Multi-Talented

Orchestral Job Interview
[ed. "I'll play anything"! Don't have her name unfortunately.]

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

The Real Charley (Hull)

Charley Hull’s Instagram tells a story. A trip to her English home told the real one (The Athletic)

Image: Sarah Stier/Getty Images/Getty Images

[ed. No BS free spirit.]

via:

What Happens When an NFL Ball Goes Into the Stands?

It was Dec. 11, 2022, and Philadelphia Eagles third-year quarterback Jalen Hurts was building a campaign that would earn him MVP runner-up and his first Super Bowl nod.

In a Week 14 win against the New York Giants at MetLife Stadium, Hurts found a coverage gap and darted for a 10-yard touchdown run in the third quarter. It made him the first quarterback to post back-to-back seasons with at least 10 rushing touchdowns. The Pro Football Hall of Fame later announced that Hurts’ jersey and pants worn in that game would be put on display.

The broadcast showed Hurts running through the end zone and handing the ball to an Eagles fan in the first row. Paul Hamilton, the fan at the receiving end of that celebration, won’t forget that moment. But it’s not because he shook hands with the star player of his favorite team. Instead, it marked the beginning of the end of his Eagles and NFL fandom.

One year later, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against the NFL, MetLife Stadium, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and New Jersey State Police, claiming false arrest, false imprisonment, assault and battery, abuse of process and negligence. The NFL and Eagles were dismissed as defendants earlier this year, but the lawsuit remains unresolved against the other parties and is expected to extend into 2026.

Hamilton’s lawsuit says he was approached by stadium employees after Hurts handed him the ball, and “they misrepresented and lied to Mr. Hamilton claiming the football was not his property, and that he was violating law if he kept it and demanded that the football be returned.”

The lawsuit claims that an alternative gift was offered, but Hamilton did not want to give up the game ball. When he tried to leave, the lawsuit says Hamilton “was then thrown into a gate and forcibly held against it.” The lawsuit also claims that approximately 10 New Jersey State Police officers swarmed Hamilton and threatened arrest if he didn’t turn the ball over. Hamilton eventually exited with the ball and still has it in his possession...

Hamilton, now 34, hasn’t been back to an NFL game since the incident, nor does he plan to. He says he is “absolutely not” an Eagles fan anymore, nor a fan of the NFL.

“It’s any sports fan’s all-time high, followed by an all-time low. It’s emotionally very hard to comprehend how that feeling started and how that feeling ended,” Hamilton said. “I still struggle with it every day; it’s not like it’s gone away. It’s 2025, and it still feels like it was yesterday that they destroyed something for me.

by Jayna Bardahl, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; Photo: G Fiume/Getty Images

MacKenzie Scott Announces $7 Billion of Charitable Giving This Year

The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced on Tuesday that she had made donations in the past year totaling nearly $7.2 billion, vaulting the total value of her gifts to over $26 billion.

Since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Ms. Scott has come to embody a new brand of philanthropy. She has made large gifts to nonprofits that were distinguished not just by their dollar value but by the fact that she gave without dictating how the money should be spent.

Ms. Scott also has devoted a sizable share of her giving to groups that promote equity and racial justice. In a political climate where many donors have pulled back from such giving, Ms. Scott has made gifts to groups that support refugees and work to address climate change, and to historically Black colleges and universities. Conservatives, such as Elon Musk, have attacked Ms. Scott for her progressive leanings.

Her disclosure came one week after Michael and Susan Dell traveled to the White House to join President Trump in celebrating the more than $6 billion they had committed to so-called Trump accounts. That donation is expected to put $250 in accounts for 25 million American children to use when they turn 18, though some progressives criticized it for burnishing the president’s reputation in the process.

When, in 2019, she committed to giving away at least half of her wealth as part of the Giving Pledge, Ms. Scott said, “I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.” As her net worth has waxed and waned in the ensuing years, some observers have questioned whether she would give her money away faster than her wealth could appreciate.

Having given more than $26 billion away, Ms. Scott is not only one of the biggest givers in absolute terms, but she has also given away a significant share of her total wealth, which Bloomberg estimates at nearly $40 billion. The Dells, for instance, are still worth more than $150 billion.

Ms. Scott is employing a subtly different public-relations strategy. She usually announces her gifts once or twice a year in blog posts and has criticized media coverage of her philanthropy that centers on the donations and not the recipients.

And so Tuesday, she included the $7 billion figure quietly, by updating the fourth paragraph of a blog post she had published in mid-October. She also updated the database maintained by her philanthropy, Yield Giving, with an additional 225 donations.

“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” she wrote in the post that was updated on Tuesday, “but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year.”

About 70 percent of those gifts went to organizations she had previously backed.

The largest disclosed donation was for $90 million, according to the database, going to an organization called Forests, People, Climate, which focuses on halting tropical deforestation. The next largest disclosed gifts were of $70 million each to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the United Negro College Fund, which offer scholarships.

As she often does, Ms. Scott used her post to talk about all the ways that people with fewer resources give. “Who nurtured a child in the kitchen; who was kind to a stranger in line at a grocery store; who gave $50 to a local food shelter: These are not news stories. But all of it matters,” Ms. Scott wrote.

by Nicholas Kulish and Theodore Schleifer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press
[ed. History will look kindly upon her. It's not an easy process.]

Will West Coast Jazz Finally Get Some Respect?

Will West Coast Jazz Finally Get Some Respect? 

[ed. From me, certainly. In the late 50s and 60s East Coast jazz seemed all about pushing experimental boundaries, and some of it just became too effortful to listen to (Bill Evans an exception). I'm thinking about later Coltrane and especially the burgeoning 'free jazz' movement, as typified by artists like Ornette Colman, Cecil Taylor and others. Just beeps, squawks, honks and atonal solos that didn't seem to have any clear grounding or destination. West Coast jazz on the other hand sounded cool, laid back, and melodic, and projected a sense of style and energy that I found much more appealing (complex but still accessible).]

