Should You Blow Up Your Life?

My friend Leila came to me the other night with an urgent question. Should I blow up my life? she wondered. Am I delusional? What if I regret it?

Below are some of the things I talked about with Leila (not her real name, obviously) over tea and ginger cake. These thoughts come from my own life and from the lives of many women who have written me since All Fours came out, as well as the conversations I had while writing it. Please give your own advice to Leila in the comments. Feel free to speak to the complications of children, financial dependency, etc. – we are making big decisions in an unjust, difficult world. This post could be a nice place for women to go when they are having this feeling. (Note: Leila is married to a man so these are slanted a bit that way but most should be applicable to everyone.) (Also this is heavily biased; Leila already had a lot of people telling her to stay and work it out.)

• I do believe (and I tell this to my child) that romantic relationships are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to "lifelong" in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length. But knowing the right length is profound, letting relationships change and perhaps even come back as friendships, that is very meaningful. My very best man-friend was once my worst boyfriend.

• In the case of a long relationship, you better hope you're not the exact same person you were at the start. And that alone can be reason to leave. You simply know yourself better now, you would not choose that person if you met them now or you perhaps you would choose them all over again but you would describe yourself and your needs much differently in those first dates and: they might not have chosen you. It might have just been a fling if they had known who you really were and what you wanted. (For example: you're really, not just a little, bisexual. You're devoted and consistent but not monogamous. You see yourself primarily as a solo adventurer, not in terms of a couple. Etc.)

• Often there is a new person involved in this crisis. Indeed it is the new person who makes it a crisis, who brings it to a breaking point. Most of the time this new person does not endure but they are still very significant in the story of your life (a friend of mine calls these people crowbars — they get you out.) What I really think is that you are not doing it for this new person, but for this new side of yourself. The new love speaks to this side of you so it seems very tied to them. It’s hard to trust your new side because it has no credit score, no deeds in its name. You don't know how trustworthy or good it is. In fact every instinct and every friend may tell you it's for sure untrustworthy and not good — it's tearing up your home! Home good! New side of you bad! I would generally say: take risks in order to know yourself. (...)

• One friend had an elaborate plan designed to make her leaving the marriage more palatable and understandable to her husband. It involved several lies and I was nodding for a while, it seemed plausible, maybe even kind. But then I remembered something! "Maybe he doesn't need to understand or approve of what you’re doing?" She laughed in horror – it was, after all, a plan to leave him. This is where it gets tricky. Because for a long while you are still a part of him, like trees with entangled roots. So it is very hard to think your desires aren’t dangerous. It feels almost suicidal. The confusion of this probably stops a lot of women in their tracks.

• As you are so busily trying to think of how to not hurt your partner you might consider that a wife who doesn't want to be with him might not be such a great prize. He might be able to do better. And you might want this for him.

• The one person I know who regrets blowing up her long marriage did it very abruptly, with no conversation before, no couples therapy, no period of questioning. She was trying to be a good person: she had fallen in love with someone new and did not want to cheat. The new love did not ultimately work out and the whole thing seemed like madness in retrospect. But when I ask her if she wishes she was still with her long-time partner she says, Not usually. She just can’t believe how black and white her thinking was back then. And some nights she does wonder if she made a big mistake.

by Miranda July, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Dissenting opinions: Ladies, Miranda July is Not Your Friend (IFFS); and, Miranda July's Lucrative Fantasies (Freddie deBoer):]

"For example, you may remember a now-ancient controversy about whether women “can have it all.” This was a big, meaty, thinkpiece-and-take-generating debate years back. What “having it all” meant was never entirely clear, but the basic debate concerned whether women had to choose between having their careers and raising children/having a family. Of course, the answer to all of these questions depends a great deal on whether the woman and her partner have the socioeconomic flexibility to pay for various kinds of child care; this (correct) observation was often dropped on social media like some kind of gnostic bauble. Some attempted to connect the debate to other flashpoints of modern female identity, like the endlessly-blogged “cool girl” speech featured in Gone Girl. I stayed out of this fray, at the time, but privately I held with those who were pointing out that “having it all” was an unrealistic goal for anyone, not just for women. Yes, there are of course unique difficulties when it comes to women both flourishing in their careers and starting a family, and these are no doubt influenced not just by biology but by structural sexism. Still, everyone’s ambitions are constrained in prosaic ways in life, including men, and (like the directive to be cartoonishly self-confident) the goal of it having it all becomes just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet. (...)

