via:
Thursday, March 19, 2026
NSF Tech Labs: Science Funding Goes Beyond the Universities
The National Science Foundation announces Friday that it is launching one of the most significant experiments in science funding in decades. A new initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures, a major departure from how the agency has funded research over the past 75 years.
The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.
For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model. Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” sketched a vision of government-backed research led by university-based scientists pursuing their own ideas. The system that emerged—small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists—worked brilliantly for decades. It gave researchers autonomy, kept politics at arm’s length, and helped make American science the envy of the world.
But the frontier has moved. In 1945 world-class scientific research could be done with a few graduate students and modest equipment. But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support.
Take the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps explain why anything has mass—and thus why atoms, molecules and matter itself can exist. Making this discovery required a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator, thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and papers with multipage author lists.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem and earned researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, emerged from a team with access to massive computational resources and sustained institutional support.
The Janelia Research Campus in collaboration with other institutions mapped the complete wiring diagram of the fruit-fly brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, through years of coordinated microscopy and analysis that no single lab could attempt alone.
Yet our federal science funding system is still largely organized around small grants to university scientists. At the NSF, around two-thirds of research dollars flow through small awards to individual university investigators. At the National Institutes of Health, the share is often more than 80%. The average NSF grant is roughly $246,000 a year for three years, often requiring investigators to predict in advance exactly what research they’ll pursue and to spend a significant amount of time navigating administrative hurdles. Scientists consistently report spending close to half their research hours on compliance and grant management.
The system still produces good science, but it has weak points. The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure. Many advances we now celebrate succeeded despite the funding model, not because of it.
Philanthropy has stepped into this gap. Focused research organizations, a model backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, build time-limited teams around ambitious technical problems and tie funding to specific milestones that researchers must meet. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, launched with $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built the first comprehensive gene-expression map of the mouse brain through industrial-scale data collection that would have been impossible under fragmented academic grants. The Arc Institute offers scientists eight-year appointments backed by permanent technical staff with expertise in topics such as machine learning and genome engineering, the kind of sustained expertise that often evaporates when a three-year grant ends. These institutions bet on teams, not projects.
But philanthropy alone can’t reshape American science. The federal government spends close to $200 billion on research and development, orders of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve.
While final details are still being worked out, Tech Labs represents NSF’s attempt to do exactly that. Rather than funding isolated projects, the agency would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions. The program would bring the lessons of philanthropic science into a part of the federal portfolio that hasn’t seriously tried them.
This is a good political moment to launch this initiative. Republicans have expressed interest in diversifying federal research away from universities. Democrats want to see the legacy of the Chips and Science Act come to fruition and to get dollars out the door. By funding independent research organizations, Tech Labs sidesteps some of the thorniest debates about indirect costs and institutional overhead.
The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.
But the frontier has moved. In 1945 world-class scientific research could be done with a few graduate students and modest equipment. But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support.
Take the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps explain why anything has mass—and thus why atoms, molecules and matter itself can exist. Making this discovery required a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator, thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and papers with multipage author lists.
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which cracked the 50-year-old protein-folding problem and earned researchers the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, emerged from a team with access to massive computational resources and sustained institutional support.
The Janelia Research Campus in collaboration with other institutions mapped the complete wiring diagram of the fruit-fly brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, through years of coordinated microscopy and analysis that no single lab could attempt alone.
Yet our federal science funding system is still largely organized around small grants to university scientists. At the NSF, around two-thirds of research dollars flow through small awards to individual university investigators. At the National Institutes of Health, the share is often more than 80%. The average NSF grant is roughly $246,000 a year for three years, often requiring investigators to predict in advance exactly what research they’ll pursue and to spend a significant amount of time navigating administrative hurdles. Scientists consistently report spending close to half their research hours on compliance and grant management.
The system still produces good science, but it has weak points. The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure. Many advances we now celebrate succeeded despite the funding model, not because of it.
Philanthropy has stepped into this gap. Focused research organizations, a model backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, build time-limited teams around ambitious technical problems and tie funding to specific milestones that researchers must meet. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, launched with $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built the first comprehensive gene-expression map of the mouse brain through industrial-scale data collection that would have been impossible under fragmented academic grants. The Arc Institute offers scientists eight-year appointments backed by permanent technical staff with expertise in topics such as machine learning and genome engineering, the kind of sustained expertise that often evaporates when a three-year grant ends. These institutions bet on teams, not projects.
But philanthropy alone can’t reshape American science. The federal government spends close to $200 billion on research and development, orders of magnitude more than even the largest foundations. If we want to change how science gets done at scale, federal funding has to evolve.
While final details are still being worked out, Tech Labs represents NSF’s attempt to do exactly that. Rather than funding isolated projects, the agency would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions. The program would bring the lessons of philanthropic science into a part of the federal portfolio that hasn’t seriously tried them.
This is a good political moment to launch this initiative. Republicans have expressed interest in diversifying federal research away from universities. Democrats want to see the legacy of the Chips and Science Act come to fruition and to get dollars out the door. By funding independent research organizations, Tech Labs sidesteps some of the thorniest debates about indirect costs and institutional overhead.
by Caleb Watney, Wall Street Journal (via Archive Today) | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Sounds like a good idea. Especially since science funding has become more politicized, and Congress can't seem to go six months without shutting down the government.]
Pest Control
Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You.
They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. Extra options are foisted upon you. Things are made intentionally worse, forcing you to pay to make it less worse. Least bad deals require careful search. Experiences are not as advertised. What you want is buried underneath stuff you don’t want. Everything is data to sell you something, rather than an opportunity to help you.
When you deal with Out to Get You, you know it in your gut. Your brain cannot relax. You lookout for tricks and traps. Everything is a scheme.
They want you not to notice. To blind you from the truth. You can feel it when you go to work. When you go to church. When you pay your taxes. It is bad government and bad capitalism. It is many bad relationships, groups and cultures.
When you listen to a political speech, you feel it. Dealing with your wireless or cable company, you feel it. At the car dealership, you feel it. When you deal with that one would-be friend, you feel it. Thinking back on that one ex, you feel it. It’s a trap.
Banksy Revealed?
The once anonymous artist half-shredded ‘Girl with Balloon,’ his best-known work, now renamed 'Love is in the Bin.' Joe Maher/Getty Images via
In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in this village outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a gray hoodie, another a baseball cap. Both had masks covering their faces.
The third was more easily identifiable: He was unmasked, and had one arm and two prosthetic legs, witnesses told Reuters.
