Jane Birkin
via:
Friday, December 19, 2025
The Violin and the Fan
(Teased at school for playing violin, and practicing alone in his bedroom one summer afternoon, he played a particular set of notes while the fan in the window was producing a high-pitched vibration in the glass)
“As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing,what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there … it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room … Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly”…
“I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the same resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I’ve ever confronted … Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede… . It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me … The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college … One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years. It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older … I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt … Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself … It’s never come back.”
“As the two vibrations combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing,what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there … it was total horror. It was all horror everywhere, distilled and given form. It rose in me, out of me, summoned somehow by the odd confluence of the fan and those notes. It rose and grew larger and became engulfing and more horrible than I shall ever have the power to convey. I dropped my violin and ran from the room … Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it. I can say and mean only shape, dark, and either billowing or flapping. But because the horror receded the moment I left the room, within minutes it had become unreal. The shape and horror. It seemed to have been my imagination, some random bit of psychic flatulence, an anomaly”…
“I returned shortly to the room and the fan and picked up the violin again. And produced the same resonance again immediately. And immediately again the black flapping shape rose in my mind again. It was a bit like a sail, or a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality. It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I’ve ever confronted … Set free somehow by that one-day-only resonance of violin and fan, the dark shape began rising out of my mind’s corner on its own. I dropped the violin again and ran from the room once again, clutching my head at the front and back, but this time it did not recede… . It was as if I’d awakened it and now it was active. It came and went for a year. I lived in horror of it for a year, as a child, never knowing when it would rise up billowing and blot out all light. After a year it receded. I think I was ten. But not all the way. I’d awakened it somehow. Every so often. Every few months it would rise inside me … The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college … One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years. It is the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older … I thought I’d have to hurl myself out of my dormitory’s window. I simply could not live with how it felt … Some boy I hardly knew in the room below mine heard me staggering around whimpering at the top of my lungs. He came up and sat with me until it went away. It took most of the night. We didn’t converse; he didn’t try to comfort me. He spoke very little, just sat up with me. We didn’t become friends. By graduation I’d forgotten his name and major. But on that night he seemed to be the piece of string by which I hung suspended over hell itself … It’s never come back.”
Favorite Rob Reiner Credits
When Rob Reiner was killed earlier this week, along with his wife and creative partner Michelle, the world of film lost one of its most beloved and respected figures, an artist who had done very good and extremely popular work in a variety of genres, first in front of the camera, then behind it as a writer, producer, and director, and then again in his later life as an actor. All the while, Reiner maintained a spotless reputation as a mensch, in an industry with vanishingly few of those. He was one of the most sophisticated and successful political activists in California, and his work (and money) helped pass the state's groundbreaking marriage equality law. Few filmmakers have had as vast or varied an impact on American life over the last 50 years, which is something that Reiner would surely have found very funny. Here are some of Reiner's films and roles that we love:
Stand By Me
Stand By Me is probably the purest chunk of schmaltz in Rob Reiner's generational early-career run. The movie is oozing with sentiment, factory-designed to squeeze profundity out of every otherwise mundane childhood interaction, and some not so mundane. It pulls out every trouble-at-home cliché to make you root for the kids and add dramatic heft. Richard Dreyfuss's narration should come with an insulin pump.
And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.
Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.
It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius. (...)
- Barry Petchesky
When Harry Met Sally
It’s like 90 minutes, and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.
That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.
- Maitreyi Anantharaman
Stand By Me
And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.
Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.
It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius. (...)
- Barry Petchesky
When Harry Met Sally
It’s like 90 minutes, and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.
That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.
- Maitreyi Anantharaman
Michael "Meathead" Stivic in All In The Family
Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while, nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.
The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible but weirdly prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one. I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic, but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny, but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.
Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMDB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him.
- Ray Ratto
This Is Spinal Tap
In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: The best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.
On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.
Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”
Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“Oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the setup: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “These go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.
Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)
That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity. Who produces not just a masterpiece, but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.
- Luis Paez-Pumar
Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while, nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.
The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible but weirdly prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one. I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic, but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny, but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.
Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMDB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him.
- Ray Ratto
This Is Spinal Tap
In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: The best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.
On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.
Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”
Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“Oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the setup: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “These go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.
Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)
That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity. Who produces not just a masterpiece, but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.
- Luis Paez-Pumar
by Defector Staff, Defector | Read more:
Images: Andy Schwartz/Fotos International/Getty Images; Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap (YouTube).]
Images: Andy Schwartz/Fotos International/Getty Images; Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap (YouTube).]
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Plaques
[ed. Priceless. And always classy. Now we know how he occupies time when he isn't eating cheeseburgers, drinking diet cokes, and watching Fox News (and golfing and texting). Poor Republicans, this is your savior, see: White House installs plaques (MSN). hmm. wonder why this country feels so divided. Also, if you want to read some truly deranged stuff, check this out (transcript) from a recent rally 12-9-25 (Sen. Dems).]