Which brings me to Miranda July and the micro-movement she’s spawned with her book All Fours: convincing aging women that they should leave their long-term partners, or stop looking for one, and just spend the rest of their lives cycling through one lover after another, enjoying a pleasantly hedonistic existence unbound by the restrictions of conventional morality - and, it seems, by mortality and time, which have conspicuously little presence in all of this. July’s book is a novel and does not advocate for a specific path for women, but her extremely successful newsletter more or less does, and the large online movement July has sparked certainly prefers to embrace the ethos of Just Dump Your Husband Already. This has all been aided by a massive amount of attention from media, both traditional and new - very large presence of Lady Podcasts, mentions in Emily Gould’s newsletter for the Cut, a profound fixation in the New York Times. Here’s Marie Solis with the initial worshipful profile, here’s Alyson Krueger with that classic indicator of social importance, an NYT Style-section trend piece, here’ss Mirielle Silcoff with a charming little bit of football-spiking, protesting against depictions of aging women that make them appear unfulfilled or sexless. (Protesting, perhaps, too much.) We could get into the whole phenomenon here of people being moved to explicitly explain and justify their happiness to others, in the pages of the New York Times no less; you can’t help but wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince. Still, if your wife writes thinkpieces for the Times you might want to keep a close eye on her Pinterest.

As I wrote recently, what media sells in 2025 is permission; that is our product. Apparently a lot of women were waiting for a particular kind of permission that Miranda July has provided. What’s remarkable about all of this cheering on of July in our most elite publications is not just its sheer volume, but also how untouched it is by skepticism or pushback. It’s not just that a certain kind of person at a certain kind of publication wants this story told; they also don’t want to hear anyone object to it. And I think this is the “Can women have it all?” phenomenon again, where saying that a particular kind of happiness for women is genuinely unattainable is too easily represented as saying that you don’t want them to attain it."

Starliner’s Flight to the Space Station Was Wilder Than We Thought

As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."

Starliner astronauts meet with the media

On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them.

Many of the questions concerned the politically messy end of the mission, in which the Trump White House claimed it had rescued the astronauts after they were stranded by the Biden administration. This was not true, but it is also not a question that active astronauts are going to answer. They have too much respect for the agency and the White House that appoints its leadership. They are trained not to speak out of school. As Wilmore said repeatedly on Monday, "I can't speak to any of that. Nor would I."

So when Ars met with Wilmore at the end of the day—it was his final interview, scheduled for 4:55 to 5:05 pm in a small studio at Johnson Space Center—politics was not on the menu. Instead, I wanted to know the real story, the heretofore untold story of what it was really like to fly Starliner. After all, the problems with the spacecraft's propulsion system precipitated all the other events—the decision to fly Starliner home without crew, the reshuffling of the Crew-9 mission, and their recent return in March after nine months in space.

I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight. We blew through the 10-minute interview slot and ended up talking for nearly half an hour.

It's a hell of a story.

Launch and a cold night

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft faced multiple delays before the vehicle's first crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5, 2024. These included a faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket's upper stage, and then a helium leak inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.

The valve issue, in early May, stood the mission down long enough that Wilmore asked to fly back to Houston for additional time in a flight simulator to keep his skills fresh. Finally, with fine weather, the Starliner Crew Flight Test took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first human launch on the Atlas V rocket, which had a new Centaur upper stage with two engines.

Sunita "Suni" Williams: "Oh man, the launch was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, 'Wow, this is going just perfectly.' So the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect."

