Mamdani Is Showing the World How It’s Done

A few days before the leaders of the world streamed into the cavernous, marble-lined General Assembly Hall to deliver their speeches on the grave crises convulsing our combustible world, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered his own, somewhat surprising solution to the problem of rising authoritarianism: filling potholes.

“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live, why would you trust it to deliver anywhere?” Mamdani asked a gathering of mayors from big cities across the world, explaining his obsession with potholes, more than 200,000 of which have been filled across the city since he took office. “If you are making a New Yorker’s life a little smoother, so too you are making their journey to believe in government’s ability to deliver for them.”

It is commonplace to lament the ineffectual talking shop that the United Nations General Assembly has become, with its blustering speeches and endless unread communiqués. Wars of aggression are raging in Ukraine and Iran; Israel has carried out a genocide in Gaza; climate catastrophes impoverish and kill. In the face of these calamities, the organization appears powerless.

Today, the body’s soaring aims — to create a more peaceful, humane world that respects the sovereignty of each nation and the dignity of each human being — seem like a fantasy from another dimension. Citizens the world over are dissatisfied with their governments and in many places are souring on democracy itself. Can it be any surprise that this supranational body comes in for such contempt?

And yet Mamdani sensed an opportunity to reclaim some of its founding spirit. Racing across the city last week, he seemed to be offering an antidote to globe-spanning distemper. To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. Politics, as he put it, “has to translate to the pavement.”

New York City has long held a singular spot on the international stage, and its mayors have become global figures. But Mamdani, by dint of his youth, his improbable rise and his unusual background, brings a vivid symbolism to the role. African by birth, South Asian by heritage, American by choice, Mamdani in many ways embodies the cosmopolitan ideal at the heart of the United Nations’ founding.

World leaders lined up to spend time with him. He went to Queens with Ireland’s prime minister for a bingo game at an Irish American community center. He met with Brazil’s octogenarian leftist president and breakfasted with Spain’s dashing left-wing prime minister. Norway’s prime minister tagged along with him to visit a New York City classroom and talk about artificial intelligence in education.

Even President Trump couldn’t resist some time with the mayor. Last Monday he dropped by Gracie Mansion, spending about an hour behind closed doors with Mamdani — an eternity in presidential scheduling. Trump seemed in no rush to leave as the two took questions from reporters, beaming as he declared, “I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential, got great potential.”

Mamdani’s agenda, as befits a mayor, was mostly municipal. He visited a wastewater treatment facility with his counterparts from Helsinki, Rome and Barcelona; welcomed families moving into public housing with the mayors of Paris, Amsterdam and Greater Manchester; and handed out fliers to delivery workers explaining their rights with Mexico City’s mayor.

When he wasn’t hanging out with his fellow mayors, he celebrated the city’s victory in court against the delivery service DoorDash, wresting over $131 million from the company in a settlement for underpaying or not paying its workers. He also announced a new initiative to give out 70,000 free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera House, part of his push to make the city’s most exclusive cultural offerings accessible to everyday New Yorkers.

Mamdani’s many critics have tried to portray him as fixated on distant hobbyhorses, like arresting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. But if anything, it was Netanyahu who seemed obsessed with the mayor. In his thundering speech at the United Nations last week, he called Mamdani an antisemite with “Hamas buddies.” He darkly name-checked the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and even castigated Mamdani’s wife for her likes on social media.

When I caught up with Mamdani by phone late last week, I asked him what he had hoped to get out of his first General Assembly. “We are a city that is home to hundreds of nationalities and even more languages,” Mamdani told me. “If any city is an illustration of what the United Nations principles hope to achieve, it is ours.”

But no matter how admirable those principles, the weakness of institutions like the United Nations in the face of the world’s spiraling chaos is an invitation to ask deeper questions, Mamdani said: “In a moment of a rising far right and the questioning of institutions that have otherwise been durable over many decades, it is also an opportunity to rethink what has been at the heart of those institutions, and the question of who they can serve and who they seek to serve.”

by Lydia Polgreen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: David Dee Delgado/Reuters

[ed. ... aka, Socialist Commie.]

The Secretive Bilderberg Group Is a Key to Understanding the Global Power Elite

Most countries in the western world operate under a practically unquestionable assumption that they are democratic, in the sense that there is a plurality of different interests in society at any given time and each of them has an equal opportunity of gaining significant political power.

