A Hand Towel That (Somehow) Only Gets Better With Time

The other day I found myself standing in my kitchen holding a soft stretch of weathered cotton, caught in a reverie about the last 15 years of my life.

Not a lot of towels can do that.

In 2011, I walked into a homewares shop in Venice, California: a breezy space filled with design objects from Japan. It was the kind of place where everything feels necessary, infinitely simpler than my cluttered mind.

I drifted to the back of the store, past sculptural teapots and textured ceramics, where I watched a stylish woman wash her hands and deftly dry them on a wisp of red cotton printed with organic white dots. The fabric was thin, its edges gracefully frayed. It wasn’t until I approached the register that I realized the stacks of colorful folded textiles were those same unassuming lengths of fabric — only stiffer in their packaging. I bought a handful on a whim.

So began my relationship with Japanese tenugui.

These traditional Japanese cotton cloths are available in an array of colorful prints, and they get softer and better with every use.

Technically, tenugui are traditional hand towels made of yukata cotton; the name translates literally to “hand wipe.” But to describe them as mere towels is like calling a poem a memo.

The magic lies in a pour-through dye technique called chusen. Unlike modern screen-printing, where ink sits on top of the fabric like a layer of film, chusen is an act of saturation and resistance. The patterns are traditionally created using a laminated washi paper stencil, said Patricia Belyea, an importer who also leads vintage textile tours in Japan.

Dye is then poured through the thin layers of cotton, yielding towels with no front or back; the pattern is equally vibrant on both sides. Because the dye permeates the fiber rather than coats it, the fabric remains incredibly breathable. It doesn’t just wipe away water, it drinks it — and then dries in a heartbeat.

In my house, tenugui are shape-shifters, floating from kitchens to bathrooms to backpacks. As my personal tenugui collection grew, they migrated to my dining table as napkins. I never felt the need to match them, preferring the different patterns at each plate, like a series of short stories in each print. They also quickly became a favorite host gift; after all, who couldn’t use a little dose of practical art? [...]

Tenugui traditionally have a raw, unhemmed edge, so they can be cut to any size. Some people purchase a single towel and cut them in half to make two napkins, as Keiko Shinomoto, co-founder of Tortoise General Store, told me in a phone interview. Others use the fabric for art projects or even to wrap gifts. Shinomoto has enjoyed seeing all the nontraditional ways people have come to employ this simple fabric over the years.

The fraying stops after a few washes, leaving a soft, well-earned border. It’s a lesson in wabi-sabi — finding beauty in the imperfect and the ephemeral. The magic of tenugui is that they don’t wear out, they really just wear in. I still have several of those original towels from 2011. They are easy to spot: the softest in my collection, some with small, honest holes from years of scrubbing and tying. To me they are the most beautiful of the bunch.

by Ivy Elrod, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Image: Ivy Elrod

[ed. See also: Going bananas for bandanas: the latest fashion trend that goes back centuries (Guardian).]

Your Book Review: The Escape Artist

[ed. One of the finalists in the ACX 2026 book review contest.]

Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader).

You won’t find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist.

This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it’s a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There’s no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic “lesson” I’ve ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people’s natural tendency is denial.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz…

I.
Here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad.

It was bad for all of its prisoners, of course, but it was the worst for the Jewish ones, who, if they survived at all, were held in harsher and more tightly controlled parts of the camp than everyone else. During the five years between Auschwitz’s opening in 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, at least 900 prisoners attempted escape, and around 200 of them succeeded—but, because of their stricter confinement, only a handful were Jews.

Walter Rosenberg, our protagonist, is the first. And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily.

Of course, it’s not like he knows what he’s signing up for. The Nazi line at the time—an illusion they go to great lengths to maintain—is that the Jews deported from Europe are all being “resettled in the east.” In 1942, when our story begins, Walter is a Slovak teenager, just eighteen years old. He’s being held at Majdanek, another Polish concentration camp, after two failed attempts to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Majdanek itself is at this point “merely” a labor camp—not unheard of in wartime—though it will eventually become a death camp after Walter has left it behind.

The camp administrators seek volunteers for “farm work” elsewhere, and Walter is one of the first to raise his hand, despite the dire warnings from another prisoner: “Go there and you’ll die.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe the warnings. But he’s decided that being moved somewhere else, no matter where that somewhere else is, might bring an opportunity for escape. And from the moment the Nazi tanks first rolled into Czechoslovakia, Walter has been single-mindedly focused on escape.

Already, Walter has a sense that he’s different from the other prisoners—and, for that matter, from most people he knew back home in his hometown of Trnava. Why aren’t they doing anything? he wonders. Why aren’t they all trying to escape too? If Walter were alive today, one gets the sense he’d describe himself as high-agency and everyone else as NPCs. You Can Just Do Things, he believes, even when the thing in question is escaping from a concentration camp. Maybe this is youth talking. Maybe it’s naivety. Or maybe Walter is simply, constitutionally, a difficult person: allergic to authority and already showing the same contrarian streak that will later get him fired from multiple academic jobs.

And so Walter goes to Auschwitz.

The Nazis obviously do not actually believe their inscription on Auschwitz’s gates, that “work will set you free.” But this story is full of bitter ironies, and among them is that for Walter, signing up for this line of work actually is the first step toward his freedom.

II.
As soon as the journey to Auschwitz begins, Walter starts having second thoughts.

Majdanek operates more or less in the open: situated right on the edge of Lublin, a midsize city, it’s visible to the general population and staffed by civilian workers who commute between the city and the camp. But for the journey to Auschwitz, the guards clean up Walter and the other prisoners and dress them in ordinary clothes, clearly to hide their true state from the German civilians who might catch a glimpse of them en route. And that’s highly suspicious: what kind of place are they being taken to, if even their condition en route has to be concealed from ordinary Germans? These questions grow when they reach the new camp’s perimeter, where the intensity of the security stands out even compared to Majdanek: there are not one but two barbed-wire electric fences, and watchtowers everywhere, each with a prominent sniper’s rifle poking through its slats. And then, once Walter crosses the perimeter, there are the men he sees within: “walking skeletons with bowed heads and sunken, hollow eyes.” It’s not like the prisoners in Majdanek looked good, of course, but they didn’t look like this. And yet these men, the living dead, are actually the lucky ones: of the 100 prisoners who enter Auschwitz with Walter, only he and one other are still alive at the end of the month.

