They Said It Could Not Be Done

They said that it could not be done, he said just let me try.

They said, “Other men have tried and failed,” and he answered, 

“But not I.”

They said, “It is impossible,” he said, “There is no such word.”
He closed his mind, he closed his heart to everything he heard.

He said, “Within the heart of man, there is a tiny seed.
It grows until it blossoms, it’s called the will to succeed.
Its roots are strength, its stem is hope, its petals inspiration,
Its thorns protect its strong green leaves, its grim determination.

“Its stamens are its skills which help to shape each plan,
For there’s nothing in the universe beyond the scope of man.”

They thought that it could not be done, some even said they knew it,
But he faced up to what could not be done, and he couldn’t bloody do it!

~ Benny Hill

[ed. Yes, that Benny Hill.]

Lake Whatever

Trump executive order changes name of Lake Ontario to Lake America

Image: Al Drago/UPI

[ed. The childish stupidity is breathtaking. Thanks again, voters.]

Daniel Hsu
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A Future of Programmable Medicine

What if instead of editing a harmful gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal chemists, who heroically navigate maybe the hardest field in biomedicine. Rather, what I mean is this. A biologist might have a clear hypothesis about how to stop a disease, such as: blocking a particular protein will lower blood cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. Naturally enough, the biologist would like to test that hypothesis. But there is no magic button to switch off this protein; something physical has to do the blocking. Usually, that thing is a small chemical carefully designed to be administered into the body, bind to the protein, block it – and do nothing else. In practice, this almost never goes as planned, which is a major reason most drugs fail in clinical trials.

It’s worse than this: medicinal chemists struggle to come up with ways to interact with most proteins at all. The majority of human proteins are considered ‘undruggable’, meaning that none of the small molecules we can currently synthesize can effectively bind to them, either because those proteins lack a convenient pocket for drugs to attach to or because they are ‘intrinsically disordered’, with little coherent structure. Drug discovery ends up focusing on the minority of targets that are druggable, like the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because that’s where the light shines.

Even for those targets, success is far from guaranteed. A drug that works in the lab might be broken down in the body before it reaches its target protein, interfere with other proteins and cause toxic side effects, or fail to be absorbed and distributed to the right tissues. Our ability to predict what small molecule drugs will do in the body is so poor that even if the drug works, it might be for a different reason than originally hypothesized!

But what if, instead of spending years optimizing small molecule chemistry to treat just one disease, and all that work merely delivering a sharp reminder that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, there really was a magic button to switch off any gene we chose? In that case, we could treat not just high cholesterol but dozens of deadly diseases, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes to Huntington’s disease.

Welcome to the world of siRNA therapy.

Silencing genes

The story of siRNA begins in 1990, when the scientists at the DNA Plant Technology Corporation in California were trying to figure out why their petunias turned white. They had actually been trying to make their petunias darker, by adding an extra copy of the gene for an enzyme that produces pigment. Presumably, adding an extra copy of a gene for an enzyme would mean more enzyme and therefore more pigment. But somehow, the extra copy eliminated the enzyme’s production, rather than boosting it. They named this baffling effect ‘cosuppression’. Subsequent work by other researchers revealed its cause: a special kind of RNA molecule, siRNA, had interfered with the enzyme’s production. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello later won a Nobel prize for this discovery.

Biologists had already known about RNA for several decades. Similar to DNA, RNA is a complex molecule built from a chain of smaller building blocks that encode genetic information. But the two differ in one important detail: the building blocks of RNA have one extra oxygen atom compared to DNA (hence its name, ribonucleic acid, as opposed to DNA’s ‘deoxy’-ribonucleic acid). This oxygen is prone to chemical reactions that can break RNA molecules. DNA is stabler and is therefore used to store genetic information in all multicellular life. RNA molecules tend to be short-lived, and take many different forms within cells, carrying instructions, helping to assemble proteins, regulating genes, and catalyzing reactions. And while DNA is ‘double-stranded’, with two linked strands of building blocks twisting into its famous helix shape, RNA often exists as just one strand.

DNA contains the instructions for making proteins, from the enzymes that digest food to the keratin and collagen that form our hair and skin. But to get from DNA to protein, the genetic code is first transcribed into an intermediate RNA molecule, called ‘messenger RNA’ or mRNA, which is then translated into protein. If the mRNA is destroyed, the protein won’t be built.

