The Biggest Flirting Mistake

It’s time to examine one of the most common dating sins.

Just the other day, a family member revealed to me that a longtime friend of hers confessed his multi-year love for her. Without hearing any other details, I immediately knew that wasn’t going to go well for him. It didn’t.

Similarly, a woman I know recently asked a friend out with zero build-up and never got a real answer. To be fair to her, a guy making the same move would've gotten the same result. Her problem wasn’t her desire or desirability. She just tried to harvest a crop that hadn't sprouted yet.

I see this ALL the time. You know the trope. Escalating too quickly. Coming on too strong. This is a skill issue, and I want to talk about why it’s such a vibe killer and thwarts what might otherwise be successful pursuits, both for men and for women.

Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe

Escalating too quickly is a bad tactic for two reasons. First, if there is romantic potential, it overwhelms the connection before it’s mature enough to support that kind of load. Second, if there is no mutual connection, it nukes existing dynamics and causes people to see you differently. It creates consequences. Sometimes benign, but frequently bad! Lost friendships, disrupted social groups, etc.

For all our collective obsession with rom com meet cutes, attraction isn’t something that strikes two people like a lightning bolt at the same time. Instead, it grows inside each individual at its own pace.

Even among established friendships, it’s very easy to push too suddenly. You might’ve developed feelings over years, but that was happening in your head. If your interest isn’t signaled externally and mutually reciprocated, they might still be on day one.

This is Why Flirting Exists, Actually

This is the whole purpose of flirting! Flirting is tossing someone a consequence-free softball. They can hit it back, or they can let it go by, guilt-free.

That second part is super important. Skillful flirting gives the other person an out. It needs to be “plausibly deniable.” Immediately asking someone out forces everyone to put their cards on the table right away. But most people hate that. It requires them to be vulnerable and take a risk. There is no ambiguity nor graceful retreat.

What works much better is a genuine compliment. If you find something that you sincerely like or appreciate about someone, that sends the ambiguous signal that you a) romantically admire them from afar and are open to growing your relationship deeper or b) you authentically value your present relationship with them and need nothing more. The value lies in the ambiguity. You give the person the opportunity to choose their own adventure.

The key is being tactful while giving the other person a consequence-free out.

Ambiguity is only the starting point, though. Each time they hit the softball back, you get to throw the next one a little harder and with clearer intention. By the time anyone actually asks the other person out, the answer should basically be known. The ask should almost be a formality.

by Connor Daly, The Friendship Engineer  |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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A World Of Pain

Dr. M.R. Rajagopal is haunted by the memory of his cousin’s nightly cries echoing through his village. His cousin had no pain relief for flare-ups from a rare skin cancer on his scalp, which caused him immense pain. And his cousin was not the only person he was unable to help; his memoir details other occasions he was unable to do more for people in his care. In his early career, he was too cautious in administering morphine — an opioid — to a man who had burns on 70% of his body; he was afraid of creating an addict. For months, his patient was kept in agony with only a few hours of daily pain relief. Years later, the man bumped into Rajagopal and told him the ordeal almost destroyed him. Rajagopal was shattered — but the experience changed his approach to pain forever. Dr. Rajagopal went on to become a pioneer in modern Indian palliative medicine.

These anecdotes are from more than 40 years ago, but the patterns are hardly a thing of the past. Across rich and poor countries alike, people are still routinely failed through a lack of access to proper pain relief.

Having no access to pain relief can be agonizing. Cancer patients in Vietnam describe waiting for others to die so that they could get the leftover morphine. Kenyan patients speak of their wish to hasten their deaths due to their inability to find peace from pain. I experienced uncontrolled and agonizing pain myself when, as a child in Uruguay, I had second-degree burns on both legs. Without appropriate pain relief, my pain was more than just physical. As I counted down the hours to the next dressing change, the anxiety I experienced was just as distressing and memorable as the deep burn of the gauze coming unstuck from my raw flesh.

Some form of suffering is a core experience for most of us around the world. Depending on the country and survey, between 5% and 10% of people from the UK, US and Middle East report having pain that impedes their daily functioning. More than two-thirds of advanced cancer patients have serious pain, and recent estimates suggest over 70 million people endure at least one day of serious health-related suffering a year.

As populations grow older and we make gains against communicable disease, the burden of disease is shifting to chronic diseases like cancers and other diseases of old age, which can be painful and long-lasting. In much of the world, where people still can’t access good-quality healthcare, many conditions that are easily treatable remain serious causes of pain. We need better systems to help people deal with pain and death in a dignified way. [...]