Finding Peter Putnam
The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind
The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.
It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.
A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.
Then silence.
The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”
That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.
The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.
Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:
Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness
Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality
Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.
Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.
A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”
The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?
I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.
The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.
Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.” (...)
Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”
Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.
How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.
“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.” (...)
Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”
The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.
This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.
When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.
That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.
At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.
Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.
A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.
Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.
Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.
That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”
So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.
Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.
In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.
As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.
When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.
But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.
How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.
In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”
New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.
In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”
Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.
[ed. Fascinating. Sounds like part quantum physics and part AI. But it's beyond me.]
It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.
A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.
Then silence.
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”
That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.
The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.
Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:
Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness
Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality
Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.
Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.
A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”
The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?
I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.
The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.
Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.” (...)
Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”
Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.
How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.
“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.” (...)
Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh. Each one went on like that for hundreds of pages at a time, on none of which did he apparently bother to stop and explain what the whole thing was really about...
Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.” (...)
Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”
The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.
This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.
When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.
That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.
At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.
Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.
A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.
Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.
Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.
That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”
So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.
Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.
In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.
As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.
When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.
But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.
How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.
In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”
New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.
In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”
Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.
by Amanda Gefter, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: John Archibald Wheeler, courtesy of Alison Lahnston.[ed. Fascinating. Sounds like part quantum physics and part AI. But it's beyond me.]
The Shadow President
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.” [ed. See Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.]
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.” (...)
What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” (...)
Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. … I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”
[ed. What a piece of work. A modern day Eichmann pushing his modern day version of Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) - the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany that placed Hitler's word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. Also Gleichschaltung the process of Nazification by which Hitler established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education. See also: The White House Is a Lost Cause (NYT):]
The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.” [ed. See Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.]
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.” (...)
What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” (...)
Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. … I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”
by Andy Kroll, Pro Publica | Read more:
Image: Evan Vucci/AP Images[ed. What a piece of work. A modern day Eichmann pushing his modern day version of Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) - the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany that placed Hitler's word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. Also Gleichschaltung the process of Nazification by which Hitler established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education. See also: The White House Is a Lost Cause (NYT):]
***
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs... It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.
Wednesday, December 17, 2025
The Quiet Collapse of Surveys: Fewer Humans (and More AI Agents) Are Answering Survey Questions
Surveys are the bedrock of political polling, market research, and public policy. Want to know what voters think? Survey them. Need to price a product? Survey. Trying to understand shifts in public opinion or workplace satisfaction? You guessed it.
But there is a fundamental problem: fewer and fewer people are answering - and more and more of those who do are AI agents.
I explore these two converging trends below. Then, I’ll show that anybody (including me) can easily set-up an AI agent to earn some money with taking surveys. I’ll then estimate the impact of this further down the line in three main fields and propose some solutions.
Problem 1: The increase of non-response rates
If you use survey data, it probably hasn’t gone unnoticed: survey response rates have plummeted. In the 1970s and 1980s, response rates ranged between 30% and 50%. Today, they can be as low as 5% .
To give some (shocking) examples: the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) experienced a drop in response rates from approximately 40% to 13%, leading to instances where only five individuals responded to certain labor market survey questions. In the US, the current population survey dropped from a 90% response rate to a record low of 65%. (...)
Problem 2: The increase of AI agents
How difficult is it to build an agent? So… I did what any overcaffeinated social data nerd would do. I built a simple python pipeline for my own AI agent to take surveys for me (don’t worry I promise that I didn’t actually use it!). The pipeline I built just requires me to:
That’s it. With a bit more effort, this could scale to dozens or hundreds of bots. Vibe coding from scratch (see my previous Substack on how to do vibe coding ) would work perfectly too.
Don’t worry btw, I didn’t deploy it on a real platform. But other people did. Below, I extrapolated the trends of AI agents based on data points in existing research since data is very hard to find...
Downstream problems
Let’s explore how this impacts three main fields in which surveys are used: political polls, market research and public policy.
Political polls. Many polls depend heavily on post-stratification weighting to correct for underrepresentation in key demographic groups. But when response rates fall and LLM answers increase, the core assumptions behind these corrections collapse. For instance, turn-out models become unstable: if synthetic agents overrepresent politically “typical” speech (e.g., centrist or non-committal), models overfit the middle and underpredict edges. Similarly, calibration failures increase: AI-generated responses often mirror majority-opinion trends scraped from high-volume internet sources (like Reddit or Twitter), not the minority voter. This results in high-confidence and stable predictions that are systematically biased.
Market research. AI-generated responses are, by design, probabilistic aggregations of likely human language conditioned on previous examples. That’s great for fluency and coherence, but not good for capturing edge-case consumer behavior. Real customer data is heteroskedastic and noisy: people contradict themselves, change preferences, or click randomly. AI, in contrast, minimises entropy. Synthetic consumers will never hate a product irrationally, misunderstand your user interface, or misinterpret your branding. This results in product teams building for a latent mean user, resulting in poor performance across actual market segments, particularly underserved or hard-to-model populations.