Barry "Butch" Wilmore: "In simulations, there's always a deviation. Little deviations in your trajectory. And during the launch on Shuttle STS-129 many years ago, and Soyuz, there's the similar type of deviations that you see in this trajectory. I mean, it's always correcting back. But this ULA Atlas was dead on the center. I mean, it was exactly in the crosshairs, all the way. It was much different than what I'd expected or experienced in the past. It was exhilarating. It was fantastic. Yeah, it really was. The dual-engine Centaur did have a surge. I'm not sure ULA knew about it, but it was obvious to us. We were the first to ride it. Initially we asked, 'Should that be doing that? This surging?' But after a while, it was kind of soothing. And again, we were flying right down the middle."

After Starliner separated from the Atlas V rocket, Williams and Wilmore performed several maneuvering tests and put the vehicle through its paces. Starliner performed exceptionally well during these initial tests on day one.

Wilmore: "The precision, the ability to control to the exact point that I wanted, was great. There was very little, almost imperceptible cross-control. I've never given a handling qualities rating of "one," which was part of a measurement system. To take a qualitative test and make a quantitative assessment. I've never given a one, ever, in any test I've ever done, because nothing's ever deserved a one. Boy, I was tempted in some of the tests we did. I didn't give a one, but it was pretty amazing."

Following these tests, the crew attempted to sleep for several hours ahead of their all-important approach and docking with the International Space Station on the flight's second day. More so even than launch or landing, the most challenging part of this mission, which would stress Starliner's handling capabilities as well as its navigation system, would come as it approached the orbiting laboratory.

Williams: "The night that we spent there in the spacecraft, it was a little chilly. We had traded off some of our clothes to bring up some equipment up to the space station. So I had this small T-shirt thing, long-sleeve T-shirt, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm cold.' Butch is like, 'I'm cold, too.' So, we ended up actually putting our boots on, and then I put my spacesuit on. And then he's like, maybe I want mine, too. So we both actually got in our spacesuits. It might just be because there were two people in there."

Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.

Wilmore: "It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you're hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn't notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn't take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I'm going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold."

Time to dock with the space station

After a few hours of fitful sleep, Wilmore decided to get up and start working to get his blood pumping. He reviewed the flight plan and knew it was going to be a big day. Wilmore had been concerned about the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. There are 28 of them. Around the perimeter of Starliner's service module, at the aft of the vehicle, there are four "doghouses" equally spaced around the vehicle.

Each of these doghouses contains seven small thrusters for maneuvering. In each doghouse, two thrusters are aft-facing, two are forward-facing, and three are in different radial directions (see an image of a doghouse, with the cover removed, here). For docking, these thrusters are essential. There had been some problems with their performance during an uncrewed flight test to the space station in May 2022, and Wilmore had been concerned those issues might crop up again.

Wilmore: "Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'OK, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, 'If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it.' That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."

When vehicles approach the space station, they use two imaginary lines to help guide their approach. These are the R-bar, which is a line connecting the space station to the center of Earth. The "R" stands for radius. Then there is the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of the space station. Due to thruster issues, as Starliner neared the V-bar about 260 meters (850 feet) from the space station, Wilmore had to take manual control of the vehicle.

Wilmore: "As we get closer to the V-bar, we lose our second thruster. So now we're single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control. You understand that?"

Here things get a little more complicated if you've never piloted anything. When Wilmore refers to 6DOF control, he means six degrees of freedom—that is, the six different movements possible in three-dimensional space: forward/back, up/down, left/right, yaw, pitch, and roll. With Starliner's four doghouses and their various thrusters, a pilot is able to control the spacecraft's movement across these six degrees of freedom. But as Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being "single fault" tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner's movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.

Wilmore: "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station.' Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we've lost two thrusters. We didn't know why. They just dropped."

The heroes in Mission Control

As part of the Commercial Crew program, the two companies providing transportation services for NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, got to decide who would fly their spacecraft. SpaceX chose to operate its Dragon vehicles out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Boeing chose to contract with NASA's Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston to fly Starliner. So at this point, the vehicle is under the purview of a Flight Director named Ed Van Cise. This was the capstone mission of his 15-year career as a NASA flight director.

Wilmore: "Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That's a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, 'What do you think?' they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control."

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA's webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point.

by Eric Berger, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: NASA

[ed. FOD.]

'Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’

In March of last year, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, published a book called “The Anxious Generation,” which caused, let’s call it, a stir.

I always found the conversation over this book to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.

This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.