For the Few, Not the Many

In some settings, suffering from a painful medical condition can be like a sentence to ongoing torture. This torture is far more common in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) than in rich ones. 99% of children with serious health-related suffering are in LMICs. The lack of treatment for pain is especially common for the most severe types of pain, such as postsurgical and cancer pain. In Haiti, for instance, 99% of severe pain relief needs are unmet.

Worldwide, the top 10% of countries by opioid consumption consume as much as 90% of all distributed opioids (converted into doses with the potency of morphine).

To put this into perspective, one paper estimates that the average yearly controlled opioid consumption is 32 mg per person worldwide, but Germans consume around 480 mg per person. Note that this is not due to Germans overconsuming opioids; it is simply that pain elsewhere is not treated.

Many issues in global health and development can be boiled down to lack of money, but the lack of pain control is not one of them. Morphine is among the cheapest essential medicines out there; oral morphine for 10 days costs about the same as a loaf of bread. Instead, lack of pain management is driven by a fear of opioids’ side effects, accentuated by the opioid epidemic in the United States and the closely related War on Drugs.

Traditionally, clinicians have avoided using opioids as much as possible, as they can cause central nervous system depression. This reduces the rate of breathing and in doing so could potentially hasten death. As recently as 2012, a third of medical ethics educators in the United States believed this to be the case. However, while it is true that morphine and other opioids have a narrow therapeutic index, meaning that the safety margin for their use is fairly small, it is not true that they hasten death when correctly administered.

Doctors’ fears of overusing opioids have only increased with time. Opioids are addictive, and overuse is dangerous. The United States has experienced significant public health harm from the overprescription of opioids, with the opioid crisis peaking at perhaps 80,000 opioid-caused deaths per year. The start of the crisis was caused by the unscrupulous drug pushing of pharmaceutical companies for types of pain where opioids are not very helpful. In response, doctors became much more hesitant to prescribe. Indeed, doctors could even be prosecuted for overprescription.

But while this first wave of the opioid crisis in the U.S. was driven by the prescribing dynamics of doctors, this was not the lasting mechanism for increased opioid deaths into the 2020s. Between 2011 and 2021, opioid deaths tripled, even as opioid prescriptions decreased by nearly 40% during the same period. Pain medication might have kicked off the epidemic, but it was not the lasting driver. [...]

It is true that prescribing opioid pain medications comes with risks. Estimates of the true rate of opioid use disorder as a consequence of prescribing are very heterogeneous. One study has estimated the prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use at 9.3% in patients with non-cancer pain, while other studies estimated the risk as 0.2% for individuals with no preexisting addiction issues. Even a 0.2% risk of addiction is not trivial, but it must be weighed against the harm of leaving patients in debilitating pain.

Crucially, opioid pain medication must be treated like all other possibly addictive pain medications — worth the risk in some circumstances, but not in others. Different cases require different approaches. And when opioids are used in end-of-life settings, there are fewer concerns about addiction — if a patient is dying, even addiction might be a reasonable choice to make the last few months of their life more bearable.

But despite these nuances, over time, regulation has tended to tighten restrictions on pain relief, further constraining who can access relief.

Restrictions begin at the international level. Countries must report their need for opiates to the International Narcotics Control Board before importing them. Unfortunately, countries often underestimate their own needs for opioids and fear being seen as lax on drug control. Thus, they rarely choose to deviate from their current level of imports — even if it is far too low. Furthermore, since pain medication is not seen as “lifesaving,” it is an easy place for governments to cut corners. [...]

In many countries, the bureaucratic procedures one must follow to prescribe opioids remain difficult to navigate, too few clinicians are allowed to prescribe and updates in regulation take too long to trickle down to clinical practice.

Instead, clinicians lean heavily on ibuprofen and paracetamol. However, these medications are only suitable for fairly mild pain; for postsurgical pain and cancer pain, they barely make a dent. [...]

What Would It Take to Prioritize Pain?

Even in countries with excellent medication availability, progress in palliative care is often stuck for deeply human reasons: misconceptions, regulation, governance and lack of training. The barrier to good care is not medicine innovation but rather the lack of prioritization of pain control as a key part of treatment. Moreover, we need to change how people conceptualize palliative care. It is viewed as reserved for frail and dying people, which is perhaps why in the United States fewer than one in five young adults with advanced cancer get appropriate palliative care as part of their treatment.

Worldwide, most clinicians are still not properly trained in pain management and pain management specialists are very rare. Mozambique, a country of 35 million people, has just two physicians specializing in pain management. Zimbabwe, a country of 17 million people, has just two pain specialists. Pain management is often viewed as unimportant.

by Morgan Fairless, In Development |  Read more:

Image: By reference

[ed. Contrast this with the article below about the UK voting down assisted suicide. Because of Purdue Pharma and a few bad actors/pill mills, it's now almost impossible to get an opioid prescription. The pendulum has swung too far and millions of people are suffering. Examples of medical providers withholding opioids for people with terminal illnesses because they might get addicted in their last few months is insane.]

