You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits

One easy trick to make yourself smarter.

Most wisdom comes from tangible experience in our wide world. It comes from human relationships, from travel, from living and loving and fighting and falling in the dirt. There is little wisdom to be had from spending years and years reading stuff on the internet. A single hard-won lesson, though, which I have learned after wasting an embarrassing amount of time reading and writing about politics, may help to save you a good amount of angst.

You can just ignore the bad pundits. You don’t have to read them. You can just carry right on with your life.

You don’t have to talk about the bad pundits. You don’t have to engage with them. You don’t have to craft painstaking responses to their vapid arguments. You don’t have to take them seriously. Their existence creates no obligation for you. Each new piece they produce generates no appointment on your calendar. The law does not accord them any reservation on your attention. They have no inherent power over you. Instead, they get their power from you. You give it to them, for free. You, who fancy yourself their enemy, provide the fuel for their careers.

Instead of doing that, you are free not to do it.

“Ugh, the New York Times opinion page is so awful!” Don’t read it then. “I can’t stand the bullshit that Bret Stephens wrote!” Don’t read it then. “I hate the sanctimony of David Brooks! I hate the smugness of Matt Yglesias! I hate the fascists at the Wall Street Journal, the bootlickers at the Washington Post, and the clowns at the Free Press!”

Don’t read them then. Problem solved.

You may interpret this as me telling you to shelter yourself from challenging opinions. Not at all. I encourage everyone to read widely and freely. When you read widely and freely, you are able to familiarize yourself with the work of many people. What you will come to realize is that many or even most of those people are not worth reading. Some because they don’t have much to say, and others because they are consistently wrong in a way that, once you figure it out, allows you to project their opinions into the future without needing to constantly check in on them. You can move on. You gave them their audition, and they didn’t pass. Not many will! This is all as it should be. You have a limited amount of time to read and most of that time should be spent reading books and the second most time should be spent reading facts, such as news. Opinion writing that does not prove its value is crowding out other things that have a much higher chance of being worthwhile.

Why does this seem so hard for so many of us in practice? Because we are all haunted by the demons of prestige. Prestige, a false god, tells us that a person’s work is valuable because of their position, their title, rather than because of the work itself. In the case of certain powerful people, this may be true. (It’s worth knowing what Elon Musk and Donald Trump think because it may directly affect many lives, notwithstanding the fact that they are morons.) In the case of writers, however, this is always false. Good work is valuable and bad work is not. The understandable tendency of many people to use prestige as a heuristic to guide their reading often leads them down a dead end road of frustration. [...]

Writers must be taken seriously if the quality of their work demands it and if not, not. That’s it! There are many ways to be a worthwhile pundit. Some are experts on specific subjects, and some get access to very important people’s thoughts, and some are gifted at distilling many disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and some are funny, a quality which justifies itself. My point is not that famous pundits are never worth reading, but rather that they are never worth reading just because of who they are. Look at this transcript of Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat discussing their own careers. One thing you may notice is that both of these people have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but sitting at a computer blogging. Does that mean that they don’t know anything? Not at all. Then again, does it mean they do know anything? Also no. “Winning the pundit lottery with a New York Times gig” tells you nothing about whether these people are worthy of your attention. They must earn your respect, and their right to your time, solely with the quality of their work. That’s all they have! And you can judge that for yourself. Any further temptation to check for them because of the positions they hold is an error of judgment, by you. [...]

The more subtle and substantial danger of patronizing idiot pundits is that the accumulated weight of attention that we grant them bestows them with actual influence, which they use to make the world worse, as you would expect. This is bad enough when it’s, you know, Matt Yglesias morphing into a Democratic Party power broker; it is even worse when it is a calculated political effort, of the sort that Rahm Emanuel is trying to pull off now by parlaying his stint as a monotonous Wall Street Journal columnist into a presidential campaign.

James Carville is a wheezing old coot. Why is he influential? Because we all pay attention to him! Also, Donald Trump. Think about it. Depriving this sort of person of the material benefits of having a large audience is a patriotic act.

If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it. But if you are a regular person who finds yourself continually getting mad at the idiot pundits you continue to read—stop!

The idea that if you want to be a well informed person you are obligated to read all the stuff that certain prestigious writers and outlets publish is not much different from the idea that since McDonald’s is very popular, you are obligated to stop there and eat a Big Mac every day. To keep your finger on the pulse. This, just like the belief that you must read every Jonathan Chait story, will eventually give you a heart attack. Embrace ignorance of dreary idiocy. It is the kind of ignorance that makes you smarter.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; and, Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses (HTW):]

***

"If you create things for the public, you will get yelled at by dumbasses. Indeed, this is the primary experience of being the sort of writer that I am. If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else. Your high-minded arguments will be dismissed as inscrutable, your simple arguments will be dismissed as unsophisticated, and you, personally, will be dismissed as the sort of lightweight who should try getting a real job. Ever thought of that? [...]

America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.

The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed."

Tell Me What “Socialism” Means

Before you tell me if it’s good or bad.

You may have noticed that political arguments often have a frustrating, circular nature. Charges and countercharges, points and counterpoints—all get made without ever seeming to converge on a shared reality. It may seem that you and your political opponents are talking past one another. Much of this, in electoral politics, is due to the fact that the discussions are in fact bad faith attacks that seek only to undermine, rather than to reach an agreement. But even good faith attempts to find common ground with political opponents frequently sink in these murky waters.

When this happens, stop and ask: What are we talking about? Are we talking about the same thing here? What is the definition of the terms that we are allegedly debating? Frequently, you will find that you and your counterpart each have a personal definition of the thing that you are arguing about, and those definitions are not the same. Your argument has not been about political substance at all; it has been about the meaning of a particular term. Failure to settle on a shared definition before you start the debate means that the debate can just go on forever in opposite directions, like two fighter jets flying past one another at different altitudes and wondering why they never get a chance to shoot down the enemy.