That’s exactly what siRNA, or ‘small interfering RNA’, does: it’s a short strand of RNA that interferes with the production of protein by destroying mRNA. An siRNA molecule binds to a piece of mRNA with a matching sequence, like a kind of barcode, and targets it for destruction by the cell’s gene-silencing machinery, which cuts the mRNA into pieces.

siRNA also explains what happened in the petunias. Adding an extra copy of the pigment-producing gene triggered the petunias to develop siRNA targeting that sequence, and because the newly introduced gene and the original gene shared the same sequence, both were silenced, the flowers lost their pigment and turned white. This is a naturally occurring process: siRNA is used to ‘silence’ unwanted genes, such as those of viruses that have entered the cell. But we can also use it to artificially block the production of proteins that cause disease.

by Jacob Witten, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects

A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive.

“Healthcare costs have been rising faster than inflation, and a staggering share of that spending is consumed by administrative middlemen, soaring drug prices, and emergency care for conditions that should have been treated earlier and for less,” said senior author Alison Galvani, the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at YSPH and the director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis. “Medicare for All strips out those sources of waste while providing everyone with healthcare, saving over a trillion dollars and 114,000 lives every year.”

The model identified five major sources of savings: lower pharmaceutical prices, Medicare-level payments to providers, reduced administrative overhead, less fraudulent billing, and fewer avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Even under more conservative assumptions about drug prices and fraud reduction, the researchers projected that the savings would reach at least $663 billion a year. Both figures account for an estimated $304 billion in additional spending to meet unmet medical needs, reimburse care that now goes unpaid, and provide universal dental coverage.

A universal healthcare policy would also save tens of thousands of lives, the researchers project. They estimate that adequate coverage for all could avert about 62,863 deaths annually — and that nearly half, or 29,631, would be among people who already hold insurance. These are the underinsured: the more than 45 million working-age adults whose deductibles and cost-sharing put care beyond financial reach anyway. Reversing coverage rollbacks and other health policies enacted since 2025 would avert a further 51,311 deaths each year, the researchers project, bringing the annual total to 114,174.

The study builds on findings Galvani, co-author Meagan Fitzpatrick, and other colleagues published in The Lancet in 2020, which projected that universal health care would save $450 billion and more than 68,000 lives annually. The larger estimates in the new study reflect ballooning health expenditures, a widening gap between commercial and Medicare payment rates, and new estimates on recent policy changes and the underinsured.

by Alison Galvani PhD, Yale School of Public Health |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Or we could give it all to Pistol Pete and enjoy another fireworks show over Iran.]

Hannelie Coetzee (South African) - Hyena Clan V, 2023
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Flock You

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[ed. In Texas, a sheriff’s deputy used 83,000 Flock ALPRs to find a woman who had allegedly had a medication abortion, at the behest of her abusive partner. See also: The IJ Database of ALPR Abuse (IJ); and, Flock Safety Camera Appeared Overnight Aimed at His House (Yahoo News).]

The Medium Eats the Message

[ed. Expectations of privacy in communications are dead.]

You owe your belief that your mail is private, that no one should read it without your permission, to a British schoolteacher named Rowland Hill, whose 1837 pamphlet, Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, changed mail forever. Even your vague trust that your electronic mail (texts, Signal chats, email) is private, you owe to Hill, because even your Signal chats bear the traces of his policy of prepaid anonymity.

Hill saw postal delivery as wasteful and expensive. The price varied, depending on distance and number of sheets, and it was paid by the recipient, who could just refuse to accept. Hill began collecting sad stories of failure: urgent letters sitting for weeks at the postmaster’s, parents pawning clothes to pay for a letter from a child. Instead, Hill proposed, why not have the sender pay in advance, a flat rate, with a stamp (one penny). Parliament liked the idea and this is how the mail has worked since January 10, 1840 (though the price of stamps has naturally gone up).

As Hill predicted, everyone started sending letters, now that it was affordable. Mail volume doubled in the first year, from about 76 million to about 169 million. Volume passed 300 million by 1850 and kept climbing for a century and a half, peaking in 2004–05 at about twenty billion a year. It is about seven billion now. The US adopted pre-paid stamped mail in 1847.

More importantly your mail was now private. Under the old system, clerks counted sheets to figure the price, which meant handling and close inspection. An envelope counted as a sheet of paper, so most people folded their letters and sealed them with wax. In 1845 Hill’s brother Edwin, with a stationer named Warren De La Rue, patented an envelope-folding machine. By the end of the decade in the US and the UK everyone was using envelopes (which are officially called “covers”).