Music, Forest, Body

The Musical Instruments Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk across Central Park from Lincoln Center, reveals the tangled relationships among local ecologies, colonial trade, and the craft of instrument making. At first, the galleries seem like mausoleums for sound. Silent instruments sit illuminated behind sheets of plateglass, reliquaries for the remains of music whose spirits have flown. The glass, polished wooden floors, and long, narrow dimensions of the galleries give the sound of footfalls and voices a lively, clattery feel, unlike the expansive warmth of concert halls, reinforcing the sense of isolation from musical sound. This initial impression evaporates, though, when I let go of the idea that this is a space for direct experience of sound. Instead, we can marvel here at stories of materiality, human ingenuity, and the relationships among cultures. (...)

Precolonial instruments often used indigenous materials. Walking through the galleries is an education in the many ways that humans have sonified matter from their surroundings. Clay, shaped then fired, turns human breath and lip vibrations into amplified tones. Rocks turned to bells and strings reveal metallurgical connections to land. Plant matter is given voice in carved wood, stretched palm frond, and spun fiber. A bestiary of animals sings through taut skins and reshaped teeth and tusks. Each instrument is rooted in local ecological context. Condor feathers in South American pipes. Kapok wood, snake skins, antelope horn, and porcupine quills on African drums, harps, and lutes. Boxwood and brass in European oboes. Wood, silk, bronze, and stone in se, shiqing, and yunluo, Chinese percussive and stringed instruments. Music emerged from human relation- ship with the beyond-human world, its varied sounds around the world revealing not only the many forms of human culture but the diverse sonorous, reverberant properties of rock, soil, and living beings...

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonizers picked out the material most pleasing to their ears and most useful to instrument-making workshops. A few European materials made the grade and were retained, even as “exotic” woods and animal parts became more readily available. Spruce and maple, especially, remained the favored wood for the bodies of stringed instruments and the soundboards of pianos. Calfskin topped tympani. These European materials were joined by ivory, favored for its workability and stability, and tropical woods whose density, smoothness, elasticity, and tones met musical needs: mpingo’s tight, silky grain; Pernambuco’s extraordinary strength, elasticity, and responsiveness; rosewood’s warmth and stability; and padauk’s resonance. These tropical woods all belong to the same taxonomic family, tree cousins to the beans, and have tight-grained, dense wood from slow-growing trees. Most take seventy or more years to reach harvestable age. On a concert stage, we hear the voices of tree elders. (...)

The tropical woods and ivory most favored for instrument making are now mostly threatened or endangered. Nineteenth-century exploitation has turned to twenty-first-century ruination. Demand for materials for musical instruments, though, was not the primary cause of many of these losses. The volume of ivory used for violin bows and bassoon rings was dwarfed by exports for tableware handles, billiard balls, religious carvings, and ornaments, although piano keys consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds of tusks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pernambuco was extirpated from most of its range not by violin bow makers, but through overharvesting for dye made from its crimson heartwood. The country Brazil gets its name from brasa, “ember” in Portuguese, for the glowing-coal color of the wood whose trade was so important in the founding of the country.

Mpingo woodlands are in decline, driven by export for instruments and flooring, and by local uses for carving. Compounding the problem of overharvesting is the twisting, gnarled form of mpingo trunks. Carving straight billets for oboes and clarinets from such wood is challenging, and often less than ten percent of the cut log is usable. Rosewoods, often used for guitar fingerboards, are mostly exported for furniture, with more wood in one bed frame or cabinet than in any guitar shop. Although trade in many rosewood species is restricted by international law, the wood is now so valuable that financial speculators and luxury goods manufacturers drive an illegal market worth billions of dollars yearly.

The sound of contemporary music is therefore a product of past colonialism and present-day trade, but, with very few exceptions, it is not a driver of species endangerment. Indeed, the relationships between musicians and their instruments—often built over decades of daily bodily connection—serve as an inspiring example of how we might live in better relationship to forests. An oboe or violin contains less wood than a chair or stack of magazines, yet this single instrument yields beauty and utility for decades, sometimes centuries. Contrast this with the culture of overexploitation and disposability that pervades so much of our relationship to material objects and their sources. For example, we threw out more than twelve million tons of furniture in the United States in 2018, eighty percent of it buried in landfills, most of the rest burned, and only one-third of one percent recycled. Much of this furniture was sourced from tropical forests, often supplied to the United States through manufacturing hubs in Asia. Such trade is increasing and the World Wildlife Fund states that the “world’s natural forests cannot sustainably meet the soaring global demand for timber products.” If the rest of our economy took as much care of wood products as musicians do of their instruments, the deforestation crisis would be greatly eased.

Driven to action by a desire to honor the materials with which they work, some musicians and luthiers are now at the forefront of seeking alternatives to the exploitative use of wood, ivory, and other materials from threatened species. This is especially important work because musical instruments are now far more numerous than in past centuries. More than ten million guitars and hundreds of thousands of violins are made annually. Such volume of trade cannot be built on rare woods. It is therefore now possible, with some searching, to find instruments made from wood certified to come from sustainable logging operations. The Forest Stewardship Council, for example, puts its stamp of approval on several new lines of instruments. The Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative in southeastern Tanzania promotes community-based forest management where local residents own, manage, and benefit from mpingo and other woodland species, managing forests sustainably to help the local economy. Instrument makers are also introducing new materials, relieving pressure on endangered woods. Until the late twentieth century, only twenty tree species provided most of the wood for guitars, violins, violas, cellos, mandolins, and other Western stringed instruments. Today the variety of wood sources for instrument making has increased to more than one hundred species. Alongside this diversification of natural products, manufactured materials like carbon fiber and wood laminate are substituting for solid wood.

In the decades that come, unless our path changes, it will not be the overharvesting of particularly valuable species that challenges our sources of wood and animal parts for instruments. Instead, the loss of entire forest ecosystems will remake the relationship between human music and the land. The forests from which we now draw our most precious musical raw materials are in decline...