Nowhere in American politics does this stupid dilemma manifest itself more than the purported debate over “socialism.” Oh, you have opinions on “socialism?” And whether it is evil? Or great? And you would like to yell about them? Let me stop you right there. What exactly does that mean?

The majority of mainstream political discourse about socialism—and almost all of the discourse emanating from Republicans—is just bad faith, lowest-common-denominator red baiting, paltry attempts to wring some political advantage from the still-glowing embers of decades of Cold War anticommunism rhetoric that has soaked deep into the minds of anyone born before the turn of the century. None of this is a genuine attempt to discuss what socialism really is and what it might mean here, so I will ignore it. (A benefit of being a How Things Work reader is that I respect you enough to skip the many paragraphs of undeserved credulousness that other, less honest outlets would feel obligated to pay to this bullshit.)

What about those who do want to discuss the issue? Those who believe that they are trying to communicate something useful about whether or not socialism is desirable? In aggregate, I’m afraid, this has become one of the least productive mishmashes of disparate meanings in living memory.

Liberal billionaire Nick Hanauer writes that “Neither socialism nor MAGA is the answer” to America’s inequality crisis. Instead, he advocates for higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power. He puts forward his proposal for “market humanism” as a counterpoint to what is on offer from politicians like Zohran Mamdani, who supports higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power.

Bernie Sanders is America’s most famous socialist politician. He became popular by calling for higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power. When Elizabeth Warren was running for president against Bernie, she distinguished herself from him by declaring that she was, in fact, a capitalist, and wanted not socialism, but Accountable Capitalism. Her platform included higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power.

On the other side is Donald Trump, an avowed anti-socialist, who is now aggressively pursuing state ownership of corporations.

What is the public supposed to take from this contradictory, uninformative war of labels? Polls now show that socialism is significantly more popular than capitalism among Democrats. What that means is that we have succeeded in getting people to imagine that “socialism” means things they like, more than “capitalism” does. This is good, I guess, but it is mostly an indicator of the fact that everyone’s personal definition of these terms is so flexible to the point of meaninglessness.

The dictionary definition of socialism is “any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” The Republican definition of socialism is “A laundry list of the worst abuses of totalitarian communist states; or, anything advocated by a Democrat that would cost the rich money.” The centrist definition of socialism is “anyone to our left.” The progressive capitalist definition of socialism is “other progressives who may share my values but who are sadly not economically savvy enough to understand that what we really need are higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power.” That is, coincidentally, also more or less the definition of socialism that democratic socialists have. Each faction imagines that the others are unsophisticated, unrealistic dupes.

My purpose in writing this is not so much to try to litigate the One Correct Definition of Socialism, but rather to highlight the (critical!) fact that the big debate about the Soul of the Democratic Party or the Battle For the Faith of America or whatever is, for the most part, one big cloud of people talking past one another. The dirty secret is that most political commentators prefer it this way. It is easier to make grand proclamations about how either Free Enterprise Is Fundamental to Free People or how Capitalist Scum Must Die than to go about the tedious work of agreeing upon our terms and then having an actual policy debate.

I am a self-proclaimed socialist who writes for a socialist magazine and who just got back from attending the Socialist Conference. I promise you that socialists themselves do not have a shared definition of socialism. Much less do the people on the other side whose only reference point for socialism is “Cuba and uhhh Russia” have a shared definition of socialism. My own definition of what socialism means in the context of American politics would be something like “More public control and less private control in society, particularly in the economy, with the goal of producing greater equality.” That, I think, gets at what most of us actually mean when we talk about this stuff. (I have met few American socialists who are truly committed to the communist caricature of full state control of the economy, and even those who do will have to admit that that the path to getting there is described above.)

You will notice that even this definition is directional—it describes where we are trying to go in relation to where we are now, rather than articulating some strict Marxist benchmark that must be met. Politics itself is a directional endeavor, so this sort of definition is useful for politics. If you are an academic looking for analytical rigor above all, however, it might not satisfy you.

Who cares! If you take anything away from all of this, let it be: Almost all of America’s mainstream political debate over “socialism” is stupid. The portion of it that is not a scam on purpose is mostly a big waste of time. Do you support higher minimum wages, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, and less concentrated corporate power? Then we are on the same side. Let’s walk down that road together. If we make progress, we will reach some point where some people say, “This is far enough.” The rest of us will say, “No, we need to keep pushing this further.” At that point, we can have a debate about the actual policies in question, and their merits, and what the ideal we are trying to reach looks like. 

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Capital Is Organizing the World to Its Advantage and Everything Else Is a Sideshow (HTW):]

***

"We are all mad at the billionaires and whatnot but let’s be very clear about the mechanism driving all of this: American companies are making more money than ever and they don’t have to share it because workers don’t have the power to claim their fair share, and because some of the money has been used to purchase political influence to prevent the government from stepping in, and so therefore the money accrues to the owners, which is to say, to the rich. The richest ten percent of Americans own close to 90% of America’s stock market wealth.

This isn’t too hard to understand. I obviously didn’t invent this analysis—this is just grade school Marxism. But to reach these conclusions you don’t need to read any theory or know any buzzwords. You just need COMMON SENSE. All the money that businesses make will go either to the workers or to the owners. The goal of capital, of businesses, the logic of capitalism itself, is for businesses to try to take as close to 100% of the profits as possible for themselves. (Indeed, an amusing new economics paper shows that going to business schools causes managers to pursue exactly this mandate). This is the nature of a corporation. It will always do it, just like a fire will always want to burn. Our problem is that we have not kept corporations properly contained. So, like fire, they will consume everything.

It is far more accurate, more useful, and more true to understand politics as a battleground between capital and labor than as some sort of Democratic vs. Republican thing. Politics is just another arena for capital to organize in order to maximize its own growth."

via:

Why the Senate Is Weirdly Obsessed with College Sports Instead of Real Problems

Lots of news in the monopoly round-up, including a disastrous turn in the Paramount-Warner as the key state attorney general lead, Rob Bonta, caves. It’s not over, but this one took a bad turn. In better news, the crypto lobby lost its main objective for this Congress, and basically collapsed in an orgy of corruption and incompetence. Fitting, that. There’s also a bunch of news on AI, and a fascinating market power story involving musician Macklemore, Ticketmaster and Israel.