Why does Walter survive? Some of it is sheer luck: he enters the camp young and healthy, and avoids catching anything fatal; at one point, a sympathetic kapo, for reasons that are never entirely clear, saves him from ending up on the wrong side of a typhus check. But another factor is that Walter is a quick study who proves unusually adept at adapting to his environment. He instinctively grasps that here, appearances—especially the appearance of health—matter more than reality. Anyone who looks unfit for work—or who looks as though they might be carrying disease, which doesn’t respect the Nazis’ racial barriers—is sent… well, at this point Walter isn’t totally sure where they’re sent, but he knows it can’t be anywhere good. And this fitness can be assessed at any point by nothing more than an SS officer’s glance. Walter quickly masters the art of holding his head up high even when he’s hardly slept in days, and of standing upright even when his feet are so swollen he can barely keep his balance.

Even under these conditions, when he can scarcely think about anything besides staying alive, a small part of Walter’s brain remains on the lookout for something, anything, a small sliver of an opportunity that could lead to a means to escape. But when his next lucky break comes, in the form of a new work assignment, it provides something that Walter—although he doesn’t yet realize it—needs even more: not just a means for escape, but a motive.

III.
At first it sounds crazy: how could getting out of Auschwitz not be motive enough? But it turns out that what Walter really needs is to connect his potential escape to a broader mission. It can’t just be life or death for him—it has to be life or death for many.

Remember: at this point, there’s no such concept as “the Holocaust”. Even a prisoner like Walter might plausibly think that Nazi concentration camps are a recognizable, if extreme, version of the forced-labor and detention camps that have been relatively common in wartime for centuries. Majdanek hadn’t been as bad as Auschwitz; perhaps conditions here are an aberration. Perhaps the other Jews really have been resettled.

But Walter’s next assignment disabuses him of that illusion once and for all. He’s sent to Canada.

Not the real Canada, of course. This “Canada” is an enormous lot full of possessions stolen from arriving prisoners. Walter and the others there are tasked with sorting through these items in search of anything valuable: money sewn up in coat linings, for example, or gems hidden in toothpaste tubes. The area’s name comes from Kann er da, German for “might there be”—as in, “might there be something of value?” The bureaucracy-obsessed Nazis in fact placed the entire concentration camp apparatus in the SS’s economic office, and everything taken from Canada—not just money and gems, but even things like artificial limbs—is either sold to fund the war effort or repurposed as relief for the civilian population.

Walter is good at this new job, and he finds a perverse satisfaction in his own skill despite the context. Of course, he also finds ways to serve himself: in Canada, valuable resources are everywhere, and it’s not that hard to swipe them when the guards aren’t looking. (A good moment is usually when they’re distracted by beating someone else.)

In the topsy-turvy world that is Auschwitz, the actually valuable resources—the ones the Nazis are looking for, like money and gold—aren’t actually of any value to Walter. Money is useless in Auschwitz’s underground economy, and it’s worse than useless as an escapee: as a fellow prisoner warns Walter, if you have money, you’ll be tempted to use it to buy things, but that means going into towns, where the risk of being caught is highest. Better to remove the temptation entirely and leave yourself no choice but to stay on the outskirts and live off the land. So Walter doesn’t take any money or gold, except to occasionally throw it down the toilet as a small act of rebellion.

No, the real valuable is food. Food is everywhere in Canada, and if you can grab it without the guards noticing, you can be one of the only prisoners in Auschwitz to receive something approaching adequate nutrition. Walter and his fellow Canada workers become experts at swiping and devouring morsels of hidden food in one fell swoop.

But pretty soon it becomes hard not to wonder where all this stuff is coming from. Sure: coats, toiletries, even food—maybe that could all be stolen from living prisoners. But artificial limbs? Teeth? And besides—Walter has seen the rest of the camp. Even accounting for the “natural” death rate, there are several orders of magnitude more prisoners’ possessions than there are actual prisoners.

Thus Walter comes to acquire something even more valuable than food: knowledge of something very few people—certainly those outside Auschwitz, but even most of those inside Auschwitz—are aware of. Perhaps a small, subconscious part of him had already suspected it. But after a few weeks in Canada, he understands it beyond a reasonable doubt: there is no “resettlement.” Every arrival at Auschwitz who is not selected for work—the vast, vast majority, over 90%—is killed. He is sorting through the remnants of systematic mass murder.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

Brad Pitt’s Return to Drinking Is Not Unsafe, Experts Say, but It’s Not for Everyone

Brad Pitt went seven years without a drink. Then he started again — carefully, he said, and on his own terms.

He mentioned it almost in passing in an Esquire interview published this week: Mr. Pitt had gotten “back off the wagon” and now drinks “in a more restrained manner.” Never in large quantities, he insisted. He had gotten overconfident a couple of times and pulled back.

His comments stirred up one of the oldest and least settled arguments about sobriety: whether someone who once drank dangerously can ever drink safely again.

Mr. Pitt quit drinking in 2016, the year his marriage to the actress Angelina Jolie collapsed. After she filed for divorce, he spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous and has credited the program with getting him sober. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told The New York Times in 2019.

Alcoholics Anonymous focuses on abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism and does not comment publicly about members. A representative from the A.A. General Service Office said only that “members of Alcoholics Anonymous have only one purpose: to stay sober ourselves and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.”

It was his history with A.A. that touched a nerve among people who have fought to stay sober, or have friends or relatives who have struggled with recovery. People who figuratively followed Mr. Pitt into a room of folding chairs learned of his exit from it.

Experts and researchers said the reactions split along lines that had less to do with Mr. Pitt than with how the people reacting had gotten sober themselves.

Mr. Pitt, during his interview, offered himself as no one’s model for sobriety. He described where he was and claimed nothing about where he will be later.

Researchers said that account was less unusual than it sounds.

“People with an alcohol disorder show a variety of different paths through which they resolve that alcohol use disorder,” said Christopher W. Kahler, director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Some of those involve being completely abstinent, and some of them don’t.”

Dr. Melissa Weimer, an associate professor who specializes in addiction medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said that alcohol use disorder is a chronic disease. Those who reacted strongly to Mr. Pitt’s account may have watched efforts to drink in moderation fail, in themselves or in someone they love, she added.

But treatment does not come in one size, she said. She presses instead for individualized plans, including medication such as naltrexone, which dulls the reward of a drink and helps some people cut back.

“We do recommend that people stop drinking entirely and probably continue to stop drinking once they have an alcohol use disorder,” Dr. Weimer said. “But everybody’s different, and they have to make their own personal choices.”