Public policy. Governments often rely on survey data to estimate local needs and allocate resources: think of labor force participation surveys, housing needs assessments, or vaccine uptake intention polls. When the data is LLM generated this can result in vulnerable populations becoming statistically invisible and lead to underprovision of services in areas with the greatest need. Even worse, AI-generated answers may introduce feedback loops: as agencies “validate” demand based on polluted data, their future sampling and resource targeting become increasingly skewed.
So what can we actually do about this?
Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet (believe me - if there were, my start-up dream would be reality and I’d already have a VC pitch deck and a logo). But here are a few underdeveloped but in my humble opinion promising ideas:
But there is a fundamental problem: fewer and fewer people are answering - and more and more of those who do are AI agents.
I explore these two converging trends below. Then, I’ll show that anybody (including me) can easily set-up an AI agent to earn some money with taking surveys. I’ll then estimate the impact of this further down the line in three main fields and propose some solutions.
Problem 1: The increase of non-response rates
If you use survey data, it probably hasn’t gone unnoticed: survey response rates have plummeted. In the 1970s and 1980s, response rates ranged between 30% and 50%. Today, they can be as low as 5% .
To give some (shocking) examples: the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) experienced a drop in response rates from approximately 40% to 13%, leading to instances where only five individuals responded to certain labor market survey questions. In the US, the current population survey dropped from a 90% response rate to a record low of 65%. (...)
Problem 2: The increase of AI agents
How difficult is it to build an agent? So… I did what any overcaffeinated social data nerd would do. I built a simple python pipeline for my own AI agent to take surveys for me (don’t worry I promise that I didn’t actually use it!). The pipeline I built just requires me to:
- Access to a powerful language model (I just used OpenAI’s API - but perhaps for research representativeness of the distribution an uncensored model is way better!).
- A survey parser: this can be as simple as a list of questions in a .txt file or a JSON pulled from Qualtrics or Typeform. The real pros would scrape the survey live though!
- I prompted it with a persona. The easiest is to built a mini “persona generator” that rotates between types: urban lefty, rural centrist, climate pessimist, you name it.
That’s it. With a bit more effort, this could scale to dozens or hundreds of bots. Vibe coding from scratch (see my previous Substack on how to do vibe coding ) would work perfectly too.
Don’t worry btw, I didn’t deploy it on a real platform. But other people did. Below, I extrapolated the trends of AI agents based on data points in existing research since data is very hard to find...
Downstream problems
Let’s explore how this impacts three main fields in which surveys are used: political polls, market research and public policy.
Political polls. Many polls depend heavily on post-stratification weighting to correct for underrepresentation in key demographic groups. But when response rates fall and LLM answers increase, the core assumptions behind these corrections collapse. For instance, turn-out models become unstable: if synthetic agents overrepresent politically “typical” speech (e.g., centrist or non-committal), models overfit the middle and underpredict edges. Similarly, calibration failures increase: AI-generated responses often mirror majority-opinion trends scraped from high-volume internet sources (like Reddit or Twitter), not the minority voter. This results in high-confidence and stable predictions that are systematically biased.
Market research. AI-generated responses are, by design, probabilistic aggregations of likely human language conditioned on previous examples. That’s great for fluency and coherence, but not good for capturing edge-case consumer behavior. Real customer data is heteroskedastic and noisy: people contradict themselves, change preferences, or click randomly. AI, in contrast, minimises entropy. Synthetic consumers will never hate a product irrationally, misunderstand your user interface, or misinterpret your branding. This results in product teams building for a latent mean user, resulting in poor performance across actual market segments, particularly underserved or hard-to-model populations.
Public policy. Governments often rely on survey data to estimate local needs and allocate resources: think of labor force participation surveys, housing needs assessments, or vaccine uptake intention polls. When the data is LLM generated this can result in vulnerable populations becoming statistically invisible and lead to underprovision of services in areas with the greatest need. Even worse, AI-generated answers may introduce feedback loops: as agencies “validate” demand based on polluted data, their future sampling and resource targeting become increasingly skewed.
So what can we actually do about this?
Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet (believe me - if there were, my start-up dream would be reality and I’d already have a VC pitch deck and a logo). But here are a few underdeveloped but in my humble opinion promising ideas:
by Lauren Leek, Lauren's Data Substack | Read more:
Image: Lauren Leek compilation of sources
[ed. I never answer surveys because, why assist people in figuring out new and innovative ways to manipulate and sell me things (including politicans)? So, I'm not surprised this tool is tanking. What is surprising is the claim that AI bots are a significant reason. I guess if you're a professional survey taker and have the coding skills then yeah, it would make sense to automate the process (more surveys, more money). But really, how many people can do that? More than anything, I'm surprised that prediction markets aren't mentioned here. Those seem to be the most accurate and granular tools for achieving the same purpose these days.]