The masked men carried cardboard stencils from the ambulance and taped them to what had been an interior wall of an apartment before the Russians obliterated the place. Then they pulled out cans of spray paint and got to work. An absurd image appeared in minutes: a bearded man in a bathtub, scrubbing his back amid the wreckage.
Once an annoyance to authorities who viewed him as a vandal, he has become a British national treasure. In one survey, Brits rated him more popular than Rembrandt and Monet. In another poll, his “Girl with Balloon” painting was voted the favorite piece of artwork Britain has produced.
Some critics believe Banksy’s anonymity is as important to his work as stencils and paint. The British press has run many articles over the years that tried to deduce his identity. Still, Banksy and his inner circle won’t talk about it. Some have signed non-disclosure agreements. Others keep quiet out of loyalty, or fear of crossing the artist, his fans and his influential company, Pest Control Office, which authenticates his work and decides who gets the first chance to buy Banksy’s latest pieces.
When the bathtub mural and other Banksy pieces began appearing in Ukraine, Reuters wondered about the artist and how he had pulled off the stunt. Horenka was less than five miles east of Bucha, where Russian forces had left behind at least 300 civilians dead seven months earlier.
So we set out to determine how Banksy did it – and who he really is. Weeks later, a reporter visited Horenka with a photo lineup of graffiti artists often rumored to be the artist and showed the pictures to locals to see if anyone recognized him. Not long after, we heard that a famous British musician – one of the people often whispered to be Banksy – had been spotted in Kyiv, giving us a theory to pursue.
Reuters interviewed a dozen Banksy-world insiders and experts. None would comment on his identity, but many filled in details about his life and career. We examined photos of the artist, most of which obscured his face but contained critical information. We later unearthed previously undisclosed U.S. court records and police reports.
These included a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct – a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity.
And in the process, we learned how and why the man behind the name Banksy vanished from the public record more than a decade ago.
by Simon Gardner, James Pearson and Blake Morrison, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
[ed. They have to ruin everything. Why? Reading the article, I'm not sure they actually proved anything. But at least there are a lot of great Banksy pictures. See also: What to Know About Banksy and the Effort to Unmask Him (NYT).]
[ed. They have to ruin everything. Why? Reading the article, I'm not sure they actually proved anything. But at least there are a lot of great Banksy pictures. See also: What to Know About Banksy and the Effort to Unmask Him (NYT).]
***
For years, Stephens wrote, Banksy has “been subjected to fixated, threatening and extremist behaviour.” (He declined to describe those threats.) Unmasking Banksy would harm the public, too, Stephens wrote.
Working “anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests,” he wrote. “It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution – particularly when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion or social justice.”
Reuters took into account Banksy’s privacy claims – and the fact that many of his fans wish for him to remain anonymous. Yet we concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency. [ed. blah, blah, blah...]
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Monty Python: Summarizing Proust Game Show
[ed. "Well, there you go, he must have let himself down a bit on the hobbies... golf's not very popular around here." Ha! See also: Literature: Marcel Proust's 'A la recherche du temps Perdu' (In search of Lost Time); and Marcel Proust documentary (YT).]
The Lanyard Class
The British conference industry gets through ten million square metres of carpet per year. Rolled out as gangway (the trade-show term for the soft corridor that runs between the display stands) this carpet would stretch from the Excel Centre in London to the Palais des Congrès convention centre in Montreal, a vast ribbon of spun polypropylene, a lanyard for the Earth itself.
The reason so much carpet is needed is that for every trade show, at every exhibition centre – from the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to the Wales Millennium Centre to the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre – a new carpet is fitted. For two or three days it cushions the footsteps of attendees, guides them from zone to zone, absorbs their caffeinated flatus and the hubbub of their sales pitches and meetings. And then it’s rolled up, churned into pellets, heated and extruded to become car dashboards, plant pots, sunglasses. Manufacturers love it because it’s cheap, and they can say they’re using recycled plastic. It is all around us, right now, in the chairs in which we sit, the phones in our hands, in our toothbrushes, packaging our food. The trade-show carpet goes on forever.
The trade-show-carpet world was revealed to me by its creator, a man from one of the country’s leading conference-carpet manufacturers, as we watched a stream of people walking across his product (“Midnight Blue”, he said, quietly proud) on the floor of the Excel. We were at International Confex, a trade show for the trade-show industry: an expo-expo, a conference about conferences.
The Confex has a Kantian purity: the ding an sich of corporate events. It has no separate theme or context, it is undiluted by anything outside itself. It is the place to experience the trade show as it really is, and Britain as it really is: a land of meetings and branded tote bags. At the beginning of the 18th century, half the population of England worked on farms. A few generations later we were, according to Napoleon, a nation of shopkeepers. Today we are a nation of delegates, a conference-based society. The economic contribution of the professional events industry is nearly five times that of all the country’s farms. “This,” the carpet man tells me, “is what most of the creative industry really looks like.”
The Confex is at the heart of this industry. It is where the people who put on trade shows find venues, staging, food, merchandise, lighting, furniture, executive entertainment and seamless transport solutions. It is where the lanyard class orders its lanyards.
Of the three lanyard suppliers I speak to, not one has heard of the phrase “the lanyard class”. The disdain on the political right for urban professionals and HR departments has not registered with the people cutting the fabric, and yet these British businesses feel its effects. One lanyard manufacturer tells me that a few years ago his company made tens of thousands of rainbow lanyards per year, but in the changing political climate, large businesses are less enthusiastic about Pride month. Government departments were a big customer, but they too have “cut right back”, or switched to a cheaper product imported from China.
At the gates of the Confex, silver orbs hang in the air, bouncing on the updraft from hidden fans. The words “thought bubble” are written on the orbs. Beyond them, a stand demonstrates how chocolate lollipops can be printed with corporate brands. In The Golden Bough, the Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer documents the ancient and widespread practice – from Europe to Japan to India to the Aztec empire – of devouring one’s god. The Logopop is the latest iteration of that ritual, a secular eucharist: the body of BP, the blood of Invesco Perpetual. Nearby, a machine creates an alcoholic vapour that you inhale through a straw. One of the Logopop staff asks if I can guess the flavour. Salted caramel seems a safe bet. She shakes her head. “Pornstar martini.”