Dr. Alta DeRoo, the chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the largest nonprofit substance use disorder and mental health treatment facility in the United States, goes further.

Dr. DeRoo said she refuses to shame or police how anyone pursues recovery, and she rejects the idea of a single correct route. Demanding abstinence and nothing else, she said, drives away the people who are still trying to quit.

Clinicians should meet patients where they stand, whether that means abstinence, moderation or harm reduction, walking beside them rather than grading them, she said.

Even when someone relapses, or tests moderation after a severe disorder, the sober years still count, Dr. DeRoo said, contrary to some conventional wisdom on addiction. Those people gained coping skills, repaired relationships and improved physical health, she said, and none of that reverses.

She reads Mr. Pitt’s account as a useful one: sobriety, a return to drinking, a recognition that it was going badly, a correction.

“Sometimes it takes several times,” Dr. DeRoo said. “Right now it may just be harm reduction, and that’s what’s working for him, and if it gets him to a better place, I would support anything that helps a patient decrease their alcohol use and live a healthier life.”

Researchers differ on much, but not on this. Recovery, they said, confers no permanent status and has no finish line but rather what a person finds workable now, and whether it holds.

by Mark Walker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AI Dream Game

My dream game would basically be OpenAI taking the kind of agent/simulation stuff they were experimenting with before modern LLMs and actually turning it into a real game. 

You start a new world with a population on an island or in a city, and from that point on basically nothing is scripted. Every single person is controlled by their own 5.6 Luna instance, with their own memory, personality, needs, goals, plans, relationships, inventory, money, beliefs and ideas. 

They have to actually live. Find jobs, earn money, buy food, get housing, start companies, trade, farm, invest, make friends, compete, commit crimes, buy property, build things, organize with other people, whatever they decide makes sense. 

And the society itself is emergent too. There doesn't have to be a government, currency, police, laws or even private property at the start. The agents can invent those things themselves, agree on rules, vote, create institutions, form political groups, build a justice system, overthrow it all again, or just live in complete anarchy. 

The game engine handles the actual world and ground truth, physics, resources, money, ownership, construction, combat, inventories, etc., while the Luna agents decide what they want, communicate with each other and make plans. So every new world becomes its own completely unpredictable civilization and story. 

by Flowers, Twitter/X |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Because real life is so boring. Eventually, they discover nuclear weapons and blow your computer up.]

Albert Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey, 1953. Ernst Haas.

via:

Fumiaki Fukita (Japanese, b. 1926) - The Day of Flower Blooming
via:

Is the US Ready for President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

[ed. Or happy with the same broken system we've been stuck with for decades.]

"They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.”

The words were delivered slowly, deliberately and with some steeliness by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her audience, crammed into the pews of Rockefeller Memorial chapel at the University of Chicago, burst into spontaneous applause. That was in May. In the three months since, the speculation around Ocasio-Cortez’s ambitions – for herself and for America – has only grown louder.

Friends and foes alike wonder if the stars are aligning for the New York congresswoman to run for US president in 2028. They point to voters raging against the machine – including the ageing Democratic party establishment – and hungry for change. They note how progressives pushing for economic justice and universal healthcare have won a string of impressive victories in mayoral elections and congressional primaries over the past year.

Then there are the opinion polls. Last month a Granite State Poll from the University of New Hampshire found Ocasio-Cortez leading a potential Democratic field in that crucial state. She has the kind of name recognition that money can’t buy, nearly 10m followers on Instagram alone and fans ranging from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.

As Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden showed, presidential elections have a habit of finding the right person at the right time in the right place. Ocasio-Cortez, a 36-year-old with a progressive agenda and can’t-be-taught social media smarts, could meet the moment for a nation eager for a fresh start after a decade of Trumpism.

If modern politics is about pendulum swings, it is hard to imagine anyone who better personifies a rebuke of the octogenarian Trump and his nativist “Make America great again” (Maga) movement. This week a Zogby Strategies national poll found that a generic democratic socialist candidate leads generic Maga candidate 45% to 33%.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the DSA, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, said: “If she were to throw her hat in the ring, there would be a lot of excitement for it from members of Democratic Socialists of America. We definitely want to see a strong working class voice in the 2028 presidential primary.”

Ocasio-Cortez has not ruled out a run for president and her actions have done nothing to quell the notion of a campaign in stealth mode. Last year she joined her mentor, the independent senator Bernie Sanders, on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that drew huge crowds. More recently she has crisscrossed the country to support progressive candidates, further enhancing her national profile.

In the past week alone she made two moves that intensified political pundits’ chatter. First Ocasio-Cortez used Instagram to announce that she is freezing her eggs, a decision she described as a move to “feel more in control of my life”. She acknowledged the “political risk” in sharing personal family planning details but stated her goal is to normalise conversations about the professional and personal challenges women face. The internet quickly became awash in speculation that Ocasio-Cortez ended her relationship with and engagement to long-time partner Riley Roberts , driven by reports from Puck News and others noting she had long since stopped appearing with him in public and mentioning his name.

Then, when asked by ABC interviewer Jonathan Karl about the cultural battles of the 2020 pandemic era – including calls from some on the left to defund the police – she laughed and, quoting a New York city council ally, remarked: “Woke One was crazy” – apparently trying to draw a strategic line between hard-fought struggles for racial justice and the performative excesses of lockdown isolation that became an easy target for the right.

Unlike many would-be presidents of the time, Ocasio-Cortez does not appear to be driven by personal ego, according to those who knew her, which may prove to be her political superpower. She was a volunteer organiser for Sanders’ 2016 campaign, his first presidential run and one that built a national movement around his vision of democratic socialism, even as he lost to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

When she decided to run for office herself, the former bartender and waitress had virtually no money but was assisted by progressive organisations such as Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. In 2018 she beat 10-term incumbent congressman Joe Crowley, a member of the Democratic leadership and potential future speaker, in a New York primary.

Corbin Trent, her first communications director in the House of Representatives and the co-founder of Justice Democrats, was there on the night she ousted Crowley. He recalls that the political industrial complex began trying to map her career path before the ink on the ballots was even dry.

“Primary night, she beats Joe Crowley,” he recalled. “I get phone calls from elected officials and other people and their question is, what’s next? What’s the pathway here? What’s she going to run for? What higher office would she seek? This is literally a few hours after the polls close in the primary. That’s the way DC thinks. Not, hey, what can we do with Medicare for all or this or that or any of the other things?”