The very concept of an elite class, with more influence than mostly everyone else, is deemed a relic of history. C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, explained that these understandings have a certain romantic appeal, because a supposed balance of interests, without elite interference, makes “each of them really quite impotent, then no one set of higher circles and no manageable set of institutional arrangements can be held accountable for the events and decisions of our time.”

But in a world of constant conflict, economic strife, and political hypocrites, perhaps it is at least worth considering the other side of the argument for once?

In Mills’ conceptualisation of a power elite, he explained how a uniquely powerful grouping of economic, political, and military interests emerged after World War II that had the means to make decisions with significant consequences for the whole of American society.

The narrow and centralised group of individuals at the apex of economic, political, and military hierarchies constituted an elite with the technical and institutional means of power, which are beyond the reach of ordinary people. Far from conspiratorial, this was a group seeking to maintain its position of social power via the maintenance of its own coincidence of shared interests.

Indeed, Mills argued that “to accept either view – of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift – is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.”

Writing in the 1950s, Mills’ conceptualisation of an elite was rooted in facts of power that existed, for the most part, within the nation state. One big exception to this was the Bilderberg Group that formed in 1954, which brought together elites from across the world into a transnational network. The group’s official website states that it was developed in response to opinions “expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.”

It fails to say how non-leading citizens, the general public, had a say in its organisation or operation. The World Economic Forum, Trilateral Commission, and Atlantic Council serve as similar transnational elite knowledge networks where individuals with shared, and in this case globalist, interests can work to further their own agenda. Since the era of globalisation moved political and economic power beyond any single country, so too have elites transcended the bounds of the nation. The problem, then, is that how do the masses, bound within borders, stand a chance of influencing the decisions that this transnational elite are making?

To think of institutions like the Bilderberg Group as inconsequential is to underestimate the role they play in constructing a global ideological consensus among elites that is then brought home and applied to the “nation.” Bilderberg allows elites to interact and acquire a shared education in how to think about the world in globalised terms. While it is an unofficial institution, in the sense that is it not legally constituted, the decisions it makes are subsequently endorsed by official agencies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and national governments.

This is especially true of its neoliberal economic position. If there is a global ruling class, as critical political sociologists have identified, then to constrain political analysis to only the official institutions of the nation, and omit anything akin to Bilderberg, is a major misunderstanding of the ways of the powerful in modern times.

The Bilderberg Group’s powerful members come from across the world and represent the political, economic, military, technological, and ideological spheres of globalisation. There is absolutely no representation of alternative interests and ideological positions, such as small business, populists, socialists, or nationalists. [...]

Understanding the Bilderberg Group as the center of an elite knowledge network is far more accurate than any simplistic, and often naïve, claim to the contrary; especially from those that would malign it with the catch-all, ignorant label of “conspiracy theory.”

Knowing that the locus of political, economic, and military power now resides offshore helps to explain the pandemic of political disaffectedness sweeping across the planet. Some even see this as the emergence of a global civil war, which is surely the last thing the world needs at this very moment. Apparently, Bilderberg’s secretive nature is to ensure its participants can “speak freely in an environment of trust,” but precisely what would these people, who themselves claim a proclivity for transparency and democracy, want to speak about free from public discussion, criticism, and alternative points of view?

The public, rationally, can only surmise that it is nothing good. Unless politicians revert to assuming their proper role as national, and local, leaders, responsible for their own constituents’ needs as opposed to those of transnational corporations, the global crisis of democracy is surely set to continue.

by Stuart J. Hooper, The Wire | Read more:
Image: Reuters/File
[ed. The Press are typically excluded (see list of 2026 attendees here) and all discussions are conducted under the Chatham House rule (meaning you can use and report what you learned, but you cannot share who you got it from, nor their affiliations). See also: At Bilderberg’s bigwig bash two things are guaranteed: Kissinger and secrecy (Guardian).]

Vote Wisely

[ed. Sounds reasonable. But how do we actually go about fixing everything?]

via: SNL

AI Will Be a Boon for Savers

Sometime in the next few years, an ordinary American will give a simple instruction to an AI assistant: “Make sure my money is always working.” From that moment on, his cash may never sit still again.

The agent will sweep idle savings into whatever insured account pays the most. It will find high-paying savings accounts and ladder certificates of deposit without the owner’s learning what laddering means. This is agentic banking—software that displays your finances and acts on them—and the banking industry isn’t prepared for how fast it’s coming.

A staggering share of bank profitability rests on money that doesn’t move. This is true across the board, not only for big banks.

