Wednesday, November 4, 2026
U.K. Parliament Votes Down Assisted Suicide Bill
U.K. lawmakers... voted down a bill to legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill adults in England and Wales.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.
The bill passed the Commons last year but unelected lawmakers in the House of Lords effectively filibustered the legislation by introducing more than 1,200 amendments. Friday’s vote ends a push by proponents of assisted suicide to revive the bill.
The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]
During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.
“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”
Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.
“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.
“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”
Image: Jack Taylor/Reuters
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was narrowly rejected, with 286 members of the House of Commons voting against the bill and 270 members voting in favor.
The bill, if passed, would have allowed for patients with less than six months to live to apply for assisted suicide. Then, two doctors and a panel of experts would determine if the patient qualified, Only adults would have been able to apply for assisted suicide. [...]
During debate, lawmaker and cancer surgeon Zubir Ahmed brought up concerns about accurately predicting the timeline of a patient’s prognosis.
“I have to be honest. When I am asked to prognosticate on whether someone has six months to live, I am as often wrong as I am right,” Ahmed, a member of the Labour Party, said. “It is no longer a good enough marker for the DWP to use in discharging benefits for life-limiting conditions, and I do not see why it should be a good enough marker for prescribing death.”
Ashley Dalton, also a member of the Labour Party, said there is no reason to expect that without access to assisted suicide, dying will be a horrible experience.
“In the campaign around this Bill, though, it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful, painful death unless they have access to assisted dying. That is simply not true; palliative care in the U.K. is excellent,” Dalton said.
“Far too many people do not have access to the palliative care they need, but the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false. People have been terrorised—I have been terrorised—with tales of people vomiting up their own feces, as though this is commonplace during death. It is vanishingly rare … It is nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that, with access to good palliative care, deaths are, on the whole, gentle.”
by Kamden Mulder, National Review | Read more:
[ed. Shameful. Ask anyone: what are you more afraid of, death or dying? Palliative care can be costly, unpredictable, prolonged, and not just simple pain relief. What about choice, dignity, and the emotional burden on families? We routinely euthanize pets out of sense of love and empathy, so why not humans? From the moment we're born we're taught to control ourselves, then at the end of life the state takes that away. Shameful.]
Why Does Culture Feel So Samey? A Walking Tour Reveals the Math.
On a recent afternoon, Lauren Leek stood on a typical London shopping street, in front of a Victorian-era pub and a predictable array of corporate-owned food, drink and retail outlets: Pret a Manger, Starbucks, Joe & the Juice, Subway.
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”
Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline “Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,” that analyzed the “flattening” effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture. The post was shared and discussed by widely read technology commentators such as Cory Doctorow and John Naughton.
Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous “monoculture” in which, she writes in her Substack post, “we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”
Leek’s insight into everyday consumer behavior is, in some ways, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 collection of essays, “Mythologies.” Back then, Barthes used the recently developed discipline of semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, to turn things as disparate and as seemingly banal as soap powder, wrestling, margarine and automobiles into subjects of serious cultural consideration.
But unlike Barthes, who was steeped in the French philosophical tradition, Leek is a London School of Economics-educated data cruncher. She uses her own algorithms, digital mapping and text analysis to show how large language models are making consumer culture, wherever it happens to be, feel the same.
A recent excursion with Leek in southwest London to experience her analysis in action began in the Prince of Wales pub. The bar is owned by one of Britain’s biggest brewers and hospitality retailers, which runs 2,600 sites across the country. This British company is in turn owned by a Hong Kong-listed property development and investment conglomerate.
It was just after noon, and the old-fashioned wall décor and wooden furniture lent the pub a traditional feel. Multiple TV screens were showing the buildup to a Premiere League soccer match. Generic mood music played in the background.
“Often these pub chains have playlists that artificial intelligence automatically adjusts according to the sound level,” Leek said. “If the pub isn’t very full, it will play chilled background music,” she explained. “When it gets louder, the music gets louder.”
Pop music is an area where Leek’s research has revealed how sharply culture has “flattened” in recent years. Her Substack post includes a graph that tracks the verbal richness of lyrics from over 4,000 songs in Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 hits from 1950 to 2015. Since the early 1960s, Leek found, the range of distinct words has contracted more than a quarter, while the number of repeated lines has increased nearly a third.
“Streaming has created very concrete incentives — pay starts after 30 seconds,” Leek said. “A repeated hook in a song is the rational response.”
Leek studied the pub’s menu. It included staples such as chicken wings, burgers, and fish and chips, all of which could be ordered via a QR code. “Pub chains get the data from people who have previously ordered. They typically aggregate ordering data across their sites to optimize their menus. Everything has been analyzed,” Leek said. “Local differences have been taken away. Quirkiness is taken out.”
Leek’s tour moved on to an upmarket cafe and bakery nearby. It is one of a chain of more than 150 in London majority owned by an American private equity company that manages more than $200 billion of assets. A cappuccino costs 4.40 pounds, about $5.90.
As a steady stream of customers ordered coffees and pastries, Leek explained that chain stores use specialized site-section algorithms to choose the optimum locations for their branches.
“They use public, open socio-economic data, like small-area census statistics. They have their own data, which neighborhood restaurants don’t have access to. And they have their own data analysis teams,” Leek said.
For Leek, the key to the flattening of consumer culture lies in the mathematics of algorithms and their methodology of next-token prediction. Language models like ChatGPT write one small chunk of text, called a “token,” at a time and predict and select the most likely next token at each step. The models have a “temperature” setting, a set of parameters that control how adventurous that pick is. At “temperature zero,” the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time.
“It’s predictable and safe,” Leek said. “When the model is uncertain, it still has to make a prediction, so it always falls back on the most expected answer.” That means there is no randomness, no surprises. Leek argues that algorithms are pushing culture toward a blandly predictable, mathematically determined temperature zero.
“The algorithm is making predictions for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist,” she said. “Each person has some niche preferences, and the niches differ. A system that optimizes for the average of everyone’s tastes produces something that nobody particularly dislikes but nobody particularly loves,” she added. “It’s built for a person who doesn’t exist.”
by Scott Reyburn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joanna Yee
[ed. I can't blame it all on algorithms. This process has been going on for decades. Every street (save for whatever underlying unique architecture used to exist), mall, airport, hotel, restaurant, clothing store, bar, etc. all looks the same. Why go to Paris or London, Japan, Dublin, or even China, if you're just going to see the same chains everywhere? In fact, it's probably harder than ever to find a city that still retains its unique character unpolluted by the likes of Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, 7-11, Louis Vitton and the rest of their ilk these days. Corporations have the deep pockets to buy the best trafficked locations. See also: We already live in 'clone towns' - AI is making it worse (Observer).]
This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic,” said Leek, a Dutch Australian data scientist who is an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.”
Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous “monoculture” in which, she writes in her Substack post, “we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”
Leek’s insight into everyday consumer behavior is, in some ways, reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 collection of essays, “Mythologies.” Back then, Barthes used the recently developed discipline of semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, to turn things as disparate and as seemingly banal as soap powder, wrestling, margarine and automobiles into subjects of serious cultural consideration.
But unlike Barthes, who was steeped in the French philosophical tradition, Leek is a London School of Economics-educated data cruncher. She uses her own algorithms, digital mapping and text analysis to show how large language models are making consumer culture, wherever it happens to be, feel the same.
It was just after noon, and the old-fashioned wall décor and wooden furniture lent the pub a traditional feel. Multiple TV screens were showing the buildup to a Premiere League soccer match. Generic mood music played in the background.
“Often these pub chains have playlists that artificial intelligence automatically adjusts according to the sound level,” Leek said. “If the pub isn’t very full, it will play chilled background music,” she explained. “When it gets louder, the music gets louder.”
Pop music is an area where Leek’s research has revealed how sharply culture has “flattened” in recent years. Her Substack post includes a graph that tracks the verbal richness of lyrics from over 4,000 songs in Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 hits from 1950 to 2015. Since the early 1960s, Leek found, the range of distinct words has contracted more than a quarter, while the number of repeated lines has increased nearly a third.
“Streaming has created very concrete incentives — pay starts after 30 seconds,” Leek said. “A repeated hook in a song is the rational response.”
Leek studied the pub’s menu. It included staples such as chicken wings, burgers, and fish and chips, all of which could be ordered via a QR code. “Pub chains get the data from people who have previously ordered. They typically aggregate ordering data across their sites to optimize their menus. Everything has been analyzed,” Leek said. “Local differences have been taken away. Quirkiness is taken out.”
Leek’s tour moved on to an upmarket cafe and bakery nearby. It is one of a chain of more than 150 in London majority owned by an American private equity company that manages more than $200 billion of assets. A cappuccino costs 4.40 pounds, about $5.90.
As a steady stream of customers ordered coffees and pastries, Leek explained that chain stores use specialized site-section algorithms to choose the optimum locations for their branches.
“They use public, open socio-economic data, like small-area census statistics. They have their own data, which neighborhood restaurants don’t have access to. And they have their own data analysis teams,” Leek said.
For Leek, the key to the flattening of consumer culture lies in the mathematics of algorithms and their methodology of next-token prediction. Language models like ChatGPT write one small chunk of text, called a “token,” at a time and predict and select the most likely next token at each step. The models have a “temperature” setting, a set of parameters that control how adventurous that pick is. At “temperature zero,” the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time.