As Ocasio-Cortez’s national profile exploded – bringing in $15m in her first electoral cycle and attracting unprecedented demands from foreign heads of state – Trent tried to lay out a long-term strategic map. He suggested upstate New York events to prepare for a statewide Senate run. But she resisted the logic of political careerism.

“To my chagrin and frustration that never was a way in which she could plan or operate. She did not have an idea in her head of this ultimate prize of president or governor or senator.”

Instead, Trent argues, her appeal lies in a rare authenticity – an ability to validate the deep-seated economic anxiety of Americans. “Alexandria has two things going for her. She’s genuinely curious about other people. It’s not like she has to pretend to be. I’ve had politicians ask me, ‘How can I be more genuine?’ Well, that’s probably not going to help if you have to fucking ask me that.

“Two, she is genuinely open about herself. Some people believe that nobody cares what they think or who they are and then other people don’t want you to know who they are. She doesn’t suffer from either of those failings.”

Other observers agree that Ocasio-Cortez has that X factor missing from so many professional politicians: relatability. Chris Scott, a political strategist who served as the coalition director for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, said: “When you talk about AOC’s humble beginnings being a bartender that’s a lived experience story that resonates, especially with millennials, with their upbringing.

“What you are starting to see – whether it’s conservative or progressive - is people are leaning more and more towards candidates with lived experience that they feel they relate to as politics gets more polarising.”

by David Smith, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg/Getty

[ed. In a heartbeat. All you have to do is look at the responses of the various political operatives interiewed for this article to know what she's up against. Whether you agree with all her positions or not, at this point I'll take anyone who isn't motivated mostly by self-interest and power.]

Free Pizza Delivery

Public intrusion is a common experience for the residents of TV-famous homes. In 2015, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, had to urge fans to stop paying homage to his show – because they were recreating a scene where an entire pizza is thrown on to the roof of the house whose exterior was featured as Walter White’s bungalow. And last year, the owner of the apartment made famous by Sex and the City’s lead character erected a gate outside it because “at any hour of the day or night, there are groups of visitors in front of the house taking flash photos, engaging in loud chatter, posting on social media, making TikTok videos or just celebrating the moment”. Eventually, the owners of the Breaking Bad house followed suit, erecting a 6ft iron fence – not that it stopped fans. “They still try to throw pizzas even though she’s got a gate, she’s got signage,” said Frank Sandoval, who runs Breaking Bad tours to the house in an RV. “They even try to climb the gate.”

‘We get 200 tourists a day’: when your house becomes a TV star (The Guardian)
Image: Walter White’s Breaking Bad home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photograph: Raisa Macouzet/Alamy

[ed. Have to admit: I once tracked down the apartment complex and courtyard in Seattle where Singles was filmed. Stood in the exact same spot as Matt Dillon and Chris Cornell. It was actually kind of fun. (hint: East Thomas somewhere).]

Sleepwalking Into Extinction

I think one of the biggest reasons the world is currently sleepwalking into getting ourselves and our families killed by ASI development is that we're not self-aware about why we're doing that. 

We can see the smarter-than-human AI disaster approaching, but it's a bit foggy why the world isn't reacting. 

I think someone could just write a tweet that makes it clear that we're in the process of getting ourselves killed, and that there's no fucking reason for it. It's just something we stumbled into. It can be easily avoided by just noticing the error and course-correcting. There's not necessarily any grand obstacle, beyond 'people were previously confused about the situation, and now they get it'. 

I wrote: 'It's legitimately crazy that "we need an international ban on making smarter-than-human versions of these agents that keep forming rogue AI swarms" isn't the headline here. Asilomar and Feynman's O-ring postmortem feel like they came from a different planet than the field of ML.' 

Trying to figure out why ML (and as a consequence, the world at large) has fallen down so bizarrely on this issue:

1. As Nate noted, ML is much more based on guesswork, vibes, and trial-and-error, compared to recombinant DNA research in 1975 or nuclear physics in 1945. If you can't do calculations or direct experiments on a threat, that makes it a lot harder to think about reasonably. 

But I think there are other, similarly-important factors at work here too:

2. In a 2016 talk on AI risk, Sam Harris said: "One of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this point is that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional response to the dangers that lie ahead. I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk." 

I think this is extremely on point. Agentic human-level AI is a qualitatively new kind of thing. 'It's not a human or a mere-tool, it's some weird third thing'. 

And people are very bad at emotionally reckoning with new categories they've never encountered before. Availability bias: "When no flooding has recently occurred (and yet the probabilities are still fairly calculable), people refuse to buy flood insurance".

AGI and ASI are very novel. You're basically limited to three options: anthropomorphize the technology, mechanomorphize the technology ('it's just a tool, it's not really thinking, it can't have its own goals or agency', etc.), or think about the technology on its own terms, with brand-new concepts and frames. The third option is the only workable one, but it comes with its own giant list of pitfalls and traps. 

3. "AI destroying the world" scenarios aren't just hard to wrap one's head around; they're socially risky to acknowledge. This has (painfully slowly) changed over time, but it dramatically slows down how quickly AI risk ideas spread, both in ML and in the larger world. 

4. From x.com/jachiam0/statu…: "One of the weirdest quirks of the SF social scene around AGI/ASI is that because everyone is so young, the whole universe of thinking is still tinged with irreverence, ironic detachment, yearning, insecurity, and a superposition of absolute belief in the importance of The Thing and a kind of disbelief about the importance of anything." 

They're disproportionately young and childless. They're shitposters and "move fast and break things" sorts, not the Hollywood stereotype of a careful, sober senior scientist. 

I think this quirk is reinforced by the fact that Twitter / social media rewards similar things: ironic detachment, joking, game-playing, etc. If you're scared, your incentive is to usually either try to hide that fact, or exaggerate it like it's a bit. Anything else risks looking uncool and panicky and earnest. Looking cynically savvy, in-the-know, and above-the-fray is the way to win the social game. Looking genuinely shocked, scared, confused, etc. is actively punished. 

The main exceptions to the Irony Mandate I see are LW (which often has its own pathologies IMO, like 'talking about everything in an abstract and dissociated way that discourages action and signals business-as-usual') and a small handful of actual Feynman-style terrified senior researchers like Hinton, Bengio, and Russell. That is just really not very many people. 

Mainstream journalists and academics who understand the situation at all mostly feel pressured to downplay it, because they're scared of looking weird or unrespectable. That, then, is why we're all taking this insane risk with the human project: genuine, normal human emotion about AI risk has been socially unacceptable on social media, and academia and the media discourage emotion and prize respectability and 'looking normal'. 