So I stayed out of that debate, because, on the one hand, I couldn’t settle it, and on the other hand, I didn’t think I should come in and say it wasn’t important.

But a year later, two things have happened. One: Haidt’s book has never left the best-seller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord.

Two: Policy is moving in Haidt’s direction. We are seeing a genuine policy revolution, happening in places governed by both Republicans and Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. And I feel a lot more confident, as a parent, that we’re going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.

But then, of course, the truck of artificial intelligence is about to T-bone whatever consensus we come to socially — which, to be quite honest, scares the hell out of me. (...)

Ezra Klein: Jon Haidt, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Haidt: Ezra, it’s great to be back with you.

I want to begin with the big question: What is childhood for?

Childhood is evolution’s answer to: How do you have a big-brained cultural creature?

You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things — all sorts of maneuvers and social skills — in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.

If you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there’s a plastic period where stuff comes in and shapes who you are. And once you’ve got that, you’re ready to convert to the adult form — be reproductive, have a baby.

But if you don’t have play in childhood, you’re not going to reach adulthood properly.

You had one statistic in the book that I think I’ve actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew, maybe now because I have a 5-year-old who just turned 6: At 5 years old, the human brain is 90 percent of its adult size, and it has more neurons than it will when you’re an adult.

That’s right. We’re used to thinking of bodily growth as just: Time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons, which have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together.

So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that. Whereas if you repeatedly swipe and tap, swipe and tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain is going to wire to do that.

I guess you’re an older millennial. How did you grow up?

I am among the eldest of millennials.

The millennial elders. Tell me: At what age could you go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood?

I don’t remember exactly, but I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb, and I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. We would be playing kickball on somebody’s garage door. The other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse.

Exactly. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods, like the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn’t have a childhood. But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow with me, has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way. There’s no thought that the mother has to be supervising the 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 9-year-olds. They’re all off playing with the other kids.

And there are 9- and 10-year-olds there. So they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids. And remember, the younger kids are trying to wire up their brain to: What is a functional member of this society? And the best role models for them are not kids their age — it’s kids a few years older.

In America, in the West, we’ve got these factory kinds of schools where we put all the 8-year-olds together and then all the 9-year-olds together. But the healthiest is what you just said.

So my point is: Everyone before the millennials had this childhood. Millennials are the transitional generation. So you were on the elder side — you got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country, and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the ’90s — you can see it in the charts — that’s the decade when we really pulled our kids in.

We thought: They’ll get abducted. We can’t let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket. Or a man with a white van — all this crazy stuff comes in in the ’90s.

Something you mentioned about the ’90s in the book: I am familiar with this statistic that, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, both parents spend much more time with their kids than they did before.

But I hadn’t realized that was not a steady increase over the decades. It sharply increased in the ’90s.

That’s right. There’s this weird graph that I have in the book that shows the number of hours that women spend parenting — what you would consider time with your kid doing something.

And the astonishing thing is that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said.

It’s not the parent’s job to socialize the child all along. It’s the parent’s job to provide the right environment to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks.

But the real work of brain development doesn’t happen when you’re with your parents. Your parents are home base — they’re your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. That’s what other mammals do. You go off progressively farther from your home base, and that’s where the learning happens.

It’s playing kickball. It’s trying to decide: What do we do today? Or: Oh, he broke the rules. No, he didn’t.

I want to get at a tension in there, at least with the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask whether you were a good parent this week is how much time you spent with your children.

Yes. Quality time.

Quality time. I feel that. And you’re saying here that’s not true?

It’s definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid.

You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the ’90s, and it’s in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors.

If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about “Bowling Alone” and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, and someone would help. But we begin losing that trust.

This is really bad for the kids because they don’t grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it’s really bad for the adults — especially women. Mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they’re working outside the home.

So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids — and certainly not good for the adults.

If you’re tracking dynamics here: In the ’90s, we’re getting more afraid of danger. You’re having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration of the idea that the whole is community parenting your kid.

And it’s right about now that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. When I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Before then, there wasn’t a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. There were kids’ shows, but not all the time. And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels. And then, eventually, the internet, iPads, iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the handoff.

