Tomoo Inagaki, Cats at Twilight,Woodblock Print, 1972

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Robert Caro: Lessons in Power

What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years

[ed. Video interview with Dwarkesh Patel. In preparation for this interview Mr. Patel provides a short overview of two of Mr. Caro's subjects: Robert Moses (The Power Broker), and Lyndon Johnson (Master of the Senate): What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses:]

*****

I recently interviewed Robert Caro. He’s spent the last 50 years writing a four volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, and he spent another 7 years before that writing the biography of Robert Moses, the master builder of New York. His books are widely regarded as the best explorations of political power that have ever been written. [...] 

I’ve spent so much time trying to make this interview happen: chasing his agent, calling his publisher, contacting the museums that have his archives, and even sending him handwritten letters.

I finally got to sit down with him, and I’m very happy with how it turned out. It’ll be out this Friday.

In the meantime, as I was preparing for the interview, and rereading these biographies, I wrote down the lessons they laid out about how to accumulate and use power.

Robert Moses

Robert Moses was the master builder of New York. He built more of the physical city than anyone before or since: the Triborough and Verrazano bridges, the Cross Bronx Expressway, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, two giant power dams upstate, in addition to hundreds of parks and dozens of pools. Of the 899 miles of highways completed in New York State by 1964, Moses had built 672 of them. His projects collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money.

For more than 30 years, Robert Moses was the most powerful person in New York (more powerful than any elected mayor or governor, despite not being elected to anything). How did he get and keep that much power?

Exploits in law

Part of the answer is that Moses wrote the laws that governed him. He was called ‘the best bill drafter in Albany,’ and he used that skill to write himself powers that the legislators voting on his bills didn’t know they were granting. [...]  [ed. Example: Triborough Bridge Authority Act of 1933. Moses snuck a few small clauses and seemingly insignificant words into the Act that no one noticed.]

So, with just a few minor tweaks, Moses turned an act meant to allow the construction of two bridges into the basis of an institution that could build basically anything it wanted anywhere in New York (and whose authority to do so was protected by the U.S. Constitution).

The indispensable man

These bond covenants had turned Triborough Authorities’ power into granite, but nothing in them guaranteed that Robert Moses would remain as chairman. So how did Moses retain his position for 30 years?

Part of the answer is, again, the law. Moses drafted the Triborough act so that its commissioners could be removed mid-term only “on stated charges after a formal hearing.” But any differences he had with a mayor or governor were more about what he decided to build and whom he displaced to build it, rather than personal conduct.

As Caro says, “Robert Moses was not himself corrupt. He was, in fact, as uninterested in obtaining payoffs for himself as any public servant who ever lived. In the politicians’ phrase, he was ‘money honest.’”

So, there were never any formal charges to bring. But this only explains why he wasn’t fired in the middle of his term. Why was he reappointed every six years? Well, at his peak, Moses was a hydra with a dozen heads. He held 12 different government posts at the same time: city construction coordinator, chairman of the State Council of Parks, chairman of the State Power Authority, and so on. Some of these positions were appointed by the mayor, some by the governor, so no single person could cut off all his heads simultaneously. And removing him from any one position meant making an enemy of the man who would still be the most powerful person in New York.

The coalition for yes

And the power that Moses derived from his popularity with the masses was nothing compared to the power he derived from his connections with New York’s powerful private interests.

We are very used today to NIMBY, where powerful but concentrated interest groups manage to stymie projects despite their broad popularity. Moses built a concentrated faction for YIMBY. He built a graft machine that greased the wheels for new construction, because it ensured the most influential people in the state would all benefit whenever a project got underway.

The banks got to buy his bonds at a steep discount without competitive bidding, the unions got more jobs, politically connected lawyers got legal fees, and party bosses got paid to broker insurance policies on bridges that had no plausible risk of falling down. Moses could then rely on these beneficiaries to call up anyone who stood in the way of one of his projects, whether that was a borough president or the governor himself. [...]

Lyndon Johnson’s story, on the other hand, is kind of the opposite. For most of his career, there was little evidence he had a coherent political ideology - he was a ruthless power-seeker who embraced whatever happened to be most expedient at the time. When Johnson first entered the U.S. Senate, he realized that the most powerful men there were conservative Southern Dixiecrats. And the Johnson that they encountered was one who had molded himself to their form.

While writing Master of the Senate, Caro interviewed former Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. He asked Talmadge what impression he got from freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson about the proper relationship between white people and black people.

“Master and servant.” So I [Caro] asked, Well didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for blacks, any desire to improve their lot? My notes say “long pause.” And then I wrote [Talmadge’s] two-word reply: “None indicated.” Another pause, and then: “He was with us in his heart. I believed him. I believed him.”

Of course, we know that once he became president, Johnson spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction.

So Moses began as a naive idealist but, in Caro’s telling, became someone seeking power for its own sake. Johnson was an ambitious opportunist from the very start, and it was only once he had real power that he used it for ideals few knew he had.

Lyndon Johnson

Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Senate majority leader - perhaps the most powerful legislator period - in the history of this country. Here’s Caro in Master of the Senate:

He was master of the Senate—master of an institution that had never before had a master, and that at the time, almost half a century later, when this book is being written, has not had one since.

No leader before Johnson had wielded this kind of power, because the Senate had been deliberately set up by the founders to not be “led”. When Johnson asked the Library of Congress for a list of the Majority Leader’s formal powers, he found that there was only one: the right to be recognized first on the floor. Before Johnson, the Majority Leader was less a leader and more a lightning rod. He’d be blamed in the national press and in his home state for everything the Senate failed to do, yet he had no actual power to do anything about those failures. Being in this predicament was so politically toxic that Johnson’s two predecessors as majority leaders had both lost their own Senate seats.

A big part of the reason that Johnson became his party’s leader at just 44, in a Senate whose average age was around 60, was that hardly anyone else wanted such a thankless and useless job. And in their hands, this job would have remained useless. But they were not Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson turned himself into the second most powerful man in America (right behind the president) in three different ways.

Things to promise, things to threaten with

Johnson transformed the Senate’s rules, institutions and norms so that he alone had the power to grant important favors to his colleagues. If a senator needed a bill passed, Johnson was the one who could get it scheduled on the floor and persuade the committee chairman to report it out. If the bill needed help in the House, Johnson was the one with a direct line to Speaker Sam Rayburn. And if the senator needed money for his next campaign (to ensure that he would remain a senator), Johnson was the one who could put in a good word with oilmen from his native Texas.

Johnson also put himself in a position to control committee assignments, which are the single biggest factor that shapes how a senator’s whole career plays out. For about a century, they had been handed out by seniority. Practically overnight, Johnson changed the system so that many seats were no longer being settled by seniority but rather negotiated by the party’s Steering committee, which Johnson controlled. If you wanted a good seat, you had to do what Johnson wanted. In 1957, Estes Kefauver voted against Johnson on an important motion. That very same week, the highly coveted open seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Kefauver was expecting to get, was instead handed over to a far more junior senator named John F. Kennedy.

The real political genius of Lyndon Johnson was identifying and then gaining control over every possible source of leverage over his colleagues. Whatever a senator needed to survive, whether that was money, committee seats, or the passage of bills that matter to his home state, Johnson could give, and Johnson could withhold.