I speak to a man standing beside a trade-show stand advertising his company, which makes trade-show stands. To emphasise the reflective nature of the edifice, the stand-builders have formed their company’s logo from a huge mirror. They can build a stand in two to six hours. The frames can be taken apart and reused, but the Foamex panels that form the walls quickly become scuffed. We look across the Confex floor, a town erected in a morning. About a quarter of everything here will be thrown away at the end of the show, he tells me.
The Foamex panels allow every surface in the Confex to be covered with language, much of it arcane. One stand declares itself to be the place where Rigid Legacy Systems Are Replaced by Flexible Modern Technology; another asks you to Love Your Visitor Lounge. Dream With Us, invites another. Not Just Bags, claims a stand that is absolutely covered in bags. A stand the size of a one-bedroom flat says: “We Make Cool Shit”. The walls of the stand are Perspex, filled with bright yellow balls; are they the cool shit? Is the cool shit inside the balls? A marketing executive explains: the cool shit is “mostly PowerPoint presentations”.
Shit is rarely discussed at trade shows, with the exception of the World Plumbing Conference, and yet it is one of the key logistical challenges. When tens of thousands of highly caffeinated businesspeople assemble in a single building, even state-of-the-art facilities may struggle to cope with the faecal load. The atmosphere in the gents is thick, unacceptably humid, but even here the work of the trade show goes on. From the next cubicle I hear a grunt, a splash and a soft digital chime as a Confex delegate, maximising his productivity, despatches a stool and an email at exactly the same time.
Back on the conference floor, a man is thumping a drum. He tells me drumming boosts corporate performance; he has drummed at the house of the CEO of the food chain Leon. He has drummed with the sales teams from Google, and in a hotel in Manchester he drummed with 250 Kellogg’s executives. Across the gangway, a man who sells LED lightboxes looks on, visibly upset at having been allocated a stand directly opposite someone who spends several hours a day tunelessly slapping a bucket.
In a netted-off space, thumping music fills the air and a huge screen shows an AI-generated video of an astronaut dancing on the moon. On the floor, a swarm of small drones sits waiting for take-off. The drones can form your company’s brand in mid-air. As we wait for the display to begin, the man in front of me asks the woman next to him, “Do drones interest you?” She pauses for a moment to consider. “Well, no,” she says.
The reason so much carpet is needed is that for every trade show, at every exhibition centre – from the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham to the Wales Millennium Centre to the Farnborough International Exhibition and Conference Centre – a new carpet is fitted. For two or three days it cushions the footsteps of attendees, guides them from zone to zone, absorbs their caffeinated flatus and the hubbub of their sales pitches and meetings. And then it’s rolled up, churned into pellets, heated and extruded to become car dashboards, plant pots, sunglasses. Manufacturers love it because it’s cheap, and they can say they’re using recycled plastic. It is all around us, right now, in the chairs in which we sit, the phones in our hands, in our toothbrushes, packaging our food. The trade-show carpet goes on forever.
The Confex has a Kantian purity: the ding an sich of corporate events. It has no separate theme or context, it is undiluted by anything outside itself. It is the place to experience the trade show as it really is, and Britain as it really is: a land of meetings and branded tote bags. At the beginning of the 18th century, half the population of England worked on farms. A few generations later we were, according to Napoleon, a nation of shopkeepers. Today we are a nation of delegates, a conference-based society. The economic contribution of the professional events industry is nearly five times that of all the country’s farms. “This,” the carpet man tells me, “is what most of the creative industry really looks like.”
The Confex is at the heart of this industry. It is where the people who put on trade shows find venues, staging, food, merchandise, lighting, furniture, executive entertainment and seamless transport solutions. It is where the lanyard class orders its lanyards.
Of the three lanyard suppliers I speak to, not one has heard of the phrase “the lanyard class”. The disdain on the political right for urban professionals and HR departments has not registered with the people cutting the fabric, and yet these British businesses feel its effects. One lanyard manufacturer tells me that a few years ago his company made tens of thousands of rainbow lanyards per year, but in the changing political climate, large businesses are less enthusiastic about Pride month. Government departments were a big customer, but they too have “cut right back”, or switched to a cheaper product imported from China.
At the gates of the Confex, silver orbs hang in the air, bouncing on the updraft from hidden fans. The words “thought bubble” are written on the orbs. Beyond them, a stand demonstrates how chocolate lollipops can be printed with corporate brands. In The Golden Bough, the Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer documents the ancient and widespread practice – from Europe to Japan to India to the Aztec empire – of devouring one’s god. The Logopop is the latest iteration of that ritual, a secular eucharist: the body of BP, the blood of Invesco Perpetual. Nearby, a machine creates an alcoholic vapour that you inhale through a straw. One of the Logopop staff asks if I can guess the flavour. Salted caramel seems a safe bet. She shakes her head. “Pornstar martini.”
I speak to a man standing beside a trade-show stand advertising his company, which makes trade-show stands. To emphasise the reflective nature of the edifice, the stand-builders have formed their company’s logo from a huge mirror. They can build a stand in two to six hours. The frames can be taken apart and reused, but the Foamex panels that form the walls quickly become scuffed. We look across the Confex floor, a town erected in a morning. About a quarter of everything here will be thrown away at the end of the show, he tells me.
The Foamex panels allow every surface in the Confex to be covered with language, much of it arcane. One stand declares itself to be the place where Rigid Legacy Systems Are Replaced by Flexible Modern Technology; another asks you to Love Your Visitor Lounge. Dream With Us, invites another. Not Just Bags, claims a stand that is absolutely covered in bags. A stand the size of a one-bedroom flat says: “We Make Cool Shit”. The walls of the stand are Perspex, filled with bright yellow balls; are they the cool shit? Is the cool shit inside the balls? A marketing executive explains: the cool shit is “mostly PowerPoint presentations”.
Shit is rarely discussed at trade shows, with the exception of the World Plumbing Conference, and yet it is one of the key logistical challenges. When tens of thousands of highly caffeinated businesspeople assemble in a single building, even state-of-the-art facilities may struggle to cope with the faecal load. The atmosphere in the gents is thick, unacceptably humid, but even here the work of the trade show goes on. From the next cubicle I hear a grunt, a splash and a soft digital chime as a Confex delegate, maximising his productivity, despatches a stool and an email at exactly the same time.
Back on the conference floor, a man is thumping a drum. He tells me drumming boosts corporate performance; he has drummed at the house of the CEO of the food chain Leon. He has drummed with the sales teams from Google, and in a hotel in Manchester he drummed with 250 Kellogg’s executives. Across the gangway, a man who sells LED lightboxes looks on, visibly upset at having been allocated a stand directly opposite someone who spends several hours a day tunelessly slapping a bucket.