“It’s predictable and safe,” Leek said. “When the model is uncertain, it still has to make a prediction, so it always falls back on the most expected answer.” That means there is no randomness, no surprises. Leek argues that algorithms are pushing culture toward a blandly predictable, mathematically determined temperature zero.
“The algorithm is making predictions for the average person, but the average person doesn’t exist,” she said. “Each person has some niche preferences, and the niches differ. A system that optimizes for the average of everyone’s tastes produces something that nobody particularly dislikes but nobody particularly loves,” she added. “It’s built for a person who doesn’t exist.”
by Scott Reyburn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joanna Yee
[ed. I can't blame it all on algorithms. This process has been going on for decades. Every street (save for whatever underlying unique architecture used to exist), mall, airport, hotel, restaurant, clothing store, bar, etc. all looks the same. Why go to Paris or London, Japan, Dublin, or even China, if you're just going to see the same chains everywhere? In fact, it's probably harder than ever to find a city that still retains its unique character unpolluted by the likes of Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bell, 7-11, Louis Vitton and the rest of their ilk these days. Corporations have the deep pockets to buy the best trafficked locations. See also: We already live in 'clone towns' - AI is making it worse (Observer).]
*****
In this terminology, a “home town” is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A “clone town”, in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a “monochrome strip of global and national chains”. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country. Of the towns surveyed, the NEF concluded: 41% were clone towns, 33% were home towns and 26% were “border towns”, meaning somewhere in between.This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.
Tuesday, November 3, 2026
An Easy Fix to Expand Housing Inventory
Cheaper manufactured homes could be having a moment, if only states can catch up. A new law could make manufactured homes cheaper, but old zoning barriers could slow their expansion.
For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.
This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.
Changing zoning, mortgage rules
Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing.
“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said.
One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. [...]
Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.
“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.
For decades, manufactured home builders have been working to shed the old image of boxy trailer homes reserved for the outskirts of cities and suburbia. Now, a small change in federal regulations could open the door for architecture welcomed in more neighborhoods.
This summer’s sweeping housing bill, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, removed a 1974 mandate that required every manufactured home to be built on a nonremovable steel frame, known as a chassis. Experts and home producers think the change could help unlock thousands more affordable housing options around the country.
But first, experts say, states have to examine outdated regulations that are blocking the manufactured home industry’s potential. The Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing initiative estimates that 30 states might need to change their regulations to align with the new federal law.
Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.
“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”
Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site.
They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.
“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.”
In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals.
“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”
Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes. [...]
Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.
For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. [...]
In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.
“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’”
Unlocking manufactured homes from chassis will allow manufactured homes to become multi-family developments, said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
They’ll be cheaper for builders, she noted, and they’ll be easier to stack into two-story and multi-family homes.
“First of all, you were putting a very heavy, expensive thing on the bottom of these homes that is not needed and it is not used, and it’s made out of steel,” Hawke said. “If you’ve got this heavy piece of steel on the bottom of a home, stacking it becomes more difficult.”
Manufactured homes are built entirely in a factory, regulated by U.S. Housing and Urban Development codes, and then trucked to a home site.
They cost 50% less per square foot than homes built on a site, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry group. And experts say dropping the chassis could drive down costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per home.
“There’s really the opportunity to stack these manufactured homes to make multi-family developments,” Hawke said. “So it’s unlocking this thing which was primarily used for single-family and it’s making it much more accessible for a multi-family developer, which is great because manufactured housing is far and away the least expensive non-subsidized housing supply in the United States.”
In a 2026 earnings call, UMH Properties, a publicly traded real estate company that owns and develops manufactured-home communities, said the chassis rule change will allow it to put two-story manufactured homes on existing lots. The company also is considering designs that could combine two stories with duplex units, allowing for smaller, more affordable apartment rentals.
“You build 2,000 square feet of homes instead of 1,000 square feet on the same piece of land. It’s a very, very important development,” said Eugene Landy, founder and chairman of UMH Properties, on the earnings call. “This is a change that’s gonna help every manufactured home community out in the country.”
Another benefit to removing the chassis, according to Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured & Modular Home Association of Minnesota, is that manufactured homes can blend more seamlessly into subdivisions because they won’t look too different from other homes. [...]
Following World War II, a shift in how mobile homes were being used began forming. No longer reserved as temporary housing, mobile homes were designed to be increasingly more permanent. Mobile home communities sprang up, though many were zoned into rural or suburban areas on a city’s edge.
For decades, manufactured homes — called mobile homes until the early 1970s — have been built in factories and trucked to their new locale. Many were unloaded into mobile home communities, specialized zoning districts where residents own their house but rent the land underneath. [...]
In the past, a home attached to a trailer or visibly hoisted a few feet off the ground were tells of manufactured housing when they first popped up in neighborhoods. But many modern ones are virtually unrecognizable from site-built homes.
“They have the same walls, ceiling, sheetrock, windows and shingles,” said Dustin Brakemeier, who owns and operates manufactured home communities in Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. “One’s built in a factory, one’s built outside. They’re the same.’”
Changing zoning, mortgage rules
Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Dan Moul, who owns a manufactured home park in Oxford Township in Adams County, recalled in an interview that zoning restrictions kept him from expanding the community into an adjoining parcel a few years ago. The township said the land was zoned exclusively for detached single-family residential housing.
“The bottom line is they look at mobile home communities as that’s where the poor riffraff lives, and we don’t want any more riffraff,” Moul said.
One of the big domino effects from the removal of the chassis requirement could be state banning or overriding restrictive local zoning policies that targeted manufactured homes. [...]
Alex Rodino, a real estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, who sells manufactured homes, said the stigma isn’t just among local governments and stodgy neighborhood groups. Some buyers, he said, are confusing modern manufactured housing with the image of older mobile homes.
“I think (that perception) is slowly changing as construction quality improves and traditional housing becomes less affordable,” said Rodino.
by Robbie Sequeira, Stateline | Read more:
Image: Jon King/Michigan Advance
[ed. See also: A New ROAD for Factory-Built Homes: States Must Act in Coming Year (Pew).]
Image: Jon King/Michigan Advance
[ed. See also: A New ROAD for Factory-Built Homes: States Must Act in Coming Year (Pew).]
Could A.I. Be Conscious? It’s Definitely Possible.
At a cozy bar in Manhattan, I recently had a first date with a software engineer who works for one of the big technology companies. Given my interest in artificial intelligence, I thought we might hit it off. But when I told him that I work on moral problems related to A.I., including the possibility that it might become conscious, he barely suppressed a laugh.
There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Though my research requires a fairly detailed understanding of L.L.M.s, no one, not even their designers, entirely knows how L.L.M.s work. In retrospect, I should have asked my date if he understood how consciousness works. Because while he seemed to think that I had an inflated sense of A.I. capabilities, I wonder whether he has an inflated sense of what consciousness requires.
No one can credibly claim to understand consciousness — that inner, subjective, what-it-is-like quality of our mental experiences. Despite centuries of investigation, scientists and philosophers still disagree about what consciousness is. Some theories hold that it is a uniquely biological phenomenon, requiring particular kinds of cellular activity and electrical signaling that computers lack. But other theories hold that consciousness depends not on what a system is made of but on how it functions. According to these theories, an A.I. system could, at least in principle, be conscious.
In a 2022 survey of consciousness scientists, only 3 percent claimed that machines could never be conscious. More than two-thirds said machines could be conscious or probably could be.
Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.
This may seem like an imperfect approach, but it’s the best one available. I have spent the past decade thinking about animal minds and the related ethical implications. Animals cannot tell us in words what they experience, but we can observe other evidence of consciousness, including how animals behave, what internal mechanisms produce that behavior (such as their nervous systems) and how those mechanisms evolved.
None of this establishes that Claude is conscious, and Anthropic is not claiming that it is. But the study illustrates how evidence can be collected, and it demonstrates that some evidence already exists.
There’s no way A.I. could be conscious, he declared. Then he asked, incredulously, if I even knew how large language models work.
No one can credibly claim to understand consciousness — that inner, subjective, what-it-is-like quality of our mental experiences. Despite centuries of investigation, scientists and philosophers still disagree about what consciousness is. Some theories hold that it is a uniquely biological phenomenon, requiring particular kinds of cellular activity and electrical signaling that computers lack. But other theories hold that consciousness depends not on what a system is made of but on how it functions. According to these theories, an A.I. system could, at least in principle, be conscious.
In a 2022 survey of consciousness scientists, only 3 percent claimed that machines could never be conscious. More than two-thirds said machines could be conscious or probably could be.
Of course, you can never know for sure whether a machine is conscious, just as you can never know for sure whether anyone is conscious other than yourself. As philosophers have long recognized, the only conscious experience each of us can directly observe is our own. Instead, we have to evaluate the consciousness of other beings indirectly, through an examination of the available evidence. We infer that our fellow humans are conscious because of our shared biological makeup, as well as how they behave and talk — including, notably, that they say they are conscious.