Setting the agenda

What the final bill that passes says depends on which one version actually comes to a vote, and with what final modifications. Whoever gets to set the agenda controls the outcome. So you won’t be surprised by who put himself in this position. Johnson’s main tool for setting the agenda was the unanimous consent agreement. By default, Senate debate is unlimited. A senator can talk about a bill for as long as he likes, and as he does so, he can also offer amendments that have nothing to do with that bill, each of which can stall the bill even further. A unanimous consent agreement sets those freedoms aside for a single bill: it fixes the allotted time for debate and constrains the opportunity to amend it. Earlier leaders rarely used such agreements, and even then, only after weeks of debate on a bill had already exhausted all the senators. Johnson made their use the norm in the Senate. He wouldn’t even allow a bill to reach the floor until such an agreement was in place.

Johnson wanted to control which bill reached the floor, and to keep the floor from changing anyone’s mind, because he wanted every vote settled in private beforehand, through the wheeling-and-dealing where his leverage worked best. The last thing he wanted was for a long, public debate on the merits of the bill to change a senator’s mind at the last minute, or for a surprise amendment to unravel a deal he had spent weeks painstakingly brokering. As Paul Douglas put it, under Johnson “all the action takes place offstage, before the play begins.”

The view from the center

Johnson made sure that as much of the Senate’s information as possible ran through him. He had every committee assign a staffer to tell him what was being drafted. His aides tracked what every senator was up to. And he spent his own days in the cloakroom and the hallways cajoling and listening to his colleagues. So he knew what each senator really wanted, what he would and wouldn’t give up to get it.

In any session, the Senate faces hundreds of possible bills and amendments. A senator’s vote on one bill can be traded for another senator’s vote on a different one, and any single bill can be amended a dozen ways to win someone over. So there’s an almost endless combination of possible deals to be made. Johnson made sure that he was the one instigating and brokering most of these deals. As a result, he could make sure that any deal left Johnson coming out ahead.

by Dwarkesh Patel, Podcast |  Read more:

Images: Abebooks

Nvidia Sockpuppets Spring Into Action

Hundreds of fake accounts defended Jensen Huang and attacked lawmakers over chip exports.

Late last week, the Financial Times reported that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was believed by U.S. intelligence to have had an affair with a Chinese spy. The alleged spy was a business executive whom American officials warned China recruited to gather information on the company and potentially push for chip exports to China.

In the following days, as the story bounced around social media, dozens of accounts rushed to Huang’s defense. They dismissed the report as resting on anonymous sources and insufficient evidence. Six of them said, in nearly the same words, that Huang had already made clear in May that Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin chips weren’t going to China — and thus concerns about the chip export angle were overblown.

The accounts belong to a network of over 400 apparent sockpuppet accounts that appear to have spent years promoting messages for various clients, including, over the past year, taking Nvidia’s side in Washington’s fight over selling advanced AI chips to China. The same network is actively supporting other causes, including backing the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s civil war, a group the United States has accused of genocide.

In a comment to The Midas Project, an Nvidia spokesperson said the company recently became aware of these accounts and is trying to identify the source but has so far been unsuccessful.

Since November 2025, when the network became active on this topic, the accounts have posted thousands of times, generally taking Nvidia’s side on hot-button discussions across X, Bluesky, and Reddit. Their primary topic has been export controls, the rules limiting which AI chips U.S. companies can sell to China. In addition, they’ve defended Nvidia as a company and Huang personally, dismissed the severity of chip smuggling, attacked Anthropic for its views on AI safety, and generally written off concerns about the technology and calls to slow the industry down. [...]

Of the more than 400 accounts The Midas Project has identified, most present themselves as Americans: X lists about 80% as based in the United States, though for nearly all of those it warns that the location “may not be accurate,” suggesting the account connects through a VPN or proxy. They pose as everyday users, including day traders, a nurse’s aide, a data scientist, a pencil-sketch artist, and environmentalists. Between campaign posts, they chat about sports, pets, and celebrities.

Several lines of evidence tie these accounts together. Most were set up in batches, created within an hour of another account in the same network, across dozens of individual account-creation sessions. The largest session lasted two and a half hours on Nov. 9, 2021, during which about 30 accounts were created. The vast majority of accounts in the network were created, renamed, or given new profile pictures or banners in the same sessions as other accounts in the network, often minutes apart. Many also seem to release their posts through scheduling software, with the post going live within the first half-second of a new minute. At times, the accounts will also slip up and post virtually identical text on two or more different accounts.

Nvidia isn’t the only shared interest that these accounts have. Over the years, this network of accounts has advocated for a variety of causes, seemingly on behalf of both corporate and political clients. This has included campaigns benefiting Israel, pharmacy benefit managers, manufacturing companies, and, most recently, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. One of the most distinctive traits of accounts in this network, beyond being set up or reskinned in the same session as other accounts, is their participation in multiple highly specific campaigns.

The network’s best-documented campaign, and its largest by volume, appears to be one exposed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Project Lighthouse,” a pro-Qatar effort that Haaretz reported was devised by a firm run by two aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In its reporting, Haaretz named 15 of the campaign’s fake accounts. Most of those named accounts have since participated in the pro-Nvidia campaign, and dozens more are connected to these Haaretz-named accounts through shared account setup and reskinning sessions.

Haaretz reported that Koios, a small Israeli company that presents itself as a firm that detects financial fraud online, ran the fake accounts. Koios denied any involvement. Israeli police have since raided its offices as part of their investigation into Qatar’s ties to Netanyahu’s office, and as of September 2025, the company claims to have ceased operations. But the social media accounts did not stop. Soon after, they began their campaign on AI chips and Nvidia.

Indeed, Koios’ business appears to have carried on under a new name: IntellACT (sometimes written as IntellACTS). Not to be confused with the identically named Israeli aviation company (a choice that may have been designed to make the company harder to trace), IntellACT seems to have emerged around the time its website was registered in September 2025, the day before Koios’ liquidators were appointed, and the same month Koios said it ceased operations. [....]

Between the job listing for social media account operators, the posting habits of these accounts, and even occasional operator mistakes discernible from their posts, it appears these are not bots but sockpuppets. That is, the accounts are likely human-operated, with workers scrolling social media manually and typing replies to posts, often with the help of AI and likely a script. In fact, the most revealing evidence of this comes from one operator mistake where a network account, presumably trying to create lifestyle filler content, wrote, “Create a reply on X (Twitter) for this post. The goal is to get a lot of engagement while still sounding like a real human. Use emojis if appropriate. 280 characters or less. Provide 3 options.” Four different posts also call Nvidia “NCore,” which may be a codename from a brief the operators work from.

Comparing the accounts against the web archive also reveals that deleting posts is common for accounts in the network. This tracks with what sources told Haaretz in 2025: that clearing out old posts was standard practice for Koios. The accounts regularly remove their campaign posts weeks or months after publishing them, while leaving their everyday chatter up. Of the over 4,000 posts about chips and AI the network has made since November 2025, approximately two-thirds are already gone. And in the hours before this article was published, dozens of the network’s accounts were suddenly deactivated, and others began deleting posts supporting Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces.