Feast Your Eyes on Japan’s Fake Food
Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue. The phrase applies all the more when the dish in question isn’t meant to be eaten at all. Last year, I was one of two hundred thousand people to visit “Looks Delicious!,” an exhibition organized by the cultural center Japan House London showcasing dozens upon dozens of shokuhin sampuru—mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas that appear in the windows and display cases of restaurants, kiosks, and bars across Japan. Shokuhin sampuru are a roughly ninety-million-dollar industry, and a beloved part of Japanese pop culture. A few decades ago, there was a show on Japanese television in which shokuhin sampuru artisans competed to make the most convincing replicas of dishes, a sort of inverse of “Is It Cake?”
But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.
Early shokuhin sampuru were relatively rough replicas molded out of wax; some pioneering artisans were more accustomed to, say, sculpting ear canals for otologists and solar systems for science classes. Even in rudimentary form, they freed customers from having to badger employees with questions or take their chances ordering a bowl of ramen, not knowing whether it would come with two slices of pork or three. Food replicas eased embarrassment, prevented disappointment, and encouraged experimentation, just as they do today. “The Japanese customer loves to know what they’re getting,” the food writer Yukari Sakamoto told me. “When I’m meeting up with my family in Tokyo, we talk and talk and look at the plastic food displays until something jumps out at us.”
The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan...
“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.
Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima. (...)
However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.
[ed. For many more examples, see also: Photos show hyper-realistic plastic food that is a $90 million industry in Japan (MYSA).]
But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.
Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.” (...)
According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.
According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.
The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan...
“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.
Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima. (...)
However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Images: via; and Masuda Yoshirо̄/Courtesy Japan House
'Atmospheric Rivers' Flood Western Washington; Blizzard Follows
WA floods hit many uninsured small farms with ‘varied’ damages (Seattle Times)
Over the past few days, farm owners and operators across Western Washington have been returning to their businesses after heavy flooding turned massive swaths of low-lying land into deep basins of water since the downpour began last week.
Farms up and down the I-5 corridor sustained losses, though for most of them, it’s too early to accurately account for damage. Some are still unable to reach their farms due to high water levels and road closures. Many don’t have insurance and those who do have it aren’t sure what it will cover. And the National Weather Service has forecast more minor to moderate flooding in the region through Friday.
Hundreds of thousands out of power in WA; blizzard warning continues (Seattle Times)
A storm brought high winds and heavy rain to Western Washington overnight into Wednesday, leaving more than 200,000 customers in the dark after days of flooding.
Wind speeds reached the 50s and 60s in Seattle and surrounding areas early Wednesday: In the Alpental Ski Area, 112 mph gusts were recorded around 2 a.m., and Snoqualmie Pass saw 82 mph wind speeds.
WA flooding devastates major roads. What’s the path ahead? (Seattle Times)
Even after the rain ends and waters recede, after workers remove trees and clean up landslides, after engineers finally get a good look at the damage to the region’s roads and bridges, Washington state’s transportation system faces a long, expensive and daunting road to recovery following this month’s devastating weather.
Yet an even more elusive — and immediate — task is determining when traffic will flow again on roads like Highway 2, where Tuesday’s news that a 50-mile stretch will be closed for months forced grim questions about the expense of repairing ravaged roads and the immediate economic future of communities in the Cascades.
Images: Brian Marchello/King County Sherriff's Office/Erika Schultz
[ed. One/two punch.]
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Scenes from the “This Is Spinal Tap” Cutting-Room Floor
In 1982, I began shooting an almost entirely improvised film,“This Is Spinal Tap,” which also happened to be my first as a director. It transformed my life and the lives of my three friends, co-writers, and co-stars: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.
We also decided that it was time to tell the full story of the making of the original “This Is Spinal Tap.” What you are about to read is a short excerpt from that account.
Early on in editing “This Is Spinal Tap,” it became obvious that some of the film’s plotlines would have to be thrown out altogether. For example, Spinal Tap initially had an opening act, a New Wave band called the Dose. The guys are against having the Dose tour with them. They feel that the group’s punky music isn’t a good fit with heavy metal. But then, during a sound check, they catch sight of the Dose’s lead singer, Stellazine, played by Cherie Currie, the former lead singer of the Runaways—a beautiful, sexy, young blonde in a skintight, metallic-blue catsuit.
After a deliberation of about an eighth of a second, the band does a one-eighty and insists to Ian (Tony Hendra) that it’s critical the Dose be their opening act for the entire length of the tour. Ian obliges and books the band. But there’s a problem: Stellazine is what one might deem a “free spirit.” After a scene in which Nigel (Guest) is seen making time with her, he turns up with a herpes sore on his lip. Next, we see David (McKean) pairing up with Stellazine, after which he, too, sports a herpes sore. Stellazine then hangs out with Derek (Shearer) and then Viv (David Kaff), both of whom subsequently also display the herpes badge.