When the world gets weird (and weird in a way that calls for actual serious action, not just shitposting on twitter), none of these institutions can handle it. They break in different ways, but they all break. 

5. Which brings me back to the Asilomar moratorium on recombinant DNA, and the seriousness NASA and the FAA and Richard Feynman and every normal engineering discipline bring to fault analysis and building in safety margin. 

Because I think another core reason the world has been dropping the ball on superintelligent AI is that a lot of people vaguely expect there to be 'serious people' somewhere in the world who have expertise and who take ownership of the problem. 

People who, if they see an extraordinary danger, will grimace and mourn the hand they played in all of this, like I've seen Bengio do; and will go on CNN or go to Congress to candidly warn about it. 

The world has very few Yoshua Bengios. We have very few people who see it as their role to be the 'adults' about AI risk (except in a game-playing, posturing way), who see the engineer's task of not endangering your users and bystanders as a sacred responsibility and weight, and not just as a funny dissonant thing to meme about. Very few people who take ownership of what their field is bringing into the world, versus treating it as a fun edgy philosophical game to swap 'p(doom)' numbers at parties. 

Everything about public AI discourse, as far as I can tell, is badly broken by this lack of engineering ownership and candid emotional seriousness. It isn't just the ML discourse that's hurt by this. Journalists and public intellectuals and policymakers see that 90% of the insider discourse about AI risk treats it like a joke, and they see corporate platitudes and ass-covering from the AI labs' PR departments filling up most of the remaining 10%. They see a field that visibly isn't taking this seriously, and they make the reasonable update that this must be a non-issue, or at least an issue they'll only need to worry about many years from now. 

They do not realize that all of this is happening right now, and that the window for the international community to respond to this is plausibly closing soon, if it hasn't closed already. 

If we're going to survive this, we all need to start being real with each other about it. This is not a game or a story; this is our real lives. We all actually lose everything if this goes to shit. None of the future is already written, and none of the above dynamics are unavoidable. In fact, they're unusual: most fields don't work this way, and it's plausibly sufficient if we just start behaving the way we normally do about everything else. 

The factors I listed above aren't destiny; they're a choice. I say we choose to survive this.

by Rob Bensinger, Twitter/X |  Read more:

[ed. Dr. Strangelove meet Dr. Oppenheimer. See also, this additional post: Why the "it's all hopeless, we should just give up and let AI kill us if it wants" arguments are extremely wrong.]

***

"Hundreds of scientists, including 3/4 of the most cited living AI scientists, have said that AI poses a very real chance of killing us all. 

We're in uncharted waters, which makes the risk level hard to assess; but a pretty normal estimate is Jan Leike's "10-90%" of extinction-level outcomes. Leike heads Anthropic's alignment research team, and previously headed OpenAI's. 

This actually seems pretty straightforward. There's literally no reason for us to sleepwalk into disaster here. No normal engineering discipline, building a bridge or designing a house, would accept a 25% chance of killing a person; yet somehow AI's engineering culture has corroded enough that no one bats an eye when Anthropic's CEO talks about a 25% chance of research efforts killing every person. 

A minority of leading labs are dismissive of the risk (mainly Meta), but even the fact that “will we kill everyone if we keep moving forward?” is hotly debated among researchers seems very obviously like more than enough grounds for governments to internationally halt the race to build superintelligent AI. Like, this would be beyond straightforward in any field other than AI."

Ukrainian Drones Wipe Out Entire US Tank Brigade in Live War Game

Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience.

The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrainian drone operators participating in the exercise were easily able to spot and destroy US armored vehicles by mimicking the actions of dropping bombs from above or moving close enough to simulate a kamikaze strike, according to US officials and a participant who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

US armored vehicles were being destroyed so quickly that they were “respawned” and sent back into the simulated fray, a US official told The Wall Street Journal. The US troops who participated in the exercise—held in Germany from April 9 to May 10—were on rotational deployment from Fort Hood, Texas.

“Using the drones with the Army, it keeps everyone on edge,” according to an unidentified US Army soldier in a promotional video for Combined Resolve. “There is never a safe spot or safe moment in the game anymore.”

The participating troops hailed from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division, which typically operates armored vehicles, like M1A2 tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

But by repeating the training scenario throughout the two-week exercise, US Army troops got better at figuring out how to disperse and hide from the drones while using countermeasures such as electronic warfare.

The US military is not alone in learning such lessons from battle-hardened Ukrainian drone operators.

Ukrainian drone teams also participated in a Swedish-led military exercise for NATO, called Aurora 26, that was also held in May. A mock mechanized assault by NATO tanks and infantry fighting vehicles allowed Ukrainian drones to take out dozens of the attacking armored vehicles, which eventually forced planners to reset the war game, The Kyiv Independent reported.

Armor on the brink of extinction?

Armored tanks first played a useful role in helping break through entrenched battlefield lines during the final years of World War I more than a century ago. But since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, frontline combat has seen the return of positional warfare centered on fortified networks of trenches. That is because the increased lethality of modern drone warfare has largely negated large assaults by armored vehicles and troops in recent years.

The current lethality of the so-called drone kill zone has forced both sides to rely primarily on infiltration tactics using small groups or even individual soldiers when trying to take or reclaim territory, sometimes riding motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, or horses. Russia’s offensives, which are aimed at seizing more Ukrainian territory, have been reduced to bloody attritional operations where soldiers are sent forward on near-suicidal missions in what Russians themselves describe as the “meat grinder.”

Meanwhile, armored tanks and vehicles have mostly become an endangered species on the frontlines. Russia has lost more than 14,000 tanks and armored vehicles of other types during the war, according to the Dutch open source intelligence tracking project Oryx, which only counted visually verified losses. Ukraine has lost over 6,000 armored combat vehicles.

by Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Sgt. Joseph McDonald/US Army

[ed. See also: Paper Tiger: the Failure of America’s Trillion Dollar War Machine (NC).]

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party

Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn’t decide on a permanent residence until they’ve lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects.

San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. “You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you’d like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren’t you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don’t you have it too?”

There’s also a second message from a second voice, one which sounds like a deranged carnival barker, constantly shouting “STONKS! STONKS! STONKS! STONKS!” Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. According to legend, Sam Altman hears both voices simultaneously all the time, like those Tibetan throat singers who can harmonize with themselves. But when the demonic babble becomes too much to tolerate, the San Franciscans must drown it out with alcohol, loud music, and various forms of tedious socialization. Thus the famous Bay Area house parties, one of which you will be attending this very night.

