The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth

A Monument to Man’s Arrogance

Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.

Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.

But all that water is not nearly enough to sate the five million citizens of the Phoenician sprawl and the farms and the tribal communities. The rest comes from the Colorado River by way of the Central Arizona Project: a series of pumps, tunnels, and canals that every year move 456 billion gallons of Colorado River water 336 miles from the northwest. 5 billion of those gallons evaporate into the desert air before they ever reach Phoenix.

This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.

But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.

This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.

This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.

For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:

No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.

The Sierra Club’s cover story in 2022 described the coming Colorado River crisis. Their introduction ends with this:

No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture…The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. It means “all used up” or “exhausted.”

There are many more invocations of the Hohokam; I’ll quote just one more here to drive home the point. The ur-text of writing on the water crisis in the west, the book that all others cite as their inspiration, is the 1985 book Cadillac Desert. The chapter that discusses the Central Arizona Project begins this way:

The original 400,000 Arizonans were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya further south. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea. When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves.

They were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? Drought remains a possibility — perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen — but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much. And that is the exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.

It’s easy to see why the Hohokam story is used as a hook. It’s too good not to use. A people settle by the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers and build a great civilization until the changing climate or their overuse of water forces them to leave. The writers of all these pieces start by saying the disappearance of the Hohokam is a mystery, but then make it clear that the answer to this mystery is the same as whatever they believe to be the biggest problem with modern-day Phoenix: climate change, irrigation overuse, poisoned crops, social conflict, etc.

But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?

What if we asked them?

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: here and here 

[ed. Less about current water problems (and possible solutions) in the Phoenix area that exists today and more about the history of Hohokam society that predated it in the same location. A very interesting and detailed account of a unique and forward-thinking society extremely advanced for its time. See also: Friday Book Club - Cadillac Desert (DS).]

Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026

Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026

Asteroid Day was cofounded in 2014 (the year after the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor air burst) by physicist Stephen Hawking, B612 Foundation president Danica Remy, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, filmmaker Grigorij Richters, and Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). Remy, Schweickart, Richters, and May initiated Asteroid Day in October 2014, which they announced during a press conference. It was launched on December 3, 2014.

In 2016, the United Nations proclaimed Asteroid Day be observed globally on June 30 every year in its resolution. The event aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations from a catastrophic event. - Wikipedia

See also: Asteroid Day 2026: What Is It and How to Celebrate It?

There are about a million asteroids in the Solar System with the potential to strike Earth and destroy a city. Astronomers have discovered only 1% of them. Asteroid Day is an effort to educate the public and encourage policy makers to fund this important effort.

King Tut may have celebrated an ancient Asteroid Day by asking his assistants to make a dagger out of a broken-off asteroid that landed on Earth. Astronomers discovered that the blade of the knife contained much more nickel than is found in terrestrial iron, an amount consistent with iron meteorites, especially with one found in the year 2000 in the Kharga region in northern Egypt. For more information about the dagger, go to http://goo.gl/BHBivd. (via: Bruce Palmquist, Daily Record)

[ed. Brian May was also an astrophysicist? Wow. A man of many talents. Another one would be Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, guitarist for Steely Dan and US missile defense contractor/consultant.]

Daydreaming Proust

Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.

If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.

Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.

And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.

How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.

It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.

How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.

Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.

In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.

I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust

James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—

One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.

We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.

In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: TLS: "Café in Paris by Night" by Konstantin Korovin, 1936

Tension Instrument Concert Hall designed by Lihan Jin.
via:

[ed. See more:]

Grietje Postma, 1992-I, woodcut
via:

Choosing Penelope

Riley and I were married on a Saturday in a small Los Angeles church.

We had only been engaged for a month when, at the counsel of our close friend, we decided to have the wedding in three weeks, right before we planned to move away from LA to live in a small town in Louisiana, where I was born and raised.

Initially, the wedding was going to be an incredibly humble affair. I pictured us and a couple of friends in the first few pews. To our surprise, three weeks later, with the nearly-free and movie-montage-esque help of friends and family, eighty-something people showed up (some from clear across the country) at the behest of a mass text that said what amounted to “I know you probably can’t make it, but…”

It was a strange and beautiful wedding, not least because it was also a goodbye. It was a little like the final episode of a beloved sitcom. Also, thirty minutes before the wedding, I was helping my groomsmen clear away shelves of Narcan and lube for the homeless program in the very room where our reception was going to be about an hour later. This is that sort of perfect memory that arises from unplannable imperfection that no amount of time or money can reproduce.

Pronounced man and wife, we ran outside to be showered in rice. Cars horns erupted and windows rolled down to release pumping fists. People just can’t help it, possessed by the spirit of a cloud of cheering witnesses.

My argument for marriage starts and ends with that image. Even jaded LA people sitting in traffic automatically know a good thing when they see it, before they can rationalize their way into thinking something else. Generally, language makes us into casuists, able to twist ourselves into believing whatever helps us avoid the pain of making a permanent choice. Automatic responses remind us what we really must think and what should be attuned to with gentle attention. That’s a long way of saying why we know stories are truer than data.