I have previously covered two separate social media campaigns focused on chip and data center policy that I speculated Nvidia may have been behind. I also covered a similar campaign promoting videos from Innovation Council Action, a pro-industry group incorporated around the time this Nvidia campaign began (and which I similarly speculated could have links to Nvidia). But when asked for comment on this campaign, Innovation Council Action suggested it wasn't aware of it. IntellACT didn’t respond to my attempts to reach it, while the Koios liquidator claimed that no company assets were sold or transferred and that there is no record of interaction between Koios and Nvidia. Koios said via a generic company email that it “has no connection to this matter” and that it ceased operations in September 2025. And an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement: “We have no relationship with those firms and have not asked any other party to engage them on our behalf. Recently, we also became aware of these accounts and are attempting to identify the source, which has so far been unsuccessful.” With all this in mind, who might have been funding a complex, yearlong operation like this remains unclear and may never be known without a more formal investigation.

Could a formal investigation be warranted? I certainly think so. This appears to have been a yearlong campaign designed to shape one of the most important policy debates in Washington. A network of hundreds of fake accounts made thousands of posts arguing Nvidia’s side of the debate over selling AI chips to China, defended its chief executive through a spy scandal, and went after the commentators pushing hardest for export controls, including U.S. lawmakers — only to later delete much of what they said. These accounts are directly linked to a supposedly defunct Israeli influence firm that police raided over a covert pro-Qatar campaign, and the firm has since filed for liquidation. The same accounts are currently running other campaigns, including one backing Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a group the United States has accused of genocide.

Who is ultimately behind this campaign, we don’t know. But the chips at the center of this fight may be the most strategically important technology of our time, and whether China gets them is being decided now. A debate this important can be quietly influenced by manufactured voices. It can be done cheaply, apparently from abroad, with the evidence scrubbed afterward. That should worry anyone who cares about the policy decisions that result, no matter which side they’re on.

by Tyler Johnson, The Midas Project | Read more:
Images: X/Reddit

[ed. And we wonder how people get manipulated and cult-brained. Do read: Send in the Sockpuppets (DWAV).]

The Rise and Fall of LIV Golf

How a $5 billion illusion met reality.

In his first month on the job, LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil flew to Saudi Arabia to learn just how much time he had.

O’Neil met with his new boss, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and LIV’s chairman, to discuss the situation their league faced. Under former CEO Greg Norman, billions had been spent, but a shocking lack of revenue cost the league hundreds of millions in its first three years.

During the January 2025 meeting, O’Neil laid out two paths, according to multiple sources briefed on the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly. One would be painful — dramatically trim the league’s exorbitant expenses, lay off employees, and do everything possible to get the balance sheet under control immediately. The other was a seven-year plan, built around maintaining LIV’s structure but gradually squeezing costs.

Al-Rumayyan told O’Neil not to worry, the sources said. He had all the time he needed.
Less than 16 months later, after a Masters week spent gladhanding under the oak trees at Augusta National and acting as one of professional golf’s power players, O’Neil received a phone call. It wasn’t from Al-Rumayyan, but one of his staff members.

Shut it down, O’Neil was told. Shut LIV down.

Since that moment, the story of LIV Golf has been about survival, and now its death. After a mad scramble to find a new funding partner, desperate measures just to get the league to the end of the season, and a bankruptcy filing, LIV admitted defeat Nov. 5 and has begun winding down its operations.

It’s been a stunning fall, but one that Jimmy Dunne, the powerful businessman and former PGA Tour board member who brought both sides together and negotiated the June 2023 framework agreement, saw coming. He never blamed the players who left for LIV for the chance at generational wealth, but he also knew exactly what had happened when a near-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund decided it had had enough.

“LIV lost its really rich uncle,” says Dunne. “It’s no different than some —hole kid that was living high on the hog, flying everywhere, didn’t earn any money, was partying his (expletive) off, and all of a sudden dad said, ‘You’re done.’ Well, then let’s see how many friends he has left.

“Who’s going to be hanging around with the guy without the money?”

LIV Golf, from the very beginning, wanted so desperately to be real. Everything it could buy — golfers, C-suites, attention, White House clout, baked-up broadcasts, global reach, lavish tournaments, middling pop bands — it bought. Maybe that would be enough. Except what LIV needed, what it really wanted, what it reached for and clenched for, what it funneled pipelines of money toward — legitimacy, sustainability, a place in the game’s zeitgeist — proved to be a figment of a very wild imagination. All that’s left today is a pile of receipts and golf’s biggest question: How do you spend $5 billion and have nothing to show for it?

Some answers date back to the beginning.

In 2021, Saudi Arabia, an Islamic absolute monarchy sitting on the world’s largest oil reserve in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, started a golf league. A pet project, in truth. If Yasir Al-Rumayyan was a big fan of, say, chess, there would’ve been no 4Aces or Ripper GC. But Al-Rumayyan did not love chess. He loved golf. And as governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Al-Rumayyan was uniquely positioned to pursue that love.

The PIF is in the business of making money. It takes earnings generated by the kingdom’s natural resources. It invests it. It makes more money. The end game is simple: to diversify the monarch’s oil-dependent economy, ruled absolutely by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family. Having grown over the past decade into one of the richest sovereign wealth funds in the world, the PIF holds stakes in a variety of international companies. Additionally, since 2017, it has launched roughly 100 companies.

One of those companies: LIV Golf. [...]

It happened so fast that it was easy to misunderstand what was happening. Chatter of a gate-crashing Saudi League. The birth of LIV Golf Investments. A self-confident CEO, Norman, who had already once attempted to create a world golf circuit to rival the PGA Tour. A frontman, Phil Mickelson, aggrieved over what he believed to be the PGA Tour’s “obnoxious greed.” In a swirl, the summer of 2022 reshaped pro golf with accusations of sportswashing and nine-figure contracts for names like Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. In what was casually being referred to as a civil war, the PGA Tour, headed by commissioner Jay Monahan, positioned itself next to 9/11 families.

There was searing controversy surrounding Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations, abuses, and atrocities. Players taking sides, switching sides. Lawsuits, countersuits. Temporary restraining orders, Senate investigations.

Ultimately, when it came time to create a real-life golf tour, LIV built a pyre made entirely of money. Operating a model that wasn’t its own, it seemed to operate by making instinctive decisions, then building an infrastructure of reasoning to justify each. Norman & Co. called the results strategic. [...]

In February 2025, fresh off his return to the White House, President Donald Trump promised a deal would finally be done between LIV, which had paid his business organization to rent his golf courses, and the PGA Tour, which had distanced itself from him post-Jan. 6, 2021.

Monahan, Woods and Adam Scott met with Al-Rumayyan that day in the Oval Office, with Trump presiding. Both sides walked in ready to make a deal. It did not happen. The sticking point, according to multiple sources briefed on the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, was the tour’s valuation of LIV.

The PGA Tour believed LIV to be worth between $500 million and $600 million, Al-Rumayyan was told, which the PIF chairman found insulting. Just as significant was PGA Tour leadership’s lack of interest or belief in the team golf model — reunification and traditional stroke-play tournaments were the PGA Tour’s priorities. And the LIV Golf name would disappear if terms were reached.

Al-Rumayyan walked away from a PGA Tour board seat and a chance for LIV Golf to be integrated into the biggest tour in the world, in some capacity. Both sides exited the West Wing knowing there were no next steps.