Jean Paul Gaultier
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Some Thoughts on the Mid-Term Election

The Trump Decade Is Over. And a new chapter in American politics begins.

1. This was a generational wipeout for Republicans.

The Democratic Party’s margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats is expected to be about 13 percentage points. That would be the largest Democratic rout in at least half a century, according to the New York Times. Two years after several news outlets announced that Trump had created a vibe shift in American history, we’re looking at a Watergate-level swing back to the left. [chart]

2. It was also a ‘generational’ moment for Democrats.

James Talarico is 37. Jon Ossoff is 39. Abdul El-Sayed is 42. Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand is 44. The political order that has governed America for most of my adult life has been overwhelmingly dominated by Baby Boomers. But the candidate class is changing. The “Mr. Brightside caucus” of Millennial libs has an opportunity to write a new chapter in American politics.

3. Donald Trump is very good at running for president, but he is very bad at being president.

The problem with Donald Trump is not simple. It’s not just that he’s a bad president whose final pitch to voters involved talking endlessly about the shape of men’s butts and the ins and outs of White House renovations. It’s not just that he’s devoted himself to corrupt self-enrichment, spending his afternoons coating the White House ballroom in gold leaf while Americans struggle to afford gas. It’s not just that Americans increasingly oppose every single policy priority of the administration. It’s not just that he responded to frustrations about border control by dialing up a brutal immigration enforcement policy that destroyed 100 percent of his gains among Hispanic voters. It’s not just that he won a cost of living election in 2024 and then moved immediately to raise import prices with a historic tariff regime and then followed that up by sending gas and diesel prices higher by invading Iran in a military action that at once violated two campaign promises—to do something about high prices and to do nothing regarding military involvement in the Middle East. No, the deeper problem is that, on top of all of this, the man just plain sucks at candidate selection. Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for insufficient loyalty and backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed of winning in January 2025.

That Donald Trump is a unique political talent cannot be denied. But what kind of political talent is he, really? The president is now 2-0 running as an outsider trying to wrest the presidency from Democratic hands (2016 and 2024) but 0-3 in elections where he is already the president (2018, 2020, 2026). In an age of anti-incumbency, Trump is the epitome of the incumbent curse, a generational genius of charismatic negativity who has no idea what to do with the reins of power once he seizes them—other than marshal the machinery of the federal government to drive public opinion against him. [ed. See also: this (Nov. 6, 2026).]

4. Democrats, don’t lie to yourselves: This is not a permanent realignment. The middle is molten.

Two years after almost every demographic shifted right, literally every demographic shifted toward Democrats, according to the New York Times. The biggest shifts were among voters under 30 (+32%), men under 45 (+31%), and Hispanics (+28%). Two years ago, some commentators—like me!—speculated that Trump had captured young voters and made serious inroads among Hispanics. But on Tuesday, those groups moved toward Democrats more dramatically than any other. [chart]

Is it a permanent realignment? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that, in the 2020s—an era of high inflation, high interest rates, low institutional trust, global crises, and existential fears about climate change and AI—there are a lot of loosely attached independent voters who can toggle from party to party. Young voters and nonwhite voters (who are, themselves, disproportionately younger than whites) are not so much punching tickets to join a party as they are leasing one-year terms to vote for one group, only to punish them in the next election if things don’t improve. 

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa

[ed. See also: Seventeen thoughts on an epic repudiation of Donald Trump (Slow Boring).]

Go Fish

I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.

I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.

I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors. Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.

Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor. The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.

Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.

The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.

Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.

This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.

Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.

On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.

Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.

Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.

Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.

“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.

“That’s Sarah.”

“Who?”

“Sarah.”

“Which one’s Sarah?”

“They’re all Sarah.”

“?”

“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”

“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.

Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.

by Grace Glass, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Sasha Fishman, Plastic Trapped Love (Interpretive Hexagon), detail. 2025
[ed. I started out as a Tech II, but not doing this stuff. So much opportunity back then. Within five years I was doing department-wide coordination and state policy on federal oil and gas projects throughout Alaska.]

Can Using a Dumber Phone Cure ‘Brain Rot’?

Dear readers, I have a confession: I am suffering from an ailment that the younger ones call “brain rot,” the inability to think deeply after too much scrolling on my phone. These days, it’s tough to even finish a book.

Plenty of people have this problem. So many, it has birthed a category of minimalist tech products striving to rid us of distractions, from the Ai Pin, the now defunct artificially intelligent lapel pin that took notes, to phones with only basic features.