It’s the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood. That’s when all the indicators of mental illness start rising, around 2012, 2013.

Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period. But I think your question points out something I hadn’t really thought much about, which is cable TV.

I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s on “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And I showed those shows to my kids, and I said: This is so stupid. They were really simple plots. But that’s all we had.

Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging. (...)

When you look at old movies from the ’30s and ’40s, there was a really tight moral order. It would be dramatic whether a woman could go into a man’s apartment. So there was a really intense moral order around gender, around all sorts of things.

And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the ’60s. And there are many good things that happened because of that. But one of the concerns about modern secular society has been that you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.

I’m really aware now of how we’re all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always come down vertically through generations. But that link is getting weakened.

So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent. And then we end up with an amoral focus on grades and, I guess, be nice and a few other things. But it’s a very thin moral gruel, I’d say.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein podcast, NY Times

This Is the Land of Wolves Now

Some of the individuals who have been apprehended under the Alien Enemies Act have been rendered to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. Yesterday, Kristi Noem, America’s secretary of homeland security, toured this facility and then staged a photo-op and interview in front of a cell containing dozens of what we can only assume are prisoners of the supposed “war” we are fighting with Tren de Aragua.

Look at these images. What do you see?

In the background are a few dozen men, crammed into a cell. Their bunks are stacked four-high. Their heads are freshly shaved. They wear identical white shorts. They are all shirtless.

Their poses are similar. Three rows of prisoners stand still in the front as Noem speaks, their hands either at their sides or clasped in front of them. The rest of them are arrayed on the bunks so as to create a visual for Noem’s use. None of these men is speaking. Or moving. Or making any facial expressions. They have clearly been posed by the jailers, forced to hold position so that they can be useful props for the American woman so that she can manufacture propaganda for her regime.

We have seen this kind of thing before. Just not from America.

by Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark |  Read more:

Images: Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images/YouTube

[ed. With steroidal protection thug. See also: U.S. Tied Migrants to Gang Based Largely on Clothes or Tattoos, Papers Show (NYT).]

The Male Coaches Pulling Young Men Back From the Edge

“Dead inside. Those were the words that were thrown at me in my 20s … It wasn’t even an insult. It was just who I was.”

The man speaking has a handsome, sensitive face. His eyes look soulful – not like those of someone dead inside. But then, Ben Bidwell has broken free from his past, and now helps other men do the same.

“I had no intention of disconnecting from emotion or closing myself off – I just lived in a society that grabbed me and did its thing and took me down that road,” Bidwell says.

Enlightenment came via a hypnotherapist. Bidwell had anorgasmia, a difficulty in achieving orgasm, and sought help for the condition. “I wasn’t looking to change. I was just intrigued to see if I could enhance my sexual experiences,” he writes on his website. But the hypnotherapist showed him that pursuing “financial success and female adoration” were bringing no fulfilment.

The revelation that money and sex aren’t everything sounds trite, but for Bidwell it was huge.

Now, Bidwell is a self-described “human potential coach” who focuses on masculinity and men’s mental health, promising men a life of wellbeing and emotional fulfilment.

“I came out of the military after 10 years. I was 26, and I was dead. I was a zombie. I couldn’t feel anything.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Bryan Reeves uses similar language to Bidwell when describing his past. Reeves, a “life and relationship insight ninja”, also charts his journey from emotionally stunted high achiever – US air force captain turned successful businessman – to a contented “spiritual warrior” helping men become their best selves.

Reeves and Bidwell are part of the growing life coaching industry, helping men deal with the emotional pain and dissatisfaction the manosphere – misogynistic online communities and their influencers – has successfully identified and exploited to monetise an anti-feminist message.

Life coaching is unregulated and has no governing body or set of ethical standards. Anyone can call themselves a life coach and no specific requirements are needed, although many institutions now offer a range of courses. Unlike therapists, coaches do not offer advice on clinical conditions such as anxiety or depression but help clients lead more satisfactory lives.