Speaking of The Data, it suggests the opposite of happily ever after. Divorce is more than likely. My parents got divorced. That whole ordeal nearly ruined me. But the end of my parents’ marriage being catastrophic did not convince me it was a poor institution. If anything, it made me think that the force of the catastrophe could only be produced in the destruction of something good. What kept me living the bachelor’s life into my 30’s was not fear of repeating my parents’ mistakes; it was the lie of eternity promised in fleeting relationships. It was Swiping’s Lie: hookup culture and the corporate hustle that we all know is its conjoined twin.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. The dream of Calypso, after all, is only available to those brave, chosen few men who have risen to the top of the hierarchy. She, then, is the spirit within the droves of young women who would share a hero instead of settling for a man. That image is also still alive and well. Think of DiCaprio. It’s maybe not a coincidence that you might also picture him on an island with his girls, or a yacht at least.

The first part of a man’s life is occupied by the desire to become worthy of Calypso’s island. For Odysseus, that took place in The Iliad. Once the war is over and he is well-known as a brave man, the rules change. The very desire that drove him away from Ithaca to go on a grand adventure now threatens to keep him trapped on an island of his rewards. What the gods conspire to inject in him now is a new kind of courage: the courage to choose his eventual grave. The temptations against this odyssey are great: Calypso is more beautiful than any mortal woman could ever be (because she is the essence of youth and beauty itself, expressed only in part and at times in individual women). His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island.

He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice.

Riley and I had a strangely old-fashioned wedding, which was made even more strange by its setting in the infinitely hip neighborhood of Silverlake. An artist friend of ours, who, in my opinion, is very hip indeed, said the aesthetic was cool, almost “gothic.” I liked that. Riley’s antique dress made her look like the Virgin Mary. Mine was a navy-issued, double-breasted felt wool suit, authentic from the 50’s. We’ve joked that we should have done it real old-fashioned and gotten married in our own graves.

What’s romantic about a wedding is not the passing promise to pretend we’ll feel puppy-love for each other for the rest of our lives (e.g. “You’re my person”). Or else the even-sadder and more common promise to always watch TV together, as if we know all adventure is over and we have firmly settled for less than we once dreamed of. What’s romantic about a wedding are the parts modern weddings cut out or downplay: the “til’ death” part. That’s not to be morbid. The opposite. Given that we both have the choice to stay on the proverbial island with Calypso—forever looking for something new and better—we both look each other in the eyes and choose our eventual decay. We’re going home. As a result of this sacrifice there are no immediate riches; storms will rage and probably a cyclops will try to eat us, but we are going home to be with each other, come hell or high water.

People love romantic love, especially when it breaks rules, because it has no “why.” The moment you put a “why” on love—economic reasons, reasons of convenience, or because you’ve finally accepted that you just can’t do any better—it dies. So people yearn for the reckless and reasonless love they think can only be found outside the bounds of marriage. They have associated marriage with necessity, and cannot conceive of any other way it could be. [...]

The number one reason young people give for not getting married is money. It seems likely to me that this is a convenient substitute for the real reason. If you have enough money, after all, it can make commitments go away when they become inconvenient. Money makes kids go away when they annoy you. It can even get you a younger wife down the line, which is to say that money makes for a false sacrifice. At the same time, people damn well know they shouldn’t stay in Calypso’s cave forever. They sense they will wake up one day as an old child and with either no children or estranged ones, but they lack the courage to choose Penelope outright. So they try to have it both ways: to keep the island as a backup plan. We can all guess what half-measures avail us.

Speaking of money, it shocked Riley and I how much people wanted to help us once we announced we were getting married. Dozens of people worked for free to make our wedding happen in less than three weeks. There is an old Italian saying that married couples always have bread under their arm, which, you could argue (cynically), is just a way to encourage poor people to get married. It has proved to be incredibly true for us.

As a man, it has also been incredibly humbling. Had I continued searching for more and more ways to win friends and accumulate resources before I got married, it may have never taught me that provision is better gained as a gift received than something to be wrestled from a hostile world. Marrying a woman taught me what women know intuitively: that the world wants to help you. When I was still a single man, the sentiment was more like that it hated me. And it did, in the sense that young men, unlike young women, have to prove their worth. Joining flesh with a woman means that my personal war against the Trojans is over. That courage is not wasted, it has just outlived its usefulness and it’s time for me to develop a new kind of courage. The kind that takes me home. [...]

Unconsciously, also, Riley and I originally moved to LA looking for a king to serve: a big Hollywood king who could bestow power and fame on us if we pushed the correct sycophantic buttons. From that high place, we dreamed, perhaps, our king would die (or something equally fortuitous) and then maybe we would be king. This is the unspoken language of the American dream. We, of course, unlike every other person who has ever existed before us, would use our power for good, our world uncorrupted by our slobbering pursuit of pleasing those corrupt kings we claim to despise. Articulating it like this makes it plain to me now that this plan doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice. It is also plain to me that we were on a pathway of likely-forever frustrated mediocrity because our spirits were at odds—we wanted what we also hated. And a house divided cannot stand. If we had managed to fully abandon ourselves to our ambitions (which some do manage with the help of some mixture of new age sorcery and hard drugs) we would have been so spiritually mangled that our fates would be something worse than death. What does a man gain if he gets the whole world but sacrifices his soul?

I can forgive myself (a little) because patterns like these usually can’t be apprehended from within. Perspective is required. Waking perception can’t see the forest for the trees, so we sometimes have visions or dreams. These are vague, counterintuitive, and don’t play by the rules of the game you are currently fixated on. So, most people ignore them, most of the time. We also have lost most of our sophisticated language to understand visions or dreams, seeing it all as arbitrary or unscientific. The language didn’t go completely away (it can’t), so it just became unhelpfully simplistic. We’ve settled for, “Follow your dreams,” which now means something like, “Get what you already think you want at any cost and ignore any subconscious warnings against that, especially in the form of other people (aka ‘haters’)” when it probably ought to indicate something more like, “Do that thing you have a strange sense you should do, where people also seem to want you around, even if you lose whatever you once thought was important to you.”