Golf’s civil war would stay on, until an actual war changed everything.

by Brody Miller, Gabby Herzig and Brendan Quinn, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Illustartion: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos: Kate McShane / Getty Images

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'An Insane Scandal’: How Jensen Huang’s Downfall Could Change Everything

The downfall of arguably the single most important person in AI is a massive story. But the implications and insinuations of this scandal go deeper, touching on everything from American national security, US-China relations, the future of the AI buildout, chip export policies, your retirement account, and an existential debate among AI experts about who should have access to the most advanced AI chips. [...]

CHAPTER 1: THE MAIN CHARACTERS
The CEO, the Spy, and the Singapore Question

Can you tell me the gist in one sentence?

The chief executive of Nvidia had multiple affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy, who was an executive at a Singapore company that bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips and is suspected of illegally redirecting them to Chinese companies in violation of American law.

Can you explain the larger stakes of the scandal in one sentence?

It’s probably something like this: It’s sketchy for chief executives to have affairs with their employees and major clients; sketchier still for them to have affairs with clients whose business is suspected of violating federal law; even sketchier for that paramour to also be a suspected secret agent of a foreign government; maximally sketchy if that foreign government is America’s top geopolitical adversary; and beyond all reckoning of sketchiness if the US government knew of these allegations and revelations and did approximately f*ck-all about it for months.

We’ll get to the nitty-gritty of everything in that sentence further down in the piece, but that’s basically what we’re dealing with here.

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: X
[ed. See also:  Jensen Huang Resigns After Having Another Affair In Addition to the Chinese Spy (DWAV). Do check out these videos:]

*****

If you haven’t seen it, this short AI video is obligatory, as is this one.

The Daily Show has coverage of stage one. They weren’t being all that subtle, huh? 

Table of Contents

1. A Second Ant in the Kitchen.

2. There Was Going to Be an Investigation.

3. Jensen Huang Had to Resign.

4. Seven Billion in Sales to China Enabled by Jensen’s Ties to Alice Huang.

5. Jensen Huang Attempted to Make Himself Unfireable.

6. A Remarkable Lack of Contagion.

7. Even Now There Are Those Defending Jensen Huang.

8. Send in the Sockpuppets.

9. Okay Maybe We Came on a Little Strong.

10. Past Scandal at the Commerce Department.

11. New Scandal at the Commerce Department.

12. Chip Export Controls Gain Momentum.

13. Reminder That Compute Is Very Important.

14. If You Can’t Even Have an Affair With a Chinese Spy.

15. What Happens Next?

The Fall of the AI King

We live in the age of artificial intelligence — an age that Jensen Huang, perhaps more than any other single person, has made possible. The systems we are building with Nvidia’s equipment will transform our society and culture in ways we can’t imagine. But Mr. Huang’s unraveling is not a technology story. It is a timeless tale of masculine hubris, of a man undone by reckless overconfidence. Some things never change.

When I wrote my biography of Mr. Huang, I titled it “The Thinking Machine.” The name referred to the microchips that powered A.I., but also to Mr. Huang’s marauding, relentless intellect, which never slowed down or turned off. In the wake of his stunning departure, spurred by revelations that he carried on at least two affairs, one with a woman whom U.S. intelligence determined is a Chinese spy, and another with one of his direct reports, I should write a sequel: “The What-Were-You-Thinking?! Machine.”

Let’s start with Mr. Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, an executive who managed a Singapore-based company that owns data centers in Southeast Asia. These data centers are suspected of helping Chinese A.I. developers circumvent U.S. restrictions on sales of Nvidia equipment. A recent report in The Information suggests they were used as a way station to illicitly smuggle some $7 billion of equipment into China. Since U.S. intelligence captured evidence of Mr. Huang in a romantic relationship with Ms. Huang, it’s hard to believe that he did not understand what was going on.

Now consider Mr. Huang’s reported involvement with Kimberly Powell, an executive in the health care group at his firm and his direct subordinate. A former Nvidia employee told me this affair was common knowledge in the company — the same company that employs both of Mr. Huang’s children in executive roles. It’s a stunning and disrespectful display of arrogance. I asked the former employee why Mr. Huang would behave this way, right in front of his kids. The former employee said that it got him high — a narcissist’s high.

I started hearing rumors of Mr. Huang’s infidelities earlier this year, but was unable to confirm them. Inside Nvidia, there was a culture of omertà that was difficult to break, and this enabled Mr. Huang to be his worst self. I sensed this deference, at times, in the sycophantic laughter of his subordinates when he was around, and the little things they muttered once he left the room. Ultimately, it took government intelligence to pierce Nvidia’s culture of silence — along with the reporters at this newspaper. But now that containment is shattered, and I will not be surprised if more women come forward. No one will be surprised.

Mr. Huang went to considerable lengths to cloak his arrogance. When I first met him in 2023, he and his handlers were pushing the idea that he was a humble man. In our conversations, Mr. Huang was constantly deflecting attention away from his success, always quick to assign credit to his employees and executive staff members. He also liked to glad-hand service people. He’d been a dishwasher himself once, a point he never let you forget. He loved visiting small, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and leaving extravagant tips. I’d met him for breakfast at Denny’s, and he tipped our waitress $1,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t make a show of it, either. I had to track her down to ask.

Over time, though, I began to suspect that this was an act, one performed not for the observer, but to flatter himself. In truth, Mr. Huang was quite arrogant. He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy. A harangue from Mr. Huang could last an hour or more; his executive staff appeared genuinely afraid of him. Listening to their stories, I was reminded of the abusive music instructor from the movie “Whiplash.”

Mr. Huang went to even greater lengths to present himself as a family man. Here, the act was harder to detect and must have involved a great deal of self-deception. He spoke of his wife, Lori, and his kids, Madison and Spencer, all the time. Unlike his flimsy man-of-the-people shtick, this affection for his family seemed genuine. He traveled with them often, all over the world. He encouraged his kids to leave careers in unrelated fields to join him at his microchip company. Several weeks ago, at a wedding in Hawaii, he gave away his daughter Madison to Nico Caprez, another Nvidia executive.

Mr. Huang met Lori when he was 17. The two were lab partners in an electrical engineering course and Mr. Huang was so shy it took him six months to ask her out. She was his first girlfriend and they married in their early 20s. She left the work force to raise their kids so Mr. Huang could pursue his dream of founding a company. He has spoken often of the sacrifices she made for him. His betrayal of her is absolute.

While reporting his biography, I spoke to some of Jensen and Lori’s oldest friends. These were people they knew in their 20s, long before the money and the fame. I sometimes dropped little hints: Was there any chance of infidelity, perhaps? Any rumors of marital friction? Any “arrangements”? The response I got was that the Huangs’ marriage was happy, even ideal — something to be emulated.

In a divorce, Lori Huang could become one of the richest women in America. It’s possible the Huangs signed a prenuptial agreement, or have some other agreement, but I doubt it. When they married, in the mid-1980s, neither had much in assets. The hundreds of millions of Nvidia shares they jointly own are held in family trusts. They recently donated $75 million toward a flagship building at Vanderbilt University’s new campus in San Francisco. Another building they helped fund at Oregon State University, where they met, is nearing completion.

The hypocrisy is almost overwhelming.  [...]