The latest example, the $600 Light Phone III, from a Brooklyn start-up, is a stripped-down phone that does barely anything. The newest version, which began shipping in March and is set for a broader release in July, can place calls, send texts, take photos, show map directions, play music and podcasts and not do much else.

There is no web browser. There is also no app store, meaning there’s no Uber to hail a ride, no Slack and no social media. There isn’t even email.

“You use it when you need to, and when you put it back it disappears in your life,” said Kaiwei Tang, the chief executive of Light, the start-up that has developed multiple iterations of the Light Phone over the last nine years. “We get a lot of customers telling us they feel less stressed out, they become more productive, they become creative.”

I was curious to see if the Light Phone could cure me of brain rot, so I used it as my primary phone for a week. There were moments I enjoyed it. While waiting for a train, resting at the gym or eating alone, I was not tempted to stare at the phone screen, and I felt more mindful of my surroundings. Phone calls sounded nice and clear. The maps app did a fine job navigating me around town.

It reminded me of simpler times when we used phones primarily to converse before putting them away to focus on other tasks.

But over the week, the downsides of a dumber phone chipped away at my enjoyment, and over all I felt more stressed and less capable. I suddenly found myself unable to get into a train station, look up the name of a new restaurant or control my garage door.

Some of that has less to do with the Light Phone itself, which is a so-so product, and more to do with how society as a whole has become dependent on advanced smartphone features.

Here’s how my week went running errands, commuting and going out with a lower-tech phone.

by Brian X. Chen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Andria Lo For The New York Times
[ed. This review could be completely turned around by asking kids who are smartphone restricted how they might feel (even if they can't control garage doors).]

Laser Mosquito Air Defense System

A Powerful Mosquito-Hunting Laser Uses A.I. to Zap Winged Pests

For anyone kept awake by the infernal whine of mosquitoes, artificial intelligence may be coming to the rescue — armed with a laser.

A Chinese company has started marketing a $1,000 A.I.-enabled device that tracks mosquitoes in flight and burns their wings off. It uses technology found in self-driving cars to pinpoint its targets, while relying on A.I. to decide when it is safe to fire.

During a recent demonstration at the offices of Photon Matrix, the company behind the device, it appeared remarkably effective. The white, nearly brick-size machine quickly zapped mosquito after mosquito, each bursting into a green or blue flame with a tiny pop.

For anyone who has ever wished mosquitoes a horrible death, this is a strikingly high-tech way to make that wish a reality. The laser delivers a gruesome end, though not a quick one. Mosquitoes whose wings have burned off can take hours or even days to die, lying on the ground and twitching slightly, said Wang Chuan, chief executive and founder of Photon Matrix, based in Changzhou, about 100 miles northwest of Shanghai.

After the demonstration, I examined the fallen mosquitoes. The wings appeared to be gone, but their legs and bodies looked intact. None could fly, even when I waved my hand directly over them.

But there is a potentially dangerous catch. A laser powerful enough to disable a mosquito can also damage the human eye.

The device, the Laser Mosquito Air Defense System, uses a Class 4 laser, the most powerful classification, typically reserved for industrial applications. Such lasers can cause retinal injuries in less than a second, and their sale and use are tightly regulated.

While the United States leads in developing the most advanced A.I. models, the device shows how quickly China is embedding powerful computing in consumer products. The technology also has military potential. It’s not hard to imagine how a system that tracks and shoots down mosquitoes today could be adapted to target drones tomorrow.

Mr. Wang said that the company was seeking regulatory approval in China, Europe and the United States and that he believed Chinese approval was close.

In the United States, manufacturers can begin selling new laser devices after submitting paperwork to the Food and Drug Administration, which does not test the products, said Ken Barat, a former laser safety officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who oversaw the drafting of the world’s technical standards for research lasers.

Mr. Barat said Photon Matrix’s multiple safeguards could make the device safe. But he cautioned that a Class 4 laser designed to focus on something as tiny as a mosquito could pack “a lot of energy” into a small space.

Photon Matrix initially tested less powerful Class 3 lasers but found they could not reliably disable mosquitoes, Mr. Wang said. The company chose a Class 4 laser, limiting each burst to one-hundredth of a second — long enough, he said, to burn off the wings while reducing, but not eliminating, the risk of eye damage. The wings, which have little ability to absorb heat, burn off before the mosquito’s body is heavily affected.