A few old instruments—carefully tended by musicians—now evoke the memory of the departed or degraded forests. On the stage at Lincoln Center, we hear woods from past decades and centuries. Sherry Sylar plays on oboes whose woods were harvested decades ago in the early twentieth century. Each one has a “passport” documenting the wood’s provenance, showing that it was not obtained through recent cutting of now-endangered trees. When we talked, she described how some colleagues scour the country for sales of older oboes, hoping to find instruments with good wood from ages past. The music of Sylar’s violinist colleague, Sheryl Staples, comes from a Guarneri violin. Its woods are at least three hundred years old, harvested from spruce and maple forests that grew on a preindustrial Earth. Although wood for instruments still comes from the Fiemme Valley forests in northern Italy that supplied Guarneri and Stradivarius, springtime there now comes earlier, summer is hotter, and winter snowpack is diminished compared with that of previous centuries. This yields wood with a looser, less sonorous grain than the tight woods of past centuries. In another hundred years, it is likely that heat, droughts, and changed rainfall will push alpine forests off these mountain slopes. Music often now speaks of the Earth as it was, not as it is, a memory carried in wood grain.

by David Haskell, Orion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

Populism Fast and Slow

It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon. Such a person is likely to be disappointed. It does not take much reading to discover that political scientists are quite conflicted. (One might take this review article to provide a decent snapshot of the relatively large academic literature on the subject.) There is a modest level of agreement about what populism is, but the most widely accepted definition is both superficial and misleading. That is inauspicious, as far as combating the forces of populism is concerned.

Most importantly, academics have not done a great job confronting the most confounding aspect of populism, which is that the more it gets criticized by intellectuals, the more powerful it becomes. As a result, most of us are still playing the same old game, with the same old strategies, without realizing that the metagame has changed.

It is not difficult to see where the academic discussion went wrong. An unfortunately large number of writers on populism were wrongfooted by the decision, made early on, to treat populism as a type of political ideology, along the lines of socialism or liberalism. This gave rise to an immediate puzzle, because populism seems to be compatible with a large number of other conventional political ideologies. In particular, it comes in both left-wing (e.g. Chavez) and right-wing (e.g. Bolsonaro) variants. So if populism is a political ideology, it’s a strange sort of ideology, because it doesn’t seem to exclude other views in the way that a conventional ideology does.

The most obvious alternative is to treat it as a strategy, used to gain specific advantage in a democratic electoral system. This is a more promising approach, but it also generates its own puzzles. If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? And if it’s just an electoral strategy, why do populists rule the way they do? For example, why are they so keen on undermining the rule of law (leading to conflict with the courts, attempts to limit judicial independence, etc.)?

The solution that many people have settled on is to accept a watered-down version of the first view, treating populism as an ideology, but only a “thin” one. The most commonly cited definition is from Cas Mudde:

I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

The major problem with this definition stems from the fact that it needs to be so minimal, in order to accommodate the fact that populism comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavours, but as a result it is simply too minimal to explain many of the specific features of populist movements. For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)? Furthermore, reading the definition, it would seem as though the left should be able to get significant mileage out of populism, and yet throughout Europe the rise of populism has almost uniformly benefited the right.

A clue to the solution can be found in a further specification that is often made, with respect to this definition, which is that the “general will” of the people is not for any old thing, but takes the specific form of what is called “common sense.” The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.” (One can think of this as the primary point of demarcation between the people and the elites – the people have “common sense,” whereas elites subscribe to “fancy theories.”) This distinction, in turn, does not arise from the ideological content of a belief system, but rather from the form of cognition employed in its production. More specifically, it is a consequence of the distinction between what Daniel Kahneman referred to as “fast and slow” thinking. (...)

Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

This reservoir of discontent creates the opportunity that is exploited by populist politicians. Democratic political systems are fairly responsive to public opinion, but they are still systems of elite rule, and so there are specific issues on which the people genuinely have not been listened to, no matter how angry or upset they got. This creates an incentive to do an end-run around elites, and around institutions dominated by elites (e.g. traditional political parties), in order to tap into this fund of resentment, positioning oneself as the champion of the people. What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.

Seen from this perspective, it is not difficult to see why populism can be an effective political strategy, and why it has become dramatically more effective in the age of social media. As one can tell from the title of Kahneman’s book, a central feature of intuitive cognition is that it is “fast,” while analytical reasoning is “slow.” This means that an acceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style.

Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.

Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”). Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

This analysis explains why populism, despite being a mere strategy, also winds up having a characteristic ideological tone and content. The key is to see it as a political strategy that privileges a particular style of cognition. (...)

This privileging of intuitive (or System 1) cognition generates a set of diverse features that can be found in most populist movements. What follows is a non-exhaustive list:

1. Frustration with elites on specific issues. Crime is an ongoing source of frustration, in part because elites – even those who declare themselves “tough on crime” – believe that punishment should be imposed within a legal framework. This creates an opening for populist politicians like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who empowered the police to carry out summary executions, and Donald Trump in the U.S. who explicitly authorized a return to “street justice” by urban police forces, and has used the U.S. military to carry out summary executions (so far only in international waters). (...)

2. Collective action problems. Populists have never met a collective action problem that they did not feel inclined to make worse (e.g. climate change). That’s because, whenever something bad happens, there is an impulse to blame some other person, but in a collective action problem, the bad effects that you suffer genuinely are the fault of the other person! The catch is that the situation is symmetric — the bad effects they are suffering are your fault. Getting out of the situation therefore requires the cognitive insight that you must both stop, and that you must refrain from free-riding despite the incentives. Intuition, on the other hand, suggests that the correct response is to punish the other person, and since the best way to do this is typically by defecting, the intuitive response is just a formula for transforming a collective action problem into a race to the bottom. This is why civilizations collapse into barbarism and not the other way around.

3. Communication style. A very prominent feature of populist politicians is their speaking style, which has an unscripted, stream-of-consciousness quality (e.g. see Hugo Chavez’s Aló Presidente TV show, which one could also, totally imagine Trump doing). This is important precisely because it is the opposite of the self-controlled, calculated speaking style favored by mainstream politicians (which the French have the perfect term for: langue de bois). This is why populist politicians are perceived, by a large segment of the population, as being more “honest,” even when everything that comes out of their mouth is a lie. Elites typically focus on the content of what is said and ignore the manner in which it is said. Often this is because they themselves employ the controlled speaking style, and so are not bothered by others using it. And yet it is perfectly clear, when listening to Donald Trump, that what he is saying is exactly what he is thinking. Indeed, he obviously lacks the verbal self-inhibition required to speak in any other way. This is what leads people to trust him – especially if they are relying on intuitive cues, rather than analytic evaluation, to determine trustworthiness. (The use of vulgarity is another common tactic of populist politicians, to demonstrate their lack of verbal inhibition. Traditional politicians sometimes try to imitate this, without success, because they fail to realize that it is not the vulgarity, but rather the disinhibition, that achieves the important communicative effect.)