The envelope, or cover, gave you the presumption of privacy, legally. In the US, the Post Office Act of 1792 had already forbidden postal officials to open letters except when they couldn’t be delivered. In 1878 the Supreme Court included the sealed letter under the Fourth Amendment. Ex parte Jackson held that letters and sealed packages could only be opened with a warrant. [...]

Everyone sent email like they sent mail: candidly, embarrassingly, filled with gossip, complaints, things a spouse isn’t supposed to know about, dirty jokes. The privacy of email seems to be just as sacred. Congress had extended wiretap protection to electronic mail early, in 1986, on the theory that a message in transit was like a letter in transit. A system administrator could read your mail but was not supposed to. Such invasions of privacy became firing and disciplinary offenses.

Email feels personal and private to people. It works 99% of the time, unless someone’s bulk email list is wrong. You don’t get email that isn’t yours. Your address is a string: local part, @, domain. Some people have had the same address now for decades.

But very early on came the junk mail problem. In August 2002 Paul Graham published “A Plan for Spam,” and within two years the presumption of email privacy ended. Most people have no idea about this history. Graham was mad about the sheer amount of spam. The idea was software to filter your email by word phrases to separate out the junk. At first the software was just for you to put on your computer. Within a year, email providers were putting the software on the channel. There was no big announcement. Getting rid of spam seemed worth it.

Enter Gmail in April 2004. Google was transparent about the idea they’d read your email to funnel you appropriate ads. Privacy groups were appalled. A California state senator, Liz Figueroa, introduced a bill to block it. European organizations asked the British and German governments to investigate. Google shrugged and said scanning your mail is what antivirus and anti-spam software already do. What are you complaining about? By 2013, defending a wiretap suit in federal court, Google argued that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties. Having your email scanned is expected in the ordinary course of business.

And yet people kept sending emails as if they were private. In 2003, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made public roughly half a million internal Enron emails. Everyone just chatting away candidly like people in every organization do. The Sony hack in 2014 showed that nothing changed, as do the emails in the Epstein files: plain language, real names, embarrassing remarks. In the latter case, there are people who really should have known better.

A sent message exists in at least four places: the sender’s outbox, the sender’s server, the recipient’s server, and the recipient’s inbox. Corporate servers may hold mail for decades. Brokers must keep business email three to six years under SEC Rule 17a-4; federal agencies keep senior officials’ email permanently under the Federal Records Act. Once a lawsuit is anticipated, any deletion becomes an offense. Nothing in the postal system worked this way. Undeliverable mail went to Washington and eventually was burnt.

Everything changed again in November 2022 with ChatGPT, which saw a hundred million users within two months. Everyone was chatting just like on email, presuming privacy.

There’s no envelope with an LLM. There is no routing layer separate from interpretation; there’s no channel distinct from message. In this case the medium not only is the message it also eats the message, to turn it into training data.

When you’re prompting ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSeek there is no other party. Sender, carrier, addressee—the singularity is the point where three collapse into one. You are not sending a message through anything to anyone. The LLM is the addressee and you are desiring your message to be read and replied to.

On a July 2025 podcast Sam Altman said out loud that people talk about the most personal things in their lives to ChatGPT, that young people especially chat with it like it was a therapist or a life coach, asking for relationship advice. But unlike therapists, lawyers, or doctors, none of it is protected by privilege. Should there be AI privilege? [...]

Interpretation is the service with LLMs, not delivery. The model cannot not read and digest everything you send. That is the whole point. (And this is why I am deliberately impersonal in my extensive LLM engagement.)

And now agents. The postal system, with its categories of sender, carrier, recipient, never anticipated this. As Tyler Cowen and Sonia Farrell Pearson point out in their recent piece “Capitalizing Untethered AI Agents,” “the thing deciding and the thing being blamed come apart.” You authorized the agent to complete a task but you may not have authorized it to write a particular letter. Were a court to compel disclosure of your agent’s communication, who is the author?

Your agent may have contracted with vendors who did not know they were contracting with an agent. The recipient has no way to know who sent the message.

Is your agent a third party? If it is, then nothing is private per Smith v. Maryland. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If it is not, it’s a tool, an extension of you, like your pen or your hard drive. Giving instructions to your agent is like talking to yourself. Of course the “tool” runs on OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s servers…

by Hollis French, Anecdotal Value |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. And Edward Snowden is still exiled in Russia.]