To protect people and pets, an A.I.-enabled camera recognizes them and prevents the laser from firing. The system also identifies reflective surfaces that could send beams bouncing in unpredictable directions. An infrared system provides illumination so the camera can operate at night. A separate radar system detects movement by people or pets in the laser’s path, even in total darkness.

by Keith Bradsher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Qilai Shen for The New York Times

[ed. It's AI, what could go wrong? Actually, this almost makes me feel sorry for the little guys. Almost.]

via:

U.K. Parliament Votes Down Assisted Suicide Bill

U.K. lawmakers... voted down a bill to legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill adults in England and Wales.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.

The bill passed the Commons last year but unelected lawmakers in the House of Lords effectively filibustered the legislation by introducing more than 1,200 amendments. Friday’s vote ends a push by proponents of assisted suicide to revive the bill.

The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]

During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.

“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”

Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.

“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.

“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”

by Kamden Mulder, National Review |  Read more:

Image: Jack Taylor/Reuters
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]

Why Does Culture Feel So Samey? A Walking Tour Reveals the Math.

On a recent afternoon, Lauren Leek stood on a typical London shopping street, in front of a Victorian-era pub and a predictable array of corporate-owned food, drink and retail outlets: Pret a Manger, Starbucks, Joe & the Juice, Subway.

“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”

Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline “Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,” that analyzed the “flattening” effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture. The post was shared and discussed by widely read technology commentators such as Cory Doctorow and John Naughton.

Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous “monoculture” in which, she writes in her Substack post, “we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”

Leek’s insight into everyday consumer behavior is, in some ways, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 collection of essays, “Mythologies.” Back then, Barthes used the recently developed discipline of semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, to turn things as disparate and as seemingly banal as soap powder, wrestling, margarine and automobiles into subjects of serious cultural consideration.

But unlike Barthes, who was steeped in the French philosophical tradition, Leek is a London School of Economics-educated data cruncher. She uses her own algorithms, digital mapping and text analysis to show how large language models are making consumer culture, wherever it happens to be, feel the same.

A recent excursion with Leek in southwest London to experience her analysis in action began in the Prince of Wales pub. The bar is owned by one of Britain’s biggest brewers and hospitality retailers, which runs 2,600 sites across the country. This British company is in turn owned by a Hong Kong-listed property development and investment conglomerate.
It was just after noon, and the old-fashioned wall décor and wooden furniture lent the pub a traditional feel. Multiple TV screens were showing the buildup to a Premiere League soccer match. Generic mood music played in the background.

“Often these pub chains have playlists that artificial intelligence automatically adjusts according to the sound level,” Leek said. “If the pub isn’t very full, it will play chilled background music,” she explained. “When it gets louder, the music gets louder.”

Pop music is an area where Leek’s research has revealed how sharply culture has “flattened” in recent years. Her Substack post includes a graph that tracks the verbal richness of lyrics from over 4,000 songs in Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 hits from 1950 to 2015. Since the early 1960s, Leek found, the range of distinct words has contracted more than a quarter, while the number of repeated lines has increased nearly a third.

“Streaming has created very concrete incentives — pay starts after 30 seconds,” Leek said. “A repeated hook in a song is the rational response.”

Leek studied the pub’s menu. It included staples such as chicken wings, burgers, and fish and chips, all of which could be ordered via a QR code. “Pub chains get the data from people who have previously ordered. They typically aggregate ordering data across their sites to optimize their menus. Everything has been analyzed,” Leek said. “Local differences have been taken away. Quirkiness is taken out.”

Leek’s tour moved on to an upmarket cafe and bakery nearby. It is one of a chain of more than 150 in London majority owned by an American private equity company that manages more than $200 billion of assets. A cappuccino costs 4.40 pounds, about $5.90.

As a steady stream of customers ordered coffees and pastries, Leek explained that chain stores use specialized site-section algorithms to choose the optimum locations for their branches.

“They use public, open socio-economic data, like small-area census statistics. They have their own data, which neighborhood restaurants don’t have access to. And they have their own data analysis teams,” Leek said.

For Leek, the key to the flattening of consumer culture lies in the mathematics of algorithms and their methodology of next-token prediction. Language models like ChatGPT write one small chunk of text, called a “token,” at a time and predict and select the most likely next token at each step. The models have a “temperature” setting, a set of parameters that control how adventurous that pick is. At “temperature zero,” the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time.

“It’s predictable and safe,” Leek said. “When the model is uncertain, it still has to make a prediction, so it always falls back on the most expected answer.” That means there is no randomness, no surprises. Leek argues that algorithms are pushing culture toward a blandly predictable, mathematically determined temperature zero.