With A.I., we can look for similar kinds of evidence. We can look at what a system says and does, bearing in mind that it is trained on human data. We can look at how it works — whether it performs the kinds of functions that are associated with human or animal consciousness. And we can look at how its capacities emerge over time: Did they result from training pressures similar to the evolutionary pressures that may have led to consciousness in humans and other animals? Each kind of evidence is limited on its own, but together they can provide a more complete picture.
Consider a recent study by Anthropic of its Claude chatbot. According to one influential theory, consciousness arises in humans when information enters what neuroscientists call a “global workspace” in the brain, from which that information is broadcast across the brain for use in reporting, reasoning and other functions. Anthropic’s researchers found evidence that Claude, on its own, developed a set of internal representations that are similarly available to Claude across a range of tasks. This system may be partly analogous to a global workspace in humans.
The Anthropic researchers also looked at Claude’s behavior. When they swapped one concept for another inside the workspace, Claude’s reasoning and answers changed accordingly. When they suppressed the workspace, Claude’s descriptions of its experience became flat and mechanical. The fact that Claude’s workspace developed without being designed by humans suggests that brains and L.L.M.s might have arrived independently at a similar solution to a similar problem: how to make the right information available for reasoning.
The Anthropic researchers also looked at Claude’s behavior. When they swapped one concept for another inside the workspace, Claude’s reasoning and answers changed accordingly. When they suppressed the workspace, Claude’s descriptions of its experience became flat and mechanical. The fact that Claude’s workspace developed without being designed by humans suggests that brains and L.L.M.s might have arrived independently at a similar solution to a similar problem: how to make the right information available for reasoning.
None of this establishes that Claude is conscious, and Anthropic is not claiming that it is. But the study illustrates how evidence can be collected, and it demonstrates that some evidence already exists.
by Toni Sims, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. One thing for sure, the first date guy definitely did not display any evidence of consciousness.]
Monday, November 2, 2026
Georg Friedrich Haas: 11.000 Saiten (excerpt) (2020)
The minimal pitch interval a human ear can distinguish is about 2% of a semitone (the interval between two adjacent keys on a piano). So, one way to get a seamless continuum would be to make a giant piano with 50 times as many keys. In 11,000 Strings, Georg Friedrich Haas offers a simpler solution: get 50 pianos, tune each of them 2% of a semitone higher than the previous one, and arrange them in a big circle around the audience. - via:
[ed. Quite strange.]
Sunday, November 1, 2026
The Crocfather
From Croc: How I Invented the World’s Most Popular Shoe, Became a Massive Success, and Almost Destroyed Myself—in 15 Easy Lessons, which will be published this month by HarperCollins Leadership.
I partied with Fleetwood Mac, delivered pizza to Joe Montana, kidded around with Robin Williams. I have three-star generals on speed dial. I raced cars at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I was in the witness-protection program, more or less.
I live at crazy speed, but I’m still here. And with all those accomplishments, there are … things. Other things. Of course there are. How could there not?
I lost so many friends. Though death, I get—unavoidable. But the ones who turned their backs? Or altered the story? Or hopped off the gravy train because they felt they were owed more gravy? Or got all holier-than-thou? One of my friends banned me from all his restaurants, including some favorite Boulder hangouts. To be fair, that rejection I deserved.
The love of my life and I have not been together for decades.
The woman I was most serious with, post-Elizabeth, once joined a lawsuit against me.
Maybe the success of Crocs and the prestige and notoriety and especially the crazy money had something to do with my nearly destroying myself. I can’t help but think of the roulette wheel of life: I wanted a good boat shoe—simply that—so I walked into a Tommy Bahama store in Miami and asked if they had what I wanted. They did not. Thanks, Tommy. If the answer had been yes, I might never have created Crocs. You would be reading something else right now.
It was the year I became the milk thief.
Back when milk was delivered to your door, I stole from the porches and side entrances of customers on my paper route who were away on vacation.
I realize that’s more than breaking rules—and in fact, it’s breaking the law. Hear me out, though. I couldn’t afford it myself. I was hungry. The milk would have gone bad.
Some of it I drank. The entrepreneur in me got the bright idea to simply give some of my stash to Scott, one of my older brothers, in exchange for him not beating me up. I used the bottle caps to get a discount at the movies. I returned the empties to the owners’ porches so they could get the nickel for the return. It’s not as if I didn’t understand fairness.
They had no idea that I was the one stealing their milk. They knew me only as an enterprising, disciplined paperboy.
I didn’t just break rules. I made up my own. When we were in San Francisco, the 49ers football team was king. They won several Super Bowls in the years I was there, and there were many stars—first and foremost, Joe Montana, the quarterback; but also Ronnie Lott, the future Hall of Fame cornerback; Steve Young, the future star quarterback; Roger Craig, the great running back; and Dwight Clark, the wide receiver who made “The Catch.” I knew where they all lived—that sounds creepy, but everyone in the Bay Area pretty much knew where their football heroes lived—and they weren’t far from one of my stores. I’d delivered pizzas to some of their homes before, so my next idea wasn’t all that far-fetched: whenever the 49ers played out of town, that Sunday I would deliver pizzas to a couple of players’ homes, where their wives and children and friends were almost certainly gathered to watch the game on TV. No one had ordered the pizza. I showed up right before game time with several pies.
“I’m sorry, we didn’t order this.”
“Well, someone did, and it’s all paid for, tip included. Here you go.”
And of course they took it, because who turns down hot pizza and cold drinks that show up right before kickoff on Sunday? For free?
At Domino’s, from the early Eighties to the late Nineties, we outworked everyone, and we out-enjoyed them, too, Joel and me. It wasn’t a competition exactly. It was How much life could you suck out of life? Okay, maybe it was a competition, because I wasn’t going to let anyone beat me at having a good time. I wanted anyone else’s best moment of the year to be a Tuesday afternoon for me.
We had the coolest clientele. We had a regular contingent of gay customers who thought Joel was cute and hoped they could persuade him out of being straight. Occasionally they had it in for me too. For some of the men, their type was almost anyone. Joel and I might be out in the Domino’s car on delivery—two guys in their twenties in Domino’s uniforms—and guys would yell at us from their cars, nice cars. And when I started making serious money and drove around in my red convertible, I got even more of that. Not a lot of restraint then.
Everyone was doing drugs in the late Eighties, or at least it seemed that way. Powder cocaine if you were rich, smokable crack if you were poor. San Francisco was a snowstorm. Probably most of America, too.
Scotty knew chemistry, but I knew fashion. And I knew something was going on here. It was sometime between midnight and 3 am in the Caribbean, and I was the only person awake on the boat.
Still, I knew this was heading in the right direction. I drilled some holes in the top to let the foot breathe (more on that later). There was no mirror nearby but I’m pretty sure a light bulb was floating above my head.
A shoe. A boat shoe, actually. A very weird-looking shoe, one that looked different from every other kind of shoe, but one I was sure boat lovers would wear if we could figure out a way to make it. When we got to shore, Scotty and I found a plastic clog in a hardware store and started drilling it, seeing if it would support holes and not scuff surfaces.
Nope. It did not do what we needed.
I did not realize that pursuing this idea would explode in our faces over and over and over—literally.
by George Boedecker Jr., Harper's | Read more:
Image: via:[ed. See also: Todd Snider talking about his buddy George Boedecker (YouTube).]
I partied with Fleetwood Mac, delivered pizza to Joe Montana, kidded around with Robin Williams. I have three-star generals on speed dial. I raced cars at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I was in the witness-protection program, more or less.
I’ve enjoyed the company of more beautiful, intoxicating women than I can count. One thing I can count: I’ve been around the world twenty-eight times.
I lost so many friends. Though death, I get—unavoidable. But the ones who turned their backs? Or altered the story? Or hopped off the gravy train because they felt they were owed more gravy? Or got all holier-than-thou? One of my friends banned me from all his restaurants, including some favorite Boulder hangouts. To be fair, that rejection I deserved.
The love of my life and I have not been together for decades.
The woman I was most serious with, post-Elizabeth, once joined a lawsuit against me.
Maybe the success of Crocs and the prestige and notoriety and especially the crazy money had something to do with my nearly destroying myself. I can’t help but think of the roulette wheel of life: I wanted a good boat shoe—simply that—so I walked into a Tommy Bahama store in Miami and asked if they had what I wanted. They did not. Thanks, Tommy. If the answer had been yes, I might never have created Crocs. You would be reading something else right now.
It was the year I became the milk thief.
Back when milk was delivered to your door, I stole from the porches and side entrances of customers on my paper route who were away on vacation.
I realize that’s more than breaking rules—and in fact, it’s breaking the law. Hear me out, though. I couldn’t afford it myself. I was hungry. The milk would have gone bad.
Some of it I drank. The entrepreneur in me got the bright idea to simply give some of my stash to Scott, one of my older brothers, in exchange for him not beating me up. I used the bottle caps to get a discount at the movies. I returned the empties to the owners’ porches so they could get the nickel for the return. It’s not as if I didn’t understand fairness.
They had no idea that I was the one stealing their milk. They knew me only as an enterprising, disciplined paperboy.