Riley and I found each other in LA as the former type of dream follower. Funnily, though, we met each other as a direct result of a small act of the latter type of dreaming. For in the midst of all our big dreams in LA, we had both followed a still small voice to go to that little church down the street. It was uncomfortable to keep going, I now realize, because it was at odds with the larger part of our spirit that was looking for a good earthly king to serve. But we just kept showing up and volunteering at the food pantry. Right outside of that church was where I first broke the news: “I think we like each other.” And with that, old dreams began to lose their power and new, strange, and humble dreams started to crowd in.

I have to remind myself, that although what I’m trying to do here is make some sense out of all this, there are aspects that go plainly beyond sense. I doubt I will ever recover them with language. One example would be the dream that led me here in the first place, another would be my wife’s exceptional character in the face of these circumstances. For context, she is not just some aspiring actress from LA who, on some level, wanted an excuse to leave the thankless grind behind. She filmed a movie this year and was part of a Disney project last year. She had every concrete reason to stay in Hollywood. She left only because of my weird dream. Now that we’re here and living in the old house, I am the one who is much more likely to forget the dream and fret over some concern of status. Or worry that she doesn’t want to be here because there are too many blighted and abandoned homes on our street. She is usually the one to remind me why we are here: to be involved with people and to do what we are told. This is a special place. There is real history here, and that’s part of it, but what I find remarkable about the town is its aliveness and relative beauty in spite of its total lack of economics. Once you dig a bit, you realize that this town is kept alive only by the good will of a few wealthy families who care about the community. [...]

It also keeps us attuned to how our broader environment may be shaping our inner environment. We notice, for example, that to the extent there is unexplored territory in the house—places filled with dust and cobwebs—there is also unexplored territory in the mind. It is important, then, to intentionally clean every corner of the house, slowly and consciously, literally getting your fingers in every nook and cranny. While you do that, your psychology changes. You master the domain and your nervous system regulates to a more calm, resting state. Until the motions are embodied physically and dramatically, the cobwebs remain also in the marriage. This is not to say dust and cobwebs should be eradicated. Just that the opportunity of their maintenance should be perceived as a privilege rather than the terrifying indication of inevitable decay they are usually seen as. In fact, the modern compulsion to eschew all signs of rust incur an ever-increasing debt that I, at least in this phase of my life, am no longer willing to subsidize my time to afford. I’m thinking of clean, glassy, modern architecture; I once heard someone joke about that sort of place—I can’t remember who said it or where I read it—that those places would be perfect if it wasn’t for all the people in them. The cost is not just in the anti-people aesthetic (which brings a psychic cost probably higher than anyone reckons), but the literal salaries of uncountable maintenance, janitorial, and security people, all built into the ever-increasing hours demanded of the email workers inside. And all that for what? To avoid looking at some dirt, to avoid the realization that you were once that dirt and are quickly becoming it again. And by avoiding those realizations, our resilience to them gets lower, and so we erect even more walls and glass to keep it more securely away, and the cost of it all rises and rises and so we are forced to work our email jobs for longer and longer hours while someone else, also paid for with more and more working hours, makes life-long memories with our children in our stead. You start to think that a little dirt is a small price to pay for freedom. [...]

By choosing Riley, I have made the decision to leave the island of Calypso forever. I went home, in my case both figuratively and literally. That means we have both sacrificed the illusion of eternal youth and have intentionally chosen to have kids, make a home, get old and ugly together, and then eventually die. By making the choice in full consciousness, I feel that I have received a better kind of eternity in exchange.

by James Taylor Foreman, The Metaphor |  Read more:

Image: Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829-1904), Penelope

We Were Promised Sex Robots

Neil McArthur was sure we'd have sex robots by now. The University of Manitoba philosophy professor has spent over a decade studying sex tech. In 2019, when he went to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the industry's largest annual conference, he saw robots with tough, tire-like skin that couldn't walk and spoke more jaggedly than early versions of Siri. When he returned in 2024, well into the LLM boom, he thought, "Things have to have come a long way."

They hadn't. The robots' skin and speech were still unrealistic, and they couldn't move around the conference floor. What was new, though, were several Chinese companies had arrived. (Their founders were invariably young men; one was so young his mom was there, hovering in the background, McArthur says.) As with AI, electric vehicles, and several other tech sectors, China's entrance into the sex robots market had knocked down the price point. Whereas American-made sex robots from the 2010s hype cycle typically started at around $7,000 and quickly exceeded $10,000, some Chinese manufacturers sell sex robots at around $3,000. "The technology had gotten cheaper, but not better," McArthur says.

Several of the Chinese sex doll producers I reached out to did not respond to emails, including VMDoll and IronTech. Others seemed to have AI bots operating their WhatsApp messages. Eventually, I reached Stella Lau, a sales director for Jiggly Joy, a doll manufacturer based in Guangdong province with 160 employees. Lau, 32, has worked for Jiggly Joy for seven years, long before the company released its first AI robot in February.

Jiggly Joy's new model has all the classic features of a sex robot — Lau is one of many merchants who hyped up the "sucking vagina," a suction-and-release pump system — plus it could smile, talk, and wave. It also has a blonde bombshell haircut and can turn its neck like M3GAN. The robot still cannot walk, but that's mostly for safety reasons, Lau says; she's too heavy. The company has been selling about 21 AI dolls a month at $3,000, Lau says. Most of the buyers are American; they're either former sex doll users or lonely and wanted someone to talk to, Lau says.