4. Illiberalism. Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.) Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the the “logic of persecutors”: “that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.” (...)

5. Conspiracy theory. Many people have wondered why populists are so drawn to conspiracy theories, or “conspiracist” thinking. Again, this is a straightforward consequence of the privileging of intuitive thought. The natural bias of the human mind is toward belief in conspiracy theories, through a combination of apophenia, hyperactive agency-detection, and confirmation bias. Rational suspicion is achieved through the subsequent imposition of explicit test procedures, designed to eliminate false positives. In other words, it requires active suppression of conspiracist thoughts. To the extent that populists reject the style of cognition involved in that override, they open themselves up to a variety of irrational thought-patterns. When criticized by elites, many are inclined to double down on the conspiracism, because the cognitive style being pressed upon them is precisely what they hate most about elites.

by Joseph Heath, In Due Course |  Read more:

Image: Philip Lorca di-Corsica

[ed. See also: The prospects for left-wing populism (IDC):]

***

The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. (...)

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.)

The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.

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Understanding Ametora – Japan’s Americana Obsession

This article and its contents have been directly influenced by the fantastic book ‘Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style’ by W. David Marx – the book charts the full history on Japan’s relationship with Americana and is available to be purchased here. [ed. And here.]

Japan is a nation of reinterpretation. It’s a country with a long-standing fascination for taking traditional items, objects, and concepts and reimagining them in a distinctly Japanese manner – one that places function at the forefront and meticulous attention to detail close behind. There’s a national knack for spotting something made overseas and finding ways to improve it, often through minimalist refinement. Everything touched by Japanese hands somehow ends up looking, tasting, and feeling better.

Nowhere is this more prominent than in the realm of fashion, specifically, the enduring Japanese obsession with classic Americana style. Or, to give it its proper name, Ametora – a portmanteau of “American traditional” – which has not only reshaped Japanese fashion but also influenced global perceptions of Americana.

When you first think of Japanese Americana, your mind will instantly jump to exciting brands, retailers and publications, but the country’s initial foray with American clothing came long before anyone was reading Popeye or wearing Kapital…

1920s – MOBOs & MOGAs

Japan’s initial encounter with Western fabric came in the 1920s – a time when traditional art and aesthetics were beginning to merge with European life and culture. The result was a bubbling era of Japanese modernism and the creation of Asian Art Deco architecture, paintings, prints, design and fashion. Spearheading this cultural shift were two groups, the MOBOs & MOGAs, or simply Modern Boys and Modern Girls.

These groups symbolised a seismic shift in youth culture, rejecting rigid traditions and embracing style as rebellion. They filled cafés and dance halls in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe, dressed in garments inspired by Western trends. MOGAs adopted dropped waists, shorter hemlines, and bobbed hair – all scandalous by Japanese standards. MOBOs ditched kimonos for suits, fedoras, and wide-legged trousers. It was unadulterated counterculture, something Japan had never been confronted with before.

But this wave of modernism was short-lived. WWII brought a return to conservative politics and traditional values. Japan, once again, reverted to its most serious self.

1940s – Post-war influence

Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces in 1945 would leave America right on their doorstep, but not in the way the MOBOs & MOGAs could have ever envisaged. U.S. troops occupied the streets of all of Japan’s major cities, maintaining a somewhat amicable relationship with the locals, with reports of soldiers helping and playing with children in the street.

The positive relationship led the soldiers to introduce locals to Western imports – khaki trousers, linen shirts, baseball caps and, importantly, American culture and fashion magazines. It was an exciting new world of function, fabric and colour, and a small subset of Japanese aficionados started to develop around the fascination with the new U.S. commodities.

A scramble amongst this niche ensued, and right at the front of it was a man called Kensuke Ishizu, a soldier who had served in WWII, and was now working as a menswear designer for his own retail company, Ishizu Shōten (Ishizu Store)

Deeply inspired by the glimpses of Americana he’d witnessed through befriended U.S. soldiers, Ishizu was determined to make his store the focal point for the wave, and chose to focus on classic Americana garments such as cotton flannel work shirts and indigo work pants, all produced under a faux American brand called Kentucky.

Ishizu Shōten became popular with a tiny niche of discerning Japanese citizens, but the market was too small. Ishizu was far too early of an adopter and noticed the majority of his income derived from the sale of high-end sports jackets for wealthy suburban families. He subsequently rebranded the company to VAN Jacket, to focus on the garments.

1950s – The birth of Ivy

There was an issue, though. It was taboo for Japanese men to be at all interested in fashion. Before Ishizu could sell any of his products, he had to educate his neighbours. To do so, he became the face of a new menswear magazine titled Otoko no Fukushoku. The magazine debuted in 1954 and was designed to function as a textbook for semi-formal and business wear, but Ishizu had other ideas. He used it as a vehicle to inform young Japanese men about VAN products and his intrigue with Western collegiate style he had seen from U.S. fashion magazines, which was now coined ‘Ivy.’

Still, despite his best efforts, Ishizu was struggling to shift product. VAN was not designed for, or affordable enough for, the niche student crowd who read Otoko no Fukushoku. So, in search of true Ivy enlightenment, in 1959, Ishizu headed for the West.

Immediately upon arriving in the U.S.A., he headed on a tour of all the country’s prestigious universities, and it was Princeton where he found the fabled version of Ivy style he had been dreaming of. Students effortlessly wearing neckties, chino pants, wool sweaters and flannel blazers. It was everything Ishizu had wanted the Japanese youth to imitate, and when he arrived home, he set to work designing an ‘Ivy model’ suit, modelled on the Brooks Brother’s famed Number One Sack Suit.