But I want to start with something you may have missed, which was a procedural vote in the Senate last week to give the National Collegiate Athletic Association a special exemption from antitrust law. The NCAA is a widely loathed organization that has for decades prevented college athletes from being paid, despite them working what are essentially full-time jobs as minor league professionals. In 2020, the Supreme Court took away the NCAA’s authority to set wages for college athletes and run college sports. Now, Congress is on the verge of restoring their monopoly power. I’ve asked Katie Van Dyck, an antitrust lawyer working on sports, to lay out what’s happening.

In July, Stanford football players elected representatives and formed the first player-led chapter of the College Football Players Association. The CFBPA’s ultimate goal is collective bargaining on a conference-by-conference basis. From Ernest Cooper, a Stanford linebacker and one of the team’s elected representatives:

“As a Power 4 college football player you’re working out year-round, you’re getting paid …. I don’t see why people wouldn’t see us as employees.”

Just a few days later, the Oregon State women’s basketball team collected enough signatures to seek an election with the United College Athletes Association. They have filed a petition with the Oregon Employment Relations Board. From the university, which is opposing the effort:

“Playing on a college basketball team is not service performed for hire …. Student athletes at OSU matriculate to obtain and [sic] education and voluntarily pursue basketball as part of that experience.”

Last year, over 100 women’s basketball players wrote to Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey asking for a formal way to be heard on the rules that govern their sport. Neither agreed to meet.

The Senate is about to weigh in against these athletes’ efforts, with the Protect College Sports Act (the “PCSA”), which has been taking up valuable debating time in the House and Senate. The two lead Senators on the bill are Republican Ted Cruz from Texas, and Democrat Maria Cantwell, from Washington state. Both have very sharp elbows and have used them to move this legislation.

It passed a procedural hurdle last week, by a 74–24 margin, to proceed to a full vote, which will happen shortly. Populist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were opposed, but the “aye” column included most of the Senate, including some surprising center-left supporters, like Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and co-sponsor Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

It’s worth saying upfront that it is weird that Congress is focusing on this topic to the exclusion of most other things. There are massive cost increases in health care, a war in Iran driving up prices, risky problems with artificial intelligence technology and financing, and on and on, but Congress is spending its time on… college sports.

There have been countless commercials during football season promoting this legislation. Nick Saban has made his case before the Senate and on ESPN GameDay. Amazon, Paramount, and Disney are on the Hill lobbying. Even Deion Sanders has joined the bandwagon. All of them say that college sports, a $20 billion industry and growing, are in chaos. Ted Cruz even went on ESPN GameDay, and was hilariously booed with “Ted You Suck!” chants as he pitched this legislation for ten full minutes.

Still, this lobbying campaign isn’t the sole reason Congress is focusing on college athletics to the exclusion of everything else. Another reason is that, as BIG often chronicles, the superrich tend to have their priorities addressed in our political system. And the superrich love college sports. For instance, billionaire Larry Ellison, who is right now financing the Paramount-Warner takeover, and owns TikTok and Oracle, is deeply involved in the University of Michigan’s athletic department finances, because his sixth wife is an alumni of the school.

For decades, wealthy alumni, known as “boosters,” have played a part in funding college sports, as a sort of passionate high-end hobby. Key here was that the athletes didn’t get paid, which not only reduced costs but also contributed to an endless series of scandals involving athletes paid under the table.

But this whole system got a rude awakening in 2021, when the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the NCAA’s request for “immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws” in its landmark NCAA v. Alston decision. It did so at least in part based on the NCAA’s admission that it “enjoy[ed] monopsony control” and was “capable of depressing wages below competitive levels.” Justice Kavanaugh wrote that “[t]he NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”

The Alston decision created a sea change in college athletics, forcing the NCAA to abandon a long-standing ban on athlete compensation within days of the opinion’s release. Before 2021, universities were only allowed to award scholarships and certain “education-related” benefits like tutors and laptops. The result was coaches and administrators earning millions while the athletes on the field brought home nothing beyond a scholarship. It was a blatantly unfair and exploitative system. The Alston decision forced the NCAA to make a change.

Today, athletes can sign name, image, and likeness (“NIL”) deals with sponsors like Nike and Gatorade. Boosters frequently set up funds to bring in star players. And starting in 2025, schools can pay athletes directly via revenue-sharing, named for the athletic department revenue that funds it. Revenue-sharing is currently capped at $20.5 million per school, but a report published by The Athletic shows that the biggest programs are spending over $50 million a year on their rosters.

Alston also ushered a wave of lawsuits challenging other NCAA rules, including those limiting the number of transfers, restricting eligibility for older players and professional athletes, and capping the amount of prize money tennis players can collect. These have frustrated coaches, administrators, and some fans alike. And it changed the way universities finance athletics, since traditionally they cross-subsidize revenue-generating sports with those that don’t bring in enough cash.

Given the massive changes in college athletics wrought by the Alston decision, universities began a big lobbying campaign. Enter the Protect College Sports Act. To its proponents, the PCSA restores balance to college sports, putting the NCAA back as the governor of the system. It limits revenue sharing, regulates NIL deals, and imposes uniform rules on transfers and recruiting. It also grants an antitrust exemption to schools to pool and sell media rights. The idea here is to “fix” college athletics and make it more sustainable. Senator Cantwell’s office even released a financial report during the first PCSA procedural vote claiming that her bill will put an end to “unsustainable athletics spending [] amplifying the broader fiscal pressures facing higher education.”

But there’s a reason athletes and labor unions are opposed. The truth is, the PCSA is the culmination of a 5-year, multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign by the NCAA to secure an antitrust exemption that will allow it to unilaterally set the rules governing athletes’ compensation and eligibility.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images via
[ed. College and professional sports are Big Business personified. Reminds me of record companies and how they treat 'talent'. See also: AI Is an Elite Crime Spree (BIG).]