I also reached a representative for Formosa Doll, a 5-person Hong Kong-based distributor that works exclusively with Chinese sex doll companies. (He asked for anonymity to protect his privacy.) He says AI sex robots are "underdeveloped" and not ready for sale. For one, some doll head prototypes removed the oral sucking motors from the mouth to make space for the AI voice. Trading sucking for talking, he says, is a "big downside."

Voice AI can also be unpredictable and unruly, and sex doll users may be used to making up role-play scenarios in their heads — scenarios they have full control over. That makes him skeptical that AI robots would sell well. "People want an experience, they want to satisfy a fantasy," he says. "People don't want something at home that talks."

The Western market, meanwhile, has mostly flattened out. I tried to contact four of the sex doll makers featured in articles in the 2010s hype cycle. My emails bounced, and my calls went to disconnected numbers.

The only company remaining from the late 2010s appears to be RealDoll, which is now spinning off from the publicly traded Realbotix. The independent RealDoll will be led by Sue Ennis, who started as president of Realbotix the day before our chat. She has big plans, repeating four times that the company would be the "Apple store of intimacy technology."

The robots are built and selling; RealDoll was shipping out 12 as we speak, Ennis tells me. (It's generally a low-revenue business: Realbotix, whose humanoids are also used in healthcare and corporate training settings, reported $353,037 in Q1 earnings.) They have AI voices, AI vaginas, and proprietary skin technology that's also sold to burn victims. Still, the dolls remain very heavy and lack mobility. Some customers take their dolls out on dates. "The dolls are definitely not walking into the theater," Ennis says. "They're being wheeled in."

If the sex robot revolution does happen, it may spread through specialization.

Most of the current AI robots look the same: blonde, skinny, hourglass-shaped. The sex doll underclass is growing more diverse, though. Elves were popular at Formosa Doll, as was Judy Hopps from the "Zootopia" movies. "Goblin dolls are a really hot trend now," Formosa's rep tells me. Consumers don't want generic sexbots; they want their sexbot.

Porn stars are an easy way in. Fans spend thousands in tips to their favorite OnlyFans models. Some are finding that they're willing to spend even more to see them in the (artificial) flesh. Cliff Jensen, a 37-year-old award-winning porn star and OnlyFans model, says his fans want to date him, to prank their friends with him, and to make him take it up the bum. "They've always wanted me to bottom, and I never have," he says.

I meet Jensen at his rep's apartment in Silver Lake, California. We sit side-by-side on the couch, a clutter-filled table with joints and doughnuts in front of us. The big chair is reserved for his sex doll doppelgänger, which he heaved in from his trunk. Jensen is upset; the previous owner, it seemed, had stuffed the sex doll in a closet and piled things on top. The doll retained some head scratches and a mild case of pink eye.

Jensen has worked with the Chinese company IronTech for over 3 years, during which the doll has undergone many evolutions. He performed a 3D body scan for the first iteration, but they couldn't scan his penis. When he saw the doll in-person, he ripped its too-small penis off clean. "It's bad for my brand," he says. He keeps that early, poorly sized phallus as a keepsake.

Yes, Jensen has had sex with himself. It was in an orgy scene, and he found it hilarious. After that scene, Jensen accidentally dropped the doll down a flight of stairs, damaging it beyond repair. He threw the doll in the dumpster, but a hairy elbow peeked out of the trash bag. A neighbor called the cops, thinking it was a corpse. The cops were delighted, he says. "They've seen sex dolls before, but they're those cheap, smaller ones that are washed up on the shore," he says. "They're like, 'Dude, this is gold.'"

Indeed, Jensen's doll didn't look cheap at all. I feel the skin and the hair, which are hauntingly realistic. I hold the breathtakingly large penis in my hand, and it feels like a breathtakingly large penis. Jensen has dozens of ideas to keep improving it: an opening in the lips so you could kiss it, a kit of different penis sizes for those who cannot take his full member, and an AI voice. His primary goal, though, is weight reduction: the current model is at least 140 pounds. He has to haul it over his shoulder to move it.

Jensen has sold around 100 dolls at about $3,800. His customers seem price-sensitive; sales have dropped since the tariffs went into effect. Some fans have considered a doll-sharing model.

by Henry Chandonnet, Business Insider | Read more:
Images: Simon Simard; Cliff Jensen

[ed. See also Lars and the Real Girl (with Ryan Gosling). Now streaming on Tubi for free (with ads). Also, Are Humanoid Robots Ready to Be Deployed? (New Yorker).]

Pharmaceutical Freedom: Why Patients Have a Right to Self-Medicate

If Patients Can Refuse Care, Why Can't They Access It?
A Psychiatrist’s Read of Jessica Flanigan's "Pharmaceutical Freedom"

V. The Third Person in the Room

The clinical encounter is not a two-party relationship. There is a third presence in the room, composed of malpractice precedent, DEA scrutiny, prior-authorization architecture, board-of-medicine expectations, and institutional risk management. It does not speak. It shapes what can be offered, what can be discussed openly, and what stays outside the bounds of the conversation. The patient senses it. The prescriber feels it more acutely.

Flanigan directs her critique at the state, as if the state were a discrete actor whose policies could be evaluated on their merits and replaced with better ones. The state is not in the room. Individual prescribers are in the room, and the policies of the state arrive there refracted through professional liability, employer policy, payer requirements, and the residue of every malpractice case any of us has read about. What looks like medical paternalism is, in many cases, professional survival adapting to a system in which the visible costs of one kind of error are concentrated and the visible costs of the other are dispersed.