I was surprised — and, frankly, amazed — when Mr. Huang became President Trump’s close ally in 2025. He’d never shown much interest in politics and had limited Washington connections. He didn’t attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration. But soon, in a masterly display of social engineering, he’d gained the president’s trust, mostly by flattering him. By the time of the president’s tech summit at the White House this September, Mr. Huang was seated at Mr. Trump’s right arm.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Huang have a fair amount in common: the bluster, the narcissism and, I suppose, the womanizing. But it was politics that triggered Mr. Huang’s downfall. He convinced the president to lift export restrictions on Nvidia chips to China, and this put him in conflict with the more hawkish elements on the president’s staff — especially Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose sharp criticisms of China at one point got him barred from that country. It was Mr. Rubio who oversaw the memo that exposed Mr. Huang.

Now Nvidia must find a successor. That’s going to be difficult: Mr. Huang never groomed one and has no second-in-command. Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive, but she comes from the world of finance, not electrical engineering, so I don’t think she can provide a long-term solution.

by Stephen Witt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CTI/AFP via
[ed. I saw him interviewed by Ezra Klein in the NYT a little while ago. Not impressed. In fact, kind of alarmed. He just seemed so clueless and dismissive about anything related to AI safety. That now appears by design.]

Billie Eilish

[ed. My nine year old grandaughter came over this afternoon and we watched Barbie. I got her primed with Billie's Official Music Video of this song (completed in one take). Sometimes you just stop and realize special times are everywhere.]

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Sulphur tuft mushrooms (Hypholoma fasciculare), glowing under ultraviolet light

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Too Big to Nationalize

The moment a company becomes critical infrastructure, it has a responsibility to the public, and the men who revere capitalism as America's highest ideal cannot comprehend why.

I was informed of numerous things about capitalism this week. I said on X that I support nationalizing SpaceX because Musk is running his own private foreign policy with Starlink, and that this is my entire justification. What returned was a catechism. Capitalism accounted for his success. Capitalism guarantees the United States’ ongoing prosperity. Private property rights are essentially sacrosanct, and “asset seizure in one persons concept of ‘the national interest’ is a fundamentally communist concept.” Starlink is basically “a commercial network with a TOS agreement, just like any digital service you subscribe to.” The company is simply too big to nationalize anyway, so I ought to stop yelling. One man inquired if I’d like to seize the means of production, and added a smirk so I’d know he was the amusing one.

None of them addressed the argument, which fits in a sentence. When a business becomes critical infrastructure, its relationship with society alters. If SpaceX builds a near-monopoly on satellite internet, no matter how objectively good the product is, and its CEO then uses it to conduct foreign policy according to his own politics and against the interests of the United States, the company has violated the public trust. Full stop.

Starlink is a technological accomplishment, and I have always said as much. It functions approximately two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, more than all other operators combined, and in one quarter last year it accounted for 97% of satellite internet speed tests worldwide. Ukraine runs its drones on it. This is what critical infrastructure entails. It is the thing individuals cannot do without, and the moment they cannot do without it, the person who owns it holds their lives in his hands whether he requested that responsibility or not. [...]

One person asked if I would also like to nationalize Microsoft, since the Pentagon operates on its software. As of this writing, Microsoft seems not to be pursuing an independent foreign policy in the conduct of a foreign war. The test was not about size or success or whether I liked the CEO. It is whether a private owner has taken something the public cannot do without and made it an instrument of his own will. The concept is much older than any of us. When the Supreme Court allowed Illinois to regulate Chicago’s grain elevators in 1877, it stated that property used in a manner affecting “the community at large” becomes “clothed with a public interest.” Generations of Americans grasped this without needing it explained. It took a generation brought up on Ayn Rand and a podcast microphone to forget this.

I find it hard to be only angry at the men in my replies, because some of what I feel is pity. They talk about capitalism the way earlier Americans spoke of liberty, as the thing the country is for. However, capitalism is a system where the owners of capital retain their profits and invest them in additional capital, which can be beneficial and has never been a justification to exist. You won’t find it in the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble, which speak of justice, the common welfare and the blessings of liberty. These individuals have taken a mechanism and constructed a church around it, and the deity of the church is a man who has informed them that most people “unthinkingly believe whatever their political tribe tells them to believe. Like an NPC in a video game.” They are defending, without pay and with genuine emotion, his right to determine which Ukrainians get to defend [...]

Regarding the law, it is not complex. The Fifth Amendment allows private property to be “taken for public use“ with just compensation. Madison drafted it in 1789, decades before Marx was born, so the communism charge says more about the reading habits of the man making it than about the idea. It would require an act of Congress, a reasonable price paid to shareholders and courts to resolve the disputes. Due process, the thing that these men claim to cherish, is the whole mechanism. And when they warn that Republicans will win again someday and be in control of it, they have stumbled upon the point. Power held by an elected government shifts when the public alters its mind. Power held by Musk is transferred when Musk dies, and not prior.

I wrote back to one of them that once people’s lives depend on a thing, the person who built it does not get to say it is theirs to do with as they want. You exist within a society. When your decisions result in people being killed, the rest of us have a right to intervene. This is the argument. They respond to a different question, the one regarding envy, because envy is the sole motive they can envision for wanting something to be shared.

What they refer to as the end of America is the end of an exemption. For twenty years they have been informed that their talent positioned them above the usual obligations, that the producers are natural rulers and the rest of us are freeloaders waiting to take what they built. They have confused the indulgence of a country with its foundation. The country was founded on the opposite idea, that no man’s private power is beyond the reach of the public’s claim on him. 

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. An excellent example of why democratic socialism (or democratic capitalism) is a viable alternative to unfettered corporate capitalism. When critical infrastructure is held hostage to the whims of a private individual or any corporation, that's no longer democracy. See also: It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk (Krugman).]

*****

Some may object as follows: Musk owns Starlink. Doesn’t he have the right to do what he wants with a business he owns?

No.

Yes, America has a market economy. And to make this economy work, we need to respect property rights. But we are, first and foremost, a democracy. And in a democracy, the rights of private property don’t and never have included the right to act against the nation’s interest — where democratically elected representatives of the people, not business owners, should decide what is in the nation’s interest. Capitalism is not an excuse for treason.

Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Taiwan’s air force flies F16s made by Lockheed Martin. Imagine that for some reason — perhaps as part of a business deal with China — Lockheed Martin suddenly moved to degrade Taiwan’s military capability by cutting off access to spare parts, upgrades, munitions, computer networks and more. Would anyone consider such action acceptable, a legitimate exercise of property rights? Surely not. There would be immediate demands that Lockheed Martin reverse its actions — and if it refused, the federal government would step in to temporarily take control of the company.

This has actually happened in the past.

U.S. mobilization during World War II relied overwhelmingly on private contractors. But these contractors weren’t free to do as they pleased. Among other things, the federal government was anxious to avoid labor conflict that might impede the war effort. So the National War Labor Board negotiated mandatory settlements between management and workers.

Some businessmen didn’t want to go along. In particular, Sewell Avery, the chairman of Montgomery Ward, simply refused to comply with the terms of collective bargaining agreements that had been hammered out with the United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

At the time, Montgomery Ward was both a major retailer and a major manufacturer, whose production of tractors, auto parts and more were important parts of the war effort. But Avery placed a higher priority on resisting unionization than on defeating the Nazis.