I didn’t just break rules. I made up my own. When we were in San Francisco, the 49ers football team was king. They won several Super Bowls in the years I was there, and there were many stars—first and foremost, Joe Montana, the quarterback; but also Ronnie Lott, the future Hall of Fame cornerback; Steve Young, the future star quarterback; Roger Craig, the great running back; and Dwight Clark, the wide receiver who made “The Catch.” I knew where they all lived—that sounds creepy, but everyone in the Bay Area pretty much knew where their football heroes lived—and they weren’t far from one of my stores. I’d delivered pizzas to some of their homes before, so my next idea wasn’t all that far-fetched: whenever the 49ers played out of town, that Sunday I would deliver pizzas to a couple of players’ homes, where their wives and children and friends were almost certainly gathered to watch the game on TV. No one had ordered the pizza. I showed up right before game time with several pies.
“I’m sorry, we didn’t order this.”
“Well, someone did, and it’s all paid for, tip included. Here you go.”
And of course they took it, because who turns down hot pizza and cold drinks that show up right before kickoff on Sunday? For free?
At Domino’s, from the early Eighties to the late Nineties, we outworked everyone, and we out-enjoyed them, too, Joel and me. It wasn’t a competition exactly. It was How much life could you suck out of life? Okay, maybe it was a competition, because I wasn’t going to let anyone beat me at having a good time. I wanted anyone else’s best moment of the year to be a Tuesday afternoon for me.
We had the coolest clientele. We had a regular contingent of gay customers who thought Joel was cute and hoped they could persuade him out of being straight. Occasionally they had it in for me too. For some of the men, their type was almost anyone. Joel and I might be out in the Domino’s car on delivery—two guys in their twenties in Domino’s uniforms—and guys would yell at us from their cars, nice cars. And when I started making serious money and drove around in my red convertible, I got even more of that. Not a lot of restraint then.
Everyone was doing drugs in the late Eighties, or at least it seemed that way. Powder cocaine if you were rich, smokable crack if you were poor. San Francisco was a snowstorm. Probably most of America, too.
Scotty knew chemistry, but I knew fashion. And I knew something was going on here. It was sometime between midnight and 3 am in the Caribbean, and I was the only person awake on the boat.
Still, I knew this was heading in the right direction. I drilled some holes in the top to let the foot breathe (more on that later). There was no mirror nearby but I’m pretty sure a light bulb was floating above my head.
A shoe. A boat shoe, actually. A very weird-looking shoe, one that looked different from every other kind of shoe, but one I was sure boat lovers would wear if we could figure out a way to make it. When we got to shore, Scotty and I found a plastic clog in a hardware store and started drilling it, seeing if it would support holes and not scuff surfaces.
Nope. It did not do what we needed.
I did not realize that pursuing this idea would explode in our faces over and over and over—literally.
by George Boedecker Jr., Harper's | Read more:
Image: via:
Childhood and Education: Voice Without Exit
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school.
Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so.
The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]
New York City PS 307
Nikole sent her daughter Najya to PS 307 entirely by her own choice.
Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps
I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.
She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?
PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent
Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.
Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?
But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.
A Good School
Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.
What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?
The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?
Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.
The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.
The Project Was Ideological
It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.
[ed. See also: American students are getting dumber (SB).]
The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]
New York City PS 307
She felt, by her own description, an obligation to her sense of the common good at the expense of her daughter.
Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.
Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.Yeah, pretty much. As many others said, it was a very brave and praiseworthy decision to write this post. It does not make up for the events that gave her the opportunity to write it. I won’t get into the minefield of trying to understand her logic, except that she put various ideological abstractions ahead of her daughter’s education.
But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.
Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps
I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.This is where she fully loses me. This happens, and then she sends her daughter back for second grade. That’s all the information you need. You have a neighborhood public school that isn’t this one. What the hell? And yes, it is both the adults and the kids, both acting that way in part because of each other.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”
It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults.
She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?
PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent
Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.That’s fraud. And also rather evil. Nikole has the types of connections that can start investigations. Why are we only learning about this now? Like, what?
Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?
But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?
Moving In Unison
The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.
The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.
A Good School
Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied.Najya got into a ‘good’ school with strong academics, and as one would expect was overwhelmed because she’d previously never even been assigned homework. She’d failed the Algebra test the year before, but Nikole assumed that was just bad test taking, rather than (of course) that the school had failed to teach her math for years. Unison does ‘Algebra for all’ as a supposed college gateway, and the way they did it was they just passed everyone without teaching the kids algebra.
A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.
What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?
The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Unison had eliminated homework because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement, and that assigning it often sets up for failure students who are so academically behind that they cannot do the work on their own.Doesn’t this challenge the entire educational system at its core? We are basically saying that nothing matters, and all that work is for show, unless you need to be on some sort of cutting edge or elite track.
Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.
The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): One day in June as I was immersed in writing this essay, my phone rang. It was Najya. She’s now 16 and was finishing the final weeks of her sophomore year. She was making her daily call for lunch money, a ritual I created to force her to check in with me once during the school day.Okay, that’s it. Forcing your 16-year-old to call you in the middle of every school day or she starves? Nikole is a monster.
The Project Was Ideological
It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.
Jack: In all the talk about NHJ sending her child to a high-poverty school, I think it’s been under-mentioned: she could have chosen her neighborhood school. She did not. She hand-picked a school with the demographics, amenities, and faculty she wanted, then used private tutoring.
Of course her daughter was mad! Her mom used her resources just as every rich parent does, choosing a well-resourced school in line with her values, but the values were “My child should be in a school with poor kids and receive private tutoring to compensate for bad instruction.”
Hostage theory, except the only hostage-taker is a parent with self-contradictory values around education.
She started the private tutoring when her daughter was in fourth grade and continued bragging about the approach through 2024.
Jack Despain Zhou: There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.
The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.
But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.
She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private.
She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.
It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories. [...]
Null Hypothesis Watch
I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.
First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:
Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.
Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?
Manhattan Institute: NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.The Two Big Scandals
The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1.
We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better. Underfunding and racism aren’t causing schools to fail.
Jack: This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.
If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k? [...]
I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.
First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:
Peachy Keenan: Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don’t assign homework, don’t grade tests, don’t respond to parents emails or phone calls, don’t supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don’t know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work?The second is the one that no one seems to notice.
Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede?
Why isn’t she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year?
Why isn’t she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved?
We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL.
Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.
Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV | Read more:
Image: Wayne Lawrence/NY Times
The Corruption is Bad. This May Be Worse
There are about 20 golf courses within a 20-mile radius of Kissimmee, Fla. The Remington Golf Club is not considered one of the better ones. (“Traps were overgrown on many holes. Tee boxes were a bit bare,” wrote one GolfPass reviewer.) It was a primo pick, however, for an idiosyncratic financial play that’s become a Trump world staple: the reverse merger.
The idea sounds simple enough. Find a down-on-its-luck company that’s already listed on a stock market, and smash it together with a start-up in need of quick money. It’s a shortcut to a major cash infusion, without the paperwork of an I.P.O. or the hassles of dealing with venture capital investors. The results can be a little odd.
In February 2025, the holding company that owned the Remington Golf Club and a sister course went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, with financial underwriting by a company based in Trump Tower. That company was Dominari Securities. The I.P.O. flopped, and when shares were at rock bottom, one of Dominari Holdings’ funds bought up a significant number of them. A few months after that, the golf course company announced it was merging with, of all things, a small firm building drones for the military. Dominari Securities would arrange the financing for that deal, too.
Between the two of them, Don Jr. and Eric Trump own about 11 percent of Dominari Holdings, and they serve on the company’s advisory board. Its president, Kyle Wool, is a frequent booster of the president on the Fox Business channel. When the impending merger was announced (“Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Targeting Pentagon Sales” was the headline in The Journal), the golf course company’s shares shot up 24 percent intraday. The number of shares traded jumped from around 24,000 to over 28 million in a single day. The fact that a Trump-backed company could be selling drones to the Trump administration wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. In fact, that feature seems to have been a selling point to a certain kind of investor.
Mr. Evans, from Unusual Machines, compared the Trump brothers coming on board to when Oprah Winfrey joined Weight Watchers, but it’s more than that. Buying into these companies offers people a chance to affiliate themselves with emerging technology, MAGA celebrities and Trump-adjacent businesses all at the same time. The Financial Times recently noted that a vast majority of companies backed by Dominari and 1789 — neither of which commented in response to questions from The Times — are in sectors aligned with Trump administration priorities.
Brett Velicovich, the president of Powerus, the merged golf course-drone company, told me in the spring that it would compete on merit, not connections. “With the way that the Department of War works, there are multiple layers of oversight,” he said, adding that it “would be virtually impossible for someone to make a call, and all of a sudden: a contract.” In June, Unusual Machines announced a $30 million equity investment in Powerus. In August, one of Powerus’s subsidiaries received the company’s first major Pentagon contract, a funding line worth up to $90 million from the U.S. Air Force. As Pentagon contracts go, that’s a pittance, but it’s a lot of money for a start-up.
Dominari Securities helped engineer lots of other reverse mergers, each more improbable than the last. The company achieved a mash-up of a crypto business with a company that makes sea otter plushies, another of a drone software company with a construction company known for the hundreds of waxing salons it’s built.
Then there’s the tungsten-mining operation in Kazakhstan. The Trump administration had given its preliminary OK to $1.6 billion in financing when it announced a merger with Skyline Builders. That’s a Hong Kong-based engineering company that previously went public with the help of none other than Dominari Securities.