After slowly developing VAN & Ivy awareness through Otoko no Fukushoku (now named ‘Men’s Club‘) Ishizu unveiled the brand’s first complete Ivy line in 1962. But once again, the colourful blend of blazers and chinos was not well received, particularly by retailers who refused to stock it for fear it was too niche.

1960s – Take Ivy

In Spring 1963, Ishizu would connect with another Ivy fanatic and Men’s Club writer – Toshiyuki Kurosu. The two would both spend hours writing & speaking of Ivy style, and Kurosu would go on to create a column titled ‘Ivy Leaguers on the Street‘, which was supplemented with images he had taken on the streets of Ginza of those that were adopting the new look.

These editorial efforts, alongside a hugely influential photobook detailing American students wearing Ivy League style titled ‘Take Ivy‘ by photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida, resulted in the popularisation of the style in Japan.

Soon, the streets of Ginza were flooded with individuals wearing a Japanese interpretation of American prep, and one brand everyone wanted, was VAN.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the groundwork that Ishizu, VAN and Kurusou laid was starting to snowball.

American Ivy Leaguers had switched from sweater vests and chinos to torn denim & T-shirts. Civil rights movements, the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis had conjured up an air of counterculture in the U.S., and it was directly assimilated on the streets of Japan. Young men were beginning to reject the work-first lifestyle and began adopting a more casual one, and it manifested through a certain fabric…

Denim.

Denim represented everything about America that Japan loved – it was the symbol for freedom, for rebels, for those who did as they pleased, and went about it in a way that didn’t please others. Wearing a pair of jeans was a statement of counter-culture, and it quickly became translated into Japanese. The blue legwear flooded the streets of Japan, covering the country’s youth like a great denim wave off Kanagawa.

1970s – The birth of POPEYE

Japan in the ’70s was moving faster than it ever had. Stylistically, more had been said in the last ten years than it had the previous fifty. It was a melting pot of music, fashion and print, and one of the most important publications of all would spread its wings in 1976 – POPEYE Magazine.

POPEYE, now a cult magazine even among those who can’t read it, was originally founded when two editors, Yoshihisa Kinameri & Jirō Ishikawa, were working on two American-inspired publications titled ‘Ski Life‘ & ‘Made in U.S.A.’ The two publications were so well received by the new Americana-obsessed population that their publisher, Heibon, made them an offer to produce their own magazine…

The pair leapt at the chance and were convinced that the next big thing in Japan was to be West Coast culture. So, they grabbed the first flight to L.A. to study first-hand the Californian surf & skate culture.

Ishikawa wanted to name the new magazine ‘City Boys‘, a popular term associated with Japan’s new urban youth, but Kinimeri wanted ‘POPEYE’, inspired by the American cartoon character, but also because it meant having an ‘eye’ on ‘pop.’ So, it was settled, the magazine would be called ‘POPEYE – Magazine for City Boys’

The magazine functioned differently from those at the time, opting to show hundreds of products across its pages with corresponding prices and retailers. Opening an issue of POPEYE was a portal to a world of the latest Japanese-American style; it was a manual for getting whatever City Boy look you wanted, and it spread like wildfire on the streets of Tokyo.

1980s – Japanese streetwear

By the late ’80s, Japan had transitioned from one of the most stylistically uniform countries to one of the most stylistically diverse. Each day, people were trying new things and reinterpreting Western trends as their own, but it was POPEYE’s fascination with West Coast Culture combined with a certain individual, Hiroshi Fujiwara, that held the key to Japan’s next style evolution.

Fujiwara was one of the main heads in Tokyo’s music & design scene at the time and by all accounts, potentially one of Japan’s first influencers. People looked to him for anything fashion and music-related, a status that would earn him the title of ‘best dressed‘ at an underground party called ‘London Nite‘ and as a token of recognition, he received a free trip to London to meet Vivienne Westwood & her partner Malcolm McLaren.

Fujiwara’s time in London was hugely influential, largely thanks to his introduction to New York hip-hop by McLaren. He returned to Tokyo with a crate of records and a mission to spread the addictive sound among the city’s youth.

For the same reasons they had fallen in love with Ivy League & denim, Japan fell in love with hip-hop. It was against the grain and unapologetically American. Japanese rap groups began to surface, and one of them was Fujiwara’s seminal group, ‘Tinnie Pax’.

The new hip-hop scene would bring together creatives in a new way, with names such as Jun “Jonio” Takahashi and Nigo attending Fujiwara’s famed hip-hop nights at Tokyo’s nightclubs. Turned on by the loose-fitting, relaxed garb donned by Wu-Tang Clan, Run DMC & De La Soul, Fujiwara & co. found themselves competing against one another to acquire the latest American streetwear labels, predominantly Stussy.

This new infatuation would segue to the first Japanese streetwear brands, with Nigo creating A Bathing Ape, Takahashi and Undercover & Fujiwara’s Good Enough. The designs were bold – you’ve only got to look towards A Bathing Ape’s catalogue of loud camouflage jackets and neon Bapestas to understand that Japanese streetwear was here to be heard.

1990s – Americana reproduction

By the 1990s, the foundations laid by VAN, Men’s Club, and POPEYE had evolved into something far bolder. Good Enough, Undercover, and A Bathing Ape were not just brands; they were cultural catalysts. Each represented a new era of Japanese streetwear that would define global fashion for decades to come. Fujiwara’s Good Enough introduced the notion of limited drops. Nigo’s A Bathing Ape commercialised streetwear with spectacle camo patterns and cartoon graphics. Takahashi’s Undercover blurred the lines between punk, fashion, and conceptual art, bridging Harajuku and Paris.

The brands became blueprints – not only for how to build streetwear labels but how to root them in subculture and elevate them into cultural institutions. Their success opened doors for countless others: WTAPS, Neighborhood, Visvim, White Mountaineering, and more. They proved that Japan wasn’t just part of the global fashion conversation – it was leading it.