Reeves and Bidwell are not short of customers. The demand for their services shows that men are in search of guidance on everything from relationships to careers. The market research company IBISWorld estimated that coaching was a $2.1bn industry in the US, and more and more men are customers. Both coaches feel that men are feeling lost, and evidence supports this theory. The pandemic has exacerbated an already growing crisis of male connection: in the US, the number of men who had six or more close friends halved between 1990 and 2021, a phenomenon that particularly affected single men.

This has been blamed on a complex set of factors, from socio-economic and work pattern changes to the decline of traditional community structures – as well as dominant masculinity norms, which don’t encourage men to nurture friendships with other men into adulthood. In the UK, research by Movember found that a quarter of British men had no close friends.

As their friendships have declined, men have found networks on digital platforms. The 2023 State of American Men report by the gender equality organisation Equimundo found that nearly half of the men polled considered their online lives more rewarding than their offline lives and that only 22% had three or more close connections in their local area that they could depend on. Forty per cent of respondents said they trusted one or more figures from the manosphere; for young men, the proportion was almost half.

Male malaise and moral panics about the disappearance of men are not new. The postwar period was marked by anxious discussion about allegedly declining masculinity both in Europe and in North America. These days, plenty of airtime is devoted to what ails men, and the “crisis of masculinity” regularly features in media headlines. (...)

According to Reeves, men are threatened with “cultural redundancy” – falling behind in education, dropping out of the workforce, and failing as fathers. These shifts feed their feelings of irrelevance, and there is no consensus about what a healthy model of masculinity looks like.

By most metrics, men as a class, particularly straight white men, are doing OK. Men still out-earn women significantly and dominate political leadership. Yet in an era in which societal norms have changed rapidly, many men do feel adrift, a change partly driven by socio-economic factors and the decline of manufacturing jobs in favour of services-based roles, some of which men are reluctant to take. While men at the top continue to thrive, others are struggling with “aggrieved entitlement” – a term coined by the sociologist Michael Kimmel to describe the wounded feelings of a person who feels entitled to something and fails to receive it.

Reeves and others have rightly cautioned against confusing the success of a handful of powerful men and the broad trend with the lived experience of the many young men whose status is less rarefied. A minority may be thriving, but countless men are suffering and need attention, so the argument goes.

This sits uneasily with some progressives and feminists. In the face of persistent gender inequality and continued violence against women, there is understandable reticence about paying attention to men’s problems. Many feminists rightly argue that it is not women’s job to “fix men”. Figures like Bryan Reeves and Ben Bidwell fill a need: they are men that other men can turn to.

By addressing male distress and insecurity, however, they share space with Pickup Artists (PUAs) – misogynistic dating coaches – and red-pilled influencers of all kinds, such as Myron Gaines, co-host of the dating podcast Fresh and Fit, who regularly calls women “hoes” and promises to “help men transform from simps to PIMPS”. Or Rollo Tomassi, founder of the life and relationship advice website The Rational Male, who argues that “[men] coddle and cater to the feminine”. (...)

Bidwell avoids directly talking about the manosphere – both in his work and our conversation. But Reeves positions himself more openly as an alternative to it. “I’ve always been suspicious of that community,” he says. “These guys – they know how to get the girl, but they have no idea how to have a healthy relationship.”

by Cécile Simmons, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Ben Bidwell

Touch Grass

“You should go touch grass”…as the saying goes when you’ve been online for the past 18 hours. Incredibly, someone took that quip and made an app: Touch Grass Now, which locks selected apps on a smartphone until the user goes outside and takes a photo of actual grass. Top-tier use of visual AI.

via: SatPost by Trung Phan

[ed. Lots of other good links, too.]

The Plot Against America

As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn't a spontaneous coup—it's the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress.

DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.

What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.

The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago. (...)

From Silicon Valley to Main Street: The Spread of Techno-Libertarian Ideas

2008 did not just destroy the economy—it shattered faith in democratic institutions themselves. Libertarians saw an opportunity. And in Silicon Valley, a new belief took hold: democracy wasn’t just inefficient—it was obsolete. Over the next decade, the ideas incubated in this period would evolve into a coherent challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy, backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology and finance.

As millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs in the years following the crisis, these ideas began to gain momentum. The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against government bailouts and the Obama administration's response to the crisis.