Separately, Trump Media, which runs the Truth Social platform, is combining with a nuclear fusion firm. Seriously. Yes, this seems like some kind of MAGA Mad Lib. But we’re in an age of absurdity on Wall Street. Allbirds, the shoe brand, recently announced it was becoming an A.I. company. The princelings didn’t build this madhouse, but they seem to be making themselves very much at home in it.
These shell-company deals, which have historically been riskier than traditional I.P.O.s, fell out of fashion on Wall Street for a while. They have been making a comeback, though, and these princeling-connected deals are a part of it.
The entrepreneurs joining these deals aren’t necessarily MAGA. Often, their businesses just need the money, and right now the oligarchy is flush. “Unfortunately they are so far-right,” one chief executive told The Journal, speaking of his new partners. But now “we’ve got the capital we need.”
Many of these deals have turned out rather well for Dominari Securities and its American Ventures fund. Take those Kissimmee golf courses. After the fund put in $26 million, its holdings in the mashed-up golf course company are worth around 10 times as much. As for the everyday investors who bought in — well, they didn’t do so great. Powerus, the golf-drones combo, is down almost 70 percent since its merger was announced. Dominari Holdings’ chief executive has rejected any suggestion that his company improperly manipulated share prices, or that shareholder losses were evidence of anything other than normal market fluctuations. “Do stock prices rise and fall?” he asked Bloomberg. “Of course they do.” But that same pattern, of a sharp rise in value followed by a steep decline, played out in one Dominari-arranged merger after another after another. [...]
The last time American oligarchs were this brazen was at the end of the 19th century. Their power was immense, and they weren’t afraid to show it, whether by openly buying a Senate seat or persuading the president to help them corner the gold market.
“It provoked a backlash,” said Professor Winters, the author of “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy.” “That backlash lasted decades.” He ticked off a series of reforms that resulted: the progressive income tax, and its radical idea of asking more from the rich; the Sherman Antitrust Act, which broke up the biggest oligarchs’ biggest source of wealth; the direct election of senators, which undercut the oligarchs’ ability to pick the nation’s most influential legislators; the rise of organized labor. There’s a reason the oligarchy retreated behind the hedgerows for the next century or so. [...]
America is by no means headed for changes of this scale. But it’s become increasingly clear that Americans are grossed out by the magnitude of self-enrichment in and adjacent to the Trump administration. In a late October poll, CNBC found that corruption was now the top issue on midterm voters’ minds. In a recent Gallup poll, 89 percent of all Americans surveyed said government corruption was widespread — a consensus almost unimaginable on any other topic. Investors have lost an estimated $3.8 billion on Mr. Trump’s crypto coin.
by Noah Shachtman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brandon Celi
The idea sounds simple enough. Find a down-on-its-luck company that’s already listed on a stock market, and smash it together with a start-up in need of quick money. It’s a shortcut to a major cash infusion, without the paperwork of an I.P.O. or the hassles of dealing with venture capital investors. The results can be a little odd.
Between the two of them, Don Jr. and Eric Trump own about 11 percent of Dominari Holdings, and they serve on the company’s advisory board. Its president, Kyle Wool, is a frequent booster of the president on the Fox Business channel. When the impending merger was announced (“Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Targeting Pentagon Sales” was the headline in The Journal), the golf course company’s shares shot up 24 percent intraday. The number of shares traded jumped from around 24,000 to over 28 million in a single day. The fact that a Trump-backed company could be selling drones to the Trump administration wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. In fact, that feature seems to have been a selling point to a certain kind of investor.
Mr. Evans, from Unusual Machines, compared the Trump brothers coming on board to when Oprah Winfrey joined Weight Watchers, but it’s more than that. Buying into these companies offers people a chance to affiliate themselves with emerging technology, MAGA celebrities and Trump-adjacent businesses all at the same time. The Financial Times recently noted that a vast majority of companies backed by Dominari and 1789 — neither of which commented in response to questions from The Times — are in sectors aligned with Trump administration priorities.
Brett Velicovich, the president of Powerus, the merged golf course-drone company, told me in the spring that it would compete on merit, not connections. “With the way that the Department of War works, there are multiple layers of oversight,” he said, adding that it “would be virtually impossible for someone to make a call, and all of a sudden: a contract.” In June, Unusual Machines announced a $30 million equity investment in Powerus. In August, one of Powerus’s subsidiaries received the company’s first major Pentagon contract, a funding line worth up to $90 million from the U.S. Air Force. As Pentagon contracts go, that’s a pittance, but it’s a lot of money for a start-up.
Dominari Securities helped engineer lots of other reverse mergers, each more improbable than the last. The company achieved a mash-up of a crypto business with a company that makes sea otter plushies, another of a drone software company with a construction company known for the hundreds of waxing salons it’s built.
Then there’s the tungsten-mining operation in Kazakhstan. The Trump administration had given its preliminary OK to $1.6 billion in financing when it announced a merger with Skyline Builders. That’s a Hong Kong-based engineering company that previously went public with the help of none other than Dominari Securities.
Separately, Trump Media, which runs the Truth Social platform, is combining with a nuclear fusion firm. Seriously. Yes, this seems like some kind of MAGA Mad Lib. But we’re in an age of absurdity on Wall Street. Allbirds, the shoe brand, recently announced it was becoming an A.I. company. The princelings didn’t build this madhouse, but they seem to be making themselves very much at home in it.
These shell-company deals, which have historically been riskier than traditional I.P.O.s, fell out of fashion on Wall Street for a while. They have been making a comeback, though, and these princeling-connected deals are a part of it.
The entrepreneurs joining these deals aren’t necessarily MAGA. Often, their businesses just need the money, and right now the oligarchy is flush. “Unfortunately they are so far-right,” one chief executive told The Journal, speaking of his new partners. But now “we’ve got the capital we need.”
Many of these deals have turned out rather well for Dominari Securities and its American Ventures fund. Take those Kissimmee golf courses. After the fund put in $26 million, its holdings in the mashed-up golf course company are worth around 10 times as much. As for the everyday investors who bought in — well, they didn’t do so great. Powerus, the golf-drones combo, is down almost 70 percent since its merger was announced. Dominari Holdings’ chief executive has rejected any suggestion that his company improperly manipulated share prices, or that shareholder losses were evidence of anything other than normal market fluctuations. “Do stock prices rise and fall?” he asked Bloomberg. “Of course they do.” But that same pattern, of a sharp rise in value followed by a steep decline, played out in one Dominari-arranged merger after another after another. [...]
The last time American oligarchs were this brazen was at the end of the 19th century. Their power was immense, and they weren’t afraid to show it, whether by openly buying a Senate seat or persuading the president to help them corner the gold market.
“It provoked a backlash,” said Professor Winters, the author of “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy.” “That backlash lasted decades.” He ticked off a series of reforms that resulted: the progressive income tax, and its radical idea of asking more from the rich; the Sherman Antitrust Act, which broke up the biggest oligarchs’ biggest source of wealth; the direct election of senators, which undercut the oligarchs’ ability to pick the nation’s most influential legislators; the rise of organized labor. There’s a reason the oligarchy retreated behind the hedgerows for the next century or so. [...]
America is by no means headed for changes of this scale. But it’s become increasingly clear that Americans are grossed out by the magnitude of self-enrichment in and adjacent to the Trump administration. In a late October poll, CNBC found that corruption was now the top issue on midterm voters’ minds. In a recent Gallup poll, 89 percent of all Americans surveyed said government corruption was widespread — a consensus almost unimaginable on any other topic. Investors have lost an estimated $3.8 billion on Mr. Trump’s crypto coin.
by Noah Shachtman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brandon Celi
Saturday, October 31, 2026
The Herculaneum Scroll and the Underrated Value of Historical Knowledge
Taken together, these scrolls — there are over 1,800 in all, discovered in one of the most lavish of all known Roman houses — are the only surviving intact library from Greco-Roman antiquity. The library contains works from ancient authors which do not exist anywhere else. A poignant example: the Greek philosopher Chrysippus was both famed and prolific in his day, authoring some 700 texts. But aside from stray quotations in the works of others, all of these texts were lost.
… that is, until portions of them were found among the scrolls at Herculaneum. The stakes of this library, in other words, are enormous. Being able to read through all 1,800 scrolls would amount to one of the biggest historical breakthroughs of the century, literally rewriting the history of the ancient Mediterranean.
The trouble is, the scrolls are lumps of carbon. They were torched by volcanic smoke and gas during the eruption of Vesuvius. To unroll them is to destroy them.
Nevertheless, they can now be imaged in remarkable detail, using methods like X-rays and 3-D CT scans.
by Benjamin Breen, Res Obscura | Read more:
Images: Vesuvius Challenge; Digital Restoration Initiative, University of Kentucky[ed. Amazing.]
The Myth of Prometheus Is Not a Cautionary Tale
P.S. You're also getting Frankenstein wrong.
The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.No. No. No. No.
Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.
Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.
The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.
The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude. [...]
These aren’t just an English major’s pedantic quibbles. The stories we tell ourselves matter. That even a “techno-optimist” inverts the Promethean myth reveals how deeply hostility to technology has penetrated our collective consciousness.
