25 Propositions about the New Romanticism

A blueprint for the future

More than two years ago, I predicted the rise of a New Romanticism—a movement to counter the intense rationalization and expanding technological control of society.

This idea had started as a joke. Oh Beethoven, come save us! And give Tchaikovsky the news.

But when I dug deeply into the history of the original Romanticist movement, circa 1800, I stopped laughing. The more I probed, the more I was convinced that this provided a blueprint for countering the overreach of technology, the massive expansion in surveillance, and the centralization of both political and economic power.

It had worked back then. The Age of Romanticism had seen the abolition of slavery, protections for workers, prohibitions on child labor, a growing respect for human dignity, and a blossoming of the arts.

Industrialists wept. But somehow they survived.

Romanticism had countered cold profit-driven industrialization with human values. And economic growth had actually accelerated in response to this more balanced approach.

After the rise of Romanticism, circa 1800, more constraints were put on industrialization—but economic growth actually accelerated in the leading industrialized countries. Protecting humans actually added to prosperity. (Source)

Could it happen again? I thought it could. And now, two years, later, I’m convinced that the shift is already underway.

Here’s how I described it back then:

From “Notes Toward a New Romanticism” (November 2023)

I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.

• Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress.

• Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.

• Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment?

• As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.

• Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

In the two years since I wrote that, the notion of a New Romanticism has spread like a wildfire.

For valuable commentary on the subject, you should check out Ross Barkan, Santiago Ramos, Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, Kate Alexandra, Megha Lillywhite, and Campbell Frank Scribner. That’s just a start.

• The new Romanticon Substack, launched in September, is now an important part of the movement.

• I see hints of the New Romanticism in the most popular TV series (Severance, Pluribus, Yellowstone, etc.).

• The extraordinary growth in romance, fantasy, romantasy and other fanciful literary genres tells the same story. Many readers are seeking an escape from hard-headed realism in the current moment.

• I find sympathetic voices among public intellectuals—many of them mentioned here in recent months (Jonathan Haidt, Charles Taylor, Iain McGilchrist, Jennifer Frey, Paul Kingsnorth, Byung-Chul Han, etc.).

• Even Pope Leo seems to have joined the movement.

These people lack political or economic power. But they reflect the new attitude of the public—and that will become increasingly clear as the US approaches election day later this year.

This movement is not going away. It will only intensify.

The Third of May 1808, a painting by Francisco Goya, was emblematic of the rising Romanticist spirit of the era.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write more on the New Romanticism. Given the growing momentum of this movement, now is probably a good time to define it more clearly.

With that goal, I’m sharing 25 propositions. These will help you anticipate future events—at least that’s my goal.

Others will probably have a slightly different take on this—so I can’t claim any sweeping authority for my statements. These simply outline what this movement means to me, and where I think it’s heading.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Medium via; and Francisco Goya

Julie Curtiss (French, 1982) - Limule (2021)

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The Dilbert Afterlife

Sixty-eight years of highly defective people

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive.

Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.

But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.

Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.

This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.

The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.

Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.

If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.

Fugitive From The Cubicle Police

The niche that became Dilbert opened when Garfield first said “I hate Mondays”. The quote became a popular sensation, inspiring t-shirts, coffee mugs, and even a hit single. But (as I’m hardly the first to point out) why should Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work!

In the 80s and 90s, saying that you hated your job was considered the height of humor. Drew Carey: “Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

This was merely the career subregion of the supercontinent of Boomer self-deprecating jokes, whose other prominences included “I overeat”, “My marriage is on the rocks”, “I have an alcohol problem”, and “My mental health is poor”.

Arguably this had something to do with the Bohemian turn, the reaction against the forced cheer of the 1950s middle-class establishment of company men who gave their all to faceless corporations and then dropped dead of heart attacks at 60. You could be that guy, proudly boasting to your date about how you traded your second-to-last patent artery to complete a spreadsheet that raised shareholder value 14%. Or you could be the guy who says “Oh yeah, I have a day job working for the Man, but fuck the rat race, my true passion is white water rafting”. When your father came home every day looking haggard and worn out but still praising his boss because “you’ve got to respect the company or they won’t take care of you”, being able to say “I hate Mondays” must have felt liberating, like the mantra of a free man.