The 25 Science-Fiction Books You Must Read, Ranked

And six short story collections

Some ‘best of’ lists seek to achieve a spurious objectivity through means such as reader polls, complex ranking systems or asking distinguished experts for their views.

This is not one of those lists. This list has instead been compiled by the greatly superior method1 of me thinking really hard about it and assuming that my opinion mattered more than anyone else’s.

In terms of criteria, firstly, every book on the list is an excellent read. Some of the books on here may be worthy, but there are no books on here purely for their worthiness. Secondly, every book is one that will make you think, or open your eyes to a new perspective - for that is a core function of science fiction, to explore new possibilities. And thirdly, to whittle the list down to 25, I have taken into account relevance and impact - either to the world of today, or to the genre more broadly.

While the borders of every genre are porous, every book on here has a clear claim to being science fiction. There is no pure fantasy, or alternate history - much though I enjoy those genres, this is not their list.

So, without further ado, let’s get cracking. As is traditional, we’ll do this in reverse order, so you’re kept guessing to the very end as to whether I’m overlooking your own favourites, or saying they’re amongst the best.

Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon (1930)

A future history, not a novel, Stapledon takes us forward across billions of years as new races of humanity rise and fall - on Earth, on Venus and ultimately on Neptune. Some winged, some more intelligent and some less intelligent, some deliberately designed and some evolved, each have their turn on the stage. [...]

The Mote in God’s Eye - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1974)

What happens when you combine Niven’s extraordinary imagination with Pournelle’s ability to actually tell a story that has a plot? You get The Mote in God’s Eye, perhaps the best first-contact encounter with a truly alien extra-terrestrial species ever written, in a richly rendered future setting. A rare occasion of a joint-authored novel being better than any that either has written alone. [...]

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham (1951)

What if almost everyone went blind, and sentient, walking, carnivorous plants inherited the earth? This unlikely premise forms the basis for one of the most civilly bleak post-apocalyptic novels, as the protagonist and his companion wend their way across the devastated Home Counties, seeking a safe haven where the remnants of humanity can survive. [...]

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson (1995)

A world of nanotechnology and AI, in which nation states have been supplanted by ‘phyles’ - groupings, sometimes ethnic, sometimes regional, sometimes political, of freely associating individuals - the Diamond Age tells the story of Nell, a young girl growing up in poverty who receives an advanced AI ‘primer’, designed to educate and guide its owner into a ‘more interesting life’. A wildly imaginative roller-coaster ride through a provocative future. [...]

The Warrior’s Apprentice - Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)

Arguably the best science-fiction author currently writing, The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the brilliant, driven, physically stunted Miles Vorkosigan, primary protagonist of her Vorkosigan Saga, and follows him as he ‘accidentally’ builds himself a mercenary fleet. Modern space opera at its finest. [...]

Foundation - Isaac Asimov (1951)

A novel that shaped the genre, Foundation tells the story of a Galactic Empire in decline, the brilliant psychohistorian who sees a way to minimise the harm - and the lives of those who followed him, living his plan, guiding the new Foundation in its ascent. [...]

The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin (2008)

by Edrith, World of Edrith |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Not a bad list. Could easily be doubled.]

China and the Future of Science

The Chinese socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.

In the early days of Mao, the overarching aim of the communist system was to seize state power, first through subversion and insurgency, then through more regular combined arms warfare. In the later days of Mao the newly established Chinese state and the society it intertwined were oriented around class struggle, both at home and abroad. From the 1980s through the 2010s the Chinese system was orbited a different yet still very explicitly stated goal: getting rich. In theory, if not always in practice, every action taken by every cadre, every soldier, and every state employee was subordinate to this larger, unifying aim. We must make China rich.

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.”2 The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state must bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.

The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.

Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States.9 Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.

Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”

My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?

Something similar might be said for science and China.

Moreover, it is not hard so hard to find examples of dominance in the scientific literature leading to dominance in the world of applied technology. More than a decade ago Chinese researchers began to dominate academic work on batteries. Today China produces 80% of the world’s battery cells. Around that same time Chinese researchers took the lead on factory robots and factory automation. Today Chinese firms buy more robots than the rest of the world combined. They have a higher robot density than almost every other country in world, despite being the world’s second largest nation. Another example: China is the only place where the unit cost of building a new nuclear reactor has gone down over the last decade. Do you think this is unrelated to the number of nuclear engineers they train and the amount of basic research they publish on nuclear engineering? Again I beg you to look at the trend-line: In 2026 China has 102 nuclear reactors either in operation or under construction. How many did they have 15 years ago? Less than 30.

Why is China pouring so many resources into scientific and technological advance? Here is a 30-second thumbnail sketch: Xi Jinping and those around him have a specific view of history. Like most Chinese, they remember with fondness past eras when their nation was the centerpiece of human civilization. They mourn China’s fall from those grand heights. They remember with bitterness the “century of humiliation” in which their people were exploited by foreign powers and wasted by vicious warlords. The Communist Party of China was founded to save China from that fate. From its inception it has seen itself as the vehicle for the salvation of the Chinese nation and thence the restoration of this nation to its rightful place at the center of the human story.

But why was China displaced from its spot “at the center of the world stage” in the first place? Chinese intellectuals have been asking this question for more than a century. Here is their most common answer: science and technology. Today Party-affiliated thinkers often describe modern human history as punctuated by discrete revolutionary moments when a new technological regime comes into being. They call these moments “rounds of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” In such moments the material basis of human civilization changes. Those who master this transition master… well, just about everything.

by Tanner Greer, Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Go USA. See also: The Cure for Cancer Is Not a Pure Math Benchmark (SS).]

'Kawarikiri' - The Art of Garnishing

 

via: Japan Eats
[ed. Also, this Parrotfish (Uhu) sushi and saute (the scales are enormous):]

DOGE Team Dreams

Tyler Hassen’s initiation into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests.

