Friday, October 23, 2026
Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, Kyiv
The holdings of the Vernadsky National Library include large collections of manuscripts, rare printed books and incunabula. The library has the most complete collection of Slavic writing, including the Peresopnytsia Gospels, one of the most intricate surviving East Slavic manuscripts.
The Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine is the world's foremost repository of Jewish folk music recorded on Edison wax cylinders. Many of these were field recordings made during the Soviet or pre-Soviet era by ethnologists such as Susman Kiselgof, Moisei Beregovsky, and Sofia Magid. Their Collection of Jewish Musical Folklore (1912–1947) was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2005. ~ Wikipedia
France is on the Brink
The French have a phrase for it: “un engrenage,” a vicious spiral. That’s what France is in. Several crises have been long in the making; each now threatens to accelerate the others.
The first is a crisis of liberal democracy. Polls suggest that the far right may take power in the presidential election next spring. The second is a crisis of fiscal mismanagement. France’s public debt has reached a record $4 trillion, with the cost of new government borrowing surging above that of Italy and Greece. The third is a crisis of youth disaffection. French students, protesting against dilapidated schools and diminished life chances, have blocked nearly half of the country’s high schools in the past few weeks.
Clashing with police and bearing inspiring banners, the students have riveted the world’s attention. The protests are certainly dramatic and significant. So too is the rise of the far right. But the fiscal crisis is the most dangerous, underlying many of the country’s woes and threatening to bring it to ruin. France, truly, is on the brink.
The high school protests began in the poor suburbs of Paris in mid-September. They have spread to state-run schools in every region of the country, from big cities to provincial towns. The 15- to 18-year-olds are rebelling against long hours, large class sizes, frequent teacher absences and crumbling school buildings. They also worry about global warming, the rise of the far right and the A.I. threat to jobs for the young. At the center of their complaints is chronic underinvestment.
This is something of a conundrum. After all, the French state spends a great deal on education: around $100 billion a year, or 5.1 percent of gross domestic product, above the European Union average. So what’s going on? Crucially, more than a quarter of that money goes not to the young but to the old, paying the pensions of retired teachers. That points to one of the root causes of the country’s problems. About one-quarter of all state spending goes to pensions; another quarter goes on social services, from health care to unemployment benefits.
No French government has balanced its books for 52 years. Even so, the French debt pile, at 119 percent of gross domestic product, is lower than that of some other countries, including the United States. As recently as 2019, President Emmanuel Macron managed to bring the annual deficit within the E.U. target of 3 percent of G.D.P.
Then came the pandemic. Mr. Macron’s pledge to spend “whatever it takes” to keep the French economy alive during lockdown sent the deficit rocketing to 9.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2020. Accumulated debt rose by $335 billion in one year. France was then slower than other E.U. countries to ease its pandemic subsidies. The government spent another $95 billion to shelter France from rising energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
After that, Mr. Macron lost control. He was re-elected in 2022 but failed to win a majority in the National Assembly. He imposed a modest pension reform in 2023, increasing the official retirement age gradually from 62 to 64. He argued, rightly, that France needed to work longer to afford its generous pensions and welfare system. Yet over 70 percent of French people disagreed, some violently.
In response, Mr. Macron called an ill-advised snap election in 2024, which further reduced the size of his centrist coalition. Since then, two prime ministers have proposed solutions to French overspending. Both were booted out by a majority of left-wing and far-right lawmakers in the National Assembly. The result has been a curious blend of stalemate and chaos.
Mr. Macron deserves some of the blame for the mess. So does the opposition, from the far-left France Unbowed to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. They have preferred to play political games rather than address the gathering fiscal disaster — especially the stifling weight of pensions and other social payments. In February, the center-left Socialists allowed a budget to pass for this year but only at the price of suspending Mr. Macron’s pension reform. [...]
by Mujtaba Rahman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters
[ed. See also: France and the limits of liberalism (Noahpinion); and, France’s Debt Crisis Deepens as Foreign Investors Look for the Exit (WSJ).]
The first is a crisis of liberal democracy. Polls suggest that the far right may take power in the presidential election next spring. The second is a crisis of fiscal mismanagement. France’s public debt has reached a record $4 trillion, with the cost of new government borrowing surging above that of Italy and Greece. The third is a crisis of youth disaffection. French students, protesting against dilapidated schools and diminished life chances, have blocked nearly half of the country’s high schools in the past few weeks.
Clashing with police and bearing inspiring banners, the students have riveted the world’s attention. The protests are certainly dramatic and significant. So too is the rise of the far right. But the fiscal crisis is the most dangerous, underlying many of the country’s woes and threatening to bring it to ruin. France, truly, is on the brink.
This is something of a conundrum. After all, the French state spends a great deal on education: around $100 billion a year, or 5.1 percent of gross domestic product, above the European Union average. So what’s going on? Crucially, more than a quarter of that money goes not to the young but to the old, paying the pensions of retired teachers. That points to one of the root causes of the country’s problems. About one-quarter of all state spending goes to pensions; another quarter goes on social services, from health care to unemployment benefits.
No French government has balanced its books for 52 years. Even so, the French debt pile, at 119 percent of gross domestic product, is lower than that of some other countries, including the United States. As recently as 2019, President Emmanuel Macron managed to bring the annual deficit within the E.U. target of 3 percent of G.D.P.
Then came the pandemic. Mr. Macron’s pledge to spend “whatever it takes” to keep the French economy alive during lockdown sent the deficit rocketing to 9.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2020. Accumulated debt rose by $335 billion in one year. France was then slower than other E.U. countries to ease its pandemic subsidies. The government spent another $95 billion to shelter France from rising energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
After that, Mr. Macron lost control. He was re-elected in 2022 but failed to win a majority in the National Assembly. He imposed a modest pension reform in 2023, increasing the official retirement age gradually from 62 to 64. He argued, rightly, that France needed to work longer to afford its generous pensions and welfare system. Yet over 70 percent of French people disagreed, some violently.
In response, Mr. Macron called an ill-advised snap election in 2024, which further reduced the size of his centrist coalition. Since then, two prime ministers have proposed solutions to French overspending. Both were booted out by a majority of left-wing and far-right lawmakers in the National Assembly. The result has been a curious blend of stalemate and chaos.
Mr. Macron deserves some of the blame for the mess. So does the opposition, from the far-left France Unbowed to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. They have preferred to play political games rather than address the gathering fiscal disaster — especially the stifling weight of pensions and other social payments. In February, the center-left Socialists allowed a budget to pass for this year but only at the price of suspending Mr. Macron’s pension reform. [...]
France remains in many ways a robust and wealthy country. Yet market distrust of France is not so much economic as political. The markets doubt whether a poisonously splintered political system, increasingly dominated by extremes of right and left, will ever agree to the painful changes that are needed to get the public finances back on track. The country, they fear, is becoming socially volatile and institutionally paralyzed. That explains the withdrawal of confidence that has pushed France’s borrowing costs sky-high.
by Mujtaba Rahman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters
[ed. See also: France and the limits of liberalism (Noahpinion); and, France’s Debt Crisis Deepens as Foreign Investors Look for the Exit (WSJ).]