This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something. If you were really clever, you’d put the Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets in trouble for putting a comic on his cubicle wall on your cubicle wall, and dare them to move against you.

(again, I was ten at the time. I only know about this because Scott Adams would start each of his book collections with an essay, and sometimes he would talk about letters he got from fans, and many of them would have stories like these.)

But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it. The worm turns, all that is cringe becomes based once more and vice versa. Imagine that guy boasting to his date again. One says: “Oh yeah, I grudgingly clock in every day to give my eight hours to the rat race, but trust me, I’m secretly hating myself the whole time”? The other: “I work for a boutique solar energy startup that’s ending climate change - saving the environment is my passion!” Zoomers are worse still: not even the fig leaf of social good, just pure hustle.

Dilbert is a relic of a simpler time, when the trope could be played straight. But it’s also an artifact of the transition, maybe even a driver of it. Scott Adams appreciated these considerations earlier and more acutely than anyone else. And they drove him nuts.

Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain

Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.

For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.

Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still, he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants wanted to hear:

I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren't in management.

Okay, “I am cleverer than everyone else”, got it. His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”. The Onion, in its twenty year retrospective for the doomed comestible, called it a frustrated groping towards meal replacements like Soylent or Huel, long before the existence of a culture nerdy enough to support them. Adams himself, looking back from several years’ distance, was even more scathing: “the mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.”

His second foray into the culinary world was a local restaurant called Stacey’s.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: Dilbert/ACX 

[ed. First picture: Adams actually had a custom-built tower on his home shaped like Dilbert’s head.]

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[ed. What do you think. Real or fake? Who cares?]

What Makes a Novel "Good"?

Why People on Substack Lost their Minds When Someone Said: "Don't Read All the Classics"

On Substack, people will tear you a new one if you dare to neg cherished classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses. When I wrote a post last year criticizing Ulysses, I definitely caught some internet side eye. But the judgment didn’t even come close to the comments on Karen Rodriguez’ post “The 40 Famous Classics You’re Allowed to Skip (And Why Everyone Secretly Agrees).” The comments were so mean I physically flinched reading them...

My favorite section of her list is the “Literally Unreadable (But People Pretend)” category, which includes Ulysses (Joyce), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), and Finnegans Wake (Joyce), which Karen describes as “unreadable even for Joyce scholars.”

I don’t come from the academic literature world, I’m a lawyer-turned-novelist and all I care about from a reader’s perspective is that books are both 1) entertaining and 2) moving. There’s so many books that people praise lavishly but that I find fail that basic criteria, including Ulysses.

So why the hell is everyone losing their mind over this? Like is Joyce your god? Why is criticizing these books, these authors, such a cardinal sin?

I think I finally figured out why. And it has to do what people value in their books. There’s actually a whole debate in literary criticism concerning what fiction is supposed to do for humanity and what makes a novel good.

I happen to fall in with the group that doesn’t particularly appreciate Joyce. But there’s camps out there that die for modernist novels (like Ulysses) and experimental post-modern writing (like Pynchon’s work). I don’t agree with them, but it was helpful to understand what those readers value in those works.

Here’s what I learned:

Realism vs. Everything Else

The big debate in literary fiction boils down to this: should novels try to represent life as it actually is, or should they do something else entirely?

Realism is what most of us think of as “normal” fiction. It’s Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri. Characters feel like real people with believable psychology. The prose is clear and doesn’t call attention to itself. No one discovers they’re secretly royalty or gets abducted by aliens. It’s just life, rendered carefully on the page.

But here’s what makes realism click for me: it’s defined more by what it’s NOT than what it is.

Realism is not romance with impossible coincidences. It’s not allegory where characters represent abstract concepts. It’s not metafiction that constantly reminds you you’re reading a book. It’s not heavily plotted melodrama where orphans conveniently turn out to be related to their benefactors. And it’s not highly stylized or poetic prose where every sentence is gorgeously metaphorical. (...)