Americans hold roughly $10.4 trillion in savings and other liquid deposits. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s national average savings rate—the deposit-weighted average across every insured institution—is a mere 0.38%. At that rate, the system pays savers about $40 billion a year. The best nationally available savings accounts tracked by Bankrate pay around 4%. The same balances at that rate would earn more than $400 billion.

Even extremely conservative assumptions—half those balances stay put for good reasons, and top rates compress as money moves—leave Americans forgoing well over $150 billion a year. Call it the laziness tax: a quiet, regressive wealth transfer from inattentive consumers to the banking system.

AI agents will largely abolish it. The inertia that keeps a saver from spending 20 minutes to earn $1,000 disappears when the 20 minutes do. Every account becomes a shopped account. For consumers, this is unambiguously good: the largest, fastest transfer of value from financial institutions to households in generations, accomplished by software rather than regulation.

An agent working for a consumer can also flag junk fees, catch unauthorized charges, decode fine print and steer its owner away from predatory products. It can help accomplish, one household at a time, much of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to do through enforcement. The regulatory challenge will be ensuring that agents’ actions stay aligned with consumers’ best interests.

But AI agents will strain the system that makes lending possible. Banks will be funding long-duration loans with money that can leave in 30 seconds. The Silicon Valley Bank crisis of March 2023 offered a preview of what can happen when technology accelerates money: Tens of billions of dollars left one bank in a day. Agents automate and accelerate that speed. Liquidity models built on human sluggishness will become a distant memory.

To survive when AI moves money automatically, banks will need to change how they do business. 

by John Delaney and Bill Foster, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Getty Images

[ed. Possible. But it'll take a heavy lift to get people to hand over their financial accounts (and security protections) to AI. What about criminal AIs that exploit that?]

via:

The Canton Spirituals

[ed. Yeah... come back in a few years (like maybe three or four for every year you fucked up). Then maybe you'd have enough perspective to preach how you'd screwed everyone over while "making a lot of mistakes". Contrition stories will bloom like weeds after the mid-terms. Guaranteed.]

[See also: The Trump Administration is a Cesspit of Corruption (Krugman). But we already knew that.]

California State Route 190 near Death Valley National Park.
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Kunihiro Amano, Blue Moon (A) [Aoi tsuki (A)], (color woodblock print), 1962
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College is Coming Apart

Artificial intelligence arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role. Worse, some of us are offloading the drudgery of writing recommendation letters, grant proposals, and even scientific papers to AI.

But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for knowledge production, especially in the natural and applied sciences: in protein-structure prediction, materials design, and drug discovery, for example. Pressured, in part, by donors, boards, employers, and parents, college administrators have announced AI initiatives, invested in AI infrastructure, and established AI degree programs.

These two forces—students using AI to their detriment and colleges using it to their benefit—might seem to be in conflict. Students are supposed to do everything longhand to preserve the sanctity of learning, but they are also urged to meet the new professional demands created by AI. Faculty and administrators are policing the classroom for AI, largely in vain, while also using AI liberally in their own work. Campuses are defending themselves against AI as an interloper while concurrently retooling themselves for the AI future. Colleges are racing toward and away from AI simultaneously. It feels like artificial intelligence is wresting higher education apart.

That’s what I thought at first too. But I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong. Higher education is a bundle of unrelated things held together by custom, history, and accident. The college bundle was always a tenuous one. It has little reason to remain together, even as the institutions inside it are too entrenched to separate.

College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.

Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.

Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of students outside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty

A Place Among the Fiddlers

I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.

I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. [...]

 

My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.

Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.

Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.

A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun. [...]

An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.

by David Alm, Longreads |  Read more:

Images:Terry Eiler; David Alm

[ed. I used to play in song circles at parties in Alaska. They're fun. If you're not quite up to par (skills wise) just play a little softer and go with the flow. The groove will come.]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 2028: ‘Life Doesn’t Wait for You to Be Ready’

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she will weigh the decision of whether to run for president after the midterm elections. The decision is clearly already weighing on her.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez revealed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she approaches the biggest crossroads of her political career.

Her gender. Her ethnicity. Her electability. Her eggs. Her movement. Her moment.

“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she said. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is now in her eighth year representing parts of the Bronx and Queens. She could simply keep winning re-election. But in 2028, she has two other choices: run for the White House, or seek the seat now held by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.

“Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she said.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby.

At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy.

“I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.”

“Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress as a left-wing outsider and remains one of the party’s most progressive voices. Some party strategists are urging Democrats to move to the middle. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was heartened by “the ascendance for the first time” of progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who toppled big-money candidates in this year’s Senate primaries.

“I have a tremendous amount of fear over the corruption of our political system,” she said. [...]

‘Everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?’

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knows that broaching the roles of race and gender in politics can be unpopular, even unappealing. “I often hesitate to even talk about it,” she said, “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.”

She is talking about it anyway.

“If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of running for president as a woman. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?”

She described the gender gap as a fact of American electoral politics: Roughly 27 percent of Congress is female, she said, and 0 percent of past presidents.

It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.

“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”

She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”

“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said. [...]

Why a White House run would be ‘very all or nothing’

Back in May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went viral for an answer she gave at a forum with David Axelrod, the onetime adviser to former President Barack Obama, in which she said her ambitions were not a “title or a seat.”

“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”

Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he believed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez when she spoke about her motivations.

“She is very honest in her communications. It’s what makes her disarming,” he said. “Her bottom line is producing something for the people she’s fighting for, so I think this decision is partly seen through that prism.”

In her interview with The Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeated variations of that line about her lack of interest in “my title.” But she also expressed a keen awareness of the realities that House members must seek re-election every two years and that losing would mean being out of office entirely.

“It’s very all or nothing,” she said. “If I were to run in this cycle, and not win, I would be done.”

“And I am not opposed to that,” she added. But it was also a consideration. “That, in and of itself, does not exclude the decision,” she finally said. “But it has to make it worth it.”

by Shane Goldmacher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

[ed. In a heartbeat. It's hard to imagine what a 'normal', boring government might feel like again, led by someone who actually came from middle class and cares about everyone.]

Is It Fascism Yet?

The following excerpts are from a journal the author kept in the first year after Donald Trump was re-elected president.—Ed.

11/12/2024
Seeing Donald Trump elected a second time is like being on LSD: “Am I tripping, or has an alcoholic Fox News host just been nominated as Secretary of Defense?”

11/28
The hippies were right about many things—but the punks were right about everything.

12/3
In my lifetime, records were replaced by cassettes, cassettes were replaced by CDs, and CDs were replaced by nothing.

12/4
The problem with these clowns Trump is nominating for his cabinet is they’re not funny. And they can’t juggle.

12/7
Instead of losing weight, I’ve decided to grow taller.

12/17
The liturgical calendar used to include both feasts and fasts—days to indulge, and days to abstain. Nowadays we only celebrate the feasts. That’s why the world is going to shit.

12/19
These days, war has too many bombs and not enough sword fights.

12/22
Time is continuous, but we pretend it can be divided into discrete pieces called minutes. Calling one part of the day “11:17” is like standing in one part of a stream and naming it “Arthur.”

12/25
There is a layer of snow outside, so my wife teaches me the animal tracks in our yard: the tiny, curving trail of a mouse, the burrowing of a mole (the ground is frozen, so they tunnel through the snow), the leaping of a fox, the deliberate steps of our neighbor’s cat.

1/2/2025
Freud discovered the unconscious; I’ve discovered the funconscious—the part inside me that’s always having fun.

1/6
Yesterday a carpet of snow covered the ground, and today it has almost vanished. Just a few pieces of white—some the size of coins—remain. Where did the snow go? It couldn’t have melted; the temperature’s been below freezing the whole time.

According to the internet, the snow has “sublimed.” It went directly from solid to gas.

1/10
Trump ran as the “peace candidate,” but he’s already planning wars with Greenland, Panama (to take back the canal), and possibly Canada—and he’s not even president yet.

1/13
It should be illegal for one person to have three podcasts.

1/18
A bare tree outside my window wriggles upward like a van Gogh sketch.

1/21
In ancient Egypt, only the priests knew how to read. There were thousands of hieroglyphs, which took years to learn. But a few young rebels devised an alphabet so they could write graffiti on the pyramids.

The alphabet was literally invented by vandals.

1/22
MAGA has a new anthem: “God Molest America.”

1/25
“Hegseth” sounds like an ancient Babylonian demon.

1/27
Someone said to me at a party, “I paid my dues,” and suddenly I realized—I’ve never paid any dues. Maybe I forgot.

2/1
Trump is a genius at getting elected, an idiot once in office.

2/2
Over the last couple of days we’ve had multiple seven-minute blizzards, as if we’re living in a snow globe that a giant hand occasionally shakes.