And while one thread of Ametora led toward futuristic silhouettes and streetwise rebellion, another doubled down on reverence for the past. Brands like The Real McCoy’s, Buzz Rickson’s, and Freewheelers operate with near-obsessive historical accuracy, reproducing military garments, denim, and workwear with a level of craftsmanship that often surpasses the originals. At the other end of the spectrum sits Kapital – a brand that manages to honour tradition while blending it into something artful, unexpected, and unmistakably Japanese.

Together, these opposing but interconnected forces form the full picture of Ametora. On one side – reproduction & preservation; on the other, innovation and disruption. Both are rooted in an enduring admiration for Americana.

In the world of Ametora, America may have provided the raw material, but Japan reshaped it, refined it, and ultimately redefined it. From Ivy to indigo, prep to punk, camo to cut-and-sew – the story of Ametora is proof that style, when filtered through a lens of precision, passion, and cultural sensitivity, can transcend its origins. In doing so, it becomes something greater: a language not of imitation, but of transformation.

by Henry Robinson, Proper |  Read more:

Images: uncredited and via

[ed. Learned something new today: Ametora. Fascinating history (with trend-setting styles still evolving and being produced). Additional pictures at the link. See also: 'Ametora': How American style changed Japanese fashion forever (ST).]

Are We Getting Stupider?

Stupidity is surprising: this is the main idea in “A Short History of Stupidity,” by the accomplished British critic Stuart Jeffries. It’s easy to be stupid about stupidity, Jeffries argues—to assume that we know what counts as stupid and who is acting stupidly. Stupidity is, more than anything else, familiar. (Jeffries quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote that “the wise in all ages have always said the same thing, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way, too, acted alike, and done just the opposite; and so it will continue.”) But it’s also the case, in Jeffries’s view, that “stupidity evolves, that it mutates and thereby eludes extinction.” It’s possible to write a history of stupidity only because new kinds are always being invented.

Jeffries begins in antiquity, with the ancient Greek philosophers, who distinguished between being ignorant—which was perfectly normal, and not all that shameful—and being stupid, which involved an unwillingness to acknowledge and attempt to overcome one’s (ultimately insurmountable) cognitive and empirical limitations. A non-stupid person, from this perspective, is someone who’s open to walking a “path of self-humiliation” from unknowing ignorance to self-conscious ignorance. He might even welcome that experience, seeing it as the start of a longer journey of learning. (To maintain this good attitude, it’s helpful to remember that stupidity is often “domain-specific”: even if we’re stupid in some areas of life, Jeffries notes, we’re capable in others.)...

For nineteenth-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion; one of Flaubert’s characters says that, in mass society, “the germs of stupidity . . . spread from person to person,” and we end up becoming lemming-like followers of leaders, trends, and fads. (This “modern stupidity,” Jeffries explains, “is hastened by urbanization: the more dense a population is in one sense, the more dense it is in another.”) And the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen further innovations. We’re now conscious of the kinds of stupidity that might reveal themselves through intelligence tests or bone-headed bureaucracies; we know about “bullshit jobs” and “the banality of evil” and digital inundation. Jeffries considers a light fixture in his bedroom; it has a recessed design that’s hard to figure out, so he goes to YouTube in search of videos that might show him how to change the bulb. Modern, high-tech life is complicated. And so, yes, in a broad sense, we may very well be getting stupider—not necessarily because we’re dumber but because the ways in which we can be stupid keep multiplying.

“A Short History of Stupidity” doesn’t always engage with the question of whether the multiplication of stupidities is substantive or rhetorical. When Flaubert writes that people today are drowning in cliché and received opinion, is he right? Is it actually true that, before newspapers, individuals held more diverse and original views? That seems unlikely. The general trend, over the past few hundred years, has been toward more education for more people. Flaubert may very well have been exposed to more stupid thoughts, but this could have reflected the fact that more thoughts were being shared...

And yet, it seems undeniable that something is out of joint in our collective intellectual life. The current political situation makes this “a good time to write about stupidity,” Jeffries writes. When he notes that a central trait of stupidity is that it “can be relied upon to do the one thing expressly designed not to achieve the desired result”—or “to laughably mismatch means and ends”—he makes “stupid” seem like the perfect way to characterize our era, in which many people think that the key to making America healthy again is ending vaccination. Meanwhile, in a recent issue of New York magazine—“The Stupid Issue”—the journalist Andrew Rice describes troubling and widespread declines in the abilities of high-school students to perform basic tasks, such as calculating a tip on a restaurant check. These declines are happening even in well-funded school districts, and they’re part of a larger academic pattern, in which literacy is fading and standards are slipping.

Maybe we are getting stupider. Still, one of the problems with the discourse of stupidity is that it can feel reductive, aggressive, even abusive. Self-humiliation is still humiliating; when we call one another stupid, we spread humiliation around, whether our accusation is just or unjust. In a recent post on Substack, the philosopher Joseph Heath suggested that populism might be best understood as a revolt against “the cognitive elite”—that is, against the people who demand that we check our intuitions and think more deliberately about pretty much everything. According to this theory, the world constructed by the cognitive élite is one in which you have to listen to experts, and keep up with technology, and click through six pages of online forms to buy a movie ticket; it sometimes “requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. ‘homeless’), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. ‘unhoused’).” The cognitive élites are right to say that people who think about things intuitively are often wrong; on issues including crime and immigration, the truth is counterintuitive. (Legal procedures are better than rough justice; immigrants increase both the supply and the demand for labor.) But the result of this has been that unreasonable people have hooked up to form an opposition party. What’s the way out of this death spiral? No one knows.

In 1970, a dead sperm whale washed up on the beach in Florence, Oregon. It was huge, and no one knew how to dispose of it. Eventually, the state’s Highway Division, which was in charge of the operation, hit upon the idea of blowing the carcass up with dynamite. They planted half a ton of explosives—that’s a lot!—on the leeward side of the whale, figuring that what wasn’t blown out to sea would disintegrate into bits small enough to be consumed by crabs and seagulls. Onlookers gathered to watch the explosion. It failed to destroy the whale, and instead created a dangerous hailstorm of putrid whale fragments. “I realized blubber was hitting around us,” Paul Linnman, a reporter on the scene, told Popular Mechanics magazine. “Blubber is so dense, a piece the size of your fingertip can go through your head. As we started to run down [the] trail, we heard a second explosion in our direction, and we saw blubber the size of a coffee table flatten a car.” (The video of the incident—which was first popularized by Dave Barry, after he wrote about it in 1990—is a treasure of the internet, and benefits from Linnman’s deadpan TV-news narration.)