In a netted-off space, thumping music fills the air and a huge screen shows an AI-generated video of an astronaut dancing on the moon. On the floor, a swarm of small drones sits waiting for take-off. The drones can form your company’s brand in mid-air. As we wait for the display to begin, the man in front of me asks the woman next to him, “Do drones interest you?” She pauses for a moment to consider. “Well, no,” she says.
by Will Dunn, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: via
Murder Music
One hundred and nine million albums sold.
Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
What if I told you it was none of the above? And what if I told you these stunning achievements were all accomplished by the time the artist was 25? And what if it was all achieved without a single legacy media feature piece, cover story, late night TV appearance or mainstream artist co-sign? What if I told you the artist was confusingly named YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a.k.a NBA YoungBoy, a.k.a YoungBoy, a.k.a YB, a.k.a Top? You’re most likely pretty befuddled right now. Chances are you’ve never even heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. And if you have, maybe from that younger cousin who spends his every waking moment buried in the YouTube app or your one weird friend who keeps up with niche youth culture well past the age they should be doing so. Even if you have heard of NBA YoungBoy, chances are you have absolutely no idea just how legitimately, massively popular this kid truly is.
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
Fifteen billion YouTube streams.
One hundred Billboard charting singles.
One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs.
Thirty-four Billboard charting albums.
Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson?
But you should know, right? This is the type of mainstream superstardom that makes waves, makes household names, steps on stage at SNL, rocks the Super Bowl. This artist rivals Drake and has lapped Kendrick Lamar many, many times over. And you hear about those two all the time. Jay-Z, a superstar you have certainly heard of, once rapped, “Numbers don’t lie.” And Jay-Z himself would kill for those numbers. So why have you, dear reader, never heard of someone statistically proven to be a top-selling superstar in current American music? Are you just too old? Are your fingers no longer on the pulse? Are you too cultured for your own good? Did you miss a New York Magazine feature somewhere?
Breathe easy. You can be fully forgiven for never having heard of YoungBoy Never Broke Again. Because it remains a confusing fact that one of the top-selling rappers of all-time, and therefore one of the top-selling artists, period, has only been the subject of one significant New York Times article, and this came only after he was too massive to ignore any longer. YoungBoy Never Broke Again was not interviewed for that article, and though the reporter seems to have made his way into a studio session, he didn’t get a single quote. The article was basically a concert review, with the reporter noticeably shocked at the 18,000-strong crowd screaming back every word of every song, and oddly focusing on how YoungBoy smokes Newports.
The Times reporter wonders why the New York Times has been ignoring an all-time top-selling rapper. How did he get here? And, most importantly, how did he do it without us? Published in November of 2025, at a time when YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s Billboard reign was becoming impossible to ignore, the article was titled: “NBA YoungBoy, Rap’s Defining 2025 Superstar, Is Hiding in Plain Sight.” Or in other words, “We Don’t Understand Why Or How This Person Is Popular, And Therefore He Shouldn’t Be Popular.” Same for the lone New Yorker article, which was actually titled — wait for it — “NBA YoungBoy Stands Alone.” Which would be accurate if “alone” was defined as having hundreds of millions of worldwide fans, several McMansions full of day one friends and managers and blunt rollers and young men with big guns all ready to do your bidding at a moment’s notice. Essentially, what the New Yorker means by “alone” here is that YoungBoy Never Broke Again doesn’t need them. Nor does he need any of the legacy media press gauntlets every other superstar at his level had to walk through on their way to household recognition. So you’re not on the hook. You’re not as out of touch as you thought you were when reading this essay’s opening. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a superstar that has been hidden from you by the ignorance of the mainstream media. This is as confusing as it is infuriating. But unlike that grudging New York Times piece, in this space we’re going to try to get to the bottom of why. So strap in. Roll up a blunt. It gets real ugly.
The Devil’s Radar
Let’s get something out of the way right from the start: YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes excellent music. It may not be your cup of chai latte, but pull up his top five popular songs on Spotify and you will hear hooks for days and days. Everything is a hook with YoungBoy Never Broke Again. The choruses are packed with hooks, the verses are hooks, the beat is a hook, the intro is a hook, the outro is a hook. The songs may not speak to you specifically, but you will be humming them for hours against your will. And if there’s one thing YoungBoy Never Broke Again has, it’s songs. There are thousands of them spread across traditional streaming platforms, YouTube and all social media nooks and crannies. The officially released tracks are only the tip of the iceberg, since YoungBoy’s many thousands of fans trade leaks and snippets like kids in the 50s traded baseball cards. There’s an entire black market of unreleased YoungBoy tracks that has taken on an obsessive life of its own that rivals Grateful Dead fanatics trading show tapes. And none of this would be happening if the songs weren’t good. And “good” here is meant in the traditional sense. This isn’t some off-kilter musical firebrand like Playboi Carti (another artist you’ve heard of that YoungBoy has easily outsold) or a tough-on-the-ears image rapper of the SoundCloud tradition with more personality than talent.
If anything, YoungBoy is something of a triple threat. His singing voice is pleasant, unique, with a melodic southern slur that harkens back to the country blues of artists like Slim Harpo. Yes, there’s autotune, but not the type that drenches the vocals in an effort to smooth out an unskilled singing voice. There are zero loverboy R&B concessions, no carboard cutout boasts of cars/cash/women. What you do hear is pain. Centuries of slow southern poverty, of Section 8 housing complexes reclaimed by swamps, of territorial feuds and generational grudges, of narcotics and their benefits and downsides, of disloyal women and the havoc they wreak. There’s a whole current genre of rap referred to as Pain Music, and this genre was sparked specifically by YoungBoy’s crooning. If you listen closely, you can hear Leadbelly in these songs, even the faint, disembodied echoes of Robert Johnson himself.
Which brings us to The Devil. There’s a reason YoungBoy appeals to so many white kids, from the suburbs to the trailer parks, for just as a hellhound stalked Robert Johnson’s trail, there are many such hounds of hell chasing our YoungBoy. This music is as unsettling as it is melodic. All the classic subject matter of the primal side of rock n’ roll and heavy metal is fully present here, especially within the tracks where YoungBoy lets loose his non-singing, non-pain music alter ego and simply raps. This kid can absolutely rap his ass off, no doubt. This isn’t the “lyrical miracle” type of rapping so popular with the kinds of white folk who play Wordle and search for double entendres in Kendrick lyrics. This is machine gun bursts of hyper-specific violence. YoungBoy is not concerned with bars, filling up verses with words upon words upon words until they’re top heavy, unstoppable monoliths.