The cost of error is asymmetrically distributed. A patient who refuses care and deteriorates is generally respected as having exercised autonomy; the death is sad, but it is hers. A prescriber who provides risky access and watches harm follow is scrutinized, second-guessed, sometimes sued, occasionally disciplined by their state medical board. These outcomes are not philosophically symmetric, and prescribers have absorbed that asymmetry into their reflexes. Daniel Carpenter, in his analysis of the FDA in Reputation and Power, names the same pattern at the regulatory scale: visible harms are minimized, dispersed harms are tolerated, and the institution's incentive structure runs in one direction. The clinic operates on the same logic as the agency, scaled to a single examination room.

There is something genuinely appealing to me about Flanigan's proposal from inside this structure. If physicians are not the gatekeepers, they are not the bearers of the consequences. The consultant role, in which I inform rather than authorize, is the more honest description of what I am actually competent to do. It removes a distortion in the encounter that the current regulatory structure quietly imposes. I would, in some moods, sign on tomorrow.

The cost of removing it is that gatekeeping organizes responsibility in ways that are not always coercive. The patient who can be conditionally offered a risky medication, contingent on a safety plan and a follow-up visit, is in a different conversation than the patient who can simply buy it at retail. Whether that difference is therapeutic or merely bureaucratic depends on the case, the patient, and the medication; the honest answer is that it is both, in proportions that vary.

Quong's distinction returns here in a form Flanigan does not fully address. Removing physician gatekeeping does not eliminate the coercive structure around pharmaceutical decisions. It relocates it. Insurers, employers, licensing bodies, fitness-for-duty examiners, family courts, child-welfare agencies: these are the secondary gatekeepers waiting to absorb the function. A pilot whose airline learns he has been self-medicating does not become more autonomous because his prescriber is no longer the bottleneck. Flanigan's payment proposals, which include collective insurance bargaining, conditional reimbursement, and vouchers, are sensible on their own terms, but they describe a system in which insurers retain decisive control over which drugs are practically affordable, and that control is itself a form of gatekeeping.

Her reform of the prescription system would not abolish gatekeeping. It would migrate it from a clinical relationship, where there is at least some individual accountability and some possibility of negotiation, into administrative structures with less of either.

VI. What the Book Gets Uncomfortably Right

This is where Flanigan's abstraction becomes clinically useful. There is a version of her argument that sounds exaggerated until you follow it through the structure described above. Delay accumulates in individual patients. In aggregate it looks like a policy. In the clinic it looks like a pattern.

Four things in the book survive clinical scrutiny better than I would like them to.

The first is that delay is a body count, and the count is not zero. Flanigan's most provocative line, the one about prescription requirements killing people, lands harder here than in the section that introduced it, because by now the reader has the structure to see what she means. The sequence is familiar to anyone who has watched a patient cycle through the standard-of-care options for a treatment-resistant condition. An early-phase signal is not strong enough to meet the chosen endpoint. The endpoint was chosen to withstand regulatory scrutiny rather than to register clinical benefit. The trial extends. Approval waits. The patient cycles through partial responses, accumulates side effects, loses jobs and relationships, and eventually either stabilizes on something inadequate or does not stabilize at all. The drug arrives later, with narrower labeling and higher evidentiary confidence. Some patients benefit. Others have already moved on, in one direction or another. No one counts the ones who did not wait.

This is the asymmetry Carpenter describes at institutional scale. The cost of being wrong in one direction is concentrated, identifiable, traceable to a decision; the cost of being wrong in the other direction is dispersed across a population that never appears in the same frame as the decision that produced it. That asymmetry constrains what I can offer the person sitting in front of me. The menu of available treatments at any given visit is a function of what is approved, what is labeled, what is defensible, and what is reimbursable. I am choosing among the survivors of a filtration process that selected for evidentiary confidence at the cost of timeliness, and for legal defensibility at the cost of clinical range. Flanigan is right that delay carries a cost. Carpenter explains why that cost is tolerated. The clinic is where the two positions meet and refuse to resolve.

The second is regulatory inconsistency. Alcohol is sold at gas stations. Tobacco is regulated at point of sale rather than at access. The supplement industry sells substances with measurable pharmacological effects under almost no oversight, some of which overlap meaningfully with prescription pharmacology. Meanwhile, drugs with established mechanisms, known dosing, decades of safety data, and clear therapeutic niches remain tightly controlled. The boundary does not track risk. It tracks regulatory history, which is to say it tracks the order in which different industries developed, captured their respective agencies, and stabilized their privileges.

The third is that restriction redistributes harm rather than eliminating it, and the redistribution is stratified by resources. The patients who already operate in a world of pharmaceutical freedom are overwhelmingly wealthy, educated, well-connected, and white. They have the time, language, money, and confidence to use international pharmacies, online vendors, supplement markets, ketamine-clinic networks, and direct-to-consumer telehealth. They self-experiment with peptides, pay cash for novel neuromodulation protocols, and design off-label regimens with help from physicians willing to advise them and from AI tools that explain pharmacokinetics on demand. One patient with bipolar disorder, able to afford a nonstandard neuromodulation course out of pocket, designed a variant protocol after reading the literature; it seems to have helped him, and the clinical work was free to proceed because he could bypass the insurance pathway entirely. Another patient, after years of severe fibromyalgia, researched a newly approved neurosteroid obsessively and had two weeks of striking relief on samples left at an office; her right-to-try appeal failed and she could not afford the cash price. What separated those two patients was resources rather than biology. Patients without those resources remain inside the formal system, where access is slower, narrower, and subject to authorization workflows designed by people who do not have to use them. Psychedelic therapy is the cleanest contemporary example: psilocybin retreats in legal jurisdictions, ketamine clinics, and underground guides are available to people who can afford them, while the same compounds remain federally inaccessible to the patients most likely to benefit and least likely to find a way around the prohibition.