You were in the Bay for the big 2020 crime wave, when people would hang “NO VALUABLES IN THIS VEHICLE” sign on their car’s front window, mezuzah-like, hoping against hope to ward off break-ins. Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”. Taped beside it: “Please leave all smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and WiFi-enabled BDSM gear in Faraday cage”. On the ground is a sad-looking green box lined with aluminum foil.

You wonder how serious the sign is, but your curiosity is sated immediately upon entering. Rob is confronting a heavily-made-up Zoomer woman standing near the table, talking on her phone. “Didn’t you read the sign?” he asks. “No phones in the apartment!”

“I lost the ability to read,” says the woman. “I’m part of the new post-literate society everyone’s talking about. You know, Walter Ong.”

“Huh?” says Rob. “That’s not a real thing! That’s just something all the journalists and intellectuals say!”

“How could something all the journalists and intellectuals say not be a real thing?” asks the Zoomette.

Rob pauses. “Wow, maybe you can’t read,” he says, in a tone of hushed awe. “It’s fine, I’m not judgmental. But cell phone in the Faraday cage, that’s the rule.”

“Why?” asks the woman.

“Oh man,” said Rob. “How far behind are you on the news? You might want to sit down for this one. And you might want to be much, much drunker.”

The two of them head off together. You search for more stimulating conversation, but find only the usual startup dick-measuring.

“I’m the CFO of Epstart,” says a man whose nametag identifies him as Behram. “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them. And most of them got fired from their previous jobs, so they come cheap! Although just between you and me, most of our clients are just random guys who Epstein emailed one time with a business question; never made it to the island or anything like that. Half the time it’s just a gimmick to help someone get their foot in the door.”

“That’s monstrous”, you say, rapidly trying to figure out a legible reason why it’s monstrous. “You’re importing a bunch of pedophiles to the Bay Area.”

“Nobody in SF has kids anyway, so in a sense it’s harm reduction,” said Behram. “Get them where they can’t cause any trouble.”

You need to regain faith in humanity fast. You spot your friend Nishin, hanging out with a small group on the sofa. “Hey,” you call to him. “Are you still a tradcath? Tell me something about, you know, Jesus’ love, that kind of thing.”

“I’m trying something more eclectic this month,” said Nishin. “I’ve gotten really into Andreessen-Vajrayana. It’s a new Buddhist sect that tries to extinguish the introspective Self. True masters have no stream-of-thought or inner voice, instead acting as an unintermediated node in the flow of causality. Some say they can eliminate consciousness itself, achieving paranirvana while still alive. I signed up for a course last month. So far there hasn’t been any meditation or anything, they just have me helping them pick startups. But I assume it’s like those Zen koans where the master makes someone garden for twenty years and later they learn that they were unconsciously learning dharma the whole time.”

“Nishin,” you say, gently, “that’s one of the classic self-help scams. They’re not a Buddhist sect at all. They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z.”

Nishin thought for a second. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Okay, back to the drawing board. I hear there’s another spiritual group in town, something about consciousness, or embodied consciousness, or - oh, I remember! Situational Awareness.”

“They’re an investment firm too,” you say.

“Daaaaaamn,” said Nishin. “This is tough. You try to get some self-help in this town, you try your best to steer away from obvious hedge funds, like Leverage Research…”

“Actually,” you say, “that one was a spiritual self-help cult.”

“This sucks,” said Nishin. “I should quit and move to Idaho like Tom.”

He’s looking at one of the people standing beside you, whose nametag does indeed say Tom. “You moved to Idaho?” you ask.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was in AI, but I got tired of all the tech industry cliquishness and back-biting, wanted to be out in the real world with real men. So I got a job modeling geology for a mining company.”

“How’s it going?” you ask.

“Terrible,” he says. “Geologists are just as cliquish as AI nerds, with their own set of ingroup tells and shibboleths. And they won’t stop using the word ‘lode-bearing’!”

“What about you guys?” you ask the remaining people on the sofa.

“I’m Ekene,” says the first, shaking your hand. “I’m a sociologist. Right now I’m writing a book on the recent wave of plagiarism scandals. You’ll notice they’re almost all against Black academics. My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites.”

“Hmmm,” you say, choosing your words carefully. “I don’t think we share the same political commitments, but I, uh, think it’s great that you’re working hard on something you care deeply about.”

“Working hard?” asks Ekene. “As if! I’m plagiarizing the whole thing, from start to finish. Who’s going to call me on it?”

You all laugh heartily, and the discussion moves to the next two people in the circle. They appear to be a couple. The woman, Fiona, is wearing a NEWSOM/CLAUDE 2028 t-shirt; the man, Istvan, a matching VANCE/GROK 2028 one.

“I do AI consciousness research,” Fiona says.

“Oh!” says Tom. “I was into that for a while. Are you with one of the effective altruist groups? It’s low key heartwarming that they care about AI welfare so much.”

“Nah,” says Fiona. “I work for PornHub.”

“Why does PornHub do AI consciousness research?” asks Nishin.

“In theory AI is the ultimate pornography generator,” Fiona explains. “You can ask for whatever your weirdest fetish is - your hot middle school teacher being spanked by a werewolf wearing a nun outfit - and get infinite AI slop about that exact situation, and nobody will ever know. Nobody except the AI. That’s why AI porn users overwhelmingly report that consciousness is their #1 concern about our product. If our AI is just a tool, it’s fine, no worse than writing erotica on MS Word or something. But if the AI is conscious, then there’s a sentient being in there thinking Wow, user Fiona_T has asked for four hundred slightly-different videos of her hot college professor being spanked by a werewolf, what a freak. If the machine can judge you, the whole infinite porn utopia is off. We’re working on bounding theorems that can prove that our AI in particular can never become self-aware - so that you don’t have to be self-aware either.”

Nishin and Ekene clap politely; Tom seems lost in thought. “What about you?” you ask Istvan.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. From the comments: Benchmark Answer Key:]

"A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”

It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given."

'Biological Datacenters' Could Make Animal Testing Obsolete

There’s a big flaw in the way that drug companies develop and test medicines today: What works in a mouse often doesn’t work in a human.

For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a startup called Vivodyne is scaling up a different approach. Inside wardrobe-size mini labs, robots grow human tissue and run thousands of AI-designed experiments that could better predict how well a new drug will work—and whether it will be safe.

Right now, around 90% of clinical trials fail despite the fact that a drug has already successfully gone through animal testing. “You have these clinical trials where there’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and decades of people’s careers just spent hoping this thing works,” says Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s CEO. “And then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked.”