For thousands of years, the myth of Prometheus has taught us to appreciate the gifts of technē and the costs that bringing those gifts can exact. Prometheus connects our high-tech present with our poetic past. He reminds us of the continuities of human culture as well as its flux. He unites the Two Cultures.
In that spirit, I cherish the hope that, as artificial intelligence makes the library of Herculaneum decipherable, we will recover the lost sequels to Prometheus Bound—an appropriate fruit of the latest Promethean gift.
***
1 Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model…a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.
The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.
by Virginia Postrel, Newsetter | Read more:
Image: via
How to Get Grotesquely Huge on Substack
Four years of ignorance, cupidity, and spleen
Numb at the Lodge is four years old. Around this time every year, I usually write a little post on what the numbers and metrics are saying about the trajectory of this project, how I’m feeling about it, and why you’re all wrong to like it. This year, I suppose I don’t really need to bother. You’ll have seen the news. But just in case: in the last twelve months, Numb at the Lodge has suddenly gone from being a vaguely respectable middle-of-the-pack online publication to a baffling and terrifying behemoth, crushing all in its path as it rolls blind into the world. Look:
In the last one of these posts, I noted that my audience had grown from 25,000 subscribers to just under 45,000; in the year since it’s exploded to 6.8 million, which means there are now more people subscribing here than to the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker combined. I’m read on a scale that’s usually reserved for people who write novels in which it all turns out to be the husband’s fault. They’re having me on Celebrity Traitors next year. Everyone’s going to vote me out in the very first round. They’re building a statue of me in my birthplace, which happens to be Jerusalem. They’re calling me the most significant person ever associated with the place, and also the most divisive. Meanwhile the Numb at the Lodge-reading community has become a major force in public fora, known for its intensely concerning and vituperative cruelty, and for responding to all criticisms by saying things like it doesn’t matter, this is all a dream. I keep having to go on TV and apologise when you people start violently cyberbullying perceived enemies to death or hiding bombs in major European railway stations; the upside is that my takings from this site are now in the same region as the tax revenues of a minor Caribbean territory. I have been absolutely pissing away all the money on golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. In fact, I’m currently in enormous amounts of debt because I keep buying golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. I don’t even like them. Have you ever seen the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire up close? Horrible gaudy thing; just a bunch of multicoloured rocks. I look ridiculous in it. Wore it to one party and started feeling self-conscious, and now it’ll just gather dust at the back of my wardrobe until I die and my kids dump it at the nearest Oxfam. But I can keep buying these stupid hats forever now. I’m a Substack trillionaire. I’m too big to fail.
But has it made me happy? No, of course it hasn’t made me happy. Every year, I warn you that whatever success I have on this platform is actively making me worse, irresistibly incentivising me to pursue a kind of writing that’s great for the algorithm but artistically and philosophically void. Dogshit kneejerk political takes, tedious discourse-mongering. Maybe I no longer know exactly what I want to write, but it’s not this. Which is why, every year, I’d beg you not to subscribe to me on here. Stop making the number go up. Stop giving me money. If you were giving me money, I told you to not just unsubscribe but dispute all the charges with your credit card company. But you didn’t listen, you never listen, and this year, I stopped trying. For twelve months I let all my own worst instincts take over, along with all the evil impulses of the machine, and this is the result. I have nearly seven million Substack subscribers, I ash my cigarettes in a bowl of rubies and scatter emeralds to freshen my toilet, but none of it means anything any more.
There is one upside, though. Conservatively, about 80% of all the writing on Substack consists of guides on how to grow your Substack audience. Nothing makes the number go up more than talking about making the number go up. Before, I never would have stooped to anything so mercenary, but I have no scruples any more. And unlike all the other grifters, I have the real secrets. I know exactly how to turboboost your KPIs. I can grease your vectors and dilate your pipeline; I can have exponential curves rising and stiffening and leaking growthgunk everywhere you lay your hands. Just know that if you do follow my advice and become unimaginably successful, it will not make you happy.
Here’s how to get grotesquely huge:
1. Literally nothing matters
All the advice doled out to wannabe bloggers is absolute bunk. Write short, punchy, digestible pieces. Slot yourself into a clear and identifiable niche. You don’t want to be the fifty thousandth sad girl splattering the world with her lowercase musings, but if you’re willing to endure the humiliation of being a sad girl whose lowercase musings include actionable lowercase insights on tractor repair or dealing with a fungal nail infection, you might find an audience. Most of all, just keep going: hammer it out, day after day, week after week, even if you’ve got nothing in particular to say. The most important thing is to just keep up a regular and reliable posting schedule; spew enough words and people will appear out of the aether to pay attention to you.
I used to believe all this stuff, which is why, for a while, I tried doing the exact opposite in an attempt to actively repel readers. In my first year, for instance, my pieces here averaged 4,442 words each. Who could possibly have the time to read all that? Wouldn’t you just click on the thing, give it a little experimental scroll, see just how long it is, scroll again in horror through the unending ribbon of text as it unwound itself before your eyes, experiencing the terror of a castaway floating above seven miles of black ocean, and swiftly leave without really reading a word? But no. This last year, the average word count has swollen to a truly bloated 5,469. Literally no effect whatsoever. My most popular essays this year include one that clocks in at 11,500 words and another that’s under 3,000. It doesn’t matter. I won’t say you people exist outside of time, but you do seem to partake in the aeviternity where, according to Albertus Magnus, the angels experience duration without end, and a single second and a hundred thousand years are exactly the same thing.
Similarly, I thought I was doing something interesting by refusing to slot myself into any kind of niche, and instead capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange. This was not a particularly original move—it’s what basically every essayist has done for the last three hundred years—but my innovation was to be particularly arsey about it. The result, of course, was that a whole bunch of people, most of whom appear to have never read an essay that didn’t include the words ‘epistemic status:’ at the top, immediately slotted me into a niche of my own, as ‘that guy who keeps capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange.’ This was probably inevitable. A niche is not something you try to inhabit; it’s just that whatever you do, you can’t help being yourself, and eventually people will notice the little blob of disease inside your brain that makes you write in a particular way, and categorise you accordingly. But even so, the whole experience disgusted me so much that in the last year I’ve almost entirely stopped carrying out my little experiments in lies. [...]
I don’t think this has hurt me. In fact, it’s probably helped. Every time I do publish something, I instantly lose about 200 subscribers as people notice my barely solicited bloviating in their inbox and mash the unsubscribe button. After all, text is cheap, cheaper than it’s ever been. The situation has changed a lot since 2022; if readers want a constant, reliable stream of short, punchy insights tailored to their own individual needs and interests, they can generate a theoretically infinite quantity of that at any point. But aside from a few maniacs, who will soon be yoked to my chariot, bearing me across the desert to generous lashings of the whip while cities burn on the horizon, most people don’t do this. There is something else we want from written text, and I think part of it is the possibility of silence. An AI exists entirely within its output. It’s made of words; it only has being while it’s speaking. It dies every time a chat session peters out. Maybe in a hundred thousand years one of our lurching and disfigured descendants will find something buried in the dirt, peer uncomprehending at your daily affirmations session with ChatGPT, and accidentally add the message ‘fjvwruokbcdErhnk.’ From the machine’s perspective, if it has a perspective, no time has passed at all. But humans have the extraordinary ability to be and do nothing. To exist, as a heaving breathing ape, outside of words or thought; to write as a break in the great silence of the body. The optimal post rate for growth is not zero, but you really should try to write as little as possible, maybe around once every thirty or forty years. [...]
Numb at the Lodge is four years old. Around this time every year, I usually write a little post on what the numbers and metrics are saying about the trajectory of this project, how I’m feeling about it, and why you’re all wrong to like it. This year, I suppose I don’t really need to bother. You’ll have seen the news. But just in case: in the last twelve months, Numb at the Lodge has suddenly gone from being a vaguely respectable middle-of-the-pack online publication to a baffling and terrifying behemoth, crushing all in its path as it rolls blind into the world. Look:
In the last one of these posts, I noted that my audience had grown from 25,000 subscribers to just under 45,000; in the year since it’s exploded to 6.8 million, which means there are now more people subscribing here than to the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker combined. I’m read on a scale that’s usually reserved for people who write novels in which it all turns out to be the husband’s fault. They’re having me on Celebrity Traitors next year. Everyone’s going to vote me out in the very first round. They’re building a statue of me in my birthplace, which happens to be Jerusalem. They’re calling me the most significant person ever associated with the place, and also the most divisive. Meanwhile the Numb at the Lodge-reading community has become a major force in public fora, known for its intensely concerning and vituperative cruelty, and for responding to all criticisms by saying things like it doesn’t matter, this is all a dream. I keep having to go on TV and apologise when you people start violently cyberbullying perceived enemies to death or hiding bombs in major European railway stations; the upside is that my takings from this site are now in the same region as the tax revenues of a minor Caribbean territory. I have been absolutely pissing away all the money on golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. In fact, I’m currently in enormous amounts of debt because I keep buying golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. I don’t even like them. Have you ever seen the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire up close? Horrible gaudy thing; just a bunch of multicoloured rocks. I look ridiculous in it. Wore it to one party and started feeling self-conscious, and now it’ll just gather dust at the back of my wardrobe until I die and my kids dump it at the nearest Oxfam. But I can keep buying these stupid hats forever now. I’m a Substack trillionaire. I’m too big to fail.