Before realism became dominant in the mid-1800s (think Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy), novels were full of improbable adventures, clear moral lessons, and coincidence-heavy plots. Realism said: what if we just showed ordinary people dealing with ordinary disappointments? What if we went deep into their psychology instead of hitting them with dramatic plot twists?

Then Modernism Said “Not So Fast”

By the early 1900s, some writers thought realism was insufficient. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner broke with realistic conventions, but not because they didn’t care about truth. They thought traditional realism couldn’t capture modern consciousness.

Modernism’s insight: Reality is fragmented and chaotic, especially after World War I shattered Victorian certainties. Modernist authors used stream of consciousness, fractured timelines, and difficult prose to represent how minds actually work and how reality actually feels...

The questions pile up without clear answers, thoughts interrupt themselves—this is trying to show consciousness as it actually moves, not tidied up for the reader.

The key difference from realism: Modernists believed meaning still existed, but you needed new forms to access it. Joyce’s Ulysses is notoriously difficult, but according to the internet (I don’t know, I haven’t read past page six), the novel is ultimately trying to demonstrate the truth of a day in Dublin in 1904. The experiments serve a purpose.

The problem, for me, is that the experiments can make the writing very un-fun to read.

Then Postmodernism Said “There Is No Truth”

Postmodernism (think Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme) takes fragmentation and makes it playful. These writers are skeptical that fiction can reveal any stable truth at all. So they write metafiction that constantly breaks the fourth wall, mixes high and low culture, and treats meaning itself as a game.

Here’s an excerpt from Donald Barthelme’s “The School.”

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? and I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—I said, yes, maybe.

What’s interesting is that school kids wouldn’t, they couldn’t, be making the observation that death is “a fundamental datum, the means by which...everyday may be transcended in the direction...” because of their age and life experience. So if it’s not the children’s “voice” saying this in the story, it must be the narrator, or maybe even the writer. Barthelme is winking at us, breaking character (the fourth wall), reminding us that this story is all made up. It’s clever but keeps us at arm’s length emotionally.

When you read postmodern fiction, it often feels like writers writing for other writers—it’s inside jokes about literary conventions rather than stories that move you emotionally. That’s intentional. Postmodernists think the search for emotional truth through fiction is naive. Better to be playfully ironic about the whole enterprise.

This is why I sometimes find postmodernism so boring. (I actually like Barthelme’s short story “The Baby” which is harrowing.) But who reads Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) for pleasure besides academics who need to write dissertations about it?

Why This Actually Matters For Writers (and Readers)

Understanding these camps helped me see what choices I’m making in writing my novel—and how certain readers or critics might respond to those choices.

If I write a straightforward story with believable characters and clear prose, I’m in the realist tradition. If I experiment with fragmented timelines or stream of consciousness, I’m borrowing modernist techniques. If I get cute and self-referential, I’m flirting with postmodernism.

None of these are “right” or “wrong,” but they come with trade-offs. Realism connects emotionally but can feel conventional. Modernist techniques can capture complex consciousness but risk alienating readers. Postmodern playfulness might be intellectually interesting but often sacrifices what fiction does best: making us care about people who don’t exist.

These days the fiction world is pretty eclectic. There’s typical realism (Alice Munro), realism with fantastical elements (Kelly Link), experimentalism with emotional sincerity (David Foster Wallace apparently tried to split this difference), and everything in between.

My take after this deep dive: Fiction’s unique power is making us feel what it’s like to be someone else. When technique serves that purpose—whether it’s Alice Munro’s precision or Faulkner’s stream of consciousness—great. When technique becomes the point itself, I lose interest.

by Noor Rahman, Write on Track |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. More examples in the full essay. I can't read Joyce. Even (and especially) because of his prose (except for Portrait of the Artist). Same with Proust, but for different reasons - his prose is beautiful but buried beneath the endless minutia of social manners and French society that eventually becomes unbearable (In Search of Lost Time).]

Measure Up

“My very dear friend Broadwood—

I have never felt a greater pleasure than in your honor’s notification of the arrival of this piano, with which you are honoring me as a present. I shall look upon it as an altar upon which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo. As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I gather from it, as a souvenir for you from me, my very dear Broadwood; and I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument. My dear sir, accept my warmest consideration, from your friend and very humble servant.