“The algorithm is making predictions for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist,” she said. “Each person has some niche preferences, and the niches differ. A system that optimizes for the average of everyone’s tastes produces something that nobody particularly dislikes but nobody particularly loves,” she added. “It’s built for a person who doesn’t exist.”

by Scott Reyburn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joanna Yee
[ed. I can't blame it all on algorithms. This process has been going on for decades. Every street (save for whatever underlying unique architecture used to exist), mall, airport, hotel, restaurant, clothing store, bar, etc. all looks the same. Why go to Paris or London, Japan, Dublin, or even China, if you're just going to see the same chains everywhere? In fact, it's probably harder than ever to find a city that still retains its unique character unpolluted by the likes of Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, 7-11, Louis Vitton and the rest of their ilk these days. Corporations have the deep pockets to buy the best trafficked locations. See also: We already live in 'clone towns' - AI is making it worse (Observer).]

*****

In this terminology, a “home town” is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A “clone town”, in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a “monochrome strip of global and national chains”. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country. Of the towns surveyed, the NEF concluded: 41% were clone towns, 33% were home towns and 26% were “border towns”, meaning somewhere in between.

This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.

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[ed. ... you don't know what you've got till it's gone.]

An Easy Fix to Expand Housing Inventory

Cheaper manufactured homes could be having a moment, if only states can catch up. A new law could make manufactured homes cheaper, but old zoning barriers could slow their expansion.

For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.

This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.

But first, experts say, states have to examine outdated regulations that are blocking the manufactured home industry’s potential. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing initiative estimates that 30 states might need to change their regulations to align with the new federal law.

Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.

“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”

Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site.

They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.

“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.”

In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals.

“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”

Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes. [...]

Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.

For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. [...]

In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.

“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’”

 
Changing zoning, mortgage rules

Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing.

“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said.

One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. [...]

Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.

“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.

by Robbie Sequeira, Stateline | Read more:
Image: Jon King/Michigan Advance
[ed. See also: A New ROAD for Factory-Built Homes: States Must Act in Coming Year (Pew).]

Could A.I. Be Conscious? It’s Definitely Possible.

At a cozy bar in Manhattan, I recently had a first date with a software engineer who works for one of the big technology companies. Given my interest in artificial intelligence, I thought we might hit it off. But when I told him that I work on moral problems related to A.I., including the possibility that it might become conscious, he barely suppressed a laugh.

There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Though my research requires a fairly detailed understanding of L.L.M.s, no one, not even their designers, entirely knows how L.L.M.s work. In retrospect, I should have asked my date if he understood how consciousness works. Because while he seemed to think that I had an inflated sense of A.I. capabilities, I wonder whether he has an inflated sense of what consciousness requires.

No one can credibly claim to understand consciousness — that inner, subjective, what-it-is-like quality of our mental experiences. Despite centuries of investigation, scientists and philosophers still disagree about what consciousness is. Some theories hold that it is a uniquely biological phenomenon, requiring particular kinds of cellular activity and electrical signaling that computers lack. But other theories hold that consciousness depends not on what a system is made of but on how it functions. According to these theories, an A.I. system could, at least in principle, be conscious.

In a 2022 survey of consciousness scientists, only 3 percent claimed that machines could never be conscious. More than two-thirds said machines could be conscious or probably could be.

Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.

This may seem like an imperfect approach, but it’s the best one available. I have spent the past decade thinking about animal minds and the related ethical implications. Animals cannot tell us in words what they experience, but we can observe other evidence of consciousness, including how animals behave, what internal mechanisms produce that behavior (such as their nervous systems) and how those mechanisms evolved.

With A.I., we can look for similar kinds of evidence. We can look at what a system says and does, bearing in mind that it is trained on human data. We can look at how it works — whether it performs the kinds of functions that are associated with human or animal consciousness. And we can look at how its capacities emerge over time: Did they result from training pressures similar to the evolutionary pressures that may have led to consciousness in humans and other animals? Each kind of evidence is limited on its own, but together they can provide a more complete picture.

Consider a recent study by Anthropic of its Claude chatbot. According to one influential theory, consciousness arises in humans when information enters what neuroscientists call a “global workspace” in the brain, from which that information is broadcast across the brain for use in reporting, reasoning and other functions. Anthropic’s researchers found evidence that Claude, on its own, developed a set of internal representations that are similarly available to Claude across a range of tasks. This system may be partly analogous to a global workspace in humans.

The Anthropic researchers also looked at Claude’s behavior. When they swapped one concept for another inside the workspace, Claude’s reasoning and answers changed accordingly. When they suppressed the workspace, Claude’s descriptions of its experience became flat and mechanical. The fact that Claude’s workspace developed without being designed by humans suggests that brains and L.L.M.s might have arrived independently at a similar solution to a similar problem: how to make the right information available for reasoning.