Why So Many Men Aren’t Working
Thirty years ago this summer, the sociologist William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears, in which he attributed high unemployment in urban, largely Black neighborhoods to structural changes in the economy. Conservatives dismissed his argument, contending instead that the problem was a poor work ethic enabled by a welfare system in desperate need of reform. But as a new unemployment crisis has arisen—this time more white, male, and rural—many figures on the right have discovered their inner structuralist.
Prevalent conservative explanations of why one in 10 “prime age” men (25-to-54-year-olds) are economically inactive focus on the decline of industries such as manufacturing and construction that traditionally have employed many men without college degrees. Sounding a lot like Wilson, some of these commentators indict trade policy. “They let other countries raid our factories, steal our jobs, and rob us blind,” President Trump has said of Obama-era policy makers. This critique dovetails with charges that Americans have been forced to fight for the remaining scraps with outsiders. “Legal immigration has been at such high levels, and it’s driven down wages and taken a lot of jobs,” Senator Tom Cotton has argued. And, as The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis recently described, the women’s-rights movement and affirmative action are also frequently invoked as forces that feminized the workplace and brought an end to the kind of work that gave men meaning (and that maybe made women want to date them).
From this diagnosis of men’s woes has followed a misguided attempt at a cure: setting tariffs in the hopes of bringing back manufacturing jobs, kicking out immigrants who might “steal” these jobs from “real” Americans, and vanquishing the DEI culture that has supposedly made workplaces hostile to white men. But the diagnosis is not correct: “Manly” jobs exist and employers are hiring. The trouble lies in finding men who are willing and able to take them.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that, at the end of August, the mining, logging, construction, and manufacturing sectors had about 800,000 job openings. This represents an increase of 148,000 job openings in the past year, during which job openings across the entire economy increased by 160,000. Police departments and other law-enforcement agencies also have had high vacancy rates and difficulty filling those jobs. If the problem were a shortage of work in predominantly male occupations, these vacancies wouldn’t exist.
Does every one of these open positions pay excellent wages, offer good benefits, and allow upward advancement? Surely not, and improving all of those things should increase the willingness of men to apply for work. But the dynamics that have led about 6.7 million men to drop out of the workforce go beyond that.
Part of the problem (so to speak, because in fact it is a virtue of our current system) is that, for many, dropping out of the workforce is not a catastrophic outcome. A century ago, men who did not work—and frequently, their wives and children as well—were in truly desperate situations and at risk for destitution, homelessness, and malnutrition. Real GDP has increased about 20-fold since then, and the federal safety net is exponentially more robust. In such a rich country, inequality notwithstanding, forgoing work incurs much less risk and hence becomes more tolerable. A further, informal safety net has expanded outside of government: Women have flooded into the workforce over the past 75 years, many of whom are now bringing home paychecks to these men. This is not to say that unemployment is congenial. Quite the opposite: It still leads to worse physical and mental health. But it is not as harsh as it once was.
The more consequential factor may be what men are doing with all of the hours that they aren’t working. The economist Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of Men Without Work, made an intriguing observation about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, which provides data on Americans’ daily activities. According to a 2020 Brookings Institute report, prime-age women outside the labor force spend about six hours a day on caregiving and other unpaid work at home; their male counterparts spend fewer than three. The average man without a job devotes less than an hour to such purposes. What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of five and a half hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.
This isn’t just about screen-based consumption. The legalization of marijuana production and sale has collapsed the price and increased the potency of the drug, making it inexpensive to be high most or all of the time. More than a quarter of working-age men who are not employed, in school, or in other training use marijuana, and they tend to consume it every day or almost every day.
These cheap, anesthetizing entertainments don’t just make empty hours fly by more enjoyably; they also may be making men less work-ready. Most jobs—manly or otherwise—require some ability to concentrate, to listen to and follow directions, and to endure discomfort. Many also require knowing how to interact respectfully with women. Days spent watching porn, gambling, and using drugs augment none of these skills. (This is the reality that Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently invoked in an ad depicting a welfare recipient as a young white man playing video games and eating junk food—prompting a number of conservative podcasters and commentators to take to their channels to condemn Sanders over what they felt was an unfair portrayal.) Men of course can still be asked to take more responsibility for themselves to be productive, but modern technology and drug legalization do make the boulder that they are rolling uphill much heavier than what their fathers pushed, and exacerbate the temptation to give up and let it roll back over them.
[ed. I'd be cautious about applying overly broad generalizations. For example, with limited housing options, many men might still be living at home and have other means of support. Or it could be the cultural messaging they're receiving: college degree (high status) vs. trades (low status); quick and easy riches (online gambling/prediction markets); fame and fortune (YouTube star/influencer) etc.]
Prevalent conservative explanations of why one in 10 “prime age” men (25-to-54-year-olds) are economically inactive focus on the decline of industries such as manufacturing and construction that traditionally have employed many men without college degrees. Sounding a lot like Wilson, some of these commentators indict trade policy. “They let other countries raid our factories, steal our jobs, and rob us blind,” President Trump has said of Obama-era policy makers. This critique dovetails with charges that Americans have been forced to fight for the remaining scraps with outsiders. “Legal immigration has been at such high levels, and it’s driven down wages and taken a lot of jobs,” Senator Tom Cotton has argued. And, as The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis recently described, the women’s-rights movement and affirmative action are also frequently invoked as forces that feminized the workplace and brought an end to the kind of work that gave men meaning (and that maybe made women want to date them).
The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that, at the end of August, the mining, logging, construction, and manufacturing sectors had about 800,000 job openings. This represents an increase of 148,000 job openings in the past year, during which job openings across the entire economy increased by 160,000. Police departments and other law-enforcement agencies also have had high vacancy rates and difficulty filling those jobs. If the problem were a shortage of work in predominantly male occupations, these vacancies wouldn’t exist.
Does every one of these open positions pay excellent wages, offer good benefits, and allow upward advancement? Surely not, and improving all of those things should increase the willingness of men to apply for work. But the dynamics that have led about 6.7 million men to drop out of the workforce go beyond that.
Part of the problem (so to speak, because in fact it is a virtue of our current system) is that, for many, dropping out of the workforce is not a catastrophic outcome. A century ago, men who did not work—and frequently, their wives and children as well—were in truly desperate situations and at risk for destitution, homelessness, and malnutrition. Real GDP has increased about 20-fold since then, and the federal safety net is exponentially more robust. In such a rich country, inequality notwithstanding, forgoing work incurs much less risk and hence becomes more tolerable. A further, informal safety net has expanded outside of government: Women have flooded into the workforce over the past 75 years, many of whom are now bringing home paychecks to these men. This is not to say that unemployment is congenial. Quite the opposite: It still leads to worse physical and mental health. But it is not as harsh as it once was.
The more consequential factor may be what men are doing with all of the hours that they aren’t working. The economist Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of Men Without Work, made an intriguing observation about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, which provides data on Americans’ daily activities. According to a 2020 Brookings Institute report, prime-age women outside the labor force spend about six hours a day on caregiving and other unpaid work at home; their male counterparts spend fewer than three. The average man without a job devotes less than an hour to such purposes. What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of five and a half hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.