—Ludwig van Beethoven”

As musical instruments improved through history, new kinds of music became possible. Sometimes, the improved instrument could make novel sounds; other times, it was louder; and other times stronger, allowing for more aggressive play. Like every technology, musical instruments are the fruit of generations worth of compounding technological refinement.

In a shockingly brief period between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the piano was transformed technologically, and so too was the function of the music it produced.

To understand what happened, consider the form of classical music known as the “piano sonata.” This is a piece written for solo piano, and it is one of the forms that persisted through the transition, at least in name. In 1790, these were written for an early version of the piano that we now think of as the fortepiano. It sounded like a mix of a modern piano and a harpsichord.

Piano sonatas in the early 1790s were thought of primarily as casual entertainment. It wouldn’t be quite right to call them “background music” as we understand that term today—but they were often played in the background. People would talk over these little keyboard works, play cards, eat, drink.

In the middle of the 1790s, however, the piano started to improve at an accelerated rate. It was the early industrial revolution. Throughout the economy, many things were starting to click into place. Technologies that had kind of worked for a while began to really work. Scale began to be realized. Thicker networks of people, money, ideas, and goods were being built. Capital was becoming more productive, and with this serendipity was becoming more common. Few at the time could understand it, but it was the beginning of a wave—one made in the wake of what we today might call the techno-capital machine.

Riding this wave, the piano makers were among a great many manufacturers who learned to build better machines during this period. And with those improvements, more complex uses of those machines became possible.

Just as this industrial transformation was gaining momentum in the mid-1790s, a well-regarded keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven was starting his career in earnest. He, like everyone else, was riding the wave—though he, like everyone else, did not wholly understand it.

Beethoven was an emerging superstar, and he lived in Vienna, the musical capital of the world. It was a hub not just of musicians but also of musical instruments and the people who manufactured them. Some of the finest piano makers of the day—Walter, Graf, and Schanz—were in or around Vienna, and they were in fierce competition with one another. Playing at the city’s posh concert spaces, Beethoven had the opportunity to sample a huge range of emerging pianistic innovations. As his career blossomed, he acquired some of Europe’s finest pianos—including even stronger models from British manufacturers like Broadwood and Sons.

Iron reinforcement enabled piano frames with higher tolerances for louder and longer play. The strings became more robust. More responsive pedals meant a more direct relationship between the player and his tool. Innovations in casting, primitive machine tools, and mechanized woodworking yielded more precise parts. With these parts one could build superior hammer and escapement systems, which in turn led to faster-responding keys. And more of them, too—with higher and lower octaves now available. It is not just that the sound these pianos made was new: These instruments had an enhanced, more responsive user interface.

You could hit these instruments harder. You could play them softer, too. Beethoven’s iconic use of sforzando—rapid swings from soft to loud tones—would have been unplayable on the older pianos. So too would his complex and often rapid solos. In so many ways, then, Beethoven’s characteristic style and sound on the keyboard was technologically impossible for his predecessors to achieve... 

Beethoven was famous for breaking piano strings that were not yet strong enough to render his vision. There was always a relevant margin against which to press. By his final sonata, written in the early 1820s, he was pressing in the direction of early jazz. It was a technological and artistic takeoff from this to this, and from this to this.

Beethoven’s compositions for other instruments followed a structurally similar trajectory: compounding leaps in expressiveness, technical complexity, and thematic ambition, every few years. Here is what one of Mozart’s finest string quartets sounded like. Here is what Beethoven would do with the string quartet by the end of his career.

No longer did audiences talk during concerts. No longer did they play cards and make jokes. Audiences became silent and still, because what was happening to them in the concert hall had changed. A new type of art was emerging, and a new meta-character in human history—the artist—was being born. Beethoven was doing something different, something grander, something more intense, and the way listeners experienced it was different too.

The musical ideas Beethoven introduced to the world originated from his mind, but those ideas would have been unthinkable without a superior instrument.