As the Tea Party gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. This shift extended beyond traditional conservatism, creating an opening for the tech-libertarian ideas emerging from Silicon Valley.

The movement’s emphasis on individual liberty and skepticism of centralized authority resonated with the anti-government sentiment growing in tech circles. As a result, concepts like cryptocurrency and decentralized governance, once considered fringe, began to find a more mainstream audience among those disillusioned with traditional political and financial systems.

The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years. The Tea Party, while not directly advocating for these ideas, inadvertently prepared a segment of the population to be more open to the notion that traditional democratic institutions might be fundamentally flawed or obsolete. (...)

As we moved into the 2010s, this fragmentation accelerated. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, amplified sensational and divisive content. The resulting flood of competing narratives made it increasingly difficult for citizens to discern truth from fiction, with profound implications for democratic discourse and decision-making.

This epistemic chaos wasn't an accident—it was a crucial tactic in undermining democracy itself. As Curtis Yarvin and his neoreactionary allies saw it, political legitimacy depended on the existence of a shared reality. Break that consensus, and democracy becomes impossible. Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone with shit.” And by the time Trump entered office, the full strategy was in motion: destabilize public trust, replace expert analysis with endless counter-narratives, and ensure that the only people who could wield power were those who controlled the flow of information itself. (...)

The Sovereign Individual: Blueprint for a Post-Democratic World

The true revolution would come through technology itself. In 1999, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book that would become the blueprint for this technological coup: The Sovereign Individual. Published at the height of the dotcom boom, the book read like science fiction to many at the time: it predicted the rise of cryptocurrency, the decline of traditional nation-states, and the emergence of a new digital aristocracy. Taxes will become voluntary. Regulations will disappear. The most successful people will form their own private, self-governing communities, while the rest of the world is left behind.

Libertarianism, when fused with this kind of technological determinism, takes a sharp turn away from classical liberal thought. If you assume that government will inevitably be outcompeted by private networks, decentralized finance, and AI-driven governance, then trying to reform democracy becomes pointless. The more radical conclusion, embraced by the figures at the forefront of this movement, is that government should be actively dismantled and replaced with a more “efficient” form of rule—one modeled on corporate governance rather than democratic participation.

This is precisely where libertarianism morphs into neoreaction. Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent “executives” running society like a CEO would run a company. (...)

This is why neoreactionary ideas have found such a receptive audience among tech elites. If you believe that technology inevitably renders old systems obsolete, then why should democracy be any different? Why bother fixing the government if it’s doomed to be replaced by something more advanced? (...)

Cryptocurrency offered not just a way to circumvent state monetary control, but also a model for how digital technology could enable new forms of sovereignty.

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

Image: uncredited
[ed. Connecting all the dots. Quite plausible explanation as to why Musk might invest over $300 million (and more) buying his way into power. If you had a tool (AI) you thought would eventually rule the world, how do you think this might this inform your thinking about government and regulations? See also: An Open Letter to Trump Supporters (NftC); and, Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets (VF).]

MoPOP

The Museum of Pop Culture (also known as MoPOP) is a nonprofit museum in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. Founded in 2000, it contains exhibits on fantasy, horror cinema, video games, science fiction, music and more. The museum’s unique, 140,000-square-foot (13,000 sq. meter) structure was designed by architect Frank Gehry.  ~ Overview

Image: uncredited

[ed. Been inside and out, never above. Can you imagine trying to sell this thing to Paul Allen (Microsoft) and other initial organizers? From MoPOP's Wikipedia entry:]

***

Even before groundbreaking, the Seattle Weekly said the design could refer to "the often quoted comparison to a smashed electric guitar." Gehry himself had in fact made the comparison: "We started collecting pictures of Stratocasters, bringing in guitar bodies, drawing on those shapes in developing our ideas." The architecture was greeted by Seattle residents with a mixture of acclaim for Gehry and derision for this particular edifice. British-born, Seattle-based writer Jonathan Raban remarked that "Frank Gehry has created some wonderful buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but his Seattle effort, the Experience Music Project, is not one of them." New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described it as "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died". Forbes magazine called it one of the world's 10 ugliest buildings. Others describe it as a "blob" or call it "The Hemorrhoids". Despite some critical reviews of the structure, the building has been called "a fitting backdrop for the world's largest collection of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia." The building's exterior, which features a fusion of textures and colors including gold, silver, deep red, blue and a "shimmering purple haze", has been declared "an apt representation of the American rock experience."