A band meeting is called: Should the Dose remain on the tour? The four herpes-afflicted Tap members vote the Dose out. Mick (R. J. Parnell), who is clueless and herpes-free, votes for the Dose to stay.
Currie’s scenes were terrific, but the travelling-herpes show took way too long to play out. So, unfortunately, the sequence had to go. There is, however, a remnant of this subplot in the scene in which Nigel and David defend the “Smell the Glove” album cover to Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher). Nigel has a sore on his lower lip, and David has one on his upper lip. Conspicuous as these blemishes are, they go unexplained. Depending on your take, this is either a complete non sequitur or an ambiguous “What the hell is going on?” moment. Regardless, it always got a laugh—which surprised me. (...)
There was also a subplot about Derek going through a painful divorce. We filmed a number of scenes of him on the phone, getting the latest bad news from his lawyer. In one scene, he learns that his soon-to-be ex has taken out a full-page ad in the New Musical Express laying out her settlement demands. In another, he is seen saying, “She can’t have the Lamborghini. . . . O.K., she can have the Mini.” Again, it slowed the momentum. So the audience would never learn of Derek’s crumbling marriage.
Parnell, who had no background in acting, delivered an incredible performance in a scene we cut. The setup was that Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer) had succeeded in getting the band to do an earlymorning radio-station appearance. What Artie didn’t know was that, on that day, the station had changed its programming format from sports talk to rock and roll. One caller, who wasn’t aware of the change, asks the band, “Can you settle a bet I have with a buddy of mine? I think Ferguson Jenkins had fifty shutouts with the Cubs. He says he had forty-four. Who’s right?” Just as the radio host is about to brush off the question, Mick—shades on, cigarette in hand—answers, “Actually, you’re both wrong, mate. Ferguson Jenkins has had forty-eight career shutouts, and not all of them were with the Cubs.”
Then, in his sleepy drawl, he proceeds to deliver a complete statistical breakdown of Jenkins’s career. But since we ended up losing the radio-station scene, we lost with it Parnell’s eloquent Ferguson Jenkins soliloquy.
I not only cut scenes we had planned. On any given day, brilliant stuff would spontaneously fly out of someone’s mouth. A lot of that stuff had to go, too, to keep the film’s motor running. In particular, I remember a dissertation that David delivers to Marty (as played by me) about slime molds:
So we sculpted away. Originally, the scene in which the band gets lost trying to find the stage had more dialogue between the band and the maintenance man who gives them directions (played by a terrific actor named Wonderful Smith). We had a bit in which Nigel positions himself in a fixed spot, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” so that the other guys would have a reference point to prevent them from getting even more lost. But this took away from a more important bit, the band’s efforts to amp themselves up for the crowd. (It was in this spirit that Harry shouted out a line that became one of the film’s most quoted: “Hello, Cleveland!”)
The “Australian’s nightmare” scene, in which Ian ridicules Jeanine and quits, used to include a series of filthy comebacks improvised by Chadwick, with Jeanine calling Ian a “bumbling, dwarf-willied prick,” a “fucking twit full of shit,” and an “impotent bat ’n’ balls full o’ crabs.”
As tempting as it was to leave these moments in, all they did was give the elephant a second trunk. When it came to the scenes we shot depicting the seamy sex-and-drugs side of rock and roll, we made the decision to play that aspect down. There is a fleeting moment in which you can see some groupies sniffing powder. But we cut the other scenes showing drug use, and one in which Nigel has his arm around a topless girl. We felt it went against the tone of the film.
For me, looking back after forty years, all I see are the flaws that stayed in the movie, such as the continuity mistakes that I would have been able to avoid in a scripted film. With an improvised film, there are times when you just have to live with the mismatches. For instance, in the scene in which the band reacts to the all-black cover of the “Smell the Glove” album, you’ll notice that Nigel’s position keeps changing from shot to shot. First, we see him standing to the right of Ian. Then, after a cut to David and Jeanine, we go back to Nigel, who is now standing to Ian’s left as he observes, “It’s so black. It’s, like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is: none. None more black.” Normally, you want to avoid that kind of gaffe. But it was the only take in which Chris said, “None more black,” so we lived with it.
Few viewers pick up on this stuff. The editor Bob Leighton, with whom I worked on this and many of my other films, has always said that it’s more important to make the audio work smoothly than the visuals. A jump in sound is much more jarring than a jump in picture.
We also decided that it was time to tell the full story of the making of the original “This Is Spinal Tap.” What you are about to read is a short excerpt from that account.