There can be joy and humor in stupidity—think fail videos, reality television, and “Dumb and Dumber.” It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited, either. The town of Florence now boasts an outdoor space called Exploding Whale Memorial Park; last year, after a weeklong celebration leading up to Exploding Whale Day, people gathered there in costume. Watching the original video, I find myself empathizing with the engineer who conceived the dynamite plan. I’ve been there. To err is human. Intelligent people sometimes do stupid things. We all blow up a whale from time to time; the important point is not to do it again.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: markk

[ed. Stupider? Not so sure, but maybe in some cases. It could be just as likely that we've offshored our cognitive abilities and attention spans to social media, smartphones, streaming tv, and other forms of distraction (including AI), with no help from news media who dumb down nuance and detail in favor of engagement and click bait algorithms. See also: The New Anxiety of Our Time Is Now on TV (HB).]

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The Curious Notoriety of Performative Reading

Here’s a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” He could very well be reading “Moby-Dick” or “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “Middlemarch,” but, for the sake of this setup, let’s say it’s Wallace’s 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, “You know it’s got a nonlinear plot, right?” To the severely online, this guy is not simply enjoying a good book in the company of strangers but participating in the practice of “performative reading,” a concept that’s recently gained a curious notoriety. A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.

This way of perceiving social reality—and particularly a person’s reading life—may seem inane, even deranged. But performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books. On TikTok and Instagram, users post short-form videos to satirize the affectations of the performative reader, who is usually male: a twentysomething guy in an oversized sweater vest, reading two hardcovers at once while descending an escalator; a scarf-donning dude at a café, reading a book upside down; a guy sitting at an outdoor patio, glancing up to see who’s watching him annotate a text. Similarly, on X, the ruse of performative reading has come to mask a more earnest quest: to share one’s actual passion for books while also seeming in on the joke. (It’s not uncommon for a user to post a picture of himself reading a heady book with a preëmptive “I’m a performative reader” caption.) These posts function, in part, as an ironic foil to the way that influencers and celebrities have come to wield physical books as material signals of taste, hiring “book stylists” to provide them with novels for vacation photographs and social-media posts, to curate their at-home libraries and name-branded book clubs. Performative reading has emerged as a suspicious activity not because reading books is suspect but because being beheld reading a book is understood to be yet another way for one to market himself, to portray to the world that he is indeed deeper and more expansive than his craven need for attention—demonstrated by reading a difficult book in public—suggests.

When did life become a land mine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated? Will we just know? And why do we care? If our culture of liberal individualism demands anything of us, it is to be, above all else, authentic. To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation. No one wants to be perceived as the person at the skate park with all the right gear but none of the right lingo, the fan at the concert who doesn’t know any of the lyrics, or, worse, the political protester who spends hours making a quippy sign but doesn’t know the name of their district representative. If our authenticity is questioned—if we are caught pretending and playacting—what ground do we have left to stand on? If we are deemed inauthentic, how can we stand for anything at all? Conversely, if everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?

Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces where identity construction is central to the user experience. But how is one to authentically represent themselves online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not. This explains why unflinchingly earnest content rarely flies on social media; does the poster not see that simply by posting, they are revealing themselves to be image-conscious and vain? A chief reason that “virtue signalling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenty-tens was not just because it was in bad taste to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue but because the broader mores of social-media use had begun to shift dramatically. It was no longer normative to post a photo of your breakfast, or to write an Instagram caption about how much you loved your mom on International Women’s Day. Suddenly, any type of unironic persona-forward material entered the hall of mirrors of performativity criticism. These days, users can avoid being labelled as performative by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are, in some way, aware of the performance. But it is still impossible to fully ignore the spectre of performativity on social media, despite the apps’ assertion that they are organic breeding grounds for genuine human expression. (Instagram’s mission statement claims its purpose is to bring “you closer to the people and the things you love”; TikTok says that its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)...

If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.

In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner...

The irony of “Infinite Jest” becoming prime performative-reading material is that it is a novel perfectly suited to address our current cultural conundrums. Wallace depicts a politically volatile corporate dystopia on the brink of environmental collapse, an existential reality its characters seldom seem to recognize. To escape from the horrors of the external world—and the indistinguishable ways in which the external world influences one’s inner life—characters turn to drugs and alcohol, intensive sports training, and excessive media consumption, the latter of which is dramatized by a digitized entertainment cartridge so powerful that it vegetates anyone who views it. “Infinite Jest” is a novel obsessed with the shared solitude of contemporary life, of the loneliness and lack of meaning endemic to consumerism and market capitalism. Wallace argues, as he does throughout his œuvre, that salvation arrives through careful attention, through sacrificing one’s myopic sense of self to something larger, holier, more expansive. In Wallace’s personal life, this sacrifice came, in part, by reading books, a practice he feared was losing its moral imperative in an age of constant, inescapable stimulation. 

by Brady Brickner-Wood, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Well, performative displays in modern culture are everywhere and have been for a long time (fashion, art, interior design, technology, hipsters, hippies, mixtapes, bumper stickers, flag-flying pickup trucks, social media in general, etc.) although it's possible I might be confusing/conflating some of these with simple tribal association. All I know is that if someone wants to read in public (or anywhere else for that matter) more power to them. There could be worse ways of drawing attention to one's self (if that's what you're after). Also, I loved Infinite Jest (and even The Pale King), both read strictly at home.]

My neighbor Totoro
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Booker T. & the MG's

 

[ed. w/ Steve Cropper.]

Kicking Robots

Humanoids and the tech-­industry hype machine.

You can learn a surprising amount by kicking things. It’s an epistemological method you often see deployed by small children, who target furniture, pets, and their peers in the hope of answering important questions about the world. Questions like “How solid is this thing?” and “Can I knock it over?” and “If I kick it, will it kick me back?”