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se but [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED. (...)

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper's accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.  (...)

Sources within SSA expect the project to begin in earnest once DOGE identifies and marks remaining beneficiaries as deceased and connecting disparate agency databases. In a Thursday morning court filing, an affidavit from SSA acting administrator Leland Dudek said that at least two DOGE operatives are currently working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries. The agency is currently battling for sweeping access to SSA’s systems in court to finish out this work. (Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.)

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

by Makena Kelly, Ars Technica/Wired |  Read more:

Image: Tigermad
[ed. See above. Also, who's paying for all this 'help'? What's the oversight and quality control process/authority? What's this all going to cost? Lots of questions aren't being asked and no one's giving any answers. From the comments:]

***

With experience doing enterprise platform conversions for 30 years, both from a system vendor's perspective, and as an enterprise IT architect and executive, I cannot begin to describe how guaranteed to fail, in terms of service delivery, consistency, security, and continuity, this effort is. System and language choices matter, to be sure, but they are not by themselves, or usually even primarily , determinative of success, or failure. Architecture, project management, testing, scope and quality control, transition and rollout planning ... all have a bigger impact on success or failure than any of the stuff these yahoos are going on about. You can doom a project with a bad technology choice, without question, but you can't come close to assuring it success just by making a good one.

And - I can't emphasize this enough - even if they get everything right technically, architecturally, and project-wise, it won't affect the rate of fraud or error, unless the source of fraud and error are understood, and mechanisms for detecting, and correcting them are baked onto the project requirements. COBOL is not a source of fraud, and is not inherently a source of error. Given that DOGE has identified exactly no credible fraud, and very little in the way of systemic error, that element too is doomed to fail.

This reminds me of a grossly exaggerated version of multiple spectacular system conversion failures led by big consulting at various enterprises I've been involved with over the years. The only difference is the scale (literally $Trillions across the nation at stake), and the mismatch between the hired "experts" and actual understanding of the systems they are trying to replace, are both exaggerated by a couple orders of magnitude compared with even the most massive corporate consulting boondoggles.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). To show the kind of work that has been used by Meta and OpenAI, I accessed a snapshot of LibGen’s metadata—revealing the contents of the library without downloading or distributing the books or research papers themselves—and used it to create an interactive database that you can search here:

There are some important caveats to keep in mind. Knowing exactly which parts of LibGen that Meta and OpenAI used to train their models, and which parts they might have decided to exclude, is impossible. Also, the database is constantly growing. My snapshot of LibGen was taken in January 2025, more than a year after it was accessed by Meta, according to the lawsuit, so some titles here wouldn’t have been available to download at that point.

LibGen’s metadata are quite disorganized. There are errors throughout. Although I have cleaned up the data in various ways, LibGen is too large and error-strewn to easily fix everything. Nevertheless, the database offers a sense of the sheer scale of pirated material available to models trained on LibGen. Cujo, The Gulag Archipelago, multiple works by Joan Didion translated into several languages, an academic paper named “Surviving a Cyberapocalypse”—it’s all in here, along with millions of other works that AI companies could feed into their models.

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications. (...)

Publishers have tried to stop the spread of pirated material. In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against LibGen, Sci-Hub, other sites, and Elbakyan personally. The court granted an injunction, directed the sites to shut down, and ordered Sci-Hub to pay Elsevier $15 million in damages. Yet the sites remained up, and the fines went unpaid. A similar story played out in 2023, when a group of educational and professional publishers, including Macmillan Learning and McGraw Hill, sued LibGen. This time the court ordered LibGen to pay $30 million in damages, in what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions we’ve seen from a U.S. court.” But that fine also went unpaid, and so far authorities have been largely unable to constrain the spread of these libraries online. Seventeen years after its creation, LibGen continues to grow.

by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani/The Atlantic