The fourth is that restriction shapes honesty. This is essentially Anomaly's learned-helplessness point, and it deserves the most attention. When access depends on prescriber approval, the patient has a strong incentive to present in whatever way maximizes the likelihood of getting what they want. Symptoms are emphasized or hidden. Histories are edited. Substance use gets reframed as something else, or omitted. This is not lying in the sense that anyone would prosecute. It is adaptation to a system where the prescriber's authority over access creates a corresponding pressure on the information that prescribers receive. Anomaly's framing draws on Mill: state restrictions, by promising to manage risks on the citizen's behalf, can permanently stunt the development of the very faculties that would have allowed the citizen to manage them. The clinical version is more local. The frame that promises to protect the patient from bad decisions also produces the patient who cannot tell his doctor what he is actually doing.

A system that restricts access does not eliminate risk. It redistributes it: toward patients who cannot find their way around the workarounds, into clinical encounters where honesty has been priced out, and onto the timelines of patients waiting for permission that may never arrive. The conversation in which the options run out happens more often than the policy debate suggests.

VII. Toward a Capacity-Based Hybrid

The book's great virtue is that it forces clinicians to defend the gatekeeping role rather than assume it. Most pharmaceutical regulation is implicitly risk-based. The higher the perceived risk of a drug, the tighter the controls on access. Flanigan's most useful contribution, after the symmetry argument, is to demonstrate that risk on its own is a poor foundation for coercion; many activities of comparable or greater risk go entirely unrestricted, and the threshold at which paternalism becomes legitimate is not derived from any consistent principle.

A capacity-based framework offers a different organizing principle. The threshold for restricting access is not the level of risk involved, but the integrity of the decision-making process about that risk. [...]

The right analogy is not the prescriber as gatekeeper but the prescriber as fiduciary advisor. Financial advisors do not authorize their clients' trades; they cannot prevent a client from making a foolish investment. What they offer is a relationship across time, a track record of trust long enough to make persuasion possible, and the authority that comes from being someone the client has chosen to listen to. The advisor's job is to deepen the conditions under which the client can exercise autonomy well, not to override it. Having no coercive authority is what makes the advisor freer to be honest about what the client is doing wrong. That structural freedom is precisely what the prescriber's role currently lacks.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

[ed. From the 2026 ACT annual book review contest (here). This is a recurring frustration - patient requests for various drug prescriptions versus what doctors will actually prescribe (for a variety of reasons articulated in this review, none of them transparent). Since a patient generally has more intimate insight into how their body functions and feels than a physician does you'd think they'd have more influence in the decision-making process, but no. And it's hard to discern what's driving those decisions - see the list at the top of this post. (As an aside, I've never understood why there are so many drug commercials on nightly news, and who they're directed at. Do you know of anyone going to a doctor and saying "hey, I saw a new drug for my condition on tv last night, and how about we give it a try". Try it, see what kind of response you get.]

Kitaoka Fumio - Pond in autumn, Moss Garden, 1970
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[Haori] (Kabuki costume) Target and arrow design on light green satin ground. Edo period, 19th century.

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What's Elon Worth?

[ed. Let's see, by my watch $103,000 every minute. He could own every major league sports team 2.5 times over; buy all the gold in Ft. Knox (with billions to spare)... (more).]

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The Shape of the Thing

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Meta Culpa

Early last year, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a clear message for his staff. "You should quit if you feel that way," he told one employee who said workers were being treated poorly. "You should consider working elsewhere," he told another person who questioned controversial changes at the business. He was reinforcing the company Meta had spent the last few years trying to become: a lean, fast, high-pressure organization that no longer had the patience for internal debate. "You can leave," Bosworth said, "or disagree and commit."

But this month, in a memo and a meeting with employees, Bosworth sounded like a different person. Morale is "probably one of the worst it's ever been," he said, adding that the business had done "an atrocious job" with its recent restructuring. "We've undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued."

Since 2022, Meta has remade itself around a ruthless management playbook that helped define a new era in Silicon Valley. Through relentless layoffs and many other unpopular decisions, executives charged ahead, emboldened by record profits and apparently immune to the building discontent. Bosworth's comments last week were different — an acknowledgement that Meta's leadership may finally be confronting the costs of its actions.

Meta's workforce is at a breaking point. Employees in the UK are trying to form a labor union, decrying executives' "cruel and shortsighted behaviors." More than 1,600 workers have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop tracking employees' keystrokes to improve its AI models. As Wired reported this month, things have gotten so bad that one frustrated employee hijacked a livestreamed meeting with a profanity-laced outburst directed at an executive. Another compared working in a new AI-training unit to the gulag. Others are so dejected they're actually praying to get laid off so they can leave with at least some severance.

Against this backdrop, Bosworth was one of several executives in recent weeks scrambling to do damage control. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox acknowledged the "insanity of this company" that created a "difficult" and "brutal" environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted "we've made mistakes."