To his fans, YoungBoy’s non-singing rap tracks have a whole category of their own: Murder Music. It’s a fitting title, since YoungBoy sounds like an absolute unhinged monster on many of these Murder Music tracks. Dead rivals are mocked mercilessly. Gang politics are broken down. Rap industry titans are threatened. Women and close friends betray. Guns upon guns upon guns upon guns. You see, YoungBoy is from Baton Rouge, the type of southern location where it’s fully legal to walk around the projects toting a loaded assault rifle out in the open. This is what he knows. Gangs are what he knows. Hopeless, generational urban southern poverty is what he knows. This is not party music. Nor is it of the opiated mumble rap class. It isn’t of the lean-drenched DJ Screw southern rap tradition. Nor are these songs attempting to break down oppression or aspiring to lofty lyrical accomplishments. It’s obvious that the majority of these tracks are off-the-cuff expressions of whatever YoungBoy was feeling in the studio that late night, that hour, that second, and those feelings fall squarely within the realm of extreme paranoia, PTSD from a lifetime of exposure to ultra-violence, fatalistic declarations, spiritual longing, extreme romantic strife of the baby mamma drama variety, plus that age-old, ever-lingering presence of The Devil. And all delivered with a natural earworm melodicism in the same league as someone like White Album-era Paul McCartney.
No wonder two entire generations of teenagers and counting love this shit.
by Daniel Falatko, The Metropolitan Review | Read more:
Image: NBA Young Boy, 2018/uncredited
A Pattern Language
Nat Sauer: Every time I throw a large house party i am surprised by where people end up congregating. It’s never where I plan for them to congregate.The way people use space follows from design and actual patterns of life experience. If you notice people using the space ‘wrong’ then that’s on you, and you can either accept that and lean into it or you can redesign to get the patterns you want. Often subtle changes can radically improve interactions or shift them were you want them.
systemlayers: A few years ago UCLA did a study on room usage. I often think about how useless a porch/dining room is. Why hasn’t there been more innovation around how people ACTUALLY use their space in their homes?
David Roberts: I think the message about the uselessness of formal dining rooms has finally gotten through -- I never see them any more.
via:
Image: uncredited
Something's Burning
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Alice Coltrane’s Transcendent Score
What does Alice Coltrane sound like, for those who only know the name? Heavenly harp, like a thousand silver coins on a spiral staircase. Groovy bass lines, shuffley snares and sax – from Pharoah Sanders – that seems to push upward and outward, in search of something. This, at least, is the 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda, named after the Hindu word for “absolute state of being”. It was a rare moment of critical acclaim in Coltrane’s lifetime from the male jazz critics of Downbeat magazine.
It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
When thinking about the Coltranes, it is important to know that it wasn’t just music, and it certainly wasn’t just jazz. Eastern spirituality swept many rockstars and jazzers away at the end of the 1960s; even the Beach Boys’ gigs were given over to meditation sessions after their dalliance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For certain kinds of artists – generally, the brainy ones – combining music and spirituality was the peak of existence. It is a mysterious idea for anyone who can’t play, and doesn’t pray, but it’s essentially the opposite of chasing fame and good reviews.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
by Kate Mossman, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Chuck Stewart /@Alicecoltraneofficial
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
Ashamed
America is no more. Some might say it never was. But it once existed as a place where spasms of uncurbed irrational power sooner or later ran up against boundaries of reason and restraint. Sometimes the country hid its low behaviour behind its high ideals. Sometimes its high ideals shamed its low behaviour. Sometimes it simply lived up to its high ideals. No longer.
The war America is waging against Iran is unprovoked, unfounded and unnecessary. It does not even have the predatory logic of colonial intention. It makes the wars in Vietnam and Iraq look rational and justified – they were the product of elaborate deceptions that, at least, acknowledged reality by straining to reconfigure it. No one has any idea why America is at war with Iran. One minute, Trump says it is to liberate Iranians from the tyranny of the country’s theocratic regime. The next minute he says it is to eliminate what he falsely claims was the imminent threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons that can reach the United States. Then he says it is to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles. Or to retaliate for killing Americans, or to change the regime to a democracy, or to destroy its navy, or to ruin Iran’s ability to fund terrorism. He says that he will only accept Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and then, incredibly, declares that only he will decide when the country surrenders. If anyone anywhere required further proof that Trump is undergoing something like a psychotic break from reality, they would have needed only to hear him say that he and only he will decide who Iran’s next leader is. As if Iran, nowhere near “surrender”, would actually seek Trump’s permission for who their new leader will be. The regime’s choice of the late supreme leader’s son to succeed him was almost a welcome intervention, a more rational act than Trump’s demands.
I am ashamed to be an American. It shames and enrages me to hear Pete Hegseth, the sycophantic lush serving as America’s Secretary of Defense, cry that “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.” Without mercy. The unstable Hegseth has the cowardice of his convictions, too. When an American submarine sank, for absolutely no military or strategic reason, an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka – like using a semiautomatic weapon to bring down a mouse – the Americans allegedly made little attempt, some say in violation of the rules of war, to rescue the injured and drowning Iranian sailors. But then, Hegseth exults in the murder of Venezuelan drug smugglers – ordinary people, impoverished, expecting to return from work to their families that evening. There are no words to describe Hegseth’s moral imbecility. Yet he speaks for America.
One of the glories of American life has been its popular culture, in which the American ideals of freedom and equality have fevered the world’s imagination for almost as long as the country has existed. And yet as American missiles and bombs have poured black rain down upon Iran – slaughtered nearly 200 Iranian schoolgirls and killed scores of civilians, severely damaged over a dozen hospitals, crippled an already sinking economy and caused the suffering of multitudes – as America is causing such destruction, the Trump regime has been posting video montages of American action movies in celebration of the carnage. American fantasies of virtuous superheroes have now been turned on their head, replaced by an American reality of sociopaths governing as if they were superheroes. Here too: no words.