After a deliberation of about an eighth of a second, the band does a one-eighty and insists to Ian (Tony Hendra) that it’s critical the Dose be their opening act for the entire length of the tour. Ian obliges and books the band. But there’s a problem: Stellazine is what one might deem a “free spirit.” After a scene in which Nigel (Guest) is seen making time with her, he turns up with a herpes sore on his lip. Next, we see David (McKean) pairing up with Stellazine, after which he, too, sports a herpes sore. Stellazine then hangs out with Derek (Shearer) and then Viv (David Kaff), both of whom subsequently also display the herpes badge.
A band meeting is called: Should the Dose remain on the tour? The four herpes-afflicted Tap members vote the Dose out. Mick (R. J. Parnell), who is clueless and herpes-free, votes for the Dose to stay.
Currie’s scenes were terrific, but the travelling-herpes show took way too long to play out. So, unfortunately, the sequence had to go. There is, however, a remnant of this subplot in the scene in which Nigel and David defend the “Smell the Glove” album cover to Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher). Nigel has a sore on his lower lip, and David has one on his upper lip. Conspicuous as these blemishes are, they go unexplained. Depending on your take, this is either a complete non sequitur or an ambiguous “What the hell is going on?” moment. Regardless, it always got a laugh—which surprised me. (...)
There was also a subplot about Derek going through a painful divorce. We filmed a number of scenes of him on the phone, getting the latest bad news from his lawyer. In one scene, he learns that his soon-to-be ex has taken out a full-page ad in the New Musical Express laying out her settlement demands. In another, he is seen saying, “She can’t have the Lamborghini. . . . O.K., she can have the Mini.” Again, it slowed the momentum. So the audience would never learn of Derek’s crumbling marriage.
Parnell, who had no background in acting, delivered an incredible performance in a scene we cut. The setup was that Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer) had succeeded in getting the band to do an earlymorning radio-station appearance. What Artie didn’t know was that, on that day, the station had changed its programming format from sports talk to rock and roll. One caller, who wasn’t aware of the change, asks the band, “Can you settle a bet I have with a buddy of mine? I think Ferguson Jenkins had fifty shutouts with the Cubs. He says he had forty-four. Who’s right?” Just as the radio host is about to brush off the question, Mick—shades on, cigarette in hand—answers, “Actually, you’re both wrong, mate. Ferguson Jenkins has had forty-eight career shutouts, and not all of them were with the Cubs.”
Then, in his sleepy drawl, he proceeds to deliver a complete statistical breakdown of Jenkins’s career. But since we ended up losing the radio-station scene, we lost with it Parnell’s eloquent Ferguson Jenkins soliloquy.
I not only cut scenes we had planned. On any given day, brilliant stuff would spontaneously fly out of someone’s mouth. A lot of that stuff had to go, too, to keep the film’s motor running. In particular, I remember a dissertation that David delivers to Marty (as played by me) about slime molds:
Slime molds are so close to being both plant and animal that it’s like they can’t make up their mind. And they’re thinking now that maybe this is who’s been running the earth all this time: these layabouts who can’t commit.It’s easy to become self-indulgent. You fall in love with things that make you laugh, and you want to leave it in, even though it doesn’t help sculpt the elephant. But you have to be ruthless. If you indulge, you lose the audience.
’Cause there’s more slime molds than any other form of protoplasm on the planet. And if they wanted to—if they finally made up their minds to commit to being either plant or animal—they could take us over like that. You’re walking down an alleyway. You slip and twist your ankle, maybe. It wasn’t an accident. It was an attack...
So we sculpted away. Originally, the scene in which the band gets lost trying to find the stage had more dialogue between the band and the maintenance man who gives them directions (played by a terrific actor named Wonderful Smith). We had a bit in which Nigel positions himself in a fixed spot, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” so that the other guys would have a reference point to prevent them from getting even more lost. But this took away from a more important bit, the band’s efforts to amp themselves up for the crowd. (It was in this spirit that Harry shouted out a line that became one of the film’s most quoted: “Hello, Cleveland!”)
The “Australian’s nightmare” scene, in which Ian ridicules Jeanine and quits, used to include a series of filthy comebacks improvised by Chadwick, with Jeanine calling Ian a “bumbling, dwarf-willied prick,” a “fucking twit full of shit,” and an “impotent bat ’n’ balls full o’ crabs.”
As tempting as it was to leave these moments in, all they did was give the elephant a second trunk. When it came to the scenes we shot depicting the seamy sex-and-drugs side of rock and roll, we made the decision to play that aspect down. There is a fleeting moment in which you can see some groupies sniffing powder. But we cut the other scenes showing drug use, and one in which Nigel has his arm around a topless girl. We felt it went against the tone of the film.