"It's a classic example of chickens coming home to roost," says Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. "They have almost systematically destroyed trust. They are trying to figure out how to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug."

The digging started with a mass layoff of 11,000 people in late 2022, which Zuckerberg was at least apologetic about. The company then slashed another 10,000 jobs the next spring in what Zuckerberg hailed as a "year of efficiency," and then another 3,600 in 2025 that he said was to get rid of "low performers," effectively torpedoing some workers' job searches (many of them, it turned out, had received good performance reviews). In March this year, news leaked that the company was about to ax even more jobs, but it didn't confirm the cuts for weeks and didn't notify those affected until May, sending everyone into a nauseating, two-month purgatory. In April, amid the limbo, Meta announced it would start tracking employees' keystrokes, stoking fears that the company wanted to automate their work. And in May, as it laid off 8,000 employees, it reassigned another 7,000, many of them to menial jobs that involve training AI. Meta declined to comment on this story. [...]

For employees caught in the hailstorm, it must have felt validating for an executive to empathize with their situation. But surely he and the rest of Meta's leadership knew all these things would make employees unhappy, and yet they did them anyway. So why the sudden mea culpa?

Perhaps all the anger, dissatisfaction, and open rebellion was harming productivity. Or the particularly public nature of Meta's dysfunction, with the crescendo of news reports, had become a liability for its reputation with investors. Or maybe executives finally realized what had become patently obvious to everyone else — that whatever Meta was doing just wasn't working. The whole point of adopting this hard-charging management style was to get employees to innovate faster and catch up to competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the all-consuming battle over AI. Instead, Meta has been falling farther and farther behind.

by Aki Ito, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Wally Skalij/Getty; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
[ed. Why anyone would want Facebook/Meta on their business resume is beyond me. The money might be good, but working for a company like that would just be burning life years. See also: The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust (The Walrus).]

Seniors in Medicare to Get Obesity Drug Coverage

Millions of older Americans in Medicare are about to gain access to obesity drugs for the first time — but that landmark shift may be flying under the radar for many of them.

Starting Wednesday, eligible beneficiaries can get obesity drugs through Medicare’s new Bridge demonstration program for a monthly copay of just $50. The coverage marks a long-sought victory for patients, physicians and obesity advocates who have pushed for broader access to the blockbuster treatments from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which have remained out of reach for many Americans.

But a staggering 82% of all older Americans — including 79% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats — say they are unaware that Medicare is about to begin covering obesity drugs, according to a survey released in early June by the Obesity Care Advocacy Network. The survey, conducted in late March among more than 2,100 adults ages 65 and older, was completed weeks before the government announced it would extend the Bridge program through 2027.

That data may not come as a surprise: While the government has done robust outreach to healthcare providers and pharmacists, some physicians and other experts told CNBC that they have noticed limited advertising of the new coverage to the general public from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services or Novo and Lilly.

There may be good reasons for it. CMS has done limited public outreach on the program ahead of July 1 because beneficiaries are “most moved to take action” when a benefit is actually available to them, an agency official told reporters on Thursday. They added that CMS will put out more promotions after the launch, “in the interest of being good stewards of our taxpayer dollars.”

Other experts also told CNBC that it may come down to making sure providers and pharmacies are prepared and resources are in place before pursuing broad public outreach. [...]

Unlike traditional Medicare drug coverage, enrollment in the Bridge program is not automatic. Patients must meet eligibility requirements, obtain a prescription and receive prior authorization approval through CMS before coverage begins.

by Annika Kim Constantino, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Dhiraj Singh|Bloomberg|Getty Images

[ed. Feels like there's more to this story. Why is no one clamoring to get credit (or market share)?]

Ring of Kerry, Ireland
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Testosterone and the Bible - the ‘New Punk Rock’

George, Wash. — At Freedom Con, there were feats of strength and CrossFit contests. There was an obstacle course and a station for practicing how to change a tire. There was prayer and music, and original verse from a pastor and tactical gear salesman known as the Warrior Poet. There were exhortations from the stage to run for office, to have more babies and to reject “woke secular gay paganism.”

“Heterosexual, sober men who marry girls and read Bibles, we’re the new punk rock!” pastor Mark Driscoll said in a fiery sermon that brought attendees to their feet.

More than 4,500 men gathered in central Washington over Father’s Day weekend for a testosterone-fueled celebration of Christianity and patriotism that culminated in a statement calling conservative Christian men “to rise as statesmen.”

Men came with their sons. They came with their pastors. They came with their brothers, their hunting buddies, their Bible study friends.

The two-day event took place just outside the small town of George, Wash., against the backdrop of America’s 250th anniversary. The amalgam of political activation, Christian worship and male bonding provided a glimpse of an emerging right-wing movement with masculinity as its unifying force.

Rick Slaughter, 44, camped overnight at the festival last Friday with a group of eight men and boys from around Orting. On Saturday afternoon, they smiled for a photo on the sloping lawn overlooking the Columbia River, with the state flag of Washington and another one reading “JESUS IS KING.”

The men meet weekly in a group affiliated with Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s ministry that boomed in the 1990s and has recently been resurrected with a sharper political edge. The trip was an opportunity for them to spend more time together and hear from political candidates and well-known pastors about their responsibilities as Christian men, as they saw it.

“What we’re trying to do is be better men,” Slaughter said. Many of the members have become sober and started marriage counseling since joining the group. Slaughter has gotten a handle on an anger problem, he said. (Federal prosecutors accused Slaughter of attacking Capitol Police officers in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, but the case was dismissed last year when President Donald Trump granted clemency to participants. Slaughter described the charges in an interview as “a lot of lies.”)