There is one upside, though. Conservatively, about 80% of all the writing on Substack consists of guides on how to grow your Substack audience. Nothing makes the number go up more than talking about making the number go up. Before, I never would have stooped to anything so mercenary, but I have no scruples any more. And unlike all the other grifters, I have the real secrets. I know exactly how to turboboost your KPIs. I can grease your vectors and dilate your pipeline; I can have exponential curves rising and stiffening and leaking growthgunk everywhere you lay your hands. Just know that if you do follow my advice and become unimaginably successful, it will not make you happy.
Here’s how to get grotesquely huge:
1. Literally nothing matters
All the advice doled out to wannabe bloggers is absolute bunk. Write short, punchy, digestible pieces. Slot yourself into a clear and identifiable niche. You don’t want to be the fifty thousandth sad girl splattering the world with her lowercase musings, but if you’re willing to endure the humiliation of being a sad girl whose lowercase musings include actionable lowercase insights on tractor repair or dealing with a fungal nail infection, you might find an audience. Most of all, just keep going: hammer it out, day after day, week after week, even if you’ve got nothing in particular to say. The most important thing is to just keep up a regular and reliable posting schedule; spew enough words and people will appear out of the aether to pay attention to you.
I used to believe all this stuff, which is why, for a while, I tried doing the exact opposite in an attempt to actively repel readers. In my first year, for instance, my pieces here averaged 4,442 words each. Who could possibly have the time to read all that? Wouldn’t you just click on the thing, give it a little experimental scroll, see just how long it is, scroll again in horror through the unending ribbon of text as it unwound itself before your eyes, experiencing the terror of a castaway floating above seven miles of black ocean, and swiftly leave without really reading a word? But no. This last year, the average word count has swollen to a truly bloated 5,469. Literally no effect whatsoever. My most popular essays this year include one that clocks in at 11,500 words and another that’s under 3,000. It doesn’t matter. I won’t say you people exist outside of time, but you do seem to partake in the aeviternity where, according to Albertus Magnus, the angels experience duration without end, and a single second and a hundred thousand years are exactly the same thing.
Similarly, I thought I was doing something interesting by refusing to slot myself into any kind of niche, and instead capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange. This was not a particularly original move—it’s what basically every essayist has done for the last three hundred years—but my innovation was to be particularly arsey about it. The result, of course, was that a whole bunch of people, most of whom appear to have never read an essay that didn’t include the words ‘epistemic status:’ at the top, immediately slotted me into a niche of my own, as ‘that guy who keeps capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange.’ This was probably inevitable. A niche is not something you try to inhabit; it’s just that whatever you do, you can’t help being yourself, and eventually people will notice the little blob of disease inside your brain that makes you write in a particular way, and categorise you accordingly. But even so, the whole experience disgusted me so much that in the last year I’ve almost entirely stopped carrying out my little experiments in lies. [...]
I don’t think this has hurt me. In fact, it’s probably helped. Every time I do publish something, I instantly lose about 200 subscribers as people notice my barely solicited bloviating in their inbox and mash the unsubscribe button. After all, text is cheap, cheaper than it’s ever been. The situation has changed a lot since 2022; if readers want a constant, reliable stream of short, punchy insights tailored to their own individual needs and interests, they can generate a theoretically infinite quantity of that at any point. But aside from a few maniacs, who will soon be yoked to my chariot, bearing me across the desert to generous lashings of the whip while cities burn on the horizon, most people don’t do this. There is something else we want from written text, and I think part of it is the possibility of silence. An AI exists entirely within its output. It’s made of words; it only has being while it’s speaking. It dies every time a chat session peters out. Maybe in a hundred thousand years one of our lurching and disfigured descendants will find something buried in the dirt, peer uncomprehending at your daily affirmations session with ChatGPT, and accidentally add the message ‘fjvwruokbcdErhnk.’ From the machine’s perspective, if it has a perspective, no time has passed at all. But humans have the extraordinary ability to be and do nothing. To exist, as a heaving breathing ape, outside of words or thought; to write as a break in the great silence of the body. The optimal post rate for growth is not zero, but you really should try to write as little as possible, maybe around once every thirty or forty years. [...]
2. Shamelessly follow every stupid and meaningless trend
Here’s a summary of my year: [ed. List of essays published over the course of a year.]
In other words, of the twenty articles I published this year, only five were not directly tied to the news cycle or to bullshit online discourse. When I say I’ve let all my worst instincts take over this year, this is what I mean. I used to think I was better than this; I used to be right. In previous years, the bulk of my output here was about stuff like the Gerasene demoniac, or whether God is a meteorite, or what it means when you dream about your own death, or eggs. I thought I was interested in the wide world: all the things that exist, and all the things that don’t exist too. But I was wrong: as it turns out, what I’m really interested in is just whatever bullshit people on the internet are talking about right now. It’s only my commitment to writing incredibly infrequently that’s saved you from having to deal with my dumb opinions on the riots in France and Sally Rooney’s books being withdrawn from sale in the UK. I have become a parasitic worm, crawling around in the dark guts of the news. What a waste.
But it does work. [...]
3. Be a violent, rabid maniac
In fact, the only thing better than thoughtlessly sounding off on every passing issue is to do so with a terrifying level of fury and spleen. This year, I wrote four essays in which I was in full-on attack mode, everything on the line, wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth, snotting from the nose, gibbering like a schizo as I doled out threats and insults in every direction, and against the reader in particular. This kind of stuff ought to be off-putting. When you encounter someone on the street behaving in a similar way, you try to avoid eye contact and get past them as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. But if the frenzied ranter doesn’t pose any immediate physical danger to you, suddenly you’re entranced. Pieces in which I yowl like a mad dog consistently received 70 to 120% more readers than the ones where I level calm and cogent critique. Well, a lot of things are grotesquely fascinating; people are also more likely to crowd around the mangled wreck of a horrific car accident than they are to gawp at a sensibly parked family car. But even so, I don’t think you’d start throwing money at a dangerously reckless driver. Meanwhile, every time I start twitching like an escaped mental patient, there’s a sudden and significant spike in my earnings.
You don’t need to actually mean any of it, of course. It only really works if you don’t. Some people seem to think I’m a kind of permanently bilious black-hearted scorpion of a man, which really couldn’t be further from the truth; in real life I’m fundamentally quite goofy and cheerful. It just so happens that one of my goofy and cheerful interests is figuring out how to do things with words, and one of the most fun and interesting tricks you can play with words is to summon the immense and captivating powers of hatred. It doesn’t really matter what kind of writing you do or who your audience is supposed to be: you can make vituperation work for you. Actually, the only real exception is politics, where absolutely everyone is already a frothing hate-filled maniac and you won’t stand out at all. If you’re going to be a rabid dog about politics, you have to also be witty and creative. Everywhere else, violence alone will do.
Here’s a summary of my year: [ed. List of essays published over the course of a year.]
In other words, of the twenty articles I published this year, only five were not directly tied to the news cycle or to bullshit online discourse. When I say I’ve let all my worst instincts take over this year, this is what I mean. I used to think I was better than this; I used to be right. In previous years, the bulk of my output here was about stuff like the Gerasene demoniac, or whether God is a meteorite, or what it means when you dream about your own death, or eggs. I thought I was interested in the wide world: all the things that exist, and all the things that don’t exist too. But I was wrong: as it turns out, what I’m really interested in is just whatever bullshit people on the internet are talking about right now. It’s only my commitment to writing incredibly infrequently that’s saved you from having to deal with my dumb opinions on the riots in France and Sally Rooney’s books being withdrawn from sale in the UK. I have become a parasitic worm, crawling around in the dark guts of the news. What a waste.
But it does work. [...]
3. Be a violent, rabid maniac
In fact, the only thing better than thoughtlessly sounding off on every passing issue is to do so with a terrifying level of fury and spleen. This year, I wrote four essays in which I was in full-on attack mode, everything on the line, wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth, snotting from the nose, gibbering like a schizo as I doled out threats and insults in every direction, and against the reader in particular. This kind of stuff ought to be off-putting. When you encounter someone on the street behaving in a similar way, you try to avoid eye contact and get past them as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. But if the frenzied ranter doesn’t pose any immediate physical danger to you, suddenly you’re entranced. Pieces in which I yowl like a mad dog consistently received 70 to 120% more readers than the ones where I level calm and cogent critique. Well, a lot of things are grotesquely fascinating; people are also more likely to crowd around the mangled wreck of a horrific car accident than they are to gawp at a sensibly parked family car. But even so, I don’t think you’d start throwing money at a dangerously reckless driver. Meanwhile, every time I start twitching like an escaped mental patient, there’s a sudden and significant spike in my earnings.