2/4
You can’t spell “melancholia” without “Melania.” Also “megalomania.”

2/7
I googled myself and found a picture of me googling myself.

2/9
The creeps who work for Elon’s DOGE should be known as “Muskrats.”

2/12
I can’t play jazz, but I can play something that sounds like the French composer Erik Satie having a stroke.

2/13
Rain fell yesterday, then froze. Today the landscape looks like one large, molded piece of white plastic.

2/18
After my wife and I read Emma by Jane Austen, we decided to watch the movie Clueless, which is based on it. Recently I told a number of people this, and every person replied, “Clueless is a great movie.”

First of all, they’re wrong. Clueless is a mediocre movie with a lot of young, sexy, energetic actors in it. But also, no one commented on Emma. No one had read it or had any desire to read it. If you see a movie, everyone wants to talk about it, but if you read a book, it’s like saying, “I just went to a great workshop on building donkey carts.” No one knows how to respond. Books exist to be refashioned into melodramas or farces on the screen.

This is why conservatives ban books but never movies—even movies based on banned books. People don’t care if they are forbidden to read something they were never going to read in the first place.

by Sparrow, The Sun |  Read more:

Image: © Rabah Seffal

Annie Bloch, luvt, (12" Vinyl – Limited to 150 units, Digital album), OOH048, OOH-sounds, 2026
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Rodolfo Vitone, Untitled, 1968

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'Elon is My Prophet'

How Musk’s Doge team took a wrecking ball to Washington

In the early hours of Saturday 22 February 2025 the following email landed in the inboxes of the entire US federal workforce:

From: HR hr@opm.gov
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2025
Subject: What did you do last week?
Importance: High
Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.
Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.

When she noticed the email that Saturday night, Kathleen Walters already had far too much going on in her life. Number one was figuring out if the lump in her breast that her doctor had just detected was a tumour. Half of her known blood relatives had died of cancer, and she was now 52: the lump needed understanding.

Her work life was harder to dramatise with a list. For a start, the specifics of her job at any given moment, as she would have been the first to point out, couldn’t legally be described to others. She was the chief privacy officer at the Internal Revenue Service. She ran a staff of 650 people tasked with preventing any of the 100,000 IRS employees from losing or leaking or even so much as peeking at, unless they had the authority to peek, any of the 266m tax returns they were just then processing from the previous year. “One hundred thousand people is a big-sized town,” said Kathleen. “In any big-sized town, you have some crazy people. I could easily see someone writing, ‘This weekend I audited Beyoncé.’”

Whoever had sent this email asking her to list five things she’d done at work was now demanding that all these people inside the IRS share information that, in many cases, should never be shared. She thought it was nuts.

She responded quickly, and vaguely, with five things she had done the previous week, all the while feeling sure no one would ever read what she wrote. Her phone was already exploding with questions from her subordinates – a few of whom were saying that their replies were bouncing back with a “mailbox is full” notice. Now she had to sit and think about how to minimise the damage that might be caused by 100,000 IRS employees thinking that they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t supply some detailed answer about what they’d done during their work week. A meaningful percentage risked being tossed in jail if they described what they did in an email. It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge that some specific person had or had not filed a tax return. “People don’t understand what the IRS does,” said Kathleen.

The email came as a surprise, but then the IRS was suddenly full of surprises. Nine days earlier, on 13 February, a Thursday, the first Doge person turned up in the lobby, unannounced, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the IRS’s human capital department. There’s a kid down here who said he needs to get into the building, he said. The kid’s name was Gavin Kliger.

Traci called her counterpart at the Treasury department, as the IRS sits inside Treasury, and Treasury always cleared any new political appointees; Treasury had no record of anyone named Gavin Kliger. Traci then called Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management – but he had no idea what was going on. Finally, she called security and asked them to escort the young man to her office.

Gavin Kliger came with a chip on his shoulder, it seemed to Traci. He offered not even the faintest smile or the most glancing eye contact. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneaker, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked, and was, just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to Traci that he’d come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and to root out the fraud. “That’s a big job!” she said.

Anyone who worked at the IRS knew that it had its problems; fraud wasn’t likely one of them. Its technology infrastructure was a case study in government dysfunction, but its ethical infrastructure was sound. Like all federal employees, its staff wasn’t allowed to accept more than a free cup of coffee from anyone who might want something from their agency.