The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers “too locked in” to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce and, within days, find two to five ideas to present to Musk.

He checked into a nearby J.W. Marriott and told his wife he didn’t know how long he would be gone.

Thus began an 11-month stint at the center of a national firestorm — an exhilarating, chaotic and sometimes scary experience, Hassen told The Washington Post, in his first major interview detailing his forthcoming memoir and plans. The memoir, “Inside DOGE: The Real Story From a Senior Insider,” which recounts his time working for the secretive cost-cutting group, is the first tell-all to emerge from one of the most controversial periods of President Donald Trump’s time in office — a moment Hassen said he would gladly live through again.

“There’s this misconception that we all just went in there and didn’t really think about what we were doing,” Hassen said, speaking virtually from a hotel room in San Diego. “I spent 24/7 thinking about it, waking up at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ … And I know I did.”

At the heart of the book is a split screen: For many Americans, Musk’s project was a callous showcase of bending government to a billionaire’s will, associated with tens of thousands of federal layoffs, reams of lawsuits, an AI-enabled effort to kill off wasteful contracts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But Hassen’s memoir enters a different vision into the historical record: He portrays a period marked by a clash in worldviews, in which hardcore capitalists are granted unprecedented power to change a system that they argue operates under completely different incentives, logic and norms.

To Hassen, whose pre-government career involved turning around distressed companies, “DOGE was not radical,” he writes in the book. It was “not a wrecking ball, but a catalyst.”

In conversation, Hassen comes across as mild-mannered, a distant temperament from Musk, who famously brandished a red metallic chainsaw as a metaphor for cutting government waste. A 43-year-old dad with Boy Scout energy, he doesn’t cut the image of the nerd-engineer DOGE bro. He spent his entire adult life “hiring, firing, reorganizing and rescuing failing businesses” in industrial manufacturing and the energy sectors — a skill set that appealed to Musk, his longtime deputy, Steve Davis, and Baris Akis, a venture capitalist who served as a volunteer recruiter.

But for years, he seethed with rage over the national debt, now at $40 trillion. He felt angry that the amount the U.S. spends annually just to service that debt is more than the government spends on national defense and many other public benefits.

So he raised his hand — making a cold outreach to Musk through a network of business world connections, he said in the interview, and pressed the point.

“I’m staring at my daughter, who is 5, and thinking about her at 25 with $100 trillion of debt. And I know if we don’t do something about it now, we’re going to be there,” he said. “We’ve got to fix it now.”

By its own accounting, DOGE fell far short of the $2 trillion Musk claimed he would save, and an independent report from the Government Accountability Office has found DOGE’s own savings figures to be flawed. But Hassen told The Post he believes the effort was a success.

“Did we eliminate the deficit? No. Of course not,” he said. “But we made it on the top of everyone’s minds, albeit briefly, for a few months, that this deficit is something that we need to fix.”

In the book, he argues that “DOGE fit squarely” within a tradition practiced by some Democratic presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, who also sought to shrink bloated government. DOGE was different, he goes on to concede, because of its speed, “faster than Washington was ready for and faster than its defenses could absorb.”

But Hassen insists that DOGE was not cruel, a word that appears six times in the memoir, often in relation to laying off federal workers. The refrain can read as a plea for reconsideration of an effort he argues was poorly understood.

“In the private sector, there’s an understood bargain,” he writes. “You’re hired to create value. If the value disappears, so does the job. It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel. It’s the operating system of capitalism.”

Government, he argues in the book, runs on a different logic. Value is “presumed,” “permanence is the default,” and “the moral burden of proofs falls on anyone who questions headcount — no matter how bloated the system becomes.” [...]

He told The Post he was exhilarated to get deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and deploy his corporate-honed skill sets to attack a problem that had long troubled him.

During his first week at DOGE, the team met in a sparse conference room on the top floor of the SpaceX offices — empty except for a giant American flag on the wall, “because it reminded us why we are here,” he told The Post. “We had billionaires to 22-year-olds who had dropped out of Harvard, all sitting there on our laptops working with public information — trying to figure out how we can help solve this deficit, this crisis that we’re in.” [...] [ed. like talking to Congress?]

During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where’s Waldo character, popping up in key moments that caught the country’s attention. When wildfires struck California, Hassen made an unusual decision to fly to the state to grill local officials about why the state’s largest water plant wasn’t running at full capacity.

The image of him at the Jones Pumping Plant in California became one of the first posts from the DOGE X account identifying its members — prompting a flood of hateful messages and threats to Hassen and his family, he said.

When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, it fell to Hassen to officially register the rechristened Gulf of America in the Interior Department’s Geographic Names Information System — a move that then triggered a broader recognition of the name change on Google Maps and other online directories.

Hassen says he felt the difference in mindset between the public and the private sector every day. “It showed up in the way career staff spoke about ‘the workforce’ as something apart — almost sacred,” he writes. “Until we can say out loud that government is a workforce like any other — noble in purpose, human in composition, and subject to reality like everything else — reform will look like cruelty before it looks like competence.”

by Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post, via Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: WaPo

[ed. Nice. Can't wait for AI and the 'operating system of capitalism' (Praise the Lord!) to reduce its workforce by at least one cult memoirist.]

via:

Codeine Covered Cocktail Nuts

He Xi, 'A Room with a View ', 2021
via:

Heavy Meta

Bands that have appeared on the lineup at Hellfest, an annual heavy-metal-­focused music festival in Clisson, France, since 2023.

I Am Morbid
Insanity Alert
Blood Red Throne
Blood Fire Death
Napalm Death
Immolation
Suffocation
Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition
Cattle Decapitation
Cancer Bats
Castle Rat
Drug Church
Stoned Jesus
Rotting Christ
Judas Priest
Puscifer
Pestifer
Wormrat
Wormsand
Windhand
Clawfinger
Bloodywood
Septicflesh
Graveyard
Crows
Crowbar
Carcass
Ashen
Darken
Scowl
Loathe
Rancid

by Harpers |  Read more:

[ed. What? No "Fluffy Bunny"? Paywalled after this but maybe you can figure a work-around.]