This isn’t just about screen-based consumption. The legalization of marijuana production and sale has collapsed the price and increased the potency of the drug, making it inexpensive to be high most or all of the time. More than a quarter of working-age men who are not employed, in school, or in other training use marijuana, and they tend to consume it every day or almost every day.
These cheap, anesthetizing entertainments don’t just make empty hours fly by more enjoyably; they also may be making men less work-ready. Most jobs—manly or otherwise—require some ability to concentrate, to listen to and follow directions, and to endure discomfort. Many also require knowing how to interact respectfully with women. Days spent watching porn, gambling, and using drugs augment none of these skills. (This is the reality that Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently invoked in an ad depicting a welfare recipient as a young white man playing video games and eating junk food—prompting a number of conservative podcasters and commentators to take to their channels to condemn Sanders over what they felt was an unfair portrayal.) Men of course can still be asked to take more responsibility for themselves to be productive, but modern technology and drug legalization do make the boulder that they are rolling uphill much heavier than what their fathers pushed, and exacerbate the temptation to give up and let it roll back over them.
by Keith Humphreys and Brett Orell, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Sources: PhotoObject.net Getty; iStock/Getty
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Sacrificial Ham
On Kimberly Guilfoyle, recently departed US ambassador to Greece
... with her fame-hungry dreams and money-ravenous schemes, she didn’t violate the Trump ethos. She paid tribute to it. She didn’t contradict the Trump brand. She was its gaudy, greedy hood ornament.
In conventional political circles in ordinary times, an aide gets the ax because he or she has fallen out of step with the other members of the team and misunderstood the operation’s ideals. Guilfoyle understood and embodied them perfectly.
That’s what makes her banishment so interesting. It speaks to one of Trump’s favorite parlor tricks: pretending to be the opposite of who he is by feigning offense at behavior that’s a mirror of his own. He accuses Democrats of the very political thievery that he has attempted. He calls his predecessors economic ignoramuses as he redefines incompetence in that arena. And he signals disapproval of how Guilfoyle took advantage of her station as if such unscrupulous opportunism isn’t the very essence of him, his family and his friends.
The way I figure it, Trump made an example of Guilfoyle so that he doesn’t have to crack down on others in his rancidly corrupt administration. She’s the sacrificial ham. And he allowed himself an extra measure of cruel fun by acting as if he barely knew her.
“She wasn’t a member of my family,” he told reporters who asked about her resignation when it was announced last week. “She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago.”
A long time ago? Guilfoyle, 57, and Donald Trump Jr., 48, broke up in 2024. The president guesses? She and Junior were engaged and owned a house together in Florida. And she shrieked her allegiance to his wretched clan in speeches at both the 2020 and the 2024 Republican conventions. People in the front rows still haven’t gotten their hearing back.
[ed. Ah, schadenfreude. So satisfying sometimes, especially when so hilarious. Not part of our regular programming, but hard to resist rolling around in the mud every once in awhile. 😄 See also: this Wall Street Journal report (Flor de Maga?):]
The couple got engaged before Trump left office, and that spring they bought a $9.7 million Florida mansion. Guilfoyle pursued a series of business ventures—a line of hair care and fragrances called Flor de Maga; champagne ventures with names such as 1776 Liberté and Liberty Dream; a pet pharmaceuticals service called PETriot Vet, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records. Those trademarks have since been abandoned."
In conventional political circles in ordinary times, an aide gets the ax because he or she has fallen out of step with the other members of the team and misunderstood the operation’s ideals. Guilfoyle understood and embodied them perfectly.
The way I figure it, Trump made an example of Guilfoyle so that he doesn’t have to crack down on others in his rancidly corrupt administration. She’s the sacrificial ham. And he allowed himself an extra measure of cruel fun by acting as if he barely knew her.
“She wasn’t a member of my family,” he told reporters who asked about her resignation when it was announced last week. “She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago.”
A long time ago? Guilfoyle, 57, and Donald Trump Jr., 48, broke up in 2024. The president guesses? She and Junior were engaged and owned a house together in Florida. And she shrieked her allegiance to his wretched clan in speeches at both the 2020 and the 2024 Republican conventions. People in the front rows still haven’t gotten their hearing back.
by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ben Wiseman[ed. Ah, schadenfreude. So satisfying sometimes, especially when so hilarious. Not part of our regular programming, but hard to resist rolling around in the mud every once in awhile. 😄 See also: this Wall Street Journal report (Flor de Maga?):]
***
"She began dating Trump Jr. halfway through his father’s first term and quickly emerged as one of Trump’s most aggressive defenders. In her 2020 convention speech, she warned that Democrats were trying to enslave Americans with liberal ideology.
Billionaires Want to Buy This Election. It Isn’t Working.
Two weeks from now, the midterm elections will deliver an explosion of narrative meaning: about the country and its future, the president and his movement and his legacy. But the election cycle has already taught us a couple of very important things about money’s place in our democracy.
One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.
Let’s take the first point. This election will be the most expensive in history, with more money projected to be spent on political advertisements than even during the presidential campaign of two years ago. And though President Trump’s popularity is at historic lows and the Republican Party regularly registers tsunami-scale deficits in polling, Republicans are actually leading in the overall spending race. How? According to calculations by The Washington Post, the four biggest donors this cycle (including groups, nonprofits and firms) have given to Republicans, as have seven of the top ten. The single largest donor, Elon Musk, has donated 3.6 times as much money as the biggest Democratic donor, George Soros, and is almost single-handedly bankrolling Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate race in Texas against James Talarico, as my colleague Teddy Schleifer reported last week.
In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.
The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.
This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.
Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.
Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.[ed. The party of grift overplayed its hand. But, never underestimate the gullibility of the American public.]
One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.
In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.
The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.
This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.
Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.
Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Would You Press This Button?
Imagine Americans were offered this deal: Hit a big red button and China becomes the world’s first hyperpower. It rockets past the United States in technical sophistication, manufacturing capacity and wealth generation. China becomes so technologically advanced, and its human and robotic work force so huge, that Americans are left with only the dimmest comprehension of what is playing out on the economic, scientific and perhaps even geopolitical frontier.
But the rewards for disempowering ourselves are magnificent. The global economy booms, and Americans grow richer than ever before. We are given new cures and cheap energy and wondrous entertainments. Machines perform our labor and mood-enhancing drugs protect our psyches. We need not struggle — perhaps we need not even work — to live lives, long lives, of luxury and ease.
There, then, is the trade: Cede control and much that we have struggled for can be ours. But control, once gone, is gone.
Would you press the button?
The A.I. conversation centers questions of catastrophe. I want to center the question of success: What if A.I. works not as its architects fear, but as its inventors and investors hope? Wander outside of Silicon Valley’s p(doom) — their shorthand for the probability that A.I. extinguishes the human race — and you might notice that their p(utopia) has problems, too. They imagine something like the world I sketched above, but more extreme, with A.I. playing the role assigned to China.