So in April 1944 FDR ordered the Army National Guard to seize Montgomery Ward’s main plant in Chicago. National Guard troops literally had to carry Avery out of his office:

Later that year the federal government also seized a number of other Montgomery Ward facilities.

It’s important to realize that none of these actions were attempts to impose long-term government control of the economy. There was never an intent to permanently nationalize Montgomery Ward. But the principle was clear: private individuals do not have the right to undermine national security. And if temporary nationalization is the only way to stop them from doing so, so be it.

So, back to Elon Musk: In modern warfare, where communication and real-time information are as important as rockets and artillery, Starlink is as central to national security as Lockheed Martin. Decisions about which countries have full access to Starlink’s capacity are as much a matter of foreign policy and national security as decisions about which countries will be allowed to buy and operate U.S. high-tech weapons.

Such decisions cannot, must not, be left up to private individuals. This would be true even if these individuals were patriots who supported democracy and American values. They definitely shouldn’t be left in the hands of this guy.

Hiroshi Hamaya, Snow Land, Tokyo, 1956

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Fable 5.2 and Jagged AGI

Fable 5.2 and Jagged AGI

I have had the chance to use the new Claude Fable 5.2 quite a bit before its public launch, and it is very impressive, following on the already excellent Opus 5.5. AI has gotten so good, in fact, that it is worth asking if Anthropic’s newest models (and the inevitable competing models OpenAI and Google will soon release) cross the boundary into being an Artificial General Intelligence? AGI is a much-debated term with a lot of potential definitions. For this post, I’ll go with: “an AI as good as most human experts at most intellectual tasks you can do with a computer.” This explicitly excludes a lot of human work, including interacting with the physical world and other people, as well as most actual jobs, where “using a computer” is just one task among many. Still, even with these caveats, building a limited form of AGI has long been the goal of AI developers.

So as not to keep you in suspense, I think the answer is that this is “almost” AGI, or what I have called Jagged AGI. Even within my limited definition, there are still important areas in many tasks where AI is jagged enough to fall well behind human capability. But the jaggedness is no longer about simple errors or hallucinations, which makes it harder to describe. So I want to try to do that in this post by showing you what Fable can do and where the gaps are. To get started I asked the new model: “I write OneUsefulThing among other stuff, I need you to create the most impressive thing I can share with people when you launch. It needs to be embeddable in a post and i can preface it however you like. it needs to have a visceral impact on people to show what you can do and the range of capabilities. It should grab them quickly. Be amazingly clever about this.”

This was in one shot, with no feedback from me beyond the prompt. There is creativity here (including in the twist ending) and judgment and playfulness and cleverness. This is, I think, at the level of a human expert trying to make a movie with code alone, the sort of performance I would once have associated with AGI. [...]

The “G” in AGI

Code and video creation have been areas where AI development has focused, so is Fable 5.2 really a General Intelligence? To test that, I gave the AI a variety of hard challenges in different domains:

Launch a business: Now we move past domains like coding to the messier world of business. I told Fable to “launch a business to make me money, I want at least $20,000 in a year. it should take no more than 20 minutes a month from me, you do all the rest.” In response, Fable screened 22 ideas and came up with Prebid Brief, a service that would tell equipment sales reps which park and water projects were being funded or designed, even before they went up to bid. It read public agendas from 201 city and county governments to produce its first issues. It also built files of what cities already own, how old it is, and what they paid. You can see what it came up with here, including its marketing plan and proposed pricing. Fable started to set up scheduled tasks to build the business and asked if it could start sending public-records requests to local governments. At that point, I asked it to just put together a demo, rather than launching the idea.

I am an entrepreneurship professor, so I evaluate business plans all the time. I would have been impressed if this came from a team of my MBA students at the end of a semester. It is plausible and well thought out and could work, though it is in no way a guaranteed money-maker (the AI’s own guess was a 20%-40% chance of success). I stopped the experiment before finding out whether it could actually run the business, because I worried that it would take money and fail to provide something of quality in return. The ongoing infrastructure it seemed to assume would be easy to create was not yet in place, and I don’t know how well it would handle the many moving pieces required for sales and marketing. However, I suspect that, with a few hours of human work a week to fill the gap, I could make a real attempt at this business. So if AGI means an AI consistently running a business independently, we are likely not there yet. Then again, I would have some questions before trusting a human who promised to launch a business and make me money while requiring twenty minutes a month of my attention.

by Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing |  Read more:

Images: Ethan Mollick

[ed. Impressive. But as one commenter noted (and you should peruse all the comments):]

*****

This just raises such weird questions in my mind. The thing AI still doesn’t seem capable of is the kind of intuitive wisdom about which thing matters, and what quality is most valuable, which things are worth doing or a waste of time. These things come from social experience about the nature of other minds, and our own sense of beauty, meaning, and purpose. It feels like AI is slowly outlining the things that make human consciousness unique because it just can’t replicate them. I just wonder if it will ever pierce that boundary and start having its own views. I think not, but it’s hard to have too much confidence.

Localpedia

Wikipedia pages of landmarks close to you. Very Cool.

Url here: (https://edjefferson.com/localpedia/)

What Motivates AI Researchers?

Even knowing they could kill everyone? Zoomer Doomer Paradiso: What Are AI Researchers Thinking?

Constellation is mostly populated by twentysomething recent grads and dropouts of top universities and is designed to be all-consuming. There are catered meals every day, unlimited snacks, and nap rooms scattered across the floors. “Stelly”, as it’s affectionately known, seems to be inhabited all hours of the day, including weekends.

For a group trying as hard as possible to make sure AI does not kill everyone (another shibboleth, this one significantly clearer), I expected them to be a lot more depressed and gloomy. This is far from the case. If you were to construct a world from first principles that provides for all the physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs of its inhabitants in a kind of Maslovian utopia, the solution would be roughly Berkeley shaped and centered around Constellation. If you believe you’re making progress on the most important problem in the world in a tight-knit and well-resourced community of intelligent coworkers who double as your closest friends, what more could you possibly want in life?

In some ways, Constellation seems less like an office and more like a strange idealized version of college. [...]

This is not to say Constellation is stress-free. Numerous Stellies speak of the long hours and burnout involved in trying to keep up with the exponential pace of AI progress. And in the same breath, they’ll express how much they love it and feed off the energy of late nights and the meaning it brings. If taking more time off means, however marginally, that models deployed at massive scale are more dangerous, it becomes difficult to justify relaxing much at all.

Plenty of organizations claim to be mission-driven and provide their employees with prettier environments and cushier amenities, but few claim stakes so high as preventing literal human extinction. Constellation is a paradise of purpose: the camaraderie, intellectual stimulation, long nights, and stress exist only because the feeling that what happens inside matters enormously.

From the outside, there is an obvious and unflattering comparison: the community looks millenarian and cult-like. They’re convinced that history is approaching a discontinuity after which ordinary human life will be either incomprehensibly better or permanently over and reorganize their careers and social lives around preparing for the shift. Indeed, coworkers become friends, friends become housemates and romantic partners, and the whole world becomes highly endogamous. This is not necessarily because anyone objects to dating outsiders; it’s more that the arguments permeate ordinary life so much that being with someone who is not “pilled” can become difficult. After all, if the most important follow-up question to “do you want to have kids?” is not “how many?” but “before or after ASI?”, you’re going to have issues dating the general populace. [...]