Annie Dillard, Meditative Author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ Dies at 81

Annie Dillard, who as a young American writer walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” died Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 81.

Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson. No further details were given.

With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a bestselling autobiography and another bestseller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.

Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to understand it as a 20th-century analogue to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” This was no coincidence: Dillard had chosen Thoreau as the subject of her master’s thesis at Hollins University, the women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Virginia.

Like Thoreau, she found an unremarkable body of water to be as good a place as any for deep thoughts — particularly about how to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with nature’s cruelty.

Unlike Thoreau, Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.

That she was a photogenic young woman coming to grips with raw nature — a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards — was undeniably part of the Dillard mystique. So was her insistence that, in spite of her patient, unflinching observations on flora and fauna, she wasn’t a nature writer, but rather a theologian looking high and low for God. [...]

“Tinker Creek” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1975, and Dillard was overwhelmed by requests for speeches, interviews and television appearances. Her looks were thought by many media outlets to be as newsworthy as her writing — so much so that she was ridiculed in some circles as “Cheesecake at Tinker Creek.”

Repelled by the consequences of her success, she moved to Washington state and began dividing her time between the city of Bellingham and the islands Waldron and Lummi. Her marriage to Richard Dillard had ended in amicable divorce, and in the Pacific Northwest, she found privacy enough to regain the concentration essential to her work.

“The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water,” she wrote. “There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.”

 

by Daniel Lewis, NY Times via Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Rollie McKenna
[ed. Just learned about Annie's death this morning. One of my all-time favorite books is The Living (a fictional depiction of the evolution of Whatcom county, the area around Bellingham, WA). See also: Annie Dillard brought poetry into prose, pioneering a mystical form of creative nonfiction (The Conversation):]

***

Not all writing is the same. Prose typically features continuous sentences arranged in paragraphs. Poetry tends to be differentiated from prose by a deliberate organization of language that’s not determined by the page itself.

Prose poetry, the lyric essay and other hybrid forms of literature play at the intersection of genre, which usually defines these separate categories of writing. Creative nonfiction likewise aims to accurately convey reality while emphasizing literary style. The literary features of creative nonfiction are often drawn from fiction, with devices such as dialogue, scene and flashback.

But one of the distinctions of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction is how much her prose owes to poetry.

Poetry can be defined in many ways, but it tends to be characterized by honed, heightened language. Poems are often noted for their memorable images, rich sounds and foregrounding of emotion. Dillard’s nonfiction is shot through with images that arrest readers with their beauty or confront readers with their terror – as in her Harper’s essay “The Death of a Moth,” where the insect is drawn to a candle flame, becomes stuck in the wax and is transformed into a burning wick. In Dillard’s words:

“She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

It’s no accident that Dillard describes herself as reading the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud by the light of the moth. She previously wrote that she loved how language sounds in French symbolist poetry, and Rimbaud was known to combine prose with his poetry in a way Dillard herself does.

How DraftKings Uses AI to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

About a year into his job as a data analyst at DraftKings, Jayden Butts received a new assignment.

The online gambling giant was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on promotional incentives: “free” betting money advertised through emails and phone alerts. But the company knew little about their effectiveness.

So in 2023, DraftKings took customer betting records and built a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence that seeks patterns in data, to answer the question: Who was more likely to respond to promotions by gambling — and losing — more?

Butts’ task was to test that model, prioritizing free bets and bonuses for those likely losers. Soon, a question began to gnaw at him: Aren’t many of these same people prone to addiction? “We are looking for traits and features that we can target that indicate a good investment,” he said. By strict financial logic, “the best investment would be a problem gambler.”

Butts had reason to be concerned. DraftKings makes money when gamblers lose money. And the model sought to identify those it could get to lose the most. It scored each customer based on their habits: The higher the score, the more money a gambler was likely to lose for each promotion offered.

Since Butts ran those tests, DraftKings has continued to hone its methods, using data science, to target losing gamblers with promotions that encourage more betting, according to six former employees who worked on them. At the same time, four other former employees said, DraftKings has stalled or squashed efforts to use similar technology to predict who might develop a gambling problem based on their betting activity.

Silicon Valley firms spent years analyzing every digital interaction to predict what will keep users clicking on advertisements. Now, as companies like DraftKings have made gambling accessible to millions on smartphones, they too have collected an extraordinary wealth of data.

An investigation by The New York Times shows what DraftKings has chosen to do — and not do — with that power.

The Times interviewed more than 40 former DraftKings employees and obtained internal research memos, presentations and Slack messages as well as betting records from experiments conducted on customers.

The documents show how the model Butts worked on analyzed dozens of data points for gamblers, including how frequently they played, their daily account balances and how much they typically lost compared with how much they bet. It also incorporated another model that calculated how likely a user was to stop gambling.

This betting data may also contain signs that a person is headed for trouble. Yet when employees developed a machine learning model that would have assigned users “risk scores,” the company sidelined it, according to two former employees who worked on that project.

In late 2024, DraftKings fired Butts for performance reasons, he said, amid a short blip in business that led some in the company to believe its promotional experiments weren’t working as intended. The company briefly paused some of its data science work — before revving back up again with a flurry of new machine learning projects.

Butts and five other former DraftKings employees who worked on promotional targeting told the Times they regretted building technology they now viewed as dangerous.

“It is as predatory as it sounds,” said a former DraftKings analyst who, like many interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because he feared retribution. “If you lose more, we give you more, so you keep playing more.” He quit in 2024. [...]

Promotions, which take on forms like a free bet, a “profit boost” or a deposit bonus, play a vital role in DraftKings’ business: The company brought in around $8.7 billion in gross revenue from sports and casino gamblers last year and gave out about $3 billion in promotions, according to research by Citizens Bank.