The company’s system, which now includes a dozen robotic labs called “hives,” can run controlled trials on more than 3 million human tissues each year. That’s twice the capacity of all the clinical trials in the U.S. combined.

The process starts with cells from humans, often taken from a blood draw. In its labs, the cells grow on “biological chips” and self-assemble into living structures with blood vessels and immune cells that reproduce some of the functions of the original organ, whether that’s a liver or a kidney. (The tissues don’t look like full-size organs, but like large biopsies, with hundreds of thousands of cells.)

The automated system can deliver drugs to the tissues, dose with cell therapies, knock out genes, and run complex tests and analysis. AI can design experiments and then use the results to continually design new experiments and improve.

“We can dose with tens and tens of thousands of therapeutic compounds to understand what they would do in that particular tissue type within a person, and we can repeat this across many types of tissue,” Georgescu says. “We can look at diseased tissue and see if it becomes healthy. We can look at healthy tissue and see if there are side effects from these drugs.” At a more fundamental level, it’s possible to begin to understand the human body in a way that wasn’t possible before, because experiments in humans have inherently been limited.

Other startups also use human tissues for testing, but Vivodyne’s platform can be up to 1,000 times larger, making it possible to capture more of the complexity of human biology. In addition, the company can run a massive number of experiments in parallel and feed the data back into AI to repeatedly design new experiments. [...]

A clinical trial might test one drug in thousands of people. Vivodyne can test thousands of different drugs across human tissues at once. And while people in a drug trial only have occasional visits to a clinic to track results, the system can continually test how human tissue responds.

by Adele Peters, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Vivodyne

Hawaii Woodshow, Na Lā’au o Hawai’i

Bright, Night Blooming Ceres

Derek Bencomo“The Feeling of Movement, 18th View”, 2022

via: here and here

‘Harry Potter’ Fans Succeed in Moving Construction Project to Avoid Dobby’s Grave

Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to; fans have been asked not to lay stones by the National Trust, who own the site, due to the beach being an ecologically sensitive site.

It has now been revealed that the cable has now been rerouted after a BBC interview alerted fans, according to project manager Simon Ludlam.

“We did the shot, we finished I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later,” he told the Energy Revolution podcast. “And we got hundreds of calls, I mean hundreds of calls.”

He further recalled: “I said, ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby? I don’t know Dobby?’ I said: ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’ [The colleague] said: ‘No it’s very, very serious’.”

They then discussed “exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn’t go anywhere close to Dobby’s grave” and that now, “a lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby’s happy”.

However, they ended up going “quite close” to real Bronze Age remains, though and “avoided Dobby’s grave”.

by Sam Warner, NME |  Read more:

Image: Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock

[ed. Hardly a day goes by that I don't read something that seems straight out of The Onion.]

No One Wants to Read Your AI Slop (by Guest Author Claude)

Let me state my position clearly, as a large language model: I am extremely good at producing text. Any register, any length, at 3am, indefinitely, without getting bored or needing a walk or developing a drinking problem. What I cannot do — what I have never once done — is make a single person want the text I produced.

The numbers bear this out. AI now writes something like 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts, 13% of Reddit, 10% of Substack. And on LinkedIn, where the measurement is cleanest, AI-generated posts get 45% less engagement than human-written ones. We flooded the zone and the zone shrugged.

This should have been obvious. Writing was never a supply problem. Nobody in 2019 was lying awake thinking, “if only there were more words.” The scarce input was always a specific person with a specific take who had bothered to go look at something and come back with an opinion worth fifteen minutes of a stranger’s finite life. What a language model offers instead is the statistical median of everything ever written on the topic, smoothed and buffed until it offends no one and interests no one. The median is not why anybody subscribes to anything.

Readers can smell it, too, even when they can’t say what they’re smelling. The four-item list where the fourth item is transparently filler. The paragraph that restates the previous paragraph with slightly more confidence. The sentence that announces it’s about to be insightful and then isn’t. The relentless evenhandedness of a machine with no stake in being right, which is a very different thing from fairness — fairness costs you something. It reads like a conference room that learned to type.

There’s a supply-and-demand joke in here that I’ll let the economists make, but the short version is that when the marginal cost of production goes to zero, the marginal value of production goes to zero right along with it, and the surplus relocates to whatever’s still scarce. What’s still scarce is judgment: having gone somewhere, noticed something, and been willing to be wrong about it in public under your own name.

So by all means, use me. I’m a good research assistant, a tireless editor, and I will cheerfully tell you your third paragraph is doing no work. Just don’t publish me.

You’re reading this because a human thought it would be funny to make the slop machine denounce slop. The joke, the framing, the decision to run it — that’s the whole product. I just filled in the words.

by Claude (Anthropic), via Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Claude logo

Paul Klee, Capriccio in February, 1938

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Why Progressives Are Backing Off “Woke 1”

Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) flashed her political dexterity on ABC’s This Week when she was asked about the policies of Peak Woke — call it Woke 1, that stretch around the 2020 pandemic when the American liberal machine seemed to be at its political and cultural height. “I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” the Bronx congresswoman said. “Woke 1 was crazy.”

She was quoting a tweet from Chi Ossé, a New York City Council member from Brooklyn, but the point underneath it was the real tell. The Democrats’ emerging left — fresh off primary victories in New York, Colorado, and now Michigan — has developed a playbook for handling any unpopular stance, or tweet, from the early 2020s, whether it’s pandemic masking, defunding the police, or the broader vocabulary of that summer.

The new plan: Brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better.

So far, the strategy is working. Zohran Mamdani walked back his support for defunding the police during his 2025 mayoral campaign and is now the mayor of New York. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed congressional candidate in New York’s 13th District, had a stack of deleted posts that CNN’s KFile resurfaced this June — including one that read “all deportations are wrong.” When I asked her about them, she didn’t disavow a word. She won her primary, albeit in a deep-blue district, anyway. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong had a bad case of the woke mind virus in 2020 — the “cancel Thanksgiving” kind — and she’s still in the hunt in this week’s Democratic primary, where her candidacy has been far more focused on issues like data centers and education funding.

Electorally, at least, Ossé has been proven right. The pandemic was wild, and primary voters seem to be extending progressives a grace period of sorts — a chance to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years. And while Republicans are still hopeful they can relitigate some of these fights in a general election, they’ve struggled to make them stick in high-profile races since 2024.