The Ordinary Sublime of the American Diner

We had our first taste of pecan pie. Good lord. Do the Americans know how lucky they are to live with these everyday indulgences? Pecan pie is part of the ordinary sublime of American life. It knocks English apple crumble into a cocked hat. Apple crumble can be superb, with a crunchy topping, preferably with the sort of spice mix one associates with Christmas, mince pies, and mulled wine (and a pinch of cumin to go with the cinnamon), and perhaps some pear to balance the apple and squares of dark chocolate, but it is still the old world’s idea of a good time.

Pecan pie, served hot, à la mode, in a diner that looks older than my grandmother—that’s luxury, that’s life in the movies, that’s America. Apple crumble is for weekends, Sunday lunch, something you make at home. Whoever heard of a restaurant serving apple crumble like the ladies of the village used to make it? By contrast, pecan pie is for everyone, every day, whenever you feel like it. No Englishman ever asked a friend if they wanted to go for a serving of crumble the way Americans go out for coffee and a slice of pie.

We were in a diner in Bethesda, complete with the original fixtures and fittings, surrounded by people eating country fried steak, chicken tenders, and pancakes for lunch, with a jukebox at the table that no longer plays, and those Maxwell House coffee pots that are found in the old diners that have seen generations come and go. The wooden booths are reminiscent of the origins of fast food and diners: the railway carriage restaurant. They are reminiscent, too, of church pews. All along 16th Street NW, which you drive out of DC to get up to this corner of Maryland, there are the sort of churches that made America: large, level, open, well-lit, from the Protestant tradition where everyone is on a level. Diners are still, just about, America’s secular churches. Every man is a success in a diner: equal among eaters.

When I went to New York for work, and regretted the lack of time to do anything real, I got up early, went to a quiet diner run by a wizened old man on Second Avenue, and read the New York Times with my refill. In Boston, more than a decade ago, we walked through the ice-cold air to find the diner we were recommended. Police officers were eating muffins and everyone had those characteristic blue-and-white coffee cups. In Wisconsin, I travelled from Milwaukee to Madison to Taliesin, and whenever I could, I went to a diner. Whatever else we remember of America, we will always remember the Gettysburg Family Restaurant.

If there is a “real America” (though why Manhattan and the DMV are not always considered to be the “real America” is beyond me: if these are not the heart of a certain idea of America, with their (what?) twenty-million people, I cannot think what is), you will find it in these diners. Blue jeans, tattoos, happy children, friendly-busy waiters and waitresses, laminated menus, eggs any way you like ’em, a waffle on the side, families out for lunch, locals, road trippers, everything all day, the dignity of a booth no matter how little you have to spend, coffee you don’t have to wait for, period crockery, the hum of conversation and the clang of the kitchen, paying the cashier at the register, blueberry pie, peanut soup, maple bacon, the good old American hamburger, side salads, fried cheese, baked chicken, any combination you want, daily specials, and everything just like mother used to make it. America the way we remember her, the way we imagine her, the way she still sometimes can be.

And hot pecan pie, à la mode: a small plate of delight for anyone with $4.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: Lee Cartledge on Unsplash

Les frères Chapuisat, “Pierre philosophale” (2013)
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Doublet x Beta Post Tuna Head Bag, AW26

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Pre-Columbian Masks
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Inside the Modern Sports Media Ecosystem

Up until just the past decade or so, sports media felt relatively straightforward. Journalists covered games, broadcasters delivered live action, and fans consumed content through a handful of established channels. That world still exists, but it is no longer the full picture.

Today’s sports media ecosystem is layered, interconnected, and constantly evolving. Traditional media brands now coexist with club media teams, independent creators, analytics specialists, and commercial partners, all competing for the same audience attention.

The result is an industry that offers more entry points than ever before, yet demands a deeper understanding of how the system truly works.

To build a career in sports media today, it is no longer enough to ask, “How do I become a journalist?” The better question is: “Where do I fit within the ecosystem?”

A multi-trillion-dollar industry that runs on attention

Understanding sports media starts with recognising its scale. The broader entertainment and media sector continues to expand globally, reaching roughly $2.9 trillion in revenue in 2024 and projected to grow steadily toward $3.5 trillion by the end of the decade.

Sport sits at the heart of that growth. Media rights, advertising, sponsorships, and digital engagement are now primary revenue drivers, meaning storytelling is no longer just editorial work; it is economic infrastructure. Brands, leagues, broadcasters, and platforms are all fighting to capture and monetize fan attention in an increasingly fragmented landscape.

The global sports market itself continues to grow rapidly, with projections suggesting steady expansion driven by investment, infrastructure, and digital innovation.

For newcomers, this is the first major insight: sports media is no longer a single profession. It is an ecosystem of roles shaped by business models, technology, and audience behaviour.