An amusing collision of these visions came when Jacob Coxon, the 27-year-old OpenAI and Anthropic whistle-blower, sat down with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Coxon was there to warn that A.I. might kill us all, but when Stewart offhandedly mocked the “future utopia” of the A.I. architects, Coxon stopped him. “Well, I am a believer in the future utopia,” Coxon said. But what he said next sounded grimmer: “So I heard you talking about jobs. I think there will be no jobs.”
Coxon went on to describe “the world that is being envisioned by the people building this technology” as “no jobs. Universal high income. The dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.”
This vision, or some variant of it, is common enough at A.I. companies. I have heard it often. But most people, face to face with this idea, are incredulous at hearing this world — in which virtually all advanced cognitive work is done by A.I. — described as utopian. Stewart certainly was. “So we’ll all just be performing in a play?” he asked.
I tend toward skepticism of the jobless future. Human beings are good at nothing if not finding something to do. (Who would have imagined, in our grueling agrarian past, that podcasting could be a full-time job?) But I find it easy to imagine how human control and comprehension of much of society could be handed over to machines. A few recent developments — some reflecting the outer boundary of what advanced A.I. can do and the other reflecting its advancing utility in daily life — reveal the ways it is already happening.
A few weeks ago, OpenAI dumped more than 700 manuscripts proposing solutions to nearly 400 advanced mathematical problems all at once. If you’re not a mathematician, and you are not close to any mathematicians, this may have passed by unnoticed. Within mathematics, it was an earthquake.
I am not a mathematician, but my father is. The area of math he worked in had to do with the way electrons move through disordered crystals. Sitting at the center of his field were two problems that were more than just unsolved; they were, my father says, “totally out of reach — nobody had any idea how to solve them.” OpenAI’s systems solved them in an afternoon. “It is the end of mathematics as we know it,” he texted me. “It is the first time I am glad I have retired.”
The newly formed Association for Human Mathematics, which has about 1,000 members, quickly released a statement: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” It’s an interesting sentence. Should mathematicians be able to decide which math problems do and do not get solved? How do we weigh the benefits and costs of a world where the frontier of mathematics is advancing rapidly, but human beings no longer understand it?
Imagine the OpenAI process running repeatedly, over a period of years: A.I. swarms solving problems no human being has solved, then using those solutions to pose new problems, which are solved by other A.I. swarms that have absorbed the work done by their predecessors, which allows for the formulation of yet more problems, and on and on. It is too much new math for humans to comprehend, but A.I.s can absorb it easily, and they do, driving forward advances in material sciences and energy production. Human beings do not understand all this new science, but they do benefit from it.
Is that world so different from the one we now inhabit? Few of us understand much about the borderlands of human knowledge. I cannot remotely comprehend the math my father did. How different is it if none of us can understand the math the A.I. does? And yet, a world where the farthest edge of knowledge and progress rests in algorithmic systems, rather than human minds, does seem different to me. Human control — which is, in my view, inseparable from human comprehension — is worth something, is it not?
As I was writing this, I read about a study in which theoretical physicists posed 50 complex, unpublished problems to advanced A.I. systems. These problems were difficult but solvable, taking a physicist who was expert in the particular area of the problem about a day to solve. The best A.I. solved 98 percent of them, at a cost of less than $3 per problem.
The physicists initially thought the A.I. had performed worse than it had, but the model insisted that it was the humans, not the A.I., that had erred, and it was right. “Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this day to come as soon as it has,” Suvrat Raju, one of the physicists behind the study, wrote. “After we found these results, I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights.”
The grimmest A.I. stories often center on a single moment when superintelligence slips out of our control and begins plotting our demise. But the scenario I find more likely and more irresistible is called “gradual disempowerment.”
In this telling, there is no one moment when humanity loses control; there is instead a progression of small moments when we willingly give control away because it is the rational thing to do. Firms turn first more of their work and then more of their decision making over to advanced A.I.s because it gives them a competitive edge. Governments turn more battlefield decisions over to A.I. because it makes their forces swifter and more lethal. A.I. companies turn to recursive self-improvement — where the A.I. autonomously creates the next A.I. model — because it vaults them ahead of their competitors.
The key to this process is competitive pressure. Companies and governments and A.I. labs that resist are outcompeted by peers that give A.I.s more control and autonomy. Advances in A.I. systems — and, eventually, in A.I.-controlled drones and robotics — keep expanding the amount of work A.I.s can do better than human beings. Even assuming the A.I.s remain helpful and pliant, more and more of society’s basic functioning slips beyond the grasp of human beings.
But the rewards for disempowering ourselves are magnificent. The global economy booms, and Americans grow richer than ever before. We are given new cures and cheap energy and wondrous entertainments. Machines perform our labor and mood-enhancing drugs protect our psyches. We need not struggle — perhaps we need not even work — to live lives, long lives, of luxury and ease.
Would you press the button?
The A.I. conversation centers questions of catastrophe. I want to center the question of success: What if A.I. works not as its architects fear, but as its inventors and investors hope? Wander outside of Silicon Valley’s p(doom) — their shorthand for the probability that A.I. extinguishes the human race — and you might notice that their p(utopia) has problems, too. They imagine something like the world I sketched above, but more extreme, with A.I. playing the role assigned to China.
An amusing collision of these visions came when Jacob Coxon, the 27-year-old OpenAI and Anthropic whistle-blower, sat down with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Coxon was there to warn that A.I. might kill us all, but when Stewart offhandedly mocked the “future utopia” of the A.I. architects, Coxon stopped him. “Well, I am a believer in the future utopia,” Coxon said. But what he said next sounded grimmer: “So I heard you talking about jobs. I think there will be no jobs.”
Coxon went on to describe “the world that is being envisioned by the people building this technology” as “no jobs. Universal high income. The dividends from entirely automated economic production can be distributed among real humans.”
This vision, or some variant of it, is common enough at A.I. companies. I have heard it often. But most people, face to face with this idea, are incredulous at hearing this world — in which virtually all advanced cognitive work is done by A.I. — described as utopian. Stewart certainly was. “So we’ll all just be performing in a play?” he asked.
I tend toward skepticism of the jobless future. Human beings are good at nothing if not finding something to do. (Who would have imagined, in our grueling agrarian past, that podcasting could be a full-time job?) But I find it easy to imagine how human control and comprehension of much of society could be handed over to machines. A few recent developments — some reflecting the outer boundary of what advanced A.I. can do and the other reflecting its advancing utility in daily life — reveal the ways it is already happening.
A few weeks ago, OpenAI dumped more than 700 manuscripts proposing solutions to nearly 400 advanced mathematical problems all at once. If you’re not a mathematician, and you are not close to any mathematicians, this may have passed by unnoticed. Within mathematics, it was an earthquake.
I am not a mathematician, but my father is. The area of math he worked in had to do with the way electrons move through disordered crystals. Sitting at the center of his field were two problems that were more than just unsolved; they were, my father says, “totally out of reach — nobody had any idea how to solve them.” OpenAI’s systems solved them in an afternoon. “It is the end of mathematics as we know it,” he texted me. “It is the first time I am glad I have retired.”