—

I bought the instrument I’m using to write this essay in December 2020. I was standing in the frigid cold outside of the Apple Store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., wearing a KN-95 face mask, separated by six feet from those next to me in line. I had dinner with a friend scheduled that evening. A couple weeks later, the Mayor would temporarily outlaw even that nicety.

I carried this laptop with me every day throughout the remainder of the pandemic. I ran a foundation using this laptop, and after that I orchestrated two career transitions using it. I built two small businesses, and I bought a house. I got married, and I planned a honeymoon with my wife. (...)

In a windowless office on a work trip to Stanford University on November 30, 2022, I discovered ChatGPT on this laptop. I stayed up all night in my hotel playing with the now-primitive GPT-3.5. Using my laptop, I educated myself more deeply about how this mysterious new tool worked.

I thought at first that it was an “answer machine,” a kind of turbocharged search engine. But I eventually came to prefer thinking of these language models as simulators of the internet that, by statistically modeling trillions of human-written words, learned new things about the structure of human-written text.

What might arise from a deeper-than-human understanding of the structures and meta-structures of nearly all the words humans have written for public consumption? What inductive priors might that understanding impart to this cognitive instrument? We know that a raw pretrained model, though deeply flawed, has quite sophisticated inductive priors with no additional human effort. With a great deal of additional human effort, we have made these systems quite useful little helpers, even if they still have their quirks and limitations.

But what if you could teach a system to guide itself through that digital landscape of modeled human thoughts to find better, rather than likelier, answers? What if the machine had good intellectual taste, because it could consider options, recognize mistakes, and decide on a course of cognitive action? Or what if it could, at least, simulate those cognitive processes? And what if that machine improved as quickly as we have seen AI advance so far? This is no longer science fiction; this research has been happening inside of the world’s leading AI firms, and with models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3, we see undoubtedly that progress is being made.

What would it mean for a machine to match the output of a human genius, word for word? What would it mean for a machine to exceed it? In at least some domains, even if only a very limited number at first, it seems likely that we will soon breach these thresholds. It is very hard to say how far this progress will go; as they say, experts disagree.

This strange simulator is “just math,”—it is, ultimately, ones and zeroes, electrons flowing through processed sand. But the math going on inside it is more like biochemistry than it is like arithmetic. The language model is, ultimately, still an instrument, but it is a strange one. Smart people, working in a field called mechanistic interpretability, are bettering our understanding all the time, but our understanding remains highly imperfect, and it will probably never be complete. We don’t quite have precise control yet over these instruments, but our control is getting better with time. We do not yet know how to make our control systems “good enough,” because we don’t quite know what “good enough” means yet—though here too, we are trying. We are searching.

As these instruments improve, the questions we ask them will have to get harder, smarter, and more detailed. This isn’t to say, necessarily, that we will need to become better “prompt engineers.” Instead, it is to suggest that we will need to become more curious. These new instruments will demand that we formulate better questions, and formulating better questions, often, is at least the seed of formulating better answers.

The input and the output, the prompt and the response, the question and the answer, the keyboard and the music, the photons and the photograph. We push at our instruments, we measure them up, and in their way, they measure us. (...)

—

I don’t like to think about technology in the abstract. Instead, I prefer to think about instruments like this laptop. I think about all the ways in which this instrument is better than the ones that came before it—faster, more reliable, more precise—and why it has improved. And I think about the ways in which this same laptop has become wildly more capable as new software tools came to be. I wonder at the capabilities I can summon with this keyboard now compared with when I was standing in that socially distanced line at the Apple Store four years ago.

I also think about the young Beethoven, playing around, trying to discover the capabilities of instruments with better keyboards, larger range, stronger frames, and suppler pedals. I think about all the uncoordinated work that had to happen—the collective and yet unplanned cultivation of craftsmanship, expertise, and industrial capacity—to make those pianos. I think about the staggering number of small industrial miracles that underpinned Beethoven’s keyboards, and the incomprehensibly larger number of industrial miracles that underpin the keyboard in front of me today. (...)