For me, looking back after forty years, all I see are the flaws that stayed in the movie, such as the continuity mistakes that I would have been able to avoid in a scripted film. With an improvised film, there are times when you just have to live with the mismatches. For instance, in the scene in which the band reacts to the all-black cover of the “Smell the Glove” album, you’ll notice that Nigel’s position keeps changing from shot to shot. First, we see him standing to the right of Ian. Then, after a cut to David and Jeanine, we go back to Nigel, who is now standing to Ian’s left as he observes, “It’s so black. It’s, like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is: none. None more black.” Normally, you want to avoid that kind of gaffe. But it was the only take in which Chris said, “None more black,” so we lived with it.
Few viewers pick up on this stuff. The editor Bob Leighton, with whom I worked on this and many of my other films, has always said that it’s more important to make the audio work smoothly than the visuals. A jump in sound is much more jarring than a jump in picture.
by Rob Reiner and Spinal Tap, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Embassy Pictures / Everett
The Trump Mind-Set Is Not Complex
[ed. Actions speak louder than words.]
The dominant theme is governing by narcissism: Make Trump Great Again.
President Trump can be persuaded with money, the purchase of his crypto coins, contributions and sometimes with plain old obsequious flattery.
The strongest example: his refusal to accept the humiliation of defeat in the 2020 election, resulting in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by his followers determined to “stop the steal,” and Trump’s subsequent pardoning of the insurrectionists.
He is blind to the harms, up to and including death, that he and his policies have inflicted here and abroad. The notion that his actions have worsened the economy is, to Trump, intolerable. Asked by Politico to rate his handling of the economy, Trump replied, “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
Trump relishes his hatreds. Revenge brings him joy. “I hate my opponent,” Trump told mourners for Charlie Kirk at a memorial service in Phoenix, with a tone of relish. “I don’t want what’s best for them.”
The profit motive — for himself, for his allies and for his donors — dominates Trump’s decision making across the gamut, from his pardons of convicted criminals to negotiation strategies with foreign leaders to the formulation of tax legislation.
Trump lacks a basic sense of fairness, exemplified by his disregard of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, and he feels no obligation to honor alliances designed to protect democratic states.
The key measure Trump uses in defining justice, on the one hand, is whether an individual, group, corporation or country supports him (the Jan. 6 insurrectionists), contributes to his wealth (crypto) or elevates his stature (Vladimir Putin’s praise.) On the other hand, he condemns and calls for criminal prosecutions of all those who challenged the legality of what he has done or suggested anything untoward about his relations with Russia.
Trump does not think strategically. Instead, his compulsive need to be a winner, to have his ego or bank account rewarded, precludes anything but short-term tactical calculations shaped by the pursuit of his self-interest.
To quote a once-famous Washington sportscaster, Warner Wolf, “Let’s go to the videotape”:
On Nov. 4, a delegation of Swiss industrialists gave Trump a high-end Rolex desktop clock and a 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) gold bar worth $130,000 inscribed 45 and 47. Ten days later, the Trump administration agreed to cut the 39 percent tariff on Swiss imports to 15 percent.
The initial 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, drawn by Russia and the United States, makes no mention of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, providing instead for Russian retention of land it now controls. The 28 points do provide for substantial American business investment in the region and the end of sanctions against Russia.
In a key article, “Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine,” the Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson wrote that the architects of the plan were “charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold — with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.”
Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, posted a denunciation of the plan on X on Dec. 8:
It’s being described as a peace plan to end the Russian war in Ukraine, but if you look at the details, it has nothing to do with peace. It is a business deal to make the people around Donald Trump rich. It’s just corruption, through and through.Rich Trump donors, Murphy continued,
are right now trying to get in on the action. One donor just recently paid hundreds of 1000s of dollars to a lobbyist that’s really close to Trump’s inner circle to try to buy the Nord Stream two pipeline that’s a Russian gas pipeline, once again, something that is only possible for these investors to get rich on if the war is over and the US lifts its sanctions. Another close Trump associate is in talks about acquiring a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project.What does Ukraine get? Murphy asks and answers:
Nothing, nothing. This deal sells out Ukraine. In fact, this deal would require Ukraine to give to Russia territory that Russia doesn’t even currently control. It provides amnesty for all of the war crimes that Putin has committed...Trump’s transactional mind-set translates into a zero-sum mentality driving his trade and tariffs wars, based on his conviction that other countries are ripping off the United States, causing, in turn, self-inflicted damage through inflationary pressures and strained relations with allies and adversaries alike.