None of this establishes that Claude is conscious, and Anthropic is not claiming that it is. But the study illustrates how evidence can be collected, and it demonstrates that some evidence already exists.

by Toni Sims, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy; Marc Sanders Foundation

[ed. One thing for sure, the first date guy definitely did not display any evidence of consciousness.]

Georg Friedrich Haas: 11.000 Saiten (excerpt) (2020)

The minimal pitch interval a human ear can distinguish is about 2% of a semitone (the interval between two adjacent keys on a piano). So, one way to get a seamless continuum would be to make a giant piano with 50 times as many keys. In 11,000 Strings, Georg Friedrich Haas offers a simpler solution: get 50 pianos, tune each of them 2% of a semitone higher than the previous one, and arrange them in a big circle around the audience. - via:

[ed. Quite strange.]

The Crocfather

From Croc: How I Invented the World’s Most Popular Shoe, Became a Massive Success, and Almost Destroyed Myself—in 15 Easy Lessons, which will be published this month by HarperCollins Leadership.

I partied with Fleetwood Mac, delivered pizza to Joe Montana, kidded around with Robin Williams. I have three-star generals on speed dial. I raced cars at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I was in the witness-protection program, more or less.

I’ve enjoyed the company of more beautiful, intoxicating women than I can count. One thing I can count: I’ve been around the world twenty-eight times.

I live at crazy speed, but I’m still here. And with all those accomplishments, there are … things. Other things. Of course there are. How could there not?

I lost so many friends. Though death, I get—unavoidable. But the ones who turned their backs? Or altered the story? Or hopped off the gravy train because they felt they were owed more gravy? Or got all holier-than-thou? One of my friends banned me from all his restaurants, including some favorite Boulder hangouts. To be fair, that rejection I deserved.

The love of my life and I have not been together for decades.

The woman I was most serious with, post-Elizabeth, once joined a lawsuit against me.

Maybe the success of Crocs and the prestige and notoriety and especially the crazy money had something to do with my nearly destroying myself. I can’t help but think of the roulette wheel of life: I wanted a good boat shoe—simply that—so I walked into a Tommy Bahama store in Miami and asked if they had what I wanted. They did not. Thanks, Tommy. If the answer had been yes, I might never have created Crocs. You would be reading something else right now.

It was the year I became the milk thief.

Back when milk was delivered to your door, I stole from the porches and side entrances of customers on my paper route who were away on vacation.

I realize that’s more than breaking rules—and in fact, it’s breaking the law. Hear me out, though. I couldn’t afford it myself. I was hungry. The milk would have gone bad.

Some of it I drank. The entrepreneur in me got the bright idea to simply give some of my stash to Scott, one of my older brothers, in exchange for him not beating me up. I used the bottle caps to get a discount at the movies. I returned the empties to the owners’ porches so they could get the nickel for the return. It’s not as if I didn’t understand fairness.

They had no idea that I was the one stealing their milk. They knew me only as an enterprising, disciplined paperboy.

I didn’t just break rules. I made up my own. When we were in San Francisco, the 49ers football team was king. They won several Super Bowls in the years I was there, and there were many stars—first and foremost, Joe Montana, the quarterback; but also Ronnie Lott, the future Hall of Fame cornerback; Steve Young, the future star quarterback; Roger Craig, the great running back; and Dwight Clark, the wide receiver who made “The Catch.” I knew where they all lived—that sounds creepy, but everyone in the Bay Area pretty much knew where their football heroes lived—and they weren’t far from one of my stores. I’d delivered pizzas to some of their homes before, so my next idea wasn’t all that far-fetched: whenever the 49ers played out of town, that Sunday I would deliver pizzas to a couple of players’ homes, where their wives and children and friends were almost certainly gathered to watch the game on TV. No one had ordered the pizza. I showed up right before game time with several pies.

“I’m sorry, we didn’t order this.”

“Well, someone did, and it’s all paid for, tip included. Here you go.”

And of course they took it, because who turns down hot pizza and cold drinks that show up right before kickoff on Sunday? For free?

At Domino’s, from the early Eighties to the late Nineties, we outworked everyone, and we out-enjoyed them, too, Joel and me. It wasn’t a competition exactly. It was How much life could you suck out of life? Okay, maybe it was a competition, because I wasn’t going to let anyone beat me at having a good time. I wanted anyone else’s best moment of the year to be a Tuesday afternoon for me.

We had the coolest clientele. We had a regular contingent of gay customers who thought Joel was cute and hoped they could persuade him out of being straight. Occasionally they had it in for me too. For some of the men, their type was almost anyone. Joel and I might be out in the Domino’s car on delivery—two guys in their twenties in Domino’s uniforms—and guys would yell at us from their cars, nice cars. And when I started making serious money and drove around in my red convertible, I got even more of that. Not a lot of restraint then.