The rise of the distributed media model

One of the most significant shifts of the past five years has been the breakdown of traditional media boundaries. Streaming platforms, social video, and direct-to-consumer channels are redefining how stories reach fans. Streaming now dominates a majority of viewing time in many markets, reflecting a massive behavioural shift away from linear television.

At the same time, legacy broadcasters are reinventing themselves. ESPN’s move toward a direct-to-consumer streaming model, for example, illustrates how even the biggest brands must adapt to cord-cutting and changing fan expectations.

This transformation has reshaped the media ecosystem into a network rather than a hierarchy. Instead of a single editorial gatekeeper deciding which stories matter, content now flows across multiple platforms simultaneously, from live broadcasts and newsletters to TikTok clips and podcast interviews.

For those entering the industry, this means career paths are no longer linear. A sports media professional might write articles, produce short-form video, manage athlete content, and collaborate with commercial teams, often within the same role.

Who actually tells sports stories today?

Look behind any major sports narrative in 2026 and you will find a diverse mix of contributors.

Journalists and editors still play a vital role, shaping narratives and maintaining editorial standards. But they now operate alongside club media departments producing documentary-style content, communications teams managing messaging, analysts turning data into storytelling assets, and independent creators building niche audiences.

Technology has accelerated this diversification. Generative AI tools, analytics platforms, and social media dashboards allow smaller teams to produce content at scale, creating new opportunities but also raising the bar for skills and adaptability.

The ecosystem is therefore less about job titles and more about functions. Someone entering sports media might begin as a writer but gradually evolve into a hybrid role that combines reporting, content strategy, and audience engagement.

Why the ecosystem feels more competitive (and more open) than ever

There is a paradox at the heart of modern sports media.

On one hand, the industry is expanding, with new platforms and monetisation models opening doors. On the other, traditional newsroom jobs have become less stable due to restructuring, consolidation, and the rise of automation.

This tension is shaping how careers are built. Rather than relying solely on a single employer or traditional pathway, many professionals now develop their own personal platforms while collaborating with organisations on specific projects.

The competition for fan attention has intensified as well. Deloitte’s outlook highlights how sports organisations must innovate constantly, using data, digital experiences, and storytelling to remain relevant.

For newcomers, this means opportunity exists, but only for those willing to understand the full ecosystem rather than focusing on one narrow entry point.

Technology isn’t replacing storytelling

Artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation are changing how content is created and distributed, but they are not removing the need for human storytellers. Instead, technology is redefining what storytelling looks like.

AI tools can now generate highlights, automate commentary, and personalise content for millions of fans at once. Yet the demand for authentic voices, original reporting, and compelling narratives remains strong because connection (not just information) drives engagement.

At the same time, social platforms and streaming ecosystems allow creators to reach audiences directly. Digital distribution and data-driven advertising are enabling more personalised experiences, which in turn increases the need for media professionals who understand audience behaviour and narrative strategy.

The modern ecosystem therefore rewards those who can combine storytelling instincts with digital awareness.

What this means for people entering the industry

The biggest shift in 2026 is not technological, it is structural. The sports media ecosystem is no longer defined by a single career path. Instead, it resembles a network of interconnected roles that blend journalism, production, marketing, and communication.

by Sports Media Huddle |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Keith Allison

[ed. See also: The Role of a Sports Producer in Live Broadcast Production (SVG);  Understanding the Key Players in Audiovisual Production (JN); and, Sports commentator (Wikipedia).]

China’s View of America Has Changed From Alarm to a Shrug

There is no shortage of Western commentary on US President Donald Trump’s second term. What’s missing is an honest account of how 1.4 billion of us in China see it – or at least how China’s officials and scholars do, since that’s who I can speak for here. I’ve spent a decade watching that view change, from real alarm in 2017 to something closer to a shrug today.
Four things now count as consensus among Chinese scholars. One, Trump is undermining America’s alliance system. His first term rattled Washington’s furniture. His second is dismantling the house. He has purged the civil service, stretched executive power, taxed friend and foe alike, and gutted America’s contribution to global public goods.

He appears to be governing for the next election, not the next generation – and this is speeding up the arrival of a multipolar world.

Two, hostility to China is bipartisan in Washington, but Trump’s version comes with a price tag, which we find oddly reassuring. When tariffs on Chinese goods hit 145 per cent last year, American retailers, farmers and manufacturers howled, inflation bit and the White House backed into a truce. The lesson we draw: his toughness is a negotiating tactic, not a crusade. That leaves room to manage the relationship.