I am ashamed, on account of my identity as a Jew, to be associated with Israel in any way. For years, I bridled at the anti-Zionism that, almost always, concealed an anti-Semitism to some degree. No more. Netanyahu has made America his proxy every bit as much as Hezbollah is Iran’s. You sit aghast watching Israel kill dozens of women and children in Lebanon as its forces a search for the “remains” (whatever that means) of an Israeli soldier missing since the 1980s. The country considers the entire Arab and Persian world to not be worth, not just the life of one Israeli, but the “remains” of one Israeli. I’ve written this before, as one must: my ancestors were murdered by Nazis in Poland and Russia, and by hordes of anti-Semites in Odessa. As a Jew, you do not forget bloody millennia of torture, murder and daily humiliation; you never forget being struck or insulted for being a Jew when you were young. As a Jew, you understand the seething anger at any menacing of the safe haven of Israel, brought to an explosive head by 7 October. But as a Jew, I do not recognise this Israel, which is, like the bloody millennia’s very own murderous child, trying to kill every single one of its enemies. Nor do I understand the Israeli blindness to Trump’s strange insistence on explicitly linking American atrocities to Israeli designs. It is like a dream come true for the Christian right that yearns to establish its earthly kingdom in America.
Great powers, like America, like Israel relative to its position in the Middle East, must contend with attacks and assaults the way grand figures must contend with pettiness and envy. But the narcissistic personalities that now rule America, and that cannot tolerate the slightest criticism or challenge without flying into a defensive rage, seem to be the model for the way America and Israel are proceeding. It is pathetic to hear adult American congressmen declaring that yet another reason for “decimating” – Trump’s new favourite word – Iran is that some Iranians have been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. Surely a mighty power like America can bear a few chants. Contrary to Trump’s demented claims that Iran has killed “millions” of Americans, Iran has been responsible for the deaths of about a thousand Americans over the past 50 years. Heart-breaking and sad as each of those deaths was, the number is historically insignificant. It is the price a superpower pays for being a superpower. But then, Trump the malignant narcissist cannot bear the slightest insult, so why should Trump’s America?
It is true, however, that chanting “Death to America” offends one’s sense of actuality. America is already dead. The funeral will come in November, when Trump’s regime takes over the elections. These people, who have committed war crimes, and domestic crimes, and financial crimes, have nothing to lose; you do not commit crimes out in the open like that if you believe you will ever be held to account for them. And by then, Iran in chaos and flames will be barely a memory, just as the Ice murder of two innocent American citizens barely weeks ago is hardly a memory; just as Greenland is hardly a memory. Trump will announce a non-existent victory over a wily and steadfast Iranian regime, hand off the slaughter to the Israelis, who now excel at slaughter, and move stupidly and vapidly on. Cuba is next up, after all.[ed. Watch any unedited interview on YouTube. The dissassociation and cognitive decline are obvious, and scary. The question is, what happens now?]
The war America is waging against Iran is unprovoked, unfounded and unnecessary. It does not even have the predatory logic of colonial intention. It makes the wars in Vietnam and Iraq look rational and justified – they were the product of elaborate deceptions that, at least, acknowledged reality by straining to reconfigure it. No one has any idea why America is at war with Iran. One minute, Trump says it is to liberate Iranians from the tyranny of the country’s theocratic regime. The next minute he says it is to eliminate what he falsely claims was the imminent threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons that can reach the United States. Then he says it is to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles. Or to retaliate for killing Americans, or to change the regime to a democracy, or to destroy its navy, or to ruin Iran’s ability to fund terrorism. He says that he will only accept Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and then, incredibly, declares that only he will decide when the country surrenders. If anyone anywhere required further proof that Trump is undergoing something like a psychotic break from reality, they would have needed only to hear him say that he and only he will decide who Iran’s next leader is. As if Iran, nowhere near “surrender”, would actually seek Trump’s permission for who their new leader will be. The regime’s choice of the late supreme leader’s son to succeed him was almost a welcome intervention, a more rational act than Trump’s demands.
One of the glories of American life has been its popular culture, in which the American ideals of freedom and equality have fevered the world’s imagination for almost as long as the country has existed. And yet as American missiles and bombs have poured black rain down upon Iran – slaughtered nearly 200 Iranian schoolgirls and killed scores of civilians, severely damaged over a dozen hospitals, crippled an already sinking economy and caused the suffering of multitudes – as America is causing such destruction, the Trump regime has been posting video montages of American action movies in celebration of the carnage. American fantasies of virtuous superheroes have now been turned on their head, replaced by an American reality of sociopaths governing as if they were superheroes. Here too: no words.
I am ashamed, on account of my identity as a Jew, to be associated with Israel in any way. For years, I bridled at the anti-Zionism that, almost always, concealed an anti-Semitism to some degree. No more. Netanyahu has made America his proxy every bit as much as Hezbollah is Iran’s. You sit aghast watching Israel kill dozens of women and children in Lebanon as its forces a search for the “remains” (whatever that means) of an Israeli soldier missing since the 1980s. The country considers the entire Arab and Persian world to not be worth, not just the life of one Israeli, but the “remains” of one Israeli. I’ve written this before, as one must: my ancestors were murdered by Nazis in Poland and Russia, and by hordes of anti-Semites in Odessa. As a Jew, you do not forget bloody millennia of torture, murder and daily humiliation; you never forget being struck or insulted for being a Jew when you were young. As a Jew, you understand the seething anger at any menacing of the safe haven of Israel, brought to an explosive head by 7 October. But as a Jew, I do not recognise this Israel, which is, like the bloody millennia’s very own murderous child, trying to kill every single one of its enemies. Nor do I understand the Israeli blindness to Trump’s strange insistence on explicitly linking American atrocities to Israeli designs. It is like a dream come true for the Christian right that yearns to establish its earthly kingdom in America.
Great powers, like America, like Israel relative to its position in the Middle East, must contend with attacks and assaults the way grand figures must contend with pettiness and envy. But the narcissistic personalities that now rule America, and that cannot tolerate the slightest criticism or challenge without flying into a defensive rage, seem to be the model for the way America and Israel are proceeding. It is pathetic to hear adult American congressmen declaring that yet another reason for “decimating” – Trump’s new favourite word – Iran is that some Iranians have been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. Surely a mighty power like America can bear a few chants. Contrary to Trump’s demented claims that Iran has killed “millions” of Americans, Iran has been responsible for the deaths of about a thousand Americans over the past 50 years. Heart-breaking and sad as each of those deaths was, the number is historically insignificant. It is the price a superpower pays for being a superpower. But then, Trump the malignant narcissist cannot bear the slightest insult, so why should Trump’s America?