DraftKings and some competitors, including FanDuel, have boasted publicly about their use of customer data for promotions — without disclosing what those efforts entail. A DraftKings executive recently told investors that data science and analytics helped it improve its margins on promotion-driven sports bets by 13% in 2025 and that it used AI to personalize hundreds of millions of promotional dollars.

One former DraftKings data scientist who worked on promotions, Jacob Shulkin, said that they were effective because they took advantage of gamblers’ psychology. “I feel I’m getting free money,” he said, “but really, it’s dragging me back in.”

Several gamblers told the Times that promotions fueled their addictions. Bryan Biehl lost nearly $70,000 gambling online, more than half of it at DraftKings. Biehl recalled how in late 2024, when he started therapy for his addiction, his email inbox began to feel like a relapse risk.

“I would get flooded with bonuses and deposits,” Biehl said. “If you are in addiction, you are not going to say no.”

In the first two weeks of December 2024, Biehl received 40 promotions from DraftKings, emails show. He succumbed to temptation one last time on Christmas Day before putting himself on self-exclusion lists, which blocked him from gambling apps.[...]

DraftKings already had a system that weighed factors like a gambler’s skill, how much they bet and tax rates on gambling revenue in the state where they lived.

Figuring this out required machine learning. Unlike traditional data analytics, where researchers decide which patterns to look for, machine learning models can sift through hundreds of variables on their own to find combinations that help predict particular behaviors.

Data scientists had trained the new casino model on historical data. It was Butts’ job to test it on real customers. Each week, the model vacuumed up information about a user’s recent activity. The score it calculated was known internally as “elasticity,” a term borrowed from economics.

Users with below-average scores were deemed “inelastic” and marked for fewer incentives. The “elastic” bettors remained.

In September 2023, Butts tested using the elasticity model to influence promotions for about 5,000 casino players. He later expanded the tests to a larger population.

He initially thought DraftKings aimed to save money by avoiding people who were unlikely to be profitable. But he said his supervisors told him that the company did not want to reduce its promotional spending but rather to “redeploy” it. He understood this to mean the goal was to direct more promotions toward the biggest losers.

by Alex Klavens, Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Vrentas, Seattle Times/NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong/The New York Times

It Can't Be Real

This feels like an AI simulation. As if we’re all living in an edit created by the reprobates hiding among us, with their finite sense of civility and unlimited access to video-generating software.

Did that happen? Is this real?

That video that circulated across the algorithms of Texas Longhorns fans was clearly fake. The one with Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian backhand slapping sideline reporter Holly Rowe — deplorable “entertainment” that only those wallowing in the gutter of society would find amusing.

But was that really a scion of the Manning family and a room full of credentialed reporters laughing at that trash?

Yes, unfortunately. That was real.

Also, though the savagery depicted in the video was created by artificial intelligence, did the current face of a billion-dollar football enterprise actually disrespect an ESPN/ABC Hall of Fame broadcaster who won the Curt Gowdy Award in 2023, as though she were a YouTuber holding one of those budget wireless mics?

Unbelievable, but facts. That, also, was real.

“I saw the AI Edit of (Sark) slapping Holly Rowe.”

I asked Arch Manning if he’d seen any edits on TikTok or Twitter after the game, and his answer is gold. pic.twitter.com/70FnNCVEHb

— Evan Vieth (@EvanVieth) September 14, 2026

There was a time when meatheads would giggle at off-color jokes only while in the locker room, or at least in the sanctity of the group chat, because at least good sense would prevail and remind them that some punch lines aren’t suitable for public consumption. It wasn’t that long ago, either, when head coaches jacked up on adrenaline would fulfill their social contract by spitting out a couple of nothings to a sideline reporter — or, at least, express regret when they didn’t.

That kind of human decorum, however, is fading faster than someone can hit “send” on the latest AI-generated nonsense. And plummeting deeper than even Arch Manning’s likability.

I can’t tell which is worse: the phony clip depicting violence against a woman, or the real-life behavior displayed by Sarkisian, then Manning and a room of media members? Before they could edit themselves and add a glossy filter to their apologies, they showed the sordid bits of their individual characters for all to see.

What a weird couple of days in Texas. It’s almost as if the state’s content creator said “Screw it” and mixed a superedit of slop.

It started immediately after the No. 4 Longhorns’ 24-23 comeback victory over then-No. 1 Ohio State, their first home win over a top-ranked team in 76 years. Stunning! So stunned was Sarkisian that the 52-year-old coach completely forgot how to form big-boy words with his mouth. Instead of respecting the postgame interview process, Sarkisian blew off Rowe’s attempt to toss him congratulatory softballs.

Rowe was trying to do her job. Sarkisian, using the excuse of technical difficulties despite ABC’s production appearing ready for his on-field interview, did not do his.

pic.twitter.com/6ZVqJmIP2v
— Holly Rowe (@sportsiren) September 15, 2026

Yes, Sarkisian is contractually obligated to perform this duty — TV deals help fund his $11 million salary — as required by his conference’s multibillion-dollar media agreements with the networks that broadcast its games.

And no, just no: Screaming “Texas fight!” into the camera, and then leaving the reporter in the dust, does not satisfy this responsibility. Nor does it make for good television. More than anything else, it’s just not a good look.

Holly Rowe is not happy with Texas HC Steve Sarkisian

pic.twitter.com/L6etAq1k4Q
— Pick 6 Pack (@Pick6PackFB) September 13, 2026

Sarkisian makes too much money, has been around big-time college football too long to get annoyed when the TV reporter doesn’t hurry up and ask him the two questions. On the greatest night of his greatest coaching feat, Sarkisian acted without grace or a shred of tact. College coaches aren’t diplomats, but they can choose not to act like jerks. [...]

Bo French, a Republican running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, couldn’t get past all those pesky brown-skinned men invading the stands. Not just college kids, but Others cheering for Texas’ football team and snatching up Texas’ degrees. The sight of so few blond and blue-eyed coeds made the politician forget all about the Longhorns’ big night, and it instead made him thumb out his outrage and xenophobia on X.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” a post from French’s account read.