Three, pressure has been a poor substitute for actual containment. The 2018 trade war spooked Chinese firms. By 2026, the mood has flipped. Turns out sanctions are quite good at building the thing they’re meant to prevent.

Chinese chipmakers have scaled up mature 28-nanometre production. Home-grown chip-design software now holds a quarter of the domestic market. Solar panels and electric vehicles have found new buyers across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. America’s share of China’s trade shrank.

Four, the real contest is in governance, and time is on China’s side. American policy lurches with every election. China’s five-year plans, for better or worse, tend to survive them. America still leads in technology and firepower, but we’re betting that policy continuity and industrial scale will keep narrowing the gap.

Add those four up and what you get is less an argument than a mood – of relaxed, quiet confidence.

Eight years ago, China absorbed Trump’s tariffs and improvised. Now it hits back with tools – export controls on rare earths, a blacklist of “unreliable” foreign firms, tariffs of our own on energy – while building alternatives to Washington-led institutions through Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and Belt and Road Initiative. It has gone from rule-taker to rule-shaper.

China is not trying to beat the United States. It is trying to improve the lives of its people, hit what we call “common prosperity” and complete national rejuvenation, by which we mean restoring China to what we see as its rightful place in the world.

That is both the official and our genuine position. Winning was never the goal. But if you improve your country enough, for long enough, overtaking the country that used to be ahead is simply what ends up happening.

In wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles, Chinese firms now account for more than half of global capacity, output and exports. The country has built the world’s largest ultra-high-voltage grid and energy storage system, which is how it moves power from where the sun and wind are to where the people are. A state-run satellite network monitors carbon emissions, giving global, high-precision coverage. China has become the country that sets the standard for what a green transition looks like.

In AI, America still leads on chips and the underlying algorithms, but China claims the lead on deployment: government services, smart manufacturing and smart cities. In space, the comparison we Chinese scholars like to draw is with Starlink – commercial, narrow, built for coverage – against China’s broader, state-run programme: crewed missions, lunar exploration, the BeiDou satellite network and the Tiangong space station. [...]

There are caveats. America still has the deepest capital markets, the best universities, and decades of accumulated research. China still lags in precision manufacturing and some industrial software; external pressure is squeezing its exports in the short term; and the wider geopolitical picture remains genuinely unstable. I’ll admit these caveats read a little like the fine print below an advert for something you didn’t need.

Ten years ago, many of us held an admiring, almost idealised view of America. That’s gone.

We credit America’s historical contribution to the modern world. We also see, clearly now, 20 years of financial excess, winner-takes-all politics and social fracture. The Trump years have been a blessing in disguise: the pressure stings now, but it is forcing China to fix its weaknesses faster. We don’t reject competing with America. We’d rather China compete without conflict, and coexist.

by Wang Wen, South China Morning Post |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

[ed. A rational, coordinated national policy in action. Unfortunately, not ours.]

Riga, Latvia
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There’s Something Dangerous About Sam Rockwell

Ever since that monologue—you know the one—everyone knows who the legendary scene-stealer is. Still, his appetite for taking risks means he’ll never stop surprising us.

Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red Bull.”

We had been talking about the tyranny of social media.

“I’ve never had an energy drink ever,” I tell him, unnecessarily proud of myself, while I try to figure out why he’s asked. I’m distracted. The reason I’m distracted is that I don’t want to be here. I don’t mean with Sam Rockwell—Sam Rockwell is delightful. I mean in this room. It’s the greenroom outside a midtown Manhattan video studio. It sucks.

“This is a nice room, actually,” Rockwell said when we first walked in. He cut himself off—he was in the midst of warning me that he might need to stretch because he’d boxed that morning—just to make the observation. He does that a lot: cuts himself off, trails unpredictably from one topic to the next. “Carlito’s Way meets, you know, some sort of industrial workspace.”

He does that a lot too. He has a movie reference for everything, even this L-shaped hall-end space with a couple mini fridges; a table with some trail mix, chips, and granola bars; and, at the other end of the L, a couch and armchairs under the lone window, outside which a tree is swaying and it’s trying to rain. We’ll talk for 145 minutes and he’ll manage to mention thirty-two movies and fifty-three actors.

Forty-five minutes into our conversation, he gets up to take a leak. Upon returning from the bathroom, he sees the tree out the window metronoming back and forth. “Is it raining?” He walks over to the window and peers down at the street, where tiny creatures have sprouted umbrellas. He’s been inside virtually all day, shooting photos and videos in closed-off rooms. He furrows his eyebrows slightly, mouth half open, that look of coy appraisal we’ve all seen a million times now.