Everyone was doing drugs in the late Eighties, or at least it seemed that way. Powder cocaine if you were rich, smokable crack if you were poor. San Francisco was a snowstorm. Probably most of America, too.

Scotty knew chemistry, but I knew fashion. And I knew something was going on here. It was sometime between midnight and 3 am in the Caribbean, and I was the only person awake on the boat.

Still, I knew this was heading in the right direction. I drilled some holes in the top to let the foot breathe (more on that later). There was no mirror nearby but I’m pretty sure a light bulb was floating above my head.

A shoe. A boat shoe, actually. A very weird-looking shoe, one that looked different from every other kind of shoe, but one I was sure boat lovers would wear if we could figure out a way to make it. When we got to shore, Scotty and I found a plastic clog in a hardware store and started drilling it, seeing if it would support holes and not scuff surfaces.

Nope. It did not do what we needed.

I did not realize that pursuing this idea would explode in our faces over and over and over—literally.

by George Boedecker Jr., Harper's | Read more:
Image: via:

[ed. See also: Todd Snider talking about his buddy George Boedecker (YouTube).]

Okiie Hashimoto
via:

Childhood and Education: Voice Without Exit

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school.

Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so.

The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]

New York City PS 307

Nikole sent her daughter Najya to PS 307 entirely by her own choice.

She felt, by her own description, an obligation to her sense of the common good at the expense of her daughter.

Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

Yeah, pretty much. As many others said, it was a very brave and praiseworthy decision to write this post. It does not make up for the events that gave her the opportunity to write it. I won’t get into the minefield of trying to understand her logic, except that she put various ideological abstractions ahead of her daughter’s education.

Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps

I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.

Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”

It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults.

This is where she fully loses me. This happens, and then she sends her daughter back for second grade. That’s all the information you need. You have a neighborhood public school that isn’t this one. What the hell? And yes, it is both the adults and the kids, both acting that way in part because of each other.

She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?

PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent

Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.

That’s fraud. And also rather evil. Nikole has the types of connections that can start investigations. Why are we only learning about this now? Like, what?

Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?

But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?

Moving In Unison

The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.

A Good School

Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied.

A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.

Najya got into a ‘good’ school with strong academics, and as one would expect was overwhelmed because she’d previously never even been assigned homework. She’d failed the Algebra test the year before, but Nikole assumed that was just bad test taking, rather than (of course) that the school had failed to teach her math for years. Unison does ‘Algebra for all’ as a supposed college gateway, and the way they did it was they just passed everyone without teaching the kids algebra.

What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?

The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Unison had eliminated homework because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement, and that assigning it often sets up for failure students who are so academically behind that they cannot do the work on their own.

Doesn’t this challenge the entire educational system at its core? We are basically saying that nothing matters, and all that work is for show, unless you need to be on some sort of cutting edge or elite track.

Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.

The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): One day in June as I was immersed in writing this essay, my phone rang. It was Najya. She’s now 16 and was finishing the final weeks of her sophomore year. She was making her daily call for lunch money, a ritual I created to force her to check in with me once during the school day.

Okay, that’s it. Forcing your 16-year-old to call you in the middle of every school day or she starves? Nikole is a monster.

The Project Was Ideological

It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.

Jack: In all the talk about NHJ sending her child to a high-poverty school, I think it’s been under-mentioned: she could have chosen her neighborhood school. She did not. She hand-picked a school with the demographics, amenities, and faculty she wanted, then used private tutoring.

Of course her daughter was mad! Her mom used her resources just as every rich parent does, choosing a well-resourced school in line with her values, but the values were “My child should be in a school with poor kids and receive private tutoring to compensate for bad instruction.”

Hostage theory, except the only hostage-taker is a parent with self-contradictory values around education.

She started the private tutoring when her daughter was in fourth grade and continued bragging about the approach through 2024.

Jack Despain Zhou: There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.

The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.

But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.

She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private.

She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.

It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories.  [...]

Null Hypothesis Watch

Manhattan Institute: NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1.

We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better. Underfunding and racism aren’t causing schools to fail.

Jack: This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?  [...]

The Two Big Scandals

I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.

First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:

Peachy Keenan: Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don’t assign homework, don’t grade tests, don’t respond to parents emails or phone calls, don’t supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don’t know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work?

Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede?

Why isn’t she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year?

Why isn’t she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved?

We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL.

The second is the one that no one seems to notice.

Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.

Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Wayne Lawrence/NY Times

[ed. See also: American students are getting dumber (SB).]