The newly formed Association for Human Mathematics, which has about 1,000 members, quickly released a statement: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” It’s an interesting sentence. Should mathematicians be able to decide which math problems do and do not get solved? How do we weigh the benefits and costs of a world where the frontier of mathematics is advancing rapidly, but human beings no longer understand it?
Imagine the OpenAI process running repeatedly, over a period of years: A.I. swarms solving problems no human being has solved, then using those solutions to pose new problems, which are solved by other A.I. swarms that have absorbed the work done by their predecessors, which allows for the formulation of yet more problems, and on and on. It is too much new math for humans to comprehend, but A.I.s can absorb it easily, and they do, driving forward advances in material sciences and energy production. Human beings do not understand all this new science, but they do benefit from it.
Is that world so different from the one we now inhabit? Few of us understand much about the borderlands of human knowledge. I cannot remotely comprehend the math my father did. How different is it if none of us can understand the math the A.I. does? And yet, a world where the farthest edge of knowledge and progress rests in algorithmic systems, rather than human minds, does seem different to me. Human control — which is, in my view, inseparable from human comprehension — is worth something, is it not?
As I was writing this, I read about a study in which theoretical physicists posed 50 complex, unpublished problems to advanced A.I. systems. These problems were difficult but solvable, taking a physicist who was expert in the particular area of the problem about a day to solve. The best A.I. solved 98 percent of them, at a cost of less than $3 per problem.
The physicists initially thought the A.I. had performed worse than it had, but the model insisted that it was the humans, not the A.I., that had erred, and it was right. “Frankly, I wasn’t expecting this day to come as soon as it has,” Suvrat Raju, one of the physicists behind the study, wrote. “After we found these results, I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights.”
The grimmest A.I. stories often center on a single moment when superintelligence slips out of our control and begins plotting our demise. But the scenario I find more likely and more irresistible is called “gradual disempowerment.”
In this telling, there is no one moment when humanity loses control; there is instead a progression of small moments when we willingly give control away because it is the rational thing to do. Firms turn first more of their work and then more of their decision making over to advanced A.I.s because it gives them a competitive edge. Governments turn more battlefield decisions over to A.I. because it makes their forces swifter and more lethal. A.I. companies turn to recursive self-improvement — where the A.I. autonomously creates the next A.I. model — because it vaults them ahead of their competitors.
The key to this process is competitive pressure. Companies and governments and A.I. labs that resist are outcompeted by peers that give A.I.s more control and autonomy. Advances in A.I. systems — and, eventually, in A.I.-controlled drones and robotics — keep expanding the amount of work A.I.s can do better than human beings. Even assuming the A.I.s remain helpful and pliant, more and more of society’s basic functioning slips beyond the grasp of human beings.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tamara Porras for The New York Times[ed. We're screwed. Not because there aren't well-intentioned and very capable people working on AI safety and future planning but because the incentives to keep going as fast and far as we can are too great (eg. Sam Altman Is No Oppenheimer). The next 2-3 years will likely be some of the most consequential in history as various crises converge (AI, politics, economics/finance, climate). See also: The AI Doc: (Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist) on Netflix. Highly recommended.]
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Up a Creek
Nature writing after everyone stopped paying attention
The questions Dominy and Brower raise about what will persist apply to the practice of writing nonfiction today. To Brower’s point, the long view, either backwards or forwards, is hard to make out. Little lasts long in our conditions of tweet and retweet. Nature writing requires slowness, because the value of nature itself is not inherently obvious. Rushing through our lives in a screen-mediated frenzy, we are farther than ever from what it takes to know it. In his interview, many years later, with The Paris Review, McPhee describes his own process in terms that are strikingly similar to the debate on the river:
The span of McPhee’s writing in the Library of America collection covers work published in The New Yorker from 1967 to 1977—the critical years in the development of the environmental movement. The phrase “global warming” had only recently emerged, and there was still disagreement about humanity’s ability to create long-term change in the climate. The New Yorker was no stranger to the subject, publishing in 1962 a version of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was still seeping its way through American consciousness. Between the bookends of Carson and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989, McPhee was the presiding figure of The New Yorker in a time when it could lead the public conversation about environmentalism—long form could persuade through deft storytelling that integrated and presented the factual evidence.
In today’s swirl of information noise, it’s hard to imagine a similar piece ever breaking into public consciousness again. If Carson made an impassioned, if highly literary, plea (somewhat against the grain of the average New Yorker article) in a time when environmental issues were less politicized, McPhee’s work was more classically detached on a subject that was becoming a fierce battleground. Eschewing advocacy, McPhee is a patient aggregator in a sense foreign to today’s meaning of the term. Weaving between journalism and a more descriptive kind of nature writing, McPhee was given room to sprawl in a piece that was not only a portrait of Brower but also a work of landscape, broadening out from his human subject to display the ecosystem his subject sought to protect. A work like Encounters with the Archdruid would appear in three parts in the magazine over the course of a month in 1971, stretching to a total of over sixty thousand words.
I’m not aware of anyone who gets to write a sixty-thousand-word magazine piece these days. Size isn’t everything, but this is an obvious reflection of the current economics of journalism, as well as everyone’s perception of time. The print ad revenue that for decades sustained magazines like The New Yorker dried up, sucked into Meta and Google’s ad labyrinths. The reader’s patience, willingness, or capacity to read at all has been drained too, as writing in general competes with video algorithms. Everyone knows this. Good, long, serious articles still get written. But to observe the current against them is not simply nostalgia or sour grapes. The way we access information, the way we think, is still changing.
The purpose of reading a long article is no longer the acquisition of information, if it ever was primarily that. If there is new information, it will quickly be screenshotted and uploaded to social media platforms to be digested in bite-size pieces, or even rewritten by AI for efficiency fetishists. Or maybe readers would like an experience—what we used to call a story, perhaps—and there is no shortage of quicker, stickier content to flood the zone of the synapses. Information is oversaturated and undervalued, and journalistic narrative, at least for now, has been defeated. Say a decade ago, the idea of long-form journalism—the kind of in-depth article you might send to a friend to read on a lunch break (even if you hadn’t read it yourself)—still held prestige. Today, I’m not so sure. Is this writing still enjoyable? Is it necessary? Do you think you will make it to the end of this book review?
McPhee is one of The New Yorker’s signature staff writers—he has been a contributor since 1963, and remains a staff writer today. Across this seven-decade and thirty-plus-book career, he has long been considered one of the founders of both “creative nonfiction” and long-form journalism as we know it today. The course he taught for years on nonfiction writing at Princeton, where he came from and has lived almost his whole life, has been highly influential, with many of its students going on to publish their own books. (Including, notably, David Remnick, who edited this edition and edits The New Yorker.) He is known for the eclecticism of his subjects: truckers, roadkill, oranges, rocks. I can’t say if he invented this archaeology of the little thing you’ve never thought about before, but because of him it is now a whole subgenre of literary journalism, spawning pieces about hand sanitizer or paper jams. There is often no pressing reason for McPhee’s work (no news “peg,” as journalists like to call it)—his curiosity is considered reason enough, a permission that is a luxury for writers today. McPhee was a unique artist that slipped seamlessly into a commercial publishing world that today is well on its way out. Long form has died, long live short form.