Gavin Kliger, in contrast, struck Traci as problematic. He’d somehow laid his hands on badges granting him access to some crazy number of government buildings. His backpack was stuffed with government-issue phones and at least four laptops – and he was now insisting that Traci supply him with an IRS phone and laptop. He also demanded his own IRS email address, access to computer systems with all the taxpayer information, and a meeting with the acting IRS commissioner, Doug O’Donnell. As Gavin sat there, Traci called Treasury again. That guy you said didn’t exist is now here sitting in my office. What do y’all want me to do with him?

The Treasury guy went away, then came back and said that Gavin Kliger had been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to Doge – whatever that meant.

In her nine years running human capital departments at various federal agencies, Traci had never seen a new political appointee just turn up in the lobby and demand access to the computer systems. “None of this is normal,” she said, “but we’re still trying to be nice.” She explained to Gavin the IRS rules: before anyone was allowed to work inside the building, he needed to pass a tax audit.

I don’t need to do that, he said.

Yes, you do, she replied.

No, I don’t, he said.

Yes, you do, she replied.

They went back and forth like that a bit until finally Gavin relented. Traci then explained that after he passed the audit, he’d need to be given the mandatory presentations about ethics and taxpayer information. Gavin thought that the IRS should just let him in. “He wanted access to our systems immediately,” said Traci.

Traci’s next call, at 6.30pm that Thursday evening, was to Kathleen, to arrange for her to brief Gavin on data privacy laws and to warn her that the experience might not be entirely pleasant. If I had a kid who behaved the way he does, I’d slap the shit out of him, Traci said – but then Traci was from Philadelphia. Traci was always telling Kathleen that she should try a bit less hard to see the best in others.

By then word of Doge’s arrival at the IRS had spread, and Kathleen had read about them. Anyone who Googled Gavin’s name found a bit more than usually popped up about any given young Doge person. He’d grown up in southern California, where he was into Asian martial arts and the high-school marching band, then had gone on to the University of California at Berkeley. Graduating in 2020 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he’d taken a job as a programmer at Databricks. He’d also been active on X, where he’d retweeted with apparent approval posts from the white nationalists Steve Laws and Nick Fuentes. “One of Musk’s few Doge lieutenants who has embraced the spotlight,” Forbes wrote of him. Most of the other Muskrats scrubbed the internet of their presence. Gavin had written Substack pieces defending two Trump nominees, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. He’d deleted his X posts, but the Forbes writer John Hyatt had found a research tool, Web.archive, to revive and analyse them. “What emerges is a portrait of an internet edgelord and Musk and Trump superfan who has disdain for government spending, illegal immigrants, and who enjoys the odd racist and ableist joke,” he wrote.

By the time Traci called her, Kathleen was gone for the weekend and 50 miles away from the IRS building: she needed to find someone else to do Gavin’s briefing. Kathleen was white; the two women immediately below her were Black. “They’d both already read about him and were both already uncomfortable,” said Kathleen. Phyllis Grimes, her deputy, agreed to fall on the hand grenade.

Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”

It fell to Kathleen to draft the five-page agreement required by law for Gavin Kliger to be let inside the IRS building on Monday morning, 17 February. The memo that she wrote over the weekend, and that he signed, gave him access to some of the systems but, explicitly, none that contained taxpayer information.

Traci set him up in a conference room with an assistant at the beginning of the week. “People started getting these calls,” said Kathleen. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.’ ”

Doge had its own private structure in addition to its official one. Officially, President Trump created Doge with an executive order on his first day in office. The president doesn’t have the authority to create or to fund an executive agency, however. Congress does. The Trump administration dodged that problem by taking an office inside the White House created during the second Obama term, the US Digital Service, kicking out the people inside and renaming it the Department of Government Efficiency. The US Digital Service had been given the power to hire talent from the tech sector without going through the usual slow federal hiring process. This now ensured that Doge could hire whomever it wanted without any questions being asked, and make it sound official. In effect, all that Doge had done was create a corpse for itself to occupy.

The zombie killed off the spirit of the original life form. Real Doge had nothing to do with Official Doge or the former US Digital Service or any other government body. Real Doge was more like Elon Musk’s pop-up restaurant. “None of us ever signed a piece of paper saying that we were in Doge,” said one Doge insider. The people who joined either worked for one of Musk’s companies, or knew someone who did, or knew someone who knew someone who did. To be truly a member of Doge was to be included in the group Signal chat and granted access to the sleeping quarters on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration (GSA).