Kicking robots is something of a pastime among roboticists. Although the activity generates anxiety for lay observers prone to worrying about the prospect of future retribution, it also happens to be an efficient method of testing a machine’s balance. In recent years, as robots have become increasingly sophisticated, their makers have gone from kicking them to shoving them, tripping them, and even hitting them with folding chairs. It may seem gratuitous, but as with Dr. Johnson’s infamous response to Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of immaterialism, there’s something grounding about applying the boot. It helps separate what’s real from what’s not.

All of this is going through my head in April, when I find myself face-to-face with a robot named Apollo. Apollo is a humanoid: a robot with two arms and two legs, standing five feet eight inches tall, with exposed wires, whirring motors, and a smooth plastic head resembling a mannequin’s. Like so many humanoids, Apollo exemplifies the uncanny, hyperreal nature of modern robotics, simultaneously an image from science fiction and a real, tangible machine.

Robots like Apollo are seemingly everywhere these days. There are headlines about Chinese bots running half marathons, ominous videos of muscled humanoids twitching on gantries, clips of robot fight clubs. Sometimes you get the feeling that these machines constitute a fifth column of sorts—a not-so-secret cell, growing in number, biding its time, preparing for the uprising. Economists are looking forward to it. Around the world, they point out, population growth is slowing and labor shortages are spreading. Without humanoids to step into the breach, and quickly, the global economy could descend into chaos. Bank of America forecasts that there will be at least a million humanoid robots shipped annually by 2035, while Morgan Stanley predicts that more than a billion will be in use by 2050. If all goes according to plan, robotics could constitute the largest industry in the world, generating annual revenue upwards of $5 trillion. Elon Musk, that sage of understatement, claims that Tesla’s own Optimus robot will one day “be more productive than the entire global economy.”

Apollo’s creator, the U.S. startup Apptronik, is a frontrunner in this emerging industry. The company says it’s building the first general-purpose commercial robot, a machine that will one day be able to take on any type of physical labor currently performed by humans, whether cleaning houses or assembling cars. Not knowing what to believe from what I’ve seen on social media, I’ve traveled from London to Austin, Texas, to see Apollo for myself. Against prophecies of doom and salvation, “stability testing” seems like a crude way to gauge the technology’s development, but it’s a good place to start.

As I square up to Apollo in a plexiglass arena, my first instinct is, naturally, to raise a foot. But the kick test is too dangerous for visiting journalists, I’m told. Instead, someone hands me a wooden pole with a piece of foam taped around one end and mimes poking the machine in its chest. Ah, I think, the scientific method. In front of me, as various motors rev up to speed, the robot shuffles in place, looking like an arthritic boxer readying for a fight. On the other side of the plexiglass, a group of engineers chat casually with one another and glance over at a bank of monitors. One of them gives me a thumbs-up. Have at it.

My first shove is hesitant. I’ve been told that the prototype in front of me is worth around $250,000, and while breaking it would make for a good story, it would also be the end of my visit to Apptronik. In response to my prod, the bot merely teeters. It’s heavier than I’d expected, around 160 pounds. It feels, well, like a person. “Oh, you can do it harder than that,” says an engineer, and I jab forward again. Nothing. Apollo is still trotting on the spot. Fine, I think, I’ll give it a real push. Drawing back, I grip my makeshift spear and strike the robot hard in the chest. It staggers backward, stamping its feet, flinging its arms toward me in an appealingly human gesture. I’m struck by a flash of involuntary alarm, whether out of sympathy for a fellow being or fear of an expensive accident I can’t say. For a moment, the robot looks like it might fall, then regains its balance and returns to its position in front of me. I look at its blank face with wonder and disquiet. It seems pretty real to me. (...)

In my conversation with Cardenas, we discussed the different ways robots already work alongside us. When I was catching my flight to Texas, for instance, I watched a floor-cleaning machine the size of a garbage bin sweep through Heathrow Airport. An older couple stopped and pointed as it trundled past, but most travelers ignored it. Then, after landing in Austin, I walked past a “robot barista” making coffee. The operation was pure spectacle: the robot was just a mechanical arm that held a cup underneath the nozzle of a machine. Here, I thought, are the two strands of robotics: one useful and invisible, the other theatrical and redundant.

There is a basic challenge in robotic design that I’ve come across time and time again. I refer to it as the dishwasher problem. It’s like this: Imagine you’re designing a robot to clean and dry dishes the way a human does. Think of all the difficulties you need to overcome: Your robot needs hands and arms that can manipulate items of different shapes and sizes, and a vision system to identify muck and grime. It needs to be strong enough to grasp slippery things, sensitive enough to handle breakables, and dexterous enough to clean the insides of items like mugs and graters. Alternatively, you could build a waterproof box, fill it with jets and sprays, and stuff everything inside. That’s a much simpler way to tackle the problem, and one that has gifted humanity the dishwasher.

Criticism of humanoids within the robotics industry often follows a similar logic. Why go to all the trouble of mimicking nature’s blueprints when our own designs can do the job more efficiently? We don’t make planes that fly by flapping their wings or ships that wriggle through the water like tuna. So why make things harder for ourselves?

by James Vincent, Harper's |  Read more:

Images: Spencer Lowell
[ed. I imagine if you can outfit them with hundreds of sensors they might have a good shot at helping with this problem: We won’t see AGI in our lifetime (TCA):]

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"This lack of understanding brings us to the biggest barrier to AGI: the problem of embodiment. Human intelligence is deeply rooted in our physical interactions with the world. You can explain to a person what ‘heavy’ means, but they won’t understand it until they have struggled to lift a rock. Current AI systems are just text processors in server farms, severed from the feedback loops of real life, and without a body to experience gravity, friction, or the passage of time, an AI lacks the grounding required for true common sense. It can describe a thing, but it cannot know the thing. Unless we solve the massive engineering problem of giving these systems a physical form that can navigate the world, they will remain idiot savants, capable of passing tests but unable to make a cup of coffee in a messy kitchen."