His work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.
McPhee’s project is born from a tension that is common but often taken for granted. He is a classical journalist, a supposedly neutral, mostly invisible eye working to uncover and represent the facts. But he’s a storyteller first—rarely will you see the “inverted pyramid,” the paradigm of placing the most relevant information at the beginning of a (usually newspaper) story. When McPhee began his career in journalism, emerging from Princeton into the unsigned back pages of Time magazine, the stock-in-trade was profiles, and the profile is usually the vehicle for McPhee’s artistry, spread out and absorbed slowly. He meticulously plans the shape of his pieces, complete with outlines and diagrams, into extended book-length works, in which myriad details and digressions are as important as the core idea of the story (“A thousand details add up to one impression” is one of his mantras). There is something fundamentally painterly here: the portrait artist moving out to the edges, the frame widening, until the painting is not a portrait at all but instead a landscape.
by David Schurman Wallace, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I've read half a dozen John McPhee books (at least), none more impactful than Coming Into the Country. Made me buy a shotgun and start looking for bears around every corner when I first moved to Alaska.]
Three men are out rafting on the Colorado River together: an activist, a government servant, and a journalist. This is not a setup for a joke. The year is 1969, and they have been brought together for the purposes of an article to be published in The New Yorker. Two are foes: David Brower, the longtime former executive director of the Sierra Club, and Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, in charge of building the nation’s dams, against which Brower has waged a bitter war for years. The writer is John McPhee, who has put together this piece of stunt journalism; he is there to observe and record. Sitting in an inflatable boat in Arizona, south of the massive Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, the jewel in Dominy’s crown and the defeat of Brower’s life, the discussion turns into one of scale, time, and an existential threat:
The Colorado, Brower reminded us, used to be known as Old Red. This was because the river was full of red mud. It would never have been possible for Dominy to dip his cup in it in order to get water to go with his bourbon unless he wished to drink mud as well. On arriving at a campsite, rivermen used to fill their boats with water, so that the mud would settle to the bottom of the boats and they would have water for drinking and cooking. . . . “Emotionally, people are able to look only two generations back and two generations forward,” Brower said. “We need to see farther than that. It is absolutely inevitable, for example, that Lake Powell and Lake Mead will someday be completely filled with silt.”Nature writing, in the hands of McPhee, is like the interaction of river and silt. In calm, patient prose, McPhee observes, and facts accrue and settle until there is a formation that had not existed before. He is patient. He is slow, though not without a wry sense of humor (“They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone.”). He is the chronicler of things that happen so gradually that we cannot see them unless someone takes the time to document them in their entirety. Brower and Dominy’s verbal duel would become the third and final part of Encounters with the Archdruid, one of McPhee’s best-known books and a landmark in environmental writing. In a new Library of America collection titled Encounters in Wild America, four of McPhee’s books, including Encounters, are canonized.
“Nonsense, nonsense, complete nonsense. First of all, we will build silt-detention dams in the tributaries—in the Paria, in the Little Colorado. And, if necessary, we will build more.”
“Someday the reservoirs have to fill up, Floyd.”
“I wouldn’t admit that. I wouldn’t admit one inch!”
“Someday.”
“Someday! Yes, in geologic time, maybe . . .”
The questions Dominy and Brower raise about what will persist apply to the practice of writing nonfiction today. To Brower’s point, the long view, either backwards or forwards, is hard to make out. Little lasts long in our conditions of tweet and retweet. Nature writing requires slowness, because the value of nature itself is not inherently obvious. Rushing through our lives in a screen-mediated frenzy, we are farther than ever from what it takes to know it. In his interview, many years later, with The Paris Review, McPhee describes his own process in terms that are strikingly similar to the debate on the river:
It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.Today, writing in the spirit of geological time—to observe nature, but also for any kind of long-form journalism, really—is a vanished privilege. Meanwhile, Lake Powell really is filling up with silt—over “thirty thousand dump truck loads” per day—causing a long-term existential crisis, not to mention the man-made reservoirs of the Colorado River emptying out after years of sustained drought. With a good chance of outlasting the lake, McPhee is the modern archetype of the writer as practitioner of a gradual craft, working away at exquisitely detailed depictions of people and places. This work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.
The span of McPhee’s writing in the Library of America collection covers work published in The New Yorker from 1967 to 1977—the critical years in the development of the environmental movement. The phrase “global warming” had only recently emerged, and there was still disagreement about humanity’s ability to create long-term change in the climate. The New Yorker was no stranger to the subject, publishing in 1962 a version of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was still seeping its way through American consciousness. Between the bookends of Carson and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989, McPhee was the presiding figure of The New Yorker in a time when it could lead the public conversation about environmentalism—long form could persuade through deft storytelling that integrated and presented the factual evidence.
In today’s swirl of information noise, it’s hard to imagine a similar piece ever breaking into public consciousness again. If Carson made an impassioned, if highly literary, plea (somewhat against the grain of the average New Yorker article) in a time when environmental issues were less politicized, McPhee’s work was more classically detached on a subject that was becoming a fierce battleground. Eschewing advocacy, McPhee is a patient aggregator in a sense foreign to today’s meaning of the term. Weaving between journalism and a more descriptive kind of nature writing, McPhee was given room to sprawl in a piece that was not only a portrait of Brower but also a work of landscape, broadening out from his human subject to display the ecosystem his subject sought to protect. A work like Encounters with the Archdruid would appear in three parts in the magazine over the course of a month in 1971, stretching to a total of over sixty thousand words.
I’m not aware of anyone who gets to write a sixty-thousand-word magazine piece these days. Size isn’t everything, but this is an obvious reflection of the current economics of journalism, as well as everyone’s perception of time. The print ad revenue that for decades sustained magazines like The New Yorker dried up, sucked into Meta and Google’s ad labyrinths. The reader’s patience, willingness, or capacity to read at all has been drained too, as writing in general competes with video algorithms. Everyone knows this. Good, long, serious articles still get written. But to observe the current against them is not simply nostalgia or sour grapes. The way we access information, the way we think, is still changing.
The purpose of reading a long article is no longer the acquisition of information, if it ever was primarily that. If there is new information, it will quickly be screenshotted and uploaded to social media platforms to be digested in bite-size pieces, or even rewritten by AI for efficiency fetishists. Or maybe readers would like an experience—what we used to call a story, perhaps—and there is no shortage of quicker, stickier content to flood the zone of the synapses. Information is oversaturated and undervalued, and journalistic narrative, at least for now, has been defeated. Say a decade ago, the idea of long-form journalism—the kind of in-depth article you might send to a friend to read on a lunch break (even if you hadn’t read it yourself)—still held prestige. Today, I’m not so sure. Is this writing still enjoyable? Is it necessary? Do you think you will make it to the end of this book review?