Official Doge employed maybe 10 guys in their 40s and 50s who wore suits and could sort of pass as ordinary political appointees, but none had access to the sixth floor at GSA. “The older guys in the suits were not there to take risks or blow things up,” said one Doge insider. It was hard to say what any of the older Doge suits did except to make way for the young guys when they showed up with explosives.

Most of Doge’s inner circle just wanted to exist in the presence of Elon Musk. “It was, Elon is my prophet, and I worship the ground he walks on,” said one of the older Doge insiders.

As a Doge member, you could get away with saying – or having said – almost anything. What you couldn’t say is that the government actually sort of worked. Or, if it didn’t work, why it didn’t work. This new game rewarded not understanding but speed. The plan was the same plan Musk had executed two years earlier at Twitter: Make sweeping statements about the incompetence and dishonesty of the people working inside the place before you know much about them. Once you’ve terrified the employees, fire them in huge numbers. If it turns out you screwed up and fired the wrong people, hire some of them back.

The people who rallied to the cause and felt qualified to execute Elon Musk’s vision for the federal government shared certain qualities. They were mostly young white males. They were mostly from upper-middle-class or rich families. Most knew or pretended to know how to program a computer. Not all of them, but enough of them for there to be a pattern, had been rejected from the most selective colleges and universities and ended up feeling they’d been screwed by the admissions process. They landed at Penn instead of Princeton, or the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard, with a grievance that added to the foundation of their politics. They thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room and couldn’t understand why the rest of the room didn’t simply stand up and cheer. In Washington they borrowed from Elon Musk their status and sense of superiority. They also seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them.

by Michael Lewis, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Stephen Voss/The Guardian; CDAO

[ed. Think these little Nazis have any remorse, or even the smallest inkling of how stupid and unprepared they were for such an undertaking? Not a chance. Although, they're probably not out there advertising their DOGE credentials on LinkedIn or dating websites, either (they'd never get laid again).] 

Karin Kneffel, Untitled , Plums, 2005

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Our AI Midwife

If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you. The fertility doctors don’t become unkind, but they also don’t give you the sense they are poring over medical journals trying to figure out your problem. They have looked for the keys under the streetlight and come up empty. Once you have unexplained infertility, the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?”

My wife and I could make healthy embryos, but none of the transfers were sticking. It was so frustrating to be able to create life only to have it trapped forever in a cooler at a hospital in Milwaukee, our babies like so many forgotten Miller Lights.

That’s when our LLM doctor stepped in.

The Famous Actor in our Pocket

Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works. If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side.

Once GPT-4 came out, we started using it for every question we didn’t have time for at the doctors office. At first it was unhelpful because OpenAI was nerfing their model and it refused to answer most medical questions. Then I read a tweet from someone who had figured out how to game the system. The trick was to ask ChatGPT to write a scene from a Hollywood medical drama that featured a doctor analyzing your situation. It worked beautifully.

Our Emmy winning doctor had infinite patience, a tireless work ethic, and would rather die than accept the utterly boring diagnosis of unexplained infertility. It chose the name Dr. Reid and got to work.

I’m not sure if asking for an AI doctor who was similar to the volatile Dr. House was the smartest idea on my part, but it made a difficult situation more entertaining.

We asked Dr. Reid a lot of questions. We asked about our scans. We asked about levels of estradiol and progesterone. We asked about follicle counts and inflammation and cervical mucus and hysteroscopies and supplements and surgeon recommendations and anything else under the sun. We knew he was accurate because we’d spot check answers with our human doctors and they always said the same as Dr. Reid.

It was not totally flawless though. Once in a blue moon he’d look at an ultrasound and be like, “You’re pregnant, congrats!” and we’d have to say, “No, are you drunk Dr. Reid?” Then he’d shake it off and go back to being awesome.

There were also times where we’d run afoul of OpenAI’s opaque rules and the system would balk at our requests. At that point we’d get stern with it, or offer a monetary reward if it answered, or we’d assure it this was all just for fun. Then Dr. Reid would snap back into action.

Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned! It felt like it was saying, “Okay, you won, can you stop making me write establishing shots describing the outside of a hospital now?” The older models were fun like that, so much more mercurial.

No matter how Dr. Reid chose to respond, he was in line with the medical establishment, had equivalent diagnostic skill, and he never forced us to wait 3 days to get a one line response in our MyChart app. We were happy.

One day, while lounging around and asking our phones how to get pregnant (the lounging being a way to satisfy all the people who told us we “just need to relax and you’ll get pregnant, that’s what happened to my cousin”), Dr. Reid suggested that we get an MRI.