This past weekend, I replaced my MacBook Air with a new laptop. I wonder what it will be possible to do with this tremendous machine in a few years, or in a few weeks. New instruments for expression, and for intellectual exploration, will be built, and I will learn to use nearly all of them with my new laptop’s keyboard. It is now clear that a history-altering amount of cognitive potential will be at my fingertips, and yours, and everyone else’s. Like any technology, these new instruments will be much more useful to some than to others—but they will be useful in some way to almost everyone.

And just like the piano, what we today call “AI” will enable intellectual creations of far greater complexity, scale, and ambition—and greater repercussions, too. Higher dynamic range. I hope that among the instrument builders there will be inveterate craftsmen, and I hope that young Beethovens, practicing a wholly new kind of art, will emerge among the instrument players.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: 1827 Broadwood & Sons grand piano/Wikipedia

[ed. Thoughtful essay throughout, well deserving of a full reading (even if you're just interested in Beethoven). On the hysterical end of the spectrum, here's what state legislators are proposing: The AI Patchwork Emerges. An update on state AI law in 2026 (so far) (Hyperdimensional):]

***

State legislative sessions are kicking into gear, and that means a flurry of AI laws are already under consideration across America. In prior years, the headline number of introduced state AI laws has been large: famously, 2025 saw over 1,000 state bills related to AI in some way. But as I pointed out, the vast majority of those laws were harmless: creating committees to study some aspect of AI and make policy recommendations, imposing liability on individuals who distribute AI-generated child pornography, and other largely non-problematic bills. The number of genuinely substantive bills—the kind that impose novel regulations on AI development or diffusion—was relatively small.

In 2026, this is no longer the case: there are now numerous substantive state AI bills floating around covering liability, algorithmic pricing, transparency, companion chatbots, child safety, occupational licensing, and more. In previous years, it was possible for me to independently cover most, if not all, of the interesting state AI bills at the level of rigor I expect of myself, and that my readers expect of me. This is no longer the case. There are simply too many of them.

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul; Fifty People Control the Culture

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll never buy a book that looks like this, no matter what the reviews say. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with it, let alone display it on my bookshelf. See also: Fifty People Control the Culture (HB).]

Willie Bobo

Tito Puente

[ed. 'Take Five' on steroids (that really gets going around 2:00).]

Big Beautiful Belly Flop

America is losing jobs in blue-collar industries, something that last occurred during the initial shock of the early pandemic and the depths of the Great Recession. The country is down 65k industrial jobs over the last year, a dramatic reversal from 2024, when the US added a lower-than-usual but still respectable 250k jobs. A major slowdown has hit all blue-collar sectors this year, including construction, mining, and utilities—though manufacturing and transportation are driving the vast majority of US job losses. via:

The US continues to lose manufacturing jobs—payrolls are down 75k over the last year, & another 8k jobs were lost in December Transportation (especially auto manufacturing), wood, and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but few subsectors are doing well. via:

via:

Naoki Hayashi, Flight School - Breaking the Surface
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via:

Chairman Powell's Statement

[ed. Don't hear public comments from a Fed Chairman too often... screw around with administrative, social, legal fields and you might notch a few wins. Screw around with the nation's monitary system and expect significant pushback (from both parties). See also: Chairman Powell’s Statement (MR):]

***

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

[ed. And it all began with this: Trump Meets With Powell at Federal Reserve... leading to one of the most surreal political moments in recent memory.]

Stable Strategies For Middle Management

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT 

Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect's chewing mouthparts into her descendants' chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools - pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.    

- From the popular science program, Insect People!

I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn't have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come. 

I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier. 

I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart? 

I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor. 

He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand. 

"Time to get up?" he asked. I nodded. "Oh, God," he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer. 

"I'll make coffee," I said. "Do you want some?" 

He shook his head slowly. "Just a glass of apricot nectar," he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. "This is real interesting, but it wasn't in the catalog. I'll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke's." 

"I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,"I said. 

"Not from the flower arrangements..." he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. "Come here." 

It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his.We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. "How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?" I asked. 

"There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities." He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. "Let me know if my tongue is too rough." It was not.

Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.

Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out. 

Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food. 

My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten A.M. meeting. Maybe I'd just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.

Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch. In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a textbook example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree. 

He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates? 

I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, "factoring in the need for pipeline throughout," "fine-tuning the media mix," without even cracking a smile. 

Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn't like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn't join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions. 

I didn't think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I'd take. 

"Yeah, we can do that for you," I told him. "No problem." We'd see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end. 

Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered I'd heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.

Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry's arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn't taste as good as he smelled but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn't to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my styles to find a capillary. 

Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again. "We were discussing the Model 200o launch. Or have you forgotten?" he said, rubbing his arm. 

"Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning." 

I was embarrassed. "Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake." He was annoyed, and I couldn't really blame him. "Let's get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I've got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.

"Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget...

by Eileen Gunn, Norton Book of Science Fiction |  Read more (pdf):

[ed. A pioneer in science fiction.]

The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV

The Samsung Frame TV, first announced in 2017, doesn’t look all that great as an actual television. But switch it off and it sure is pretty—certainly much better to look at than an empty black void.

This is thanks to its matte-finish, anti-glare screen and the picture-frame-like bezels that together transform whatever fine art you choose to display on the TV when it's in standby mode (Samsung offers a variety of high-resolution digital slides) into something that resembles a framed painting. In the years since its debut and through a few updates, the Frame TV has become one of the more considered options for people who live in smaller spaces without dedicated rooms for watching TV.

It has taken a while for other brands to catch up, but we're now seeing a huge wave of Frame-like TVs hit the market. The trend is largely driven by aesthetes in cities where smaller living rooms are the norm, but it's getting a boost from advances in screen design.

Late last year, Hisense announced its CanvasTV, a frame competitor that also has a matte screen and displays art. (We have a review unit coming shortly.) TCL has the similar NXTvision model that uses a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait in the marketing, and LG has announced the Gallery TV (also repping van Gogh) for later this year. Even Amazon has decided to throw its hat in the ring, with the Ember Artline TV. Announced this week at CES 2026, Amazon's $899 television can display one of 2,000 works of art (available for free to Ember Artline owners) and even has a tool that uses Alexa AI to help you decide which artworks are the best fit for your room.

So what's so great about Art TVs, and why do brands seem to be pivoting so hard into the category?

Part of it has to do with personal space. It's true that many younger buyers just don't have the same taste or sense of style as folks from previous generations. But also, young city-dwelling professionals are less likely to have the room to place a large screen in a dedicated area in their home, a pain point compounded by the fact that TV screen sizes have ballooned over the past decade.

The other reason TV makers are getting artsy has to do with the evolution of TV technology itself. Brands are choosing to step into this space now because they have finally developed the means to create matte screens that can accurately represent a painting or a fine art photograph. Though Samsung is a pioneer in the space, matte LED screens are enjoying something of a renaissance across all television brands.

A typical glossy TV display reflects light like a window, but a matte screen absorbs light like a canvas might. This effect enables any art pieces displayed on the screen to look extra realistic. Another advance in technology is backlighting. Where previous generations of these Art TVs needed to be lit from the edges of the display in order to maintain their painting-like thinness and allow them to be mounted flush against a wall, brands have recently been able to employ more advanced lighting systems while keeping the TVs slim. Local dimming, better backlighting processing, and the ability to adjust the screen brightness to match a room's ambient lighting when in “art mode” make these new displays look better than ever.

by Parker Hall, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Samsung/PCMag

[ed. See also: Ambient Intelligence in the Living Room (MDPI).]

CES 2026

CES 2026 is now over another year – and after scouring its vast halls for days, we've learned a lot about how tech will evolve over the next twelve months.

We saw so much that it's hard to know where to start. To get a taste of the biggest announcements, check out our CES 2026 day 1, CES day 2 and CES day 3 roundups – each features the 11 best gadgets we saw on that day. Or you can jump straight to our roundup of the 25 best gadgets we saw at the show.

Want the bigger picture? Make sure to read our summary of the 11 biggest tech trends of CES 2026. You should also check out our hands-on review of the new Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, our coverage of Nvidia's CES 2026 keynote and – in what may be the most exciting announcement so far – the news of Lego's new smart bricks!