It is true, however, that chanting “Death to America” offends one’s sense of actuality. America is already dead. The funeral will come in November, when Trump’s regime takes over the elections. These people, who have committed war crimes, and domestic crimes, and financial crimes, have nothing to lose; you do not commit crimes out in the open like that if you believe you will ever be held to account for them. And by then, Iran in chaos and flames will be barely a memory, just as the Ice murder of two innocent American citizens barely weeks ago is hardly a memory; just as Greenland is hardly a memory. Trump will announce a non-existent victory over a wily and steadfast Iranian regime, hand off the slaughter to the Israelis, who now excel at slaughter, and move stupidly and vapidly on. Cuba is next up, after all.
UW Cherry Blossoms
[ed. Still a little early it looks like. See also: University of Washington cherry blossoms: Where to park, see webcams and more (Seattle Times); and UW Cherry Blossom webpage (UW).]
More Thoughts on Cheap TVs
Sometimes you read an article that teaches you something new, while simultaneously leaving you with a worse grasp of how the world actually works. I think Brian Potter’s recent piece on why TVs got so cheap is one of them. If you read it, you will learn the technical reasons how TVs got cheaper, but you will miss the most important thing to know—which is what is unique about TVs and why nearly everything else didn’t.
As a general heuristic in the modern economy, manufactured goods should get much cheaper over time. The forces driving this are well known: increases in material science, manufacturing techniques, and information technology; access to cheaper global labour and capital; and massive economies of scale.
You can go on AliExpress to see this in action: the price of a generic widget is shockingly low. But then we look at the things we actually want to buy and say, “Wow, this is now so expensive.”
Contrary to the deflationary pressures above, there are four significant forces that explain why many things have gotten more expensive over time:
But, in a way, this is not all that interesting. This is just the story of industrial capitalism doing what it does for basically every physical good, what the ‘laws’ of capitalism impose on everything.
What’s interesting is understanding why these forces resulted in cheaper prices for TVs, but for so few other goods.
The true answer is that there isn’t a real market for “better” TVs. A TV can only be so good. We have hard material constraints in our homes regarding how large a screen can be, and biological limitations on our eyes regarding how many pixels we can actually see from the couch. The TV does not run software that perpetually needs access to better hardware to function (like phones and computers).
The TV also lost its power as a status symbol. Nobody comes over to your house anymore and judges you based on your television’s refresh rate. This has allowed TVs to become commodified. There is no demand for them to improve or distinguish themselves on performance—so instead of competition working to make TVs “better,” all those economic forces work exclusively to make the TV cheaper.
(A secondary but interesting reason is that TVs are often sold as loss leaders for stores or bundling opportunities for streaming services, subsidizing the hardware price. See my previous post on how most businesses don’t work the way you think for more on this dynamic.)
If you think for a moment about one of the titans of modern capitalism, IKEA—most of what you can buy there is more expensive than the similar item IKEA was selling 20 years ago. But certain pieces, like the Billy Bookshelf or the Lack coffee table, have gone down in price over the last 30 years. Why? Because the Billy is a commodity purchased to fit a specific function. It isn’t used to signal status or fashion sense. For the Billy Bookshelf, IKEA is making roughly the same model as it used to, at massive scale, allowing those economic forces of modernity to lower costs. A brand new sofa that will only be sold for two years won’t have the scale to be manufactured in a way that allows it to become cheaper.
That’s because runners aren’t buying the “Billy Bookshelf” of shoes. Instead of there being one singular running shoe, there are now endless choices for every micro-purpose: tempo runs, trail runs, long runs, carbon-plated race shoes. Despite the technology being cheaper, nearly everyone who identifies as a runner wants a “better” shoe. While part of this is we want new shoes that physically look different, it’s mostly because of the inflation of “impressiveness.” It used to be impressive to run a 5k; now, unless you’re training for a half-marathon with a specific time goal, or a 50K ultra, are you even running? We need the new gear just to keep up with the Joneses on Strava. [...]
So, the real interesting part of TVs becoming cheaper isn’t just the material science of glass sheets. It’s that the TV is a rare instance where there was no improvement to be had or status to be gained from the purchase. Almost every consumer category starts with genuine innovation, but the moment there is any social value from the purchase, market forces redirect those efficiency gains away from “cheaper” and toward better and “premium differentiation.”
You can go on AliExpress to see this in action: the price of a generic widget is shockingly low. But then we look at the things we actually want to buy and say, “Wow, this is now so expensive.”
Contrary to the deflationary pressures above, there are four significant forces that explain why many things have gotten more expensive over time:
1. Labour costs have gone up (Baumol’s cost disease).The fourth point is by far the most important point for understanding how the world works, but the one that is least understood.
2. Real estate costs have gone up: zoning constraints and the increasing opportunity cost of land.
3. Regulatory mandates that force costly “improvements” consumers don’t directly value (energy efficiency standards, safety requirements, environmental compliance etc)
4. The decline of demand for that particular good
***
Brian Potter writes a comprehensive overview of the manufacturing advances that drove down TV prices. We learn that LCD manufacturing scaled up mother glass sheets from 12x16 inches to 116x133 inches (the largest driver of cost declines), which reduced equipment costs per unit area by 80%. We learn about cluster plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition machines, the reduction of masking steps, and the switch from manual labour to robots, benefiting from techniques and knowledge borrowed from the semiconductor industry.But, in a way, this is not all that interesting. This is just the story of industrial capitalism doing what it does for basically every physical good, what the ‘laws’ of capitalism impose on everything.
What’s interesting is understanding why these forces resulted in cheaper prices for TVs, but for so few other goods.
The true answer is that there isn’t a real market for “better” TVs. A TV can only be so good. We have hard material constraints in our homes regarding how large a screen can be, and biological limitations on our eyes regarding how many pixels we can actually see from the couch. The TV does not run software that perpetually needs access to better hardware to function (like phones and computers).
The TV also lost its power as a status symbol. Nobody comes over to your house anymore and judges you based on your television’s refresh rate. This has allowed TVs to become commodified. There is no demand for them to improve or distinguish themselves on performance—so instead of competition working to make TVs “better,” all those economic forces work exclusively to make the TV cheaper.
(A secondary but interesting reason is that TVs are often sold as loss leaders for stores or bundling opportunities for streaming services, subsidizing the hardware price. See my previous post on how most businesses don’t work the way you think for more on this dynamic.)