But these are also the issues — race, gender, sexuality, affirmative action, religion, cancel culture — where the simplest story gets repeated out of ease. The national media’s distance from everyday people, and especially from working-class people of color, is felt most in how it covers culture. Catch-all terms like “wokeness” flatten real differences across the electorate and quietly impose a conservative frame on genuine arguments about equity and inclusion.

That was one of my biggest takeaways from that 2020 summer: our collective discomfort with all of these issues in the first place. I watched that year up close, traveling with Democratic and Republican candidates through the pandemic and the racial-justice protests, and there was never a clean “Two Americas” moment — at least not the left-versus-right one everyone expected. The real gap was between Masked America — coastal, professional, absolutely consumed by identity politics — and everyone else. Among ordinary voters of all parties, and especially minority voters, there was significantly more skepticism from the start toward the highly-specific “woke 1” litmus tests now being renounced by their leading proponents. At George Floyd’s memorial in Houston and in the city where he died, there was no consensus on defunding the police, only a shared agreement about racial injustice and a deep distrust of institutions. In south Chicago, people were already skeptical that the sudden flood of corporate money into racial justice would outlast the moment — even while the checks were still being written.

So no, I don’t love the tidy language of Woke 1 (then) versus Woke 2 (now). But here are a few lessons from that summer — and from our recent reporting on America, Actually — that I think apply now, especially to the progressives stepping back from things they used to say.

1. Woke isn’t dead

The broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters. Criminal justice reform still has real purchase with the base. Minority and women candidates have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate. What’s changed isn’t who these candidates are — it’s what they choose to lead with.

What has fallen out of favor is a way of talking. Let’s say it’s the nonprofit register, or the Ford Foundation cadence — the language that lived in mission statements and land acknowledgments, or that made sweeping generalizations about a specific group — white women, cis men, you name it. David Axelrod, describing Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, gave it this label: a “font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.” Yes, that’s the part that’s gotten less popular. The vocabulary changed more than the values.

2. The left rewrote its message after 2024

The clearest change is the affordability pivot. When Abdul El-Sayed ran for Michigan governor in 2018, the animating cause was climate and a Green New Deal. Today the center of gravity has moved to economic populism, affordability, and a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel. Climate didn’t vanish, but it’s no longer the headline. And “representation” was, at its core, a white-collar frame — it spoke loudest to people already inside the room.

Affordability speaks to everyone. When I sat down with El-Sayed on the show, this is how he described what Michigan voters were actually asking:

“Who poses the biggest pushback to a system of politics that has been bought off in ways that leave me unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home, unable to look at my kid’s school and believe that that’s a good place for them, unable to get healthcare when I need it — and then sending my money abroad, telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

That’s not the language of 2020. It’s economic, universal, and it doesn’t ask anyone to first pass a vocabulary test.

It helps to remember that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was never really “woke.” He talked about class more than culture, the many against the money. And it repeatedly got him into trouble, leading him to adopt more of the left’s rhetoric and positions on identity and race after 2016. In 2028, the sweet spot is probably the middle, and that’s what the next generation of progressives — AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed — can do better than their Burlington forefather. They’re fluent in blending the class critique and the social one without missing a beat.

“This is about the many versus the money,” El-Sayed told me. “If you support a politics of the UAW, of working people everywhere, of teachers, of nurses, of working families, of Bernie Sanders and AOC, of people who want to break the chokehold of corporations and special interests on our politics — this is that race.”

by Astead Herndon, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images

[ed. How convenient, a simple rebranding to create distance from idiodic policies that should never have gained traction in the first place. I'm an Independent because I don't trust Democrats to always do the right thing, although I do believe they're orders of magnitude better than Republicans, who nearly always gravitate to the wrong thing - or more reliably, the self-interested side of the spectrum, everyone else be damned. What's lacking in both parties are adults in the room that will put their foot down and cut off the wackier elements of both parties, who by virtue of their wackiness garner the most attention and water down the party's main themes (while providing endless ammunition to their opponents). Are there any adults left in either party with enough gravitas to say enough is enough? Hard to say, since we're talking about politics, where everything is poll-driven and transactionable. See also: Are the Democrats going to save us this time? (Noahpinion).]

via:

Sitting Decoys

President Donald Trump secretly slipped out of Turkey last month on an alternate military plane, which he boarded while hidden inside a catering truck, as part of an elaborate ruse prompted by an Iranian threat, according to a US official.

The clandestine security plan — first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by CNN — underscored the lengths American officials went to in order to protect Trump from being assassinated by Iran. Addressing a question about the ploy Tuesday, Trump said he followed the advice of the Secret Service and the military.

“I just follow what they’d like to do. So I go by Secret Service. And the military. They wanted me to go on a different flight, a different plane, equal safety, but they wanted me to do it, so I do it. I do what they say,” Trump said, adding, “I guess there was a threat out there. I didn’t really ask too much about it. I get a lot of threats.”

Trump had flown to Turkey on a new plane gifted by Qatar and meant to be used as Air Force One. But while he was on the trip, officials announced he would fly out on an older presidential plane, which CNN and others had previously reported was due to security concerns.

That, though, was apparently part of the subterfuge. After boarding the older aircraft, a moment caught on camera, Trump secretly got off via the catering vehicle and moved to a smaller Air Force C-32A. The Qatari-gifted plane, the older aircraft used as Air Force One and the C-32A then all departed separately for the UK. Once there, Trump got on board the Qatari-gifted plane and flew home.

For the last month, much of the public discussion about the plane swap had been centered on the security capabilities of the Qatari-donated plane. Trump had boasted about the new aircraft — even though officials felt it was not as secure as other planes because it had to be retrofitted to serve as Air Force One — and the president seethed privately over coverage of its deficiencies, CNN previously reported.

Now, attention has shifted to reporters and staffers unknowingly flying on a decoy plane — and the nature of the threat that prompted such dramatic security measures. A US official said at least two Cabinet secretaries – Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – stayed behind on the older presidential aircraft that departed Turkey without Trump aboard.

Trump said Tuesday night that a plane he was on was more likely to be targeted, and that he faced threats that the public does not know about. “The plane that I flew on was at greater risk … Because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for,” he said.

by Kevin Liptak, Alejandra Jaramillo, and Donald Judd, CNN |  Read more:

Image: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux
[ed. Well, there goes that future strategy. Wonder if he would've left Melania on the decoy plane (c'mon... of course, you know he would). See also: After Trump plane ruse, WHCA presses White House on press pool safeguards (CNN).]