Thank goodness plenty of non-cretins exist across Texas, including some within his own political party, and those folks spoke out against the post.

Then, after all of this, after the head coach was rude and the GOP candidate couldn’t mask his racism, the college quarterback found some low-vibration content to be, heh heh, so hilarious. As did some of the reporters on hand, who presumably confused a press room for an out-of-control frat house.

During a Monday media availability, a reporter asked Manning if he had seen any of the TikTok edits done off the game. Arch, the 22-year-old Manning whom the public truly knows little about other than that he plays quarterback like his famous uncles, offered that he saw “an AI edit of Sark’s interview.”

Immediately, a loud laughter from reporters.

“Y’all seen that one?” Manning asked.

More laughter.

“That’s a good one!” Manning said, smiling and then pointing at someone off camera in solidarity with the joke.

Again, laughter.

“Of him slapping Holly Rowe,” Manning confirmed.

Still, laughter in the room.

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” Manning concluded, and somewhere his family’s public relations firm probably asked for a raise.

When a colleague sent me that clip Monday night, my reaction was disbelief: “Are we sure that arch video isn’t AI?”

I asked genuinely because never would I have thought that a Manning, no matter his age, would so clumsily stumble into such an unnecessary mistake. Rarely an hour goes by without Peyton and Eli filling our screens. Even Cooper, Arch’s father and the lesser-known Manning brother, presents well in commercials and interviews. The Mannings understand media. They are a media company in and of themselves. So, five-star Arch must have had a measure of training before entering the mainstream. He can read the line of scrimmage, but clearly the kid can’t read a room. Or maybe he was lured into his thoughtless comments because of the jocularity inside that room full of reporters.

Most likely, they were grown people with jobs who represent various media companies. So-called professionals. Disregard for one second the lack of judgment by those reporters, however, and consider: In what reality does an adult cackle over the depiction of a man assaulting a woman? 

By Tuesday, the desensitized reactions to a fake video led to some regrets in the real world. The reporter who asked the question and posted the video of Manning with the caption: “… his answer is gold,” issued an apology. He said he acted too hastily in trying to get the video up and made a mistake in judgment. Also, Manning posted his remorse with humility. He apologized to Rowe for what “she has personally had to deal with because of my comments.”

Manning’s apology post was indeed real. So was the very real disrespect Rowe faced from the moment she placed a microphone near Sarkisian, as was the actual post from a politician mistakenly trying to score points with the wrong people. All of it was real, which means AI isn’t ruining our world. Real people are doing just fine in that role.

by Candace Buckner, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: X/Twitter
[ed. The widespread crudeness we see these days can be attributed to one source, and it isn't AI. Let's Go Brandon! People who'd normally keep such low feelings to themselves, or share only with like-minded friends, now feel empowered to let their inner freak flags fly. From the comments:]

Stop making 22 year old men apologize to 60 year old women for goofing around

Hahahaha they made him talk to you? I feel so bad for this guy.

Are you gonna apologize now for storming off the field like a little baby when you didn't get your interview?

This is so sad. It was a cartoonish joke that was funny. The kid finally shows a little personality and you women attack him. Our society sucks.

[ed. "Our society sucks". Yes it does. In some places and with some people.]

Lost Child

He said, Come with me! Take Daddy’s hand.

How all the stories begin. A large hand lowered, your small hand lifted.

She isn’t sure, she admits, exactly what happened.

Or when. She knows that she was little.

Maybe four years old. Maybe three.

Just guessing. Mists of time, thinly whitewashed wall of memory . . .

No. Katherine does remember something about when. For today—Thursday, March 12, 2026—is an anniversary of that day.

It was, Take Daddy’s hand but hurry. Something was going to happen—unless it had already happened.

For, with Kit’s father, something was always either going to happen or had already happened, and it was either too late to stop it from happening or too early to even imagine it happening, but, in any case, Hurry, sweetie! God damn.

Not used to dressing herself. The new rosy-pink raincoat, crookedly buttoned, but maybe Daddy wouldn’t notice.

Hours later, at the hospital, parking at the rear—a high-rise garage, which Kit’s father hated because it slowed him down, Fucking God damn.

Kit cringed a little when Daddy spoke in a harsh voice, but she understood: Daddy was not talking to her.

When they were alone together—which was often now—Daddy joked that the two of them were practically living in this shithole car. Daddy was rarely silent; he was too nervous, edgy, to be silent. He seemed to be addressing Kit, but Kit knew that he would be annoyed if she interrupted him to reply.

Crucial to Kit not to annoy her father. If she was sweetly quiet, obedient, Daddy smiled at her with the radiance of Daddy love, and Kit basked in his love like a cat stretched out in the sun.

Kit’s fear was that Daddy’s smile would disappear. Like a light switched off.

You would have to have known him to understand, Katherine says.

Cursing as he made his way up through the parking garage, turning the wheel sharply, row after row of vehicles, nowhere to park, though the sign at the entrance had said “Open.”

True that Daddy was in a hurry, but true, also, that, when Daddy at last found a parking space, on the top level of the garage, he did not drive into it head first but took time to maneuver the vehicle around so that he could back it in. Daddy felt compelled always to back into a parking space; here, an alarmingly narrow gap between two large vehicles which required many excruciating minutes, Daddy grimacing as he peered into the car’s side mirrors, easing back a few inches, then forward again. His breathing came fast. His forehead glistened with moisture.

Rainwater in puddles on the garage floor. Slow-drifting fog, mist.

The smell of her father’s breath, like fumes.

In the back seat of the car, a potted plant, its blooms wrapped in crinkly cellophane, amid random newspapers, napkins, coffee cups. Also, a small suitcase so stuffed that one of the compartments was only partly zipped.

C’mon, silly. Nothing to be afraid of.

Kit smiled uncertainly. For Daddy was smiling. Nothing to be afraid of? It had not occurred to Kit that there might be something to be afraid of.

by Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Holly Andres