golfer will tell you that women’s apparel has been plagued by one particular issue, which Nike has also addressed: pockets. The game is still figuring out how to incorporate pockets that are deep enough for yardage books, balls and tees. One tiny coin pocket placed on the very back side of a skirt or pair of pants just isn’t going to cut it.

Female golfers are especially in tune with the way clothing feels and looks on the body, too. Korda says she’s hyperaware of movement in her apparel — does it flow in the wind or stay stationary? Wie West says she isn’t fond of clothing that creates noise, so she avoids certain fabrics that cause her to hear herself while swinging. [...]

“The more diversity of design we have, the more women will feel like, wow, they’re really speaking to me, this feels authentic.”

Kim-Schaad says the majority of her golf wardrobe is not purchased from golf brands. She’d rather dress in styles that make her feel comfortable and confident than blend in with the rest.

“I think that’s the biggest thing. Guys have no problem all wearing the same polo. But for women, it’s actually very different,” Kim-Schaad says. “It’s how we show our own personal flair.

“The more diversity of design we have, the more women will feel like, wow, they’re really speaking to me, this feels authentic.”

by Gabby Herzig, The Athletic | Read more:
Images:Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos: Ryan Sirus, Dylan Buell, Brenton Tse / Getty Images; Warren Little / Getty Images; Sean Haffey / Getty;Scott Halleran / Getty Images
[ed. Watching the Evian this week I thought the same thing... women's golf attire sure has gotten stylish and cutting edge these days. Very modern and flattering. Other segments of the 'athleisure' industry (and beyond) should take note.]

Samsung Blows Out the Stops

Samsung passes Nvidia to become most profitable company in the world

Samsung announced stellar results last night, noting a 19x quarterly increase in operating profit, allowing the firm to pass Nvidia as the most profitable in the world. Kim Yong-Kwan, president and head of corporate management, strategy, and operations for Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions (DS) division, said that the semiconductor unit's 2026 operating profit will exceed everything it has earned across roughly 40 years in the chip business at a company town hall last Friday, according to a report published Monday by Korea JoongAng Daily.

Brokerage consensus puts Samsung's full-year 2026 operating profit near 300 trillion won ($196 billion), and its second-quarter figure at about 84.6 trillion won ($55.1 billion). Samsung easily beat the consensus with $58.5 billion when it posted preliminary results on July 7, overtaking Nvidia's most recent quarterly operating profit of $53.54 billion and becoming the most profitable technology company in the world for the period, on the back of AI-driven memory demand.

Samsung's DS division booked 53.7 trillion won ($35.1 billion) of the company's 57.2 trillion won in total operating profit during the first quarter of 2026, roughly 94% of the total, which is why the division's projection sits so close to Samsung's full-year consensus.

"This year's profit will exceed the cumulative profit generated over the past 40 years since we entered the semiconductor business," Kim Yong-Kwan told staff, scoping the claim to the chip business rather than the wider conglomerate.

Samsung entered the semi space by acquiring Korea Semiconductor in 1974 and shipped its first 64Kb DRAM in the mid-1980s. SamMobile estimates the division's cumulative operating profit from 1985 to 2025 at under 300 trillion won. Samsung's smartphone, display, and appliance businesses have earned far more than that over the same period, so the record applies to memory and logic chips, not to Samsung overall. [...]

Samsung is releasing preliminary second-quarter figures on July 7, so these record projections are still estimates. The reported profit will also absorb a profit-sharing agreement that pays chip workers 10.5% of DS operating profit as stock, worth as much as $26.6 billion this year. 

by Luke James, Tom's Hardware |  Read more:

Image: Getty/Jung Yeon-Je

Huang Yongyu - Spring Sorrow is just like the Southern Riverbank, 1989

via:

How to Offset Your Brain

You slide your hand into your coat pocket and find an old, folded $100 bill. In the other pocket, you find a coin.

Now, here’s the gamble: flip the coin. Heads, you win another $300. Tails, you hand over your $100 bill. Do you take the risk?

Mathematically, you should. One coin flip gives you two equally likely futures: in one, heads, you gain $300; in the other, tails, you lose $100.

Because each future has a 50 per cent chance of happening, you count half of each outcome: half of $300 is $150, and half of $100 is $50. Balance those against each other, and taking the gamble puts you $100 ahead on average. Decision scientists call this positive expected value.

Even when someone grasps the mathematics, however, it’s hard to take the risk. Why?

About 50 years ago, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that this hesitation is not random. People depart from logic in patterned ways. One of the most durable patterns is loss aversion: our tendency to feel the pain of losing more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent, or even greater, gain.

This is where mindfulness becomes interesting. Mindfulness is usually defined as paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, without immediately judging what is happening. In practice, that can mean noticing a thought before believing it, feeling an emotion before acting on it, or returning attention to the body, the breath, or the world around you. At its simplest, mindfulness creates a pause between what arises in the mind and what we do next.