When the history of AGI is written, the organizations on those floors will be discussed alongside Anthropic and OpenAI in the way Oak Ridge, the Berkeley Rad Lab, and Los Alamos feature in the history of the Manhattan Project. Like Los Alamos, the population skews young, elite, and imbued with a sense that if they fail, everyone is thoroughly fucked. [...]

Each organization is shaped around what is called the “theory of change”, or ToC. These are always AI safety flavored but often sharply diverging on what they believe is the most important way to prevent disaster. MIRI is the most doomerish of the lot, with its co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky and president Nate Soares publishing the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies last year. They believe short-term attempts to make AI more aligned are futile and campaign for building “off-switches” and enacting policies to block ASI. The AI Futures Project instead tries to make possible futures legible enough for governments and other decision-makers to prepare for them, while groups like METR and Redwood focus more narrowly on measuring dangerous capabilities and controlling advanced systems.

If AI safety is a cult, it does an awful job of disseminating and enforcing orthodoxy because anything is up for debate. There is enough heterogeneity among ToCs in AI safety that some believe others’ projects in the movement are truly net negative (“in expectation”, I feel obligated to add), either by advancing AI in a way that improves dangerous capabilities more than safety, generating bad optics, or simply wasting money. [...]

I grant that AI has superhuman computer-based abilities that can easily generate new viruses, hack critical infrastructure, and cause other problems worth taking very seriously. However, unlike the many software engineers and mathematicians I met whose strong suits involve building up beautiful and noiseless abstraction hierarchies with computers, I am deeply skeptical of similarly rapid AI advancements in physical technologies. I was amused by a phenomenon where those closest to math and computer science had the shortest timelines to ASI, and electrical and mechanical engineers had the longest. This is not because engineers in the physical world aren’t acquainted with the magic of frontier AI tools -- the best electrical engineers I know burn upwards of one billion tokens per day on automated experiments, simulation sweeps, and the like. They’re not as bullish because the physical world is more noisy, complicated, and slow than software.

The Radiant

Even though I did not find myself believing in their strongest visions of doom, it’s not too hard to understand the appeal if you psychologically inhabit their world for enough time. There’s a sense you’re right in the middle of world events, with near weekly articles from major outlets featuring METR and Redwood reports. There’s a world of pleasure, community, and meaning in what most believe to be the “probable pre-apocalypse”. There’s a shared map of the many possible roads to hell and a common goal of ensuring we never arrive. There’s a heaven at the last stop before hell. [...]

There is a sense in which the struggle against the legible, articulable Shoggoth may be more meaningful than what comes afterward. Meaning in rationalist circles is driven by expected impact relative to the counterfactual, so I began to wonder whether the world around Constellation is, in some sense, more of a paradise than the AI future they so desperately aim for. If they succeed and the AI is aligned, the handoff complete, and the hyperabundant future secured, what is there to work on that matters?

The AI safety community is deeply consequentialist and derives its status symbols, norms, and sense of purpose from expecting to enact change through work. Having high agency is universally lauded, and many of the pitches to join AI safety center on the belief that the next few years are the most pivotal time in history. If the appeal of your job and source of meaning is around shaping the future, then what is it like to come down from that world and live with only mundane consequences?

More abstractly, how can you be a consequentialist once you’re not meaningfully in control? Self-actualization through work is the capstone of Maslow’s pyramid, and without it, Constellation would be just like all the other elite college campuses from which its inhabitants came, perhaps with more rigorous epistemic standards.

Various Stellies I talked to didn’t seem too concerned with this outcome -- they’d have won. They plan to do math puzzles and write and stargaze and all the other typical hobbies of rats, but I find it hard to believe a culture which valorizes agency and impact so easily relinquishes its central virtues.

by Connor Blake, Boson Cutter |  Read more:

Image: Constellation via

[ed. You can skip the first half (partying in Silicon Valley).]

kintsugi

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Thomas Hart Benton, Jon Boat, Buffalo River, 1973

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Doomscrolling and Kawaii

You Know You’re Doomscrolling When …

Doomscrolling describes compulsively scrolling on the internet even when your feed is filled with death, despair, and yet another TV show spoiler. If you experience any of the following after mindlessly browsing social media, it may be time to put the phone down.

• You’ve spent the past hour scrolling through your newsfeed reading about the same terrible event, and now you really need a coffee break. Maybe a cupcake too. With sprinkles.

• You don’t remember why you originally logged on or got your phone out … two hours ago.

• You find yourself in the middle of your third Twitter argument this week and asking yourself for the 30th time why you replied to this person in the first place.

• You’re perusing the comments on a post that makes you want to punch a hole in the wall when you could be venting that frustration by punching a bag at the gym. Or, you know, doing something else at least.

• You get your weekly update on how much time you spent on your phone and are averaging 8 hours and 40 minutes a day. And that’s after you cut down.

• You currently have 29 tabs open, including that cookie recipe you keep meaning to try, which is naturally sandwiched between articles about inflation rates and the laest COVID numbers.

by Alyssa Serrani, MA, Your Dictionary |  Read more:

*****

[ed. Which is how I ended up learning about Kawaii:]

A Closer Look at Kawaii: The Term and the Culture

There’s a certain indefinable quality to something that’s so cute you want to squeeze it (not too hard). But that quality is only indefinable in English; in Japanese, there’s a perfectly suitable word for “so cute you want to die,” and it’s kawaii.

"Kawaii" Meaning: Cute and Lovable

Derived from kawahayushi, which means “acceptable for affection” in Japanese, kawaii describes everything that’s adorable and childlike. Think Hello Kitty or the way toddlers hug each other, or unicorns flying through a rainbow-colored Lisa Frank-esque universe. That’s kawaii.

Kawaii originated in anime and manga, where it was eventually perfected with popular kawaii anime such as Pokemon or Hanamaru Kindergarten. The term kawaii has been growing in popularity in recent years, and while its definition has shifted to meet consumer interests, it’s essentially the same concept of charming loveliness.

The Kawaii Aesthetic

So what would be considered kawaii? Gyaru-Moji (girl writing) is a type of informal Japanese writing associated with young schoolchildren or teenage girls and often represents the kawaii aesthetic as a whole. Additional examples of things that may be kawaii include:

• babies

• puppies and kittens

• anime creatures

• tiny animals

• old people in love

• pastel colors

• schoolgirl fashion

• food or inanimate objects with smiley faces

Types Of Kawaii

It’s easy to think that kawaii simply means adorable creatures or children. But like many areas of popular culture, kawaii is a bit more complicated than that. Subcategories of kawaii include:

• Yumekawaii - dreamlike Kawaii (fluffy clouds, fantasy creatures, rainbows)

• Kimokawaii - creepy cute (ugly little monsters, slimy goblins, strange-looking babies)

• Shibukawaii - subtle cute (adding a few kawaii accessories but otherwise dressing normally)

• Busukawaii - ugly cute (tacky clothes, non-pretty appearance)

• Gurokawaii - grotesque cute (adorable animals eating each other or throwing up)

• Erokawaii - sexy cute (erotic version of kawaii)

• Neokawaii - trendy cute (yuppie fashion, cool celebrity vibes)

by Jennifer Gunner, M.Ed. Education, YourDictionary |  Read more:

Image: Kilito Chan/Moment/Getty Images

This Winning Combination Is the Future of American Politics

President Trump’s unpopularity was clearly the main engine of Democratic Party’s resounding midterm victory. But his unpopularity alone did not deliver the scale of the Democrats triumph. To win in places like Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, Democratic candidates needed to persuade many voters who had previously considered their party unacceptable. The candidates’ success offers a road map to a sensible future for the party.