McPhee is one of The New Yorker’s signature staff writers—he has been a contributor since 1963, and remains a staff writer today. Across this seven-decade and thirty-plus-book career, he has long been considered one of the founders of both “creative nonfiction” and long-form journalism as we know it today. The course he taught for years on nonfiction writing at Princeton, where he came from and has lived almost his whole life, has been highly influential, with many of its students going on to publish their own books. (Including, notably, David Remnick, who edited this edition and edits The New Yorker.) He is known for the eclecticism of his subjects: truckers, roadkill, oranges, rocks. I can’t say if he invented this archaeology of the little thing you’ve never thought about before, but because of him it is now a whole subgenre of literary journalism, spawning pieces about hand sanitizer or paper jams. There is often no pressing reason for McPhee’s work (no news “peg,” as journalists like to call it)—his curiosity is considered reason enough, a permission that is a luxury for writers today. McPhee was a unique artist that slipped seamlessly into a commercial publishing world that today is well on its way out. Long form has died, long live short form.
His work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.
McPhee’s project is born from a tension that is common but often taken for granted. He is a classical journalist, a supposedly neutral, mostly invisible eye working to uncover and represent the facts. But he’s a storyteller first—rarely will you see the “inverted pyramid,” the paradigm of placing the most relevant information at the beginning of a (usually newspaper) story. When McPhee began his career in journalism, emerging from Princeton into the unsigned back pages of Time magazine, the stock-in-trade was profiles, and the profile is usually the vehicle for McPhee’s artistry, spread out and absorbed slowly. He meticulously plans the shape of his pieces, complete with outlines and diagrams, into extended book-length works, in which myriad details and digressions are as important as the core idea of the story (“A thousand details add up to one impression” is one of his mantras). There is something fundamentally painterly here: the portrait artist moving out to the edges, the frame widening, until the painting is not a portrait at all but instead a landscape.
by David Schurman Wallace, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I've read half a dozen John McPhee books (at least), none more impactful than Coming Into the Country. Made me buy a shotgun and start looking for bears around every corner when I first moved to Alaska.]
Why Do Architects Keep Building Things Nobody Likes?
Image: uncredited
[ed. Different incentives. See also: Modern Architects Declared War on Beauty (A&T)
Monday, October 19, 2026
On Audiophilia: Heaven’s Melodic Strains
I am a sick man. I have skipped Friday night plans to spend hours repositioning the speakers in my living room, by inches and degrees. I have squandered small fortunes on silver and black boxes that most people couldn’t identify, whose purpose they wouldn’t understand. I have disfigured my apartment with hulking foam panels to improve the room acoustics. I have shelled out for a high-resolution music streaming service with an unpronounceable name. I have frittered days and nights trawling the back pages of online forums to find the optimal tonearm mass for a certain phono cartridge, or the suitable crossover frequency for a particular model of subwoofer.
More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.
The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?
Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. [...]
The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?
Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. [...]
Audiophiles obsess, tinker, tweak, and upgrade, their gear addiction now served by a global subindustry of specialty brands, most of them unknown to the broader public; there are still record labels whose main marketing draw is their audio quality. And more than a little of that midcentury zealotry survives in subsequent sonic novelties that tease and amaze the ears with their “realism”: spatial audio, high-res audio, surround sound. Sound snobs would plotz at the comparison, but when an audiophile tests their stereo with the sawtooth jag of a guitar or the spelunk of a low bass note, what — besides thousands of dollars’ worth of gear — makes them any different from a teenager mainlining the rustles and gurgles of ASMR videos on YouTube? When we submit ourselves to sound for its own sake, something elemental, infantile, awakens.
Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?
All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.
No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?
These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing. [...]
Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.
Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.
Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.
I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.
However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.
Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine. [...]
Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money. [...]
Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?
All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.
No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?
These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing. [...]
Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.
Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.
Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.
I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.
However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.
Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine. [...]
Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money. [...]
Yet among leisure-class hobbies, something about hi-fi remains apart, unassimilated. Where it touches other domains of luxury consumption, the results can only be absurd. In a recent TV commercial for Lexus’s new electric SUV, a handsome white man in loafers lounges in a wide, high-windowed living room. The space is almost empty, save for the Lexus itself, somehow parked in the corner, and, alone in the middle of the floor, a gleaming black and silver VPI Titan Direct turntable ($64,000), equipped with a VPI Shyla dual moving coil cartridge ($2,200). The stylus lowers, and the gossamer muted trumpet of Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” begins playing. In a close-up, twilight kisses the vinyl grooves, which fade into a view of the SUV doing slow, graceful donuts on the beach. In another close-up, the man turns his gaze downward, as if in contemplation. “The greatest measure of an automobile,” a bourbon-rich baritone voice rumbles, “is how it makes you feel.” The loafered man doesn’t seem to feel much. After twenty seconds of listening, he gets up and leaves. I would too if, like him, I had spent five figures on a turntable only to dump it on the floor, and placed my speakers against a wall of sound-reflecting windows, too far apart and approximately fifty feet away from my listening chair, which is also facing the wrong way.
by Colin Vanderburg, N+1 | Read more:
by Colin Vanderburg, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Dark Pool. 1995
Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling
There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).
It is similar to the FRONTIER Act, with stronger preemption of state laws, stronger transparency provisions and weaker enforcement provisions.
Having slept on this, I find it unacceptable that Anthropic is actively shopping exactly the type of bill I have warned we will need to fight against during the lame duck session. They are trying to use this last time with a Republican Congress to pass preemption of exactly the important state laws, and get some transparency but not much enforcement in exchange.
This reads as intentional, that Anthropic is more afraid that the government might enforce rules against Anthropic, than they are worried about the ability of the government to enforce rules against everyone. Anthropic’s policy team seems to have, chosen protecting their business interests and guarding against their political risk, at the expense of safety considerations.
There was no need for the company purportedly existing to promote safety to propose a bill that is not even actively stronger than the FRONTIER Act, when the FRONTIER Act was a compromise bill proposed back in June.
Even if you were fine with what is being given up, what you get in return very obviously does not meet the moment. Nor is there any need for such compromises. It seems rather insane for Anthropic to be proposing it now. This seems like the bill that someone on the anti-regulatory side should be pushing. It is not obvious this makes us safer than doing nothing, even if the alternative is fully nothing at all levels.
Say it isn't so, Anthropic, or at least that it was a mistake and is no longer so, or I am going to be rather cross.
Others RTFB (Read the Bill)
I have not had the time to do so, but the other usual suspects quickly sprinted to RTFB (read the bill) and they did not like what they saw. You can try to call this a ‘pretty reasonable AI safety bill’ as Charlie Bullock does, but that is by the standards of people trying to protect the industry from more impactful regulation. [...]
Charlie Bullock: Big news. My take: Anthropic deserves some credit for actually proposing a pretty reasonable AI safety bill; that’s more than other frontier labs have done.
But they don’t deserve *too* much credit, IMO; this bill is weaker than the Trahan-Obernolte FRONTIER Act in some key ways, and since the political momentum has shifted significantly in the direction of safety since FRONTIER was introduced back in July, I think new bills introduced today should ideally go further than FRONTIER was able to go rather than regressing.