That pause helps because many of our choices are made before we have fully examined them. We may think we are deliberating over the coin toss, but often the body has moved first: recoiling from loss or preserving a decision simply because we have already invested in it. These mental shortcuts are called cognitive biases, and the study of this kind of human misjudgment is central to decision science.

When we hesitate at the coin toss, we might be deliberating – but often, we’ve already decided.

Impulse has its benefits. A mind that had to reason from scratch every moment would be paralysed. But when these shortcuts override reflection, they can distort the decisions we make. Without careful thought, a patient may fail to seek the best medical care. People lose wealth because they cling to their current savings plans. You might know the feeling of preserving a job or a relationship simply because you invested so much in it. Internally, these cognitive biases feel instinctive. The question is whether we can catch these instincts before they harden into choices we mistake for reason.

I came to this question from two directions. I teach and research behavioural economics, where we study the systematic ways people depart from logic, and I also work as a licensed therapist, where I watch those same patterns play out in higher-stakes places: in relationships, in health, and in the stories people tell themselves about who they are. I have long been interested in the tension where a person knows better but cannot quite do better. Over time, I became less interested in theories of irrationality and more interested in what helps people catch themselves before their old reflexes take over.

Mindfulness kept appearing as an answer. But it was an imprecise one. If mindfulness means present-moment awareness without immediate judgment, what exactly is doing the work? Attention? Emotional steadiness? Curiosity? Acceptance? Biases do not all arise from the same source. Some are driven by emotional projection, some by inattention, and others by a failure to stay mentally engaged with a changing situation. So it would be surprising if one version of mindfulness could interrupt all biases in the same way. After all, what we call mindfulness is a cluster of distinct capacities: attention, nonreactivity, acceptance, curiosity and openness to novelty. Different biases may yield to different forms of the mindful state.

Loss aversion, for instance, may depend on how well we tolerate discomfort. Delay discounting, our tendency to overvalue immediate rewards, may depend on whether we’re attentive to change, nuance and emerging possibilities. Mental accounting – our habit of treating the same dollar differently depending on which mental bucket it lands in – may ease when we pay attention to all our money at once.

So, what are the different ways the mind slips off track, and how can mindfulness pull it back? To answer that question, it helps to distinguish the two strands that shaped modern mindfulness research. One is rooted in curiosity and active noticing, the other in meditative, nonreactive awareness.

The first school of thought is represented by the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who believes that active noticing – engaging curiously with the environment – leaves us better equipped to deal with uncertainty and change. The second path comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who first encountered mindfulness through meditation. A PhD student in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1960s, Kabat-Zinn asked whether the Zen Buddhism, Vipassana and other forms of meditation he studied could be adapted to secular medicine. Not long afterward, he launched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and used meditation, yoga and other mindfulness practices to help patients relate differently to stress and chronic pain.

Put side by side, the contrast between the two versions of mindfulness is telling. Langer teaches us to open our eyes and notice something new. Kabat-Zinn teaches us to close our eyes, accept and let go. One form of mindfulness keeps us engaged with the world; the other helps us disengage from unhelpful inner patterns. Both begin with attention to the present moment, but they train attention to do very different psychological work. If biases arise from different sources, the kind of mindfulness that eases one may not touch another.

If it still feels abstract, try this thought experiment. Imagine that I’m a local researcher, and I’ve asked to meet you at your school or workplace. You walk down the familiar hall and sit at your usual spot. Surrounding you is the same flooring, windows and lights as usual. I want you to notice three new things that you’ve never noticed before.

It might not seem like much is happening, but actually you’ve just entered a much more mindful state. Following those instructions, you influenced how your mind was taking in the world around you. As you twisted your neck to find a chip of paint or a dusty corner, you interrupted your usual way of being in the moment and, instead, engaged with it. It may seem like I was just making you more aware of your surroundings. But, actually, I was switching off your autopilot – your mindlessness – and bringing you into the present moment, where details, nuance and context abide. Your brain probably didn’t feel that interrupted. But it followed this cognitive movement enough to reach a mindful state. It is mindfulness not as stillness, but as fresh contact with the world.

This is the novelty-noticing task designed by Langer. It triggers a specific form of mindfulness, and she and her team have shown how even a small shift in attention can change behaviour. [...]

Langer’s version of mindfulness reduced many biases – but not loss aversion. Why? Perhaps because loss aversion was never a cognitive problem to begin with. It’s an emotional one. It is about the heart’s deep reluctance to surrender the comfort of a long-term relationship, the certainty of a career path, or the belonging of a community. It’s the instinct to avoid difficult conversations, not because they won’t help, but because they might cost you comfort, approval or a sense of control. It is the reluctance to leave a life that no longer fits, because the shape of the old life still feels safer than the unknown.

That’s where Kabat-Zinn’s softer approach, focused on emotional regulation, comes in.

by Pam Weintraub, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Richard Baker/Getty Images