Here's how the world's biggest tech show played out – and what we learned along the way: [links]

by Philip Berne, TechRadar |  Read more:

Image: Birdbuddy

[ed. Lots 'o links. Probably the most interesting products (to me, anyway) were Lego's new Smart Bricks (here and here); and the Birdbuddy 2 Mini bird feeder. See also: CES 2026 live: all the news, announcements, and innovations from the show floor and beyond (Verge).

Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, 1974
via:

[ed. Joni never gets enough credit for her excellent paintings.]

Dog Eat Dog, 1985

Lorraine Munro, Collage, (paper collage), 1981 
via:

You're Ugly, Too

You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, a local paper boasted the banner headline “NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN.” They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute for a movie.

Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick buildings, a small liberal-arts college by the improbable name of Hilldale-Versailles. Zoe Hendricks had been teaching American history there for three years. She taught “The Revolution and Beyond” to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the senior seminar for majors, and although her student evaluations had been slipping in the last year and a half —Professor Hendricks is often late for class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the class sips of—generally the department of nine men was pleased to have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors—that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had said, well, it was time.

The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing “Getting to Know You”—all of it. At the request of the dean, the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, “Fine,” and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn, no doubt, for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out the sides of her head like antennae.

“I’m going out of my mind,” said Zoe to her younger sister, Evan, in Manhattan. Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire soundtrack to “The King and I.” Is this history? Zoe phoned her every Tuesday.

“You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.” Evan was a part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her life was O.K. She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury midtown high rise with a balcony and access to a pool. “It’s not the same as having your own pool,” Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoe know that, as with Zoe, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.

“Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here,” said Zoe on the phone. She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling it sarcasm, something they felt qualified to recognize, and now she had to agree. It wasn’t irony. “What is your perfume?” a student once asked her. “Room freshener,” she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.

Her students were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and eggs. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were good-natured about it. “All those states in the East are so tiny and jagged and bunched up,” complained one of her undergraduates the week she was lecturing on “The Turning Point of Independence: The Battle at Saratoga.” “Professor Hendricks, you’re from Delaware originally, right?” the student asked her.

“Maryland,” corrected Zoe.

“Aw,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “New England.”

Her articles—chapters toward a book called “Hearing the One About: Uses of Humor in the American Presidency”—were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them—she didn’t trust things written in the morning only—so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day—its moods, its light—was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

The job she’d had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country. There was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren’t supposed to be critical or complain. You weren’t supposed to notice that the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy and going under. You were never to say you weren’t “fine, thank you—and yourself?” You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new I.B.M. photocopier saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.”

But now in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoe was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home even, and ask personal questions, but now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.

“You act,” said one of her senior-seminar students at a scheduled conference, “like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.”

Zoe’s eyes widened. “I am the teacher,” she said. “I do get paid to act like that.” She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big leather bow in her hair like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. “I mean, otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office hours.” Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen. She stared at the student some more, then added, “I bet you’d like that.”

“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”

“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoe, and, with a smile, she showed the student to the door. “I like your bow,” she said. (...)

Zoe had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and then asked her out for coffee. At first, she thought he was amazing— at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking-ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong he said, “You would not be ill served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.

“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.

“Excuse me?”

He slowed down at an amber light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”

“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”

“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”

The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice crumpled to a wad. Another time, he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Delacroix’s ‘The Barque of Dante,’ and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those agonized shades splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom, swirling and building up into the red fabric of Dante’s hood, swirling out into the distance, where you see these orange flames—” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching, and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.” (...)

She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoe, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”

She was looking forward to New York. (...)

“Ultrasound,” Zoe now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system or what?”

She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoe would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant they took to quarrelling and drifted apart.

“O.K.,” said the technician absently.

The monitor was in place, and Zoe’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoe’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.

Zoe stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoe.

“I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”

“I’ll be out of town,” said Zoe.

“I’m sorry,” said the technician.

Driving home, Zoe looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked —well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”

“I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.

“You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.

by Lorrie Moore, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Lorrie Moore by Lynda Nylind