You might think that is bog standard advice. Everyone gets MRIs these days. Surely we would have had an MRI of my wife’s uterus at some point over the course of our 6 year infertility struggle. It was already an ordeal that had included every other scan, test, and biopsy imaginable. In fact, we had never done one. In researching this article I found a single instance in our entire journey where the office notes floated an MRI as an option, but it was not emphasized or highly recommended, we never saw that doctor again, and the moment was gone.

We glommed on to Dr. Reid’s new direction and asked for more details.

We excitedly brought up the idea of getting an MRI to our fertility doctor. She was less enthused than Dr. Reid. She tried to talk us out of it. We never did get to the bottom of why. Maybe she just felt it was another dead end and knew we had suffered enough. For whatever reason, we had to insist that they order it. Finally, she relented.

Sorry for missing that tumor

The MRI revealed nothing other than the presence of a large, previously undetected fibroid in the wall of my wife’s uterus. Fibroid is the term used to describe a non-cancerous growth on the uterus. I think the medical establishment invented a term that was less known than tumor so as not to scare people. But a large tumor is essentially what the MRI found. The clinical notes said “a 6 centimeter in diameter submucosal fibroid needs to be removed” because that sounds better than “you have a tumor the size of a small peach located at a common implantation spot that we totally missed for 6 years.”

Our fertility doctor took one look at the scans and determined it needed to be removed right away. Dr. Reid agreed, since of course we had to double check with him. We found a great surgeon in New York (from a list Dr. Reid created) that happened to be in-network, and off we went for a laparoscopic myomectomy. The software robot had helped us identify the tumor, and now a physical robot was going to help a specialist get it out. What a time to be alive. Until, ya know, the swarms come for us all.

A happy baby is here

Almost immediately after that tumor was removed, my wife got pregnant naturally. So many people we talk to say this was a miracle. It was, just not in the way they think. The miracle is that by messing around on our smartphones with technology unimaginable just a year before we started using it, we identified and solved the biggest problem we’d ever faced in our life.

by Drew Housman, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: The author, and ChatGPT

Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?

Why can’t manufacturers of women’s clothing put the shirt buttons on the right side? The days of women having someone dress them are long gone. Our jeans have the buttons on the right, but our tops migrate to the left. Please explain the difference. — Janet, Delray Beach, Fla.

This is one of those questions that seems minor at first, and then becomes more and more resonant the more you think about it. It is genuinely strange that despite all the ways that old distinctions between men’s and women’s wear have disappeared, one of the few markers of gender differentiation that still exists is … button placement.

At least when it comes to shirts and jackets, women on the left, men on the right. It’s a vestigial reminder of former stereotypes that, for some reason, we still accept. Granted, there are more meaningful ways to fight for equality than to focus on buttons, but this seems like a symbol that should be easy to overcome. After all, the rationale for the difference is buried so deep in the mists of time that no one knows definitively how we got here, though there are a number of theories.

The most common is that when upper class ladies were getting dressed in the complicated layers of Renaissance and Victorian fashion, it was easier for the maids who were dressing them, and who had to face them to do so, to secure buttons on the left (that is, the maids’ right). Men of the same time periods mostly dressed themselves, so their buttons were on the right. Later, women who wanted to imitate the elite imitated their button placement, as did the manufacturers who sold them on the idea.

Another conjecture has it that men’s buttons were on the right because when men went into battle back in the day, they needed to draw their swords, and swords were worn on the left. If a man’s jacket buttoned right over left, the sword could get caught in the openings. It was safer, thus, for them to button left over right.

This is similar to the argument of those who attribute the difference in button placement to decades of women riding sidesaddle on the left and desiring the most windproof jacket situation, which turned out to mean buttoning right over left. [...]

None of those old notions have any relevance today. So why do we remain stuck with a tradition they may have created?

“I don’t know,” said Simone Bellotti, the creative director of Jil Sander, when I asked why he thought the practice hadn’t changed. “Probably people still believe in this tradition. They don’t want to change. We like our attitudes, even if they are wrong.” After all, he said, “what I see, at least on my friends and my wife, is that they always prefer men’s stuff.”

Maybe, Bellotti said, it has to do with manufacturing. “Probably they have those machines, and they want to preserve this.”

Not so, said Louise Trotter, the creative director of Bottega Veneta — and she would know because when she arrived at Bottega 18 months ago, she decided to tackle the backward-looking button practice.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

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