It’s hard to believe because of the boyish face and irrepressible energy, but Rockwell’s career stretches back nearly forty years. His first film was a low-budget 1989 slasher called Clownhouse, but by 1992 he was in Light Sleeper, directed by Paul Schrader, our foremost poet of male alienation and the writer of one of Rockwell’s favorite movies, Taxi Driver. That’s his career. He’s been in a Marvel film; he’s been in a Clint Eastwood film. He’s played the Big Bad Wolf and George W. Bush and the most influential choreographer of the twentieth century. He’s natural in everything. Last year, a monologue about wanting to be an Asian woman getting railed by white men, from season 3 of The White Lotus, which starred his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, tipped him from an actor beloved among people like him—cinephiles—to someone everybody knows.

His new film, Wild Horse Nine, comes out in November. Rockwell plays Lee, a CIA agent who, along with his partner, Chris, played by John Malkovich (one of Rockwell’s idols), is part of a CIA misadventure in Chile in the early 1970s. Lee and Chris take a weekend trip to Easter Island, where Lee seems to be keeping tabs on Chris, watching him from the window of his hotel room or out the windshield of an ancient red stick-shift sedan.

Wild Horse Nine is the fourth collaboration between Rockwell and writer/director Martin McDonagh, after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which Rockwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; 2012’s Seven Psychopaths; and a 2010 play with the macabre title A Behanding in Spokane. I asked McDonagh why he keeps casting Rockwell. “His danger, his truthfulness, his sense of fun, his sex appeal,” he said. “I think especially the first one—there’s always something a little dangerous about Sam in everything he does.”

There is something dangerous about Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine, but he’s playing against Malkovich, who is not known for timidity. The two of them and McDonagh rehearsed for a few weeks at the Public Theater, a legendary institution in New York City. Rockwell, who has been rather relaxed, reclining slightly with boxing shoes flat on the floor, leans in to tell me about it. “We were doing this thing where he goes off on me,” Rockwell says. After a run-through, McDonagh asked Malkovich to “turn up the anger a little bit.” “He just says [lilting], Oh yeah, sure, no problem,” Rockwell says. “He talks kind of gently. And then, just like, WHAM! Out of the gate like a monster.”

Rockwell ate it up. “I was like, I got a front-row ticket to this? I get Malkovich to yell at me?”

I point out that some people might find this intimidating. “I worked with Gene Hackman once,” he says. “And I had to yell at him, and he loved it. He loved it. Because actors are so intimidated by him. If you’re a really good tennis player, you want a good tennis player opposite you.”

Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—

“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.

by Kevin Dupzyk, Esquire | Read more:

Image: Florence Sullivan

[ed. See also: Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe (Esquire).]

Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor

Is it better to have good politics, or bad politics? Good politics. And do we just want ourselves to have good politics, or do we want everyone to share those good politics? We want everyone to have them. Yes. So if someone is insulting anyone for having good politics, that is very stupid.

What I am talking about specifically is the mini-news cycle that we are in focused on the question of whether or not certain leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America are actually, you know, rich kids. Before we discuss this, it must be said that this is, above all, a lesson in effective partisan media. The New York Post, a right wing rag, has been pumping out stories about how Gustavo Gordillo, the 38 year-old co-chair of the NYC DSA, went to Yale and lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn house owned by his dad, and how that is so very ridiculous because he is “peddling his anti-capitalist lefty agenda while enjoying the life in the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy.”

The Post, a truly immoral scumbag tabloid that is simultaneously the most skilled tabloid journalism publication in America in a way that we can all learn from, ran the story, and then it was picked up over the next few days by other right wing outlets making essentially the same “hey this left winger is a rich kid” joke, and then yesterday the story was picked up by the New York Times, which had profiled Gordillo earlier, and once that happened it instantly became acceptable fodder for non-right-wing reporters and pundits. This is a textbook case of how to shepherd a shallow partisan smear into the mainstream news cycle. You may find it distasteful, but you should admire its efficacy. Any competent cutthroat political communicator must be able to replicate this process on demand.

(When I worked at Gawker, we frequently played a similar but less political role in this general process, by writing about stories that the Times was interested in but considered disreputable, which would then allow them to write follow-ups framed as “People are talking about this thing,” which provides them an entry point to feed their readers salacious news while still maintaining an analytical, hands-off pose. Once you understand this dynamic you will see it all the time.)