I asked Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively on the rise and fall of constitutional government, to step back and describe the Trump administration. She replied by email:
Many autocrats have used their positions for self-enrichment — Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Modi and more. But none have raised this possibility for self-enrichment to the heights we have seen here in the U.S., in less than one year of Trump. Economists have called their governments predatory states because instead of providing services, these governments use public wealth for private benefit.In the forward to a book about Hungary, “The Post-Communist Mafia State,” Scheppele wrote about the regime of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, but she said in her email that her comments apply equally well, if not more so, to the Trump presidency:
When a mafia-like organization goes from underworld to upperworld and controls the state itself, the resulting mafia state takes its newly acquired tools of governance and deploys them with the principles of a mafia — holding its own loyalists in line with rigorously enforced rules of discipline while benefiting them with the spoils of power, and threatening its enemies with criminal prosecutions, libel cases, tax audits, confiscation of property, denial of employment, surveillance and even veiled threats of violence.Along complementary lines, Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who specializes in the study of authoritarian politics, replied by email to my inquiries:
Mafias also have another quality: They do not operate through formal rules, bureaucratic structures and transparent procedures. Because mafias have the mentality of criminal organizations, even when they are part of the upperworld, they are accustomed to making their crucial decisions in the shadows. Like in families on which they are modeled, the political relatives in mafias are rewarded for loyalty, not merit, and divorces occur on grounds of disloyalty rather than bad performance. The distribution of available resources within the family rewards solidarity and punishes improvisational deviation. It is precisely not based on law.
We know that strongman rule — where power is concentrated in the leadership — is associated with greater corruption. Examples from Viktor Orban in Hungary and Alberto Fujimori in Peru illustrate this well. The more power grows concentrated, the more that we see the leader, their close friends and family and loyal business elites profit.At the extreme, Frantz continued, “this becomes a kleptocratic system.” (...)
We are observing this play out in the U.S. context, where Trump and those in his entourage are growing richer through a range of activities, from cryptocurrency to real estate deals in the Middle East.
While I agree in the main with Scheppele and Frantz, I think that in key respects Trump stands apart from Putin, Narendra Modi, Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, distinctions that get lost when they are lumped together under such categories as the rulers of mafia states or nascent kleptocracies.
The most important characteristic separating the four foreign autocrats from Trump is that they think in the long term, calculating the broad implications of their decisions, while Trump’s thinking is short term, if not childlike.
Jonathan Martin, a senior political reporter for Politico, described this Trump characteristic well in his Dec. 4 essay, “The President Who Never Grew Up”:
Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-”Big,” ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.Trump is one part Orban, Martin wrote,
making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions. But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or Trapper keepers.
Yet, as with all children, there are also outbursts in the middle of restaurants. Or in this case, the Cabinet Room.Trump’s petulance is one of the reasons Putin, armed with the discipline of a former lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., runs rings around our president. At the same time, Trump’s childishness underpins his submissive adoration of his Russian counterpart.
Finally, in an administration known for its erratic adoption and sudden abandonment of policies, Trump has demonstrated an unwavering determination to enhance the fortunes of the rich while doing little or nothing to ameliorate worsening conditions for the working-class MAGA electorate that helped bring him to power.
I wrote about this before, but the MAGA electorate stands out from other political constituencies in its disproportionate share of lower-middle-income and middle-income voters, whose families make from $30,000 to $100,000 a year.
When the effects of the “big, beautiful” domestic policy act — tax cuts and reduced spending on health care and food stamps — are combined with the effects of Trump’s tariffs, these moderate to middle-income voters come out behind.
The Yale Budget Lab calculated that virtually everyone in the $30,000 to $100,000 range would come out a net loser. Households making $75,730, roughly the middle of that range, would lose, on average, $1,060 this year...
The gains, however, are tilted heavily toward the very rich, who hold a majority of the equities. Gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution do not exceed $8,000 for any decile. For those in the sixth through ninth deciles, gains range from roughly $10,750 to $51,000. In the top decile, the gain balloons to just under $280,000.
The more than quarter-million dollars going to families in the top decile is, however, chump change compared with how well Trump and his family made out during the first months of his second term.
On Oct. 16, Cryptonews reported that “the family of U.S. President Donald Trump has generated pretax gains of around $1 billion in the past year from their diverse array of crypto-related ventures, a new investigation reveals.”
In the meantime, the Trump family’s search for ways to profit continues unabated, with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, taking the lead in the most recent ventures.
On Dec. 11, The New York Post reported that Kushner had initiated talks with Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global Management and Henry Kravis’s KKR “to assist with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine.”
At the same time, Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, has put money up in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, joining the sovereign wealth firms for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
For Trump and his family, there is no separation of holding government office and making money.
by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Daniel Stier for The New York Times. Source photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times.[ed. I'm still in denial that this country elected this guy not just once, but twice. As George W. Bush famously said "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.” ... or, whatever. But I'm actually a little hopeful these days, with a feeling that things are reorienting, new alliances being formed, new scenarios being gamed out, new calculations. Politicos smell blood in the water like sharks. Also, people don't like losing (or being on a losing team). As players and coaches in the professional and college football ranks will tell you - support can evaporate in an instant when fans decide they've given you enough of a chance. Everyone has a ' let's try something different' threshold. We'll see where it is for Trump supporters. See also: Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions (NYT:]
***
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.
***
[ed. And, as they say - there's more! From one the few token conservatives on the staff of the NY Times, see: Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief:]Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.
Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick. (...)
To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds. (...)
Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized. (...)
This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,” to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.
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