If you think for a moment about one of the titans of modern capitalism, IKEA—most of what you can buy there is more expensive than the similar item IKEA was selling 20 years ago. But certain pieces, like the Billy Bookshelf or the Lack coffee table, have gone down in price over the last 30 years. Why? Because the Billy is a commodity purchased to fit a specific function. It isn’t used to signal status or fashion sense. For the Billy Bookshelf, IKEA is making roughly the same model as it used to, at massive scale, allowing those economic forces of modernity to lower costs. A brand new sofa that will only be sold for two years won’t have the scale to be manufactured in a way that allows it to become cheaper.
***
Now look at running shoes. Compared to when Nike first released their top-of-the-line running shoe in the early 1990s, you can absolutely buy a generic running shoe today that is objectively better and cheaper. But if you ask people who identify as runners, you will find they are spending more on shoes than ever before.That’s because runners aren’t buying the “Billy Bookshelf” of shoes. Instead of there being one singular running shoe, there are now endless choices for every micro-purpose: tempo runs, trail runs, long runs, carbon-plated race shoes. Despite the technology being cheaper, nearly everyone who identifies as a runner wants a “better” shoe. While part of this is we want new shoes that physically look different, it’s mostly because of the inflation of “impressiveness.” It used to be impressive to run a 5k; now, unless you’re training for a half-marathon with a specific time goal, or a 50K ultra, are you even running? We need the new gear just to keep up with the Joneses on Strava. [...]
So, the real interesting part of TVs becoming cheaper isn’t just the material science of glass sheets. It’s that the TV is a rare instance where there was no improvement to be had or status to be gained from the purchase. Almost every consumer category starts with genuine innovation, but the moment there is any social value from the purchase, market forces redirect those efficiency gains away from “cheaper” and toward better and “premium differentiation.”
by Daniel Frank, not not Talmud | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I posted the Potter article a while back (...it's around here somewhere) and don't want to repeat myself, but this provides some good added perspective. Other examples: calculators, microwaves...]
Monday, March 16, 2026
On Adversarial Capitalism
I’ve lately been writing a series on modern capitalism. You can read these other blog posts for additional musings on the topic:
A few experiences you may relate to:
- Most Businesses Don’t Work That Way – on the mistaken view of being the customer vs the product – and how businesses really make money
- Artisanal Slop Bowls as the Next Abstraction of Capitalism – how modern capitalism leads to the creation of new and improved version of goods/businesses that superficially, seem to be superior in all ways, but in fact, are without many critical but illegible components.
- How an Efficient Market Feels from the Inside – how even in an efficient market, there are still good and bad deals to be had.
- Why I Talk About Utopia, Not Politics – on the idea of living a happy enriched life in times of material abundance
A few experiences you may relate to:
- I bought a banana from the store. I was prompted to tip 20, 25, or 30% on my purchase.
- I went to get a haircut. Booking online cost $6 more and also asked me to prepay my tip. [Would I get worse service if I didn’t tip in advance…?]
- I went to a jazz club. Despite already buying an expensive ticket, I was told I needed to order at least $20 of food or drink—and literally handing them a $20 bill wouldn’t count, as it didn’t include tip or tax.
- I looked into buying a new Garmin watch, only to be told by Garmin fans I should avoid the brand now—they recently introduced a subscription model. For now, the good features are still included with the watch purchase, but soon enough, those will be behind the paywall.
- I bought a plane ticket and had to avoid clicking on eight different things that wanted to overcharge me. I couldn’t sit beside my girlfriend without paying a large seat selection fee. No food, no baggage included.
- I realized that the bike GPS I bought four years ago no longer gives turn-by-turn directions because it’s no longer compatible with the mapping software.
- I had to buy a new computer because the battery in mine wasn’t replaceable and had worn down.
- I rented a car and couldn’t avoid paying an exorbitant toll-processing fee. They gave me the car with what looked like 55% of a tank. If I returned it with less, I’d be charged a huge fee. If I returned it with more, I’d be giving them free gas. It’s difficult to return it with the same amount, given you need to drive from the gas station to the drop-off and there’s no precise way to measure it.
- I bought tickets to a concert the moment they went on sale, only for the “face value” price to go down 50% one month later – because the tickets were dynamically priced.
- I used an Uber gift card, and once it was applied to my account, my Uber prices were higher.
- I went to a highly rated restaurant (per Google Maps) and thought it wasn’t very good. When I went to pay, I was told they’d reduce my bill by 25% if I left a 5-star Google Maps review before leaving. I now understand the reviews.
Adversarial capitalism is when most transactions feel like an assault on your will. Nearly everything entices you with a low upfront price, then uses every possible trick to extract more from you before the transaction ends. Systems are designed to exploit your cognitive limitations, time constraints, and moments of inattention.
It’s not just about hidden fees. It’s that each additional fee often feels unreasonable. The rental company doesn’t just charge more for gas, they punish you for not refueling, at an exorbitant rate. They want you to skip the gas, because that’s how they make money. The “service fee” for buying a concert ticket online is wildly higher than a service fee ought to be.
The reason adversarial capitalism exists is simple.
Businesses are ruthlessly efficient and want to grow. Humans are incredibly price-sensitive. If one business avoids hidden fees, it’s outcompeted by another that offers a lower upfront cost, with more adversarial fees later. This exploits the gap between consumers’ sensitivity to headline prices and their awareness of total cost. Once one firm in a market adopts this pricing model, others are pressured to follow. It becomes a race to the bottom of the price tag, and a race to the top of the hidden fees.
The thing is: once businesses learn the techniques of adversarial capitalism and it gets accepted by consumers, there is no going back — it is a super weapon that is too powerful to ignore once discovered.
The reason adversarial capitalism exists is simple.
Businesses are ruthlessly efficient and want to grow. Humans are incredibly price-sensitive. If one business avoids hidden fees, it’s outcompeted by another that offers a lower upfront cost, with more adversarial fees later. This exploits the gap between consumers’ sensitivity to headline prices and their awareness of total cost. Once one firm in a market adopts this pricing model, others are pressured to follow. It becomes a race to the bottom of the price tag, and a race to the top of the hidden fees.
The thing is: once businesses learn the techniques of adversarial capitalism and it gets accepted by consumers, there is no going back — it is a super weapon that is too powerful to ignore once discovered.
by Daniel Frank, Frankly Speaking | Read more:
[ed. Many other great essays on his blog and substack. See also: Daniel-isms: 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share (Part 1); and 50 Ideas for Life I Repeatedly Share (part 2). Also, here's a couple more: the loss of magic: why Bob Dylan can’t write great songs anymore; and, Notes on Taiwan.]
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