Driscoll, who resigned under pressure more than a decade ago from the large church he founded in Seattle, has made a roaring comeback as the evangelical mainstream has embraced his style of brash provocations in the Trump era. Accused of bullying and cultivating a culture of fear at his church in Seattle, he now leads a large congregation in Scottsdale, Ariz., and has a huge online following.

His sermon last Friday swept through the first books of Genesis and Exodus, drawing connections between ancient biblical stories and contemporary American politics. He described the Tower of Babel as an illustration of the perils of globalism, and an entity faced by Moses as “the transgender god of Egypt.”

“New days, old demons,” he said. “You men need to understand, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”

Many of the pastors in the program’s lineup were leaders of a growing cohort of politically aggressive churches closely allied with the Trump administration and its priorities. Some were there to promote new political and educational institutions that indicated their ambitions to extend their influence beyond the purely spiritual.

Grace City Church, a large congregation in nearby Wenatchee, spearheaded the event under the auspices of Stronger Man Nation, a men’s ministry. Both were founded by Josh McPherson, a pastor who has been invited to pray for Trump in the White House and whose empire now includes a popular podcast and a new “anti-woke” college he envisions as a “Protestant West Point.”

Issues mentioned from the main stage included social-conservative mainstays like abortion and gender identity but also housing prices and construction costs, in a state where both significantly outpace the national average.

“Even young men like me, who want to be providers, who want to start a family, who want to say no to vice and live a righteous life, are crushed by the weight of tyranny,” David Prince, a student at Grace City’s new college, said from the stage Saturday during a presentation with other Generation Z men.

Another recurring theme was how important it was for conservative men to stay in blue states rather than decamping to friendlier jurisdictions like Texas.

“What a weekend like this represents is an infusion of hope into good men who have been sidelined, by virtue of feeling like this is a David versus Goliath here in Washington,” Russell Johnson, 40, the pastor of a growing network of churches in Washington, said in an interview. “If all the good guys leave, the state doesn’t get better; it gets worse.”

It was up to pastors like him to encourage them, he said. “What in the hell is the point of having influence if you don’t use it for stuff that matters?” [...]

“Everyone shows up to vote for president, but no one shows up to vote for dogcatcher,” said Kenny Blight, 38, who is part of Slaughter’s Promise Keepers group. “I want a biblical dogcatcher.”

Almost the only women on the grounds, other than venue employees (and one journalist), were hundreds of volunteers from Grace City Church who each paid $55 to be there. (General admission for men was $199.)

“God created men for a purpose; they’re providers and protectors,” said Marcy Lyon, 55, who was volunteering with her teenage daughter. “When they get together and bond, it helps them stand up.”

A small pergola on the top of the hill was set aside as a women-only listening area for volunteers. A whiteboard read in looping script, “Ladies — please be considerate and enjoy this space quietly. We want to minimize distractions so our men can listen.”

by Ruth Graham, Seattle Times/NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Grant Hindsley/The New York Times
[ed. Jesus Christ...]

Bitcoin Winter

Why bitcoin is trading at a 2-year low

Bitcoin is in the dumps.

The apex cryptocurrency is down more than 30% in 2026, slumping to its lowest level since 2024 this week to trade around $59,200. That marks about a 53% drop from the token's all-time high above $126,000 last October. Ethereum, the second-biggest crypto, is doing even worse, down 48% this year.

So, how did the Trump-era bullishness for crypto that took bitcoin to record highs give way to a brutal crypto winter that shows little sign of thawing?

Scanning around, there's little good news to be gleaned from the headlines. Interest from institutional and retail investors alike looks tapped out. That's evidenced by record outflows from bitcoin ETFs, which Deutsche Bank says have hit $6 billion in six weeks, the longest losing streak since the funds were launched in early 2024.

"This matters because ETF demand has become central to Bitcoin's price formation: the same vehicles that supported the 2024-25 rally now amplify the decline mechanically when flows reverse," the bank wrote this week.

And then there's Strategy. The business data firm founded by Michael Saylor, the "never sell" bitcoin evangelist, has sold some bitcoin.

"On 1 June, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) disclosed it had sold 32 bitcoin, its first sale since December 2022. The amount was negligible (0.004% of holdings) and the immediate price reaction was modest (~3%), but the signal was not," Deutsche wrote.

In the days following the sale, bitcoin dropped nearly 20%.

Selling by Strategy—which is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin—has been a looming question mark all year as the token's price has slumped below the Strategy's average cost. The difference in the firm's net asset value of its bitcoin holdings versus its market cap has driven speculation that it could sell more tokens, an event that would weigh further on sentiment.

"Bitcoin currently trades below Strategy's average cost of $75,699, and the market has begun to price the possibility of forced selling by leveraged corporate holders. We expect this question to persist," Deutsche analyst said.

Capital is also flowing away from bitcoin and into another speculative area of the market: AI. Analysts attribute much of the waning enthusiasm for crypto among retail traders directly to their relentless appetite for artificial intelligence. The rapid outflows from bitcoin ETFs in the last month have been mirrored in blistering pace of investing in many of the top AI and chip ETFs.

A final wrinkle is the surprisingly hawkish new Fed boss, Kevin Warsh. The policy meeting this month officially dashed all hope of a rate cut, with Warsh's first meeting further boosting odds of a rate hike, a bearish development for risk assets like bitcoin.

by Max Adams, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Yahoo Finance; Jennifer Sor/BI