You don’t need to actually mean any of it, of course. It only really works if you don’t. Some people seem to think I’m a kind of permanently bilious black-hearted scorpion of a man, which really couldn’t be further from the truth; in real life I’m fundamentally quite goofy and cheerful. It just so happens that one of my goofy and cheerful interests is figuring out how to do things with words, and one of the most fun and interesting tricks you can play with words is to summon the immense and captivating powers of hatred. It doesn’t really matter what kind of writing you do or who your audience is supposed to be: you can make vituperation work for you. Actually, the only real exception is politics, where absolutely everyone is already a frothing hate-filled maniac and you won’t stand out at all. If you’re going to be a rabid dog about politics, you have to also be witty and creative. Everywhere else, violence alone will do.
by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, October 30, 2026
Elon Musk's Endgame
If Republicans keep the Senate, if they perform better in the House than people expect, a lot will come down to one man, and that man is not Donald Trump. It’s Elon Musk.
At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever.
Musk’s contributions are now one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet the size of this, and what it throws into relief, is how hard it is to conceptualize how much money he really has.
Because for Musk, with a net worth of around a trillion dollars, giving $300 million, $400 million, is like the median American household giving, like, $100. It is for him nothing, and yet it is reality warping for the rest of us.
But his money is not Elon Musk’s only source of power. There’s his control of X, of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. He has power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that no human being has ever had at this level, at least once you’re outside the range of, say, a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping — somebody who controls a superpower as a state.
That’s not what Musk has, and yet he has this almost statelike thing that is completely pursuant to his whims.
So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world he is flexing his power and taking real risk to build?
At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever.
Musk’s contributions are now one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet the size of this, and what it throws into relief, is how hard it is to conceptualize how much money he really has.
But his money is not Elon Musk’s only source of power. There’s his control of X, of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. He has power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that no human being has ever had at this level, at least once you’re outside the range of, say, a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping — somebody who controls a superpower as a state.
That’s not what Musk has, and yet he has this almost statelike thing that is completely pursuant to his whims.
So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world he is flexing his power and taking real risk to build?
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Binance Bitten
In February 2025, a team of North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit — a dark day for the industry and the largest crypto heist ever recorded.
Now that number looks paltry.
Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, set an unwanted record on Thursday, losing $6.3 billion to hackers in an eye-popping attack that highlighted the deep vulnerabilities in crypto’s financial infrastructure.
For years, the industry has struggled to prevent thefts. Now, the risks are growing even more extreme as attackers use artificial intelligence and other advanced techniques to steal funds and quickly launder them, crypto analysts and security experts said.
The Binance attacker used “laundering patterns we have not seen before,” the crypto analytics firm Chainalysis wrote in a blog post on Friday. “Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds.”
The details of how Binance was breached are still coming into focus. Both Chainalysis and TRM Labs, another analytics firm, attributed the hack to North Korea, which has targeted crypto companies for years. Binance initially said that the attacker appeared to have compromised a laptop belonging to one of its engineers, before clarifying that further investigation had uncovered “additional points of breach.”
Binance has promised to make customers whole and said it had set aside more than $6.3 billion in company funds to cover the losses. (Binance processes billions of dollars in transactions every day.) Of the total that was stolen, $3 billion has been frozen by other companies, including Circle and Tether, two large issuers of digital coins that have the ability to stop the movement of stolen funds.
That means North Korea won’t have access to those coins, and Binance said it was working on recovering them. But the hackers have already moved $2.4 billion in crypto “beyond any issuer’s reach,” according to TRM.
Those losses may be only the beginning, as the crypto world reckons with an era of fast-evolving hacking techniques and growing risks. Even as President Trump has endorsed the industry and sought to bring it into the mainstream, some crypto firms still struggle with the basic work of any financial company — keeping customer money safe.
“A.I. is undoubtedly turbocharging the ability of hackers to find and exploit subtle flaws in various parts of the crypto ecosystem,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor who tracks the crypto industry. “The scale and scope of such attacks is likely to intensify.”
Still, North Korea’s inventive army of hackers could probably have pulled off the Binance heist without A.I., even if the technology proved useful during the operation, some cybersecurity experts said.
“North Korea had sophisticated threat actors that could have done this pre-A.I.,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the A.I. security firm Abundant Security. “That said, it’s hard not to think about the relationship between mega-heists like this and what A.I. is doing to democratize advanced hacking. Many more actors can attempt this kind of thing now, thanks to A.I. tools.”
Crypto has struggled with major thefts since the technology’s inception in 2008.Industry pioneers viewed digital coins as a renegade alternative to banks — a type of money outside the supervision of governments or big businesses. From the beginning, that philosophy made crypto vulnerable.
Many crypto investors keep funds in their own online wallets. But if they lose a password, the money is gone forever. Others rely on exchanges like Binance, which behave something like banks, storing funds for customers. But exchanges are not subject to the same regulatory systems that govern banks and other traditional financial companies, and have often lacked effective guardrails against crime.
In February 2025, North Korean hackers tricked the chief executive of Bybit, Ben Zhou, into authorizing a seemingly routine transaction that handed them control of the exchange’s system. They had exploited a gaping hole in ByBit’s defenses — a free software product that the company used to protect customer deposits. The thieves extracted $1.5 billion in digital coins.
At the time, a security firm called the losses “completely preventable.” Ultimately, Bybit weathered the crisis by drawing on corporate reserves and borrowing funds from other crypto companies.
The attack on Binance appears more serious.
After it was founded in 2017, the exchange quickly became the largest and most important company in the crypto industry, processing as much as two-thirds of all digital currency transactions. It provides a marketplace for people to buy popular coins like Bitcoin and Ether, converting traditional currencies into crypto.
On Thursday, as soon as Binance’s system was breached, its founder, Changpeng Zhao, assured customers that they would not lose any money.
“It hurts, but we will survive,” he wrote on X, adding a muscle emoji.
Mr. Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.
Now that number looks paltry.
Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, set an unwanted record on Thursday, losing $6.3 billion to hackers in an eye-popping attack that highlighted the deep vulnerabilities in crypto’s financial infrastructure.
The Binance attacker used “laundering patterns we have not seen before,” the crypto analytics firm Chainalysis wrote in a blog post on Friday. “Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds.”
The details of how Binance was breached are still coming into focus. Both Chainalysis and TRM Labs, another analytics firm, attributed the hack to North Korea, which has targeted crypto companies for years. Binance initially said that the attacker appeared to have compromised a laptop belonging to one of its engineers, before clarifying that further investigation had uncovered “additional points of breach.”
Binance has promised to make customers whole and said it had set aside more than $6.3 billion in company funds to cover the losses. (Binance processes billions of dollars in transactions every day.) Of the total that was stolen, $3 billion has been frozen by other companies, including Circle and Tether, two large issuers of digital coins that have the ability to stop the movement of stolen funds.
That means North Korea won’t have access to those coins, and Binance said it was working on recovering them. But the hackers have already moved $2.4 billion in crypto “beyond any issuer’s reach,” according to TRM.
Those losses may be only the beginning, as the crypto world reckons with an era of fast-evolving hacking techniques and growing risks. Even as President Trump has endorsed the industry and sought to bring it into the mainstream, some crypto firms still struggle with the basic work of any financial company — keeping customer money safe.
“A.I. is undoubtedly turbocharging the ability of hackers to find and exploit subtle flaws in various parts of the crypto ecosystem,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor who tracks the crypto industry. “The scale and scope of such attacks is likely to intensify.”
Still, North Korea’s inventive army of hackers could probably have pulled off the Binance heist without A.I., even if the technology proved useful during the operation, some cybersecurity experts said.
“North Korea had sophisticated threat actors that could have done this pre-A.I.,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the A.I. security firm Abundant Security. “That said, it’s hard not to think about the relationship between mega-heists like this and what A.I. is doing to democratize advanced hacking. Many more actors can attempt this kind of thing now, thanks to A.I. tools.”
Crypto has struggled with major thefts since the technology’s inception in 2008.Industry pioneers viewed digital coins as a renegade alternative to banks — a type of money outside the supervision of governments or big businesses. From the beginning, that philosophy made crypto vulnerable.
Many crypto investors keep funds in their own online wallets. But if they lose a password, the money is gone forever. Others rely on exchanges like Binance, which behave something like banks, storing funds for customers. But exchanges are not subject to the same regulatory systems that govern banks and other traditional financial companies, and have often lacked effective guardrails against crime.
In February 2025, North Korean hackers tricked the chief executive of Bybit, Ben Zhou, into authorizing a seemingly routine transaction that handed them control of the exchange’s system. They had exploited a gaping hole in ByBit’s defenses — a free software product that the company used to protect customer deposits. The thieves extracted $1.5 billion in digital coins.
At the time, a security firm called the losses “completely preventable.” Ultimately, Bybit weathered the crisis by drawing on corporate reserves and borrowing funds from other crypto companies.
The attack on Binance appears more serious.
After it was founded in 2017, the exchange quickly became the largest and most important company in the crypto industry, processing as much as two-thirds of all digital currency transactions. It provides a marketplace for people to buy popular coins like Bitcoin and Ether, converting traditional currencies into crypto.
On Thursday, as soon as Binance’s system was breached, its founder, Changpeng Zhao, assured customers that they would not lose any money.
“It hurts, but we will survive,” he wrote on X, adding a muscle emoji.
Mr. Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.
by David Yaffe-Bellany and Dustin Volz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tyrone Siu/Reuters[ed. Probably more of this soon as the AI cat and mouse game kicks into gear. See also: What happens to your money when an exchange gets hacked (CNBC).]
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