This rudimentary form of character assassination will cause lefties to complain that it is biased and unfair and whatnot, which is true but beside the point. This is a sign that DSA is gaining actual power. People and institutions that gain actual power will draw the scrutiny of the press. This may manifest itself unfairly in certain instances (especially if the New York Post is involved) but in general it is healthy. The more powerful people get—whether by getting rich, gaining political power, or otherwise—the more we want the press paying attention to them. DSA should take these newfound, accelerating attacks as a compliment. They are real live players now. And knowing that this is the case, they need to get a clear hold in their own minds of what they actually believe, and how to communicate it.

What, after all, are attacks like the ones against Gustavo Gordillo really saying? They are first of all charges of hypocrisy, which is the sin that the public hates above all in its political figures. People who are bastards but who embrace the fact that they are bastards tend to insulate themselves from these attacks. Republicans, for example. Their platform is “we are rich and greedy and that is good and we will kill anyone who stands in our way.” You may find this unethical but it is very hard to find a handhold to charge anyone with being a hypocrite when they are espousing that line. They’re completely up front about being awful! Religious Republicans, Christian preachers who cheat on their wives and anti-homosexual preachers who are secretly gay, are the only slice of the party really vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, because they are the only ones pretending to be defending ideals higher than “increase corporate profits.”

In what sense is Gordillo presumed to be a hypocrite? The accusation, when you get right down to it, is that he is rich but he is advocating political positions that are anti-rich. The first thing to notice about this is: It is not actually hypocritical. A hypocrite would be a rich person saying, for example, “rich people should pay higher taxes, except for me.” A rich person saying “rich people should pay higher taxes, including me” is just someone with good politics. Their politics are even more praiseworthy because they involve self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal. Genuine hypocrisy—not that you expect the New York Post to explore this sort of thing—is a rich person saying “I care about people who are less fortunate than me” while embracing policies that benefit themselves and harm the public programs that help needy people. Republicans, in other words.

The deeper charge against Gordillo, the one that pushes the emotional buttons, is that he is a class traitor. Nothing provokes rage among members of a class more than a class traitor. For people with money, the existence of one of their economic peers who calls for, say, higher taxes on the rich is not just a political disagreement—it is an implicit insult to all of the rich people who did not do that, because it goes to show that they could have done something more selfless if they wanted to. Class traitors of this type are living proof of everyone else’s human flaws. We are all susceptible to this. [...]

Nobody chooses how they are born. Some people are born rich and some are born poor. If you are born rich, with much greater wealth than you need for yourself, you are, I think, morally obligated to give away a lot of that wealth. This is a fairly common and uncontroversial moral intuition. It is what rich people who find their way into left wing politics have recognized. Being born wealthy is neither a sign of worth nor a reason for guilt. It is just blind luck. What we are responsible for is what we can control. When rich kids who may have lived privileged lives embrace left wing politics, that is good. That means that they have the moral fiber to recognize that they have been financially blessed by an unfair system, and that they should do their part to try to make the system more fair. It is easier for people whose parents are rich to understand and be honest about this than it is for people who get rich themselves. The heirs can see clearly that their wealth is a matter of luck, while those who gained great wealth through business or otherwise are sorely tempted, by human nature, to believe that they deserve what they have, while ignoring the many structural advantages they were given that allowed them to be in a position to get that wealth. This is unremarkable. Self-justification is one of the strongest forces on earth. But it goes to show why there are rich kids who are members of DSA, but there are not too many Goldman Sachs executives who are.

Every time a right winger points and laughs at a socialist who was born rich, it should be understood as a desperate attempt to justify their own moral failure to themselves. If you grew up rich and are now a leftist and someone points that out, the proper response is: “Yes I am. Why aren’t you?” I do not believe that there is any plank in the DSA platform that says that nobody is allowed to live in a brownstone that their dad bought. What they say instead is: If your dad has enough money to buy a brownstone, he should be paying higher taxes so that we can build more affordable housing for people who can’t afford brownstones. A rich kid who nods his head and agrees with that assertion and works to raise taxes on himself in the name of social justice is not guilty of hypocrisy at all. He’s exhibiting a commitment to basic fairness. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Every rich person is morally obligated to do this. It’s the ones who aren’t class traitors that we need to worry about.

by Hamilton Nolan, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Image: NYC DSA

[ed. On a related note, see also: Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished (WIP).]

Sierra Hull & Ava Hall

[ed. Talented young ladies.]

Daniel Arthur

via:

Alisher Kushakov, “Embrace in Fragments”
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