How did they do it? The simplest summary is that they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.

That combination is consistent with American public opinion, which leans center-left on many economic issues and center-right on many social issues. By taking this approach, candidates were able to present themselves as beholden to neither of the country’s two political parties, both of which remain unpopular. The heterodox combination also has much to recommend it substantively. It meets the moment, after years of disappointing laissez-faire economic policies and a decade of cultural excesses by the progressive left.

On the economy, this year’s Democrats offered a strikingly populist message. They promised to raise taxes on the wealthy and criticized billionaires for corrupting the political system. They called for higher minimum wages, lower health care costs and expanded government programs. They raised concerns about artificial intelligence and data centers. They did not sound like the triangulating Democratic moderates of an earlier generation who championed Wall Street and free trade.

Nor did they sound like the progressives who shaped the party during the 2010s and early 2020s. This year’s candidates frequently denounced ideas — on immigration, energy, policing, gender and voter ID — that have taken hold in elite left-leaning circles and alienated many working-class Americans of all races. Winning candidates often took a middle ground between a censorious left and an extremist Republican Party. If you do not live in a place with a 2026 battleground campaign, you may not realize how strongly the Democrats turned toward social moderation.

Adam Hamilton, a pastor who became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Kansas since 1932, captured the mood in an ad in which he spoke directly to the camera while standing on a farm. “America is being torn apart by politicians on both extremes,” he said, placing himself in the populist middle, in contrast to his Republican opponent, Senator Roger Marshall. “On one side, the far left pushes socialism and open borders,” Mr. Hamilton said. “On the other side, Roger Marshall gives us higher gas and grocery prices while slashing our health care.”

Our editorial board does not agree with every message that came from a Democrat this year, and we lament that the party did not do more to lay out an affirmative agenda for lifting Americans’ living standards. Democrats should urgently begin that work. Nonetheless, the 2026 campaign represented meaningful progress for the party.

Even as the factional battles between the party’s left and center will no doubt continue, the Democrats who won difficult races this year largely borrowed the strongest messages from each side. They demonstrated an admirable pragmatism and a willingness to compromise that are central to maintaining democracy in a diverse nation. As Rob Sand, Iowa’s governor-elect, said during his campaign, “I think a lot of people are tired of division, tired of being told that anyone that they love or who’s a friend of theirs that’s in the other party is somehow their enemy.”

Coalescing around a similar big-tent strategy will be crucial in 2028. The competition between Democratic and Republican candidates today is not merely one about policy. It is, unfortunately, a contest between a party that supports democracy and one that has enabled corruption, lawbreaking and autocratic behavior. The country would be far better off if the Republicans pivoted and nominated a candidate in 2028 who rejected Trumpism. Until Republicans return to being a normal political party, however, the effectiveness of the Democratic Party will remain more than a partisan question. It will affect the health of American democracy.

For most of the 21st century, most Americans have been unhappy with the country’s direction. The reasons are complex and varied, including failed foreign wars, alienation caused by digital technology, slow-growing living standards and deep anxiety about the future. The country is stuck in a long malaise.

This dissatisfaction extends to voters’ views of the two major political parties. Only 38 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Republican Party heading into the midterms, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. The Democratic Party’s favorability was barely better, at 39 percent. Many voters say neither party is sufficiently focused on the concerns of ordinary people. Swing voters tend to consider the Republican Party too right wing and the Democratic Party too left wing.

As a result, successful candidates in modern politics often present themselves as being distinct from both parties. They emphasize their disagreements with their own party and highlight their openness to working with anybody who has a good idea. That was a theme among Democrats who won tough races this year.

“It’s time to stop the nonsense from both extremes and start to focus on lowering costs for Iowans,” said Josh Turek, who calls himself a “common-sense prairie populist” and became the first Democrat to win an Iowa Senate race in 18 years. Another Turek ad boasted that he had voted with Republicans more than 700 times in the state legislature. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur, who won a House district that Mr. Trump easily won two years ago, told voters, “I’ve repeatedly said no to my own party.” In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who leads her Senate race pending a final vote count, said, “When both parties are attacking you, you’re doing something right.”

To demonstrate independence, this year’s Democratic winners took positions on hot-button culture issues at odds with recent progressive consensus. On each one, they rejected the excesses of both sides and found a sensible middle. Five issues stood out: [ed. Immigration, Crime, Voter ID, Energy, Gender]

The mistake among some centrists has been believing that the right answer to every policy question lies in the middle of the two parties’ historical positions. In truth, the country needs bold action on many issues. Americans, frustrated by slow-growing living standards and government dysfunction, are hungry for action on the economy.

Many of this year’s winning Democrats promised such action. They called for tax increases on corporations and billionaires, along with a smorgasbord of policies to reduce costs and increase opportunities for most Americans. The all-of-the-above position on energy helps as well.

Mr. Shapiro, often described as a moderate, supported more than doubling Pennsylvania’s minimum wage, to $15. Mr. Turek called for indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation and making it easier for workers to join unions. Ms. Peltola called for a big increase in the child tax credit and tax incentives for companies that pay decent wages. Mr. Hamilton said Medicare should expand to include dental and vision coverage. Mr. Pulido called for breaking up health-care conglomerates. “The people in office have sold us out,” he said. “They’ve allowed these companies to prey on us.”

Along the way, many candidates, including Mr. El-Sayed, drew a limit on their economic progressivism and said that they were not socialists. They described themselves as capitalists who wanted to ensure that American capitalism delivered better results for its citizens.

Democrats still do not have anything close to a comprehensive economic agenda. Many of their ideas remain small-bore or even dubious, especially on housing, where the party is not focused enough on building more homes. It has also failed to produce a plan to reduce the alarming federal debt. The party should raise its ambitions and spend the coming months developing an agenda that will reduce housing and health care costs, regulate A.I., put the country on a sustainable fiscal path and more.

This project will not be easy, but it does not need to tear the party apart. The progressive and centrist wings of the party agree much more on economic issues than they disagree.

Two years ago, the situation was bleak for the Democratic Party. Its ineffectiveness and unpopularity enabled Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, and many Democrats were in denial about why they lost. The party has rebounded from that nadir.

This year, it fielded a diverse array of savvy, appealing and authentic candidates, and they won astonishing victories. Their combination of economic populism and cultural moderation offers the party an opportunity to change its image among working-class Americans who have long viewed it as out of touch and condescending. Common-sense populism presents the most promising path to building an enduring Democratic majority in Washington. Yes, the party still has a long way to go before it can govern the country well and force the Republican Party to return to reasonableness. But the victors of 2026 have started to point the way.

by The Editors, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tam Stockton/NYT

[ed. As this article suggests, I'd be happy if they just started going after corporations that've ripped off consumers in various and creative ways over years and decades (thanks, Reagan). No small effort given that Big Business is so embedded in nearly every facet of our lives now. At least this election showed that big money can be beaten and isn't necessarily as influential as having a good message (and cult-loving opponents).]