To be fair to Anthropic, the main places where this bill is significantly weaker than FRONTIER are (a) rulemaking (very strong in FRONTIER, almost nonexistent in Anthropic’s bill) and (b) the emergency shutdown authority. Even if you take safety seriously, it might make some sense to dial those authorities back if you didn’t trust the executive branch to wield them responsibly, because those are the easiest provisions for a hypothetical President who hypothetically might not like a certain frontier AI company to abuse.
There are some improvements over FRONTIER as well; for instance, this bill does specify that auditors are employed on a continuing basis and has better provisions regarding auditor access to information. Happy to see that from Anthropic (although I think their access provision is still a little undercooked and has Fourth Amendment problems).
Overall, I think the embedded auditor bills that get introduced in the coming months are going to be significantly better and more ambitious than this, and I hope Anthropic supports those bills instead of opposing anything that treats catastrophic risks like the serious national security issue they are. Still, it’s encouraging to see a frontier lab come this far. [...]
Nathan Calvin: Charlie’s analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment and I overall think passing it would make us less protected against catastrophic risks than we are under existing law.
Two parts that stand out as particularly infuriating when taken together:
1. Some of the preemption provisions are remarkably far reaching and consequential, and in addition to preempting legislation like SB 53 would also remove general powers that state courts have to enjoin defendants and protect the public. Most outrageously, it has a provision that looks like its intended to stops states from enforcing laws or judicial decrees that “suspend the development, deployment, or internal use of an AI model” to protect their citizens from imminent catastrophic harms. Such powers to block and suspend model deployments would then only reside with the federal government.
2. The federal governments powers to restrict the development, deployment, or internal use of a frontier model has to meet an absurdly high bar.
First, there needs to be an imminent risk of a catastrophic harm (meaning killing more than 50 people or causing more than a billion dollars in damage). But thats not enough! The agency head needs to make a detailed determination with no deference given to show why no alternative would prevent the imminent catastrophe. Next the court is also explicitly told to consider the harms to the developer and other harms from restricting the model, but no considerations in the other direction.
This is absurd! For all of its warning about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe that kills literally everyone on the planet, Anthropic’s proposed federal law likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models? WTF??
There are also a bunch of others things that I would like to see improved - the substantive details of the auditing section and the potential for rule-making on substantive safety standards both come to mind - but I think these stand out as particularly indefensible.
Charlie Bullock: Nathan’s righteous anger has inspired me to make one more mildly disapproving observation: it’s kind of wild that the Anthropic bill has no government licensing for the independent auditors.
Licensing is, IMO, the bare minimum thing that you need to even be able to pretend that your auditing regime isn’t just going to devolve into a race to the bottom. Without it, auditors will inevitably compete with each other to offer their customers, the labs, the least bothersome audits available at the lowest possible price point. Obviously Anthropic trusts itself to do a great job of picking great auditors, but do they trust OpenAI to do the same? What about SpaceXSI?
Why Would Anthropic Do This?
The new Anthropic bill is weaker than their June framework, and offers both forward-looking and backward-looking preemption in exchange, despite months of movement to enable us to do more. What are we even doing? [...]
[ed. Addendum: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is now streaming on Netflix. Highly recommended.]
It is similar to the FRONTIER Act, with stronger preemption of state laws, stronger transparency provisions and weaker enforcement provisions.
Having slept on this, I find it unacceptable that Anthropic is actively shopping exactly the type of bill I have warned we will need to fight against during the lame duck session. They are trying to use this last time with a Republican Congress to pass preemption of exactly the important state laws, and get some transparency but not much enforcement in exchange.
This reads as intentional, that Anthropic is more afraid that the government might enforce rules against Anthropic, than they are worried about the ability of the government to enforce rules against everyone. Anthropic’s policy team seems to have, chosen protecting their business interests and guarding against their political risk, at the expense of safety considerations.
There was no need for the company purportedly existing to promote safety to propose a bill that is not even actively stronger than the FRONTIER Act, when the FRONTIER Act was a compromise bill proposed back in June.
Even if you were fine with what is being given up, what you get in return very obviously does not meet the moment. Nor is there any need for such compromises. It seems rather insane for Anthropic to be proposing it now. This seems like the bill that someone on the anti-regulatory side should be pushing. It is not obvious this makes us safer than doing nothing, even if the alternative is fully nothing at all levels.
Say it isn't so, Anthropic, or at least that it was a mistake and is no longer so, or I am going to be rather cross.
Others RTFB (Read the Bill)
I have not had the time to do so, but the other usual suspects quickly sprinted to RTFB (read the bill) and they did not like what they saw. You can try to call this a ‘pretty reasonable AI safety bill’ as Charlie Bullock does, but that is by the standards of people trying to protect the industry from more impactful regulation. [...]
Charlie Bullock: Big news. My take: Anthropic deserves some credit for actually proposing a pretty reasonable AI safety bill; that’s more than other frontier labs have done.
But they don’t deserve *too* much credit, IMO; this bill is weaker than the Trahan-Obernolte FRONTIER Act in some key ways, and since the political momentum has shifted significantly in the direction of safety since FRONTIER was introduced back in July, I think new bills introduced today should ideally go further than FRONTIER was able to go rather than regressing.
To be fair to Anthropic, the main places where this bill is significantly weaker than FRONTIER are (a) rulemaking (very strong in FRONTIER, almost nonexistent in Anthropic’s bill) and (b) the emergency shutdown authority. Even if you take safety seriously, it might make some sense to dial those authorities back if you didn’t trust the executive branch to wield them responsibly, because those are the easiest provisions for a hypothetical President who hypothetically might not like a certain frontier AI company to abuse.
There are some improvements over FRONTIER as well; for instance, this bill does specify that auditors are employed on a continuing basis and has better provisions regarding auditor access to information. Happy to see that from Anthropic (although I think their access provision is still a little undercooked and has Fourth Amendment problems).
Overall, I think the embedded auditor bills that get introduced in the coming months are going to be significantly better and more ambitious than this, and I hope Anthropic supports those bills instead of opposing anything that treats catastrophic risks like the serious national security issue they are. Still, it’s encouraging to see a frontier lab come this far. [...]
Nathan Calvin: Charlie’s analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment and I overall think passing it would make us less protected against catastrophic risks than we are under existing law.
Two parts that stand out as particularly infuriating when taken together:
1. Some of the preemption provisions are remarkably far reaching and consequential, and in addition to preempting legislation like SB 53 would also remove general powers that state courts have to enjoin defendants and protect the public. Most outrageously, it has a provision that looks like its intended to stops states from enforcing laws or judicial decrees that “suspend the development, deployment, or internal use of an AI model” to protect their citizens from imminent catastrophic harms. Such powers to block and suspend model deployments would then only reside with the federal government.
2. The federal governments powers to restrict the development, deployment, or internal use of a frontier model has to meet an absurdly high bar.
First, there needs to be an imminent risk of a catastrophic harm (meaning killing more than 50 people or causing more than a billion dollars in damage). But thats not enough! The agency head needs to make a detailed determination with no deference given to show why no alternative would prevent the imminent catastrophe. Next the court is also explicitly told to consider the harms to the developer and other harms from restricting the model, but no considerations in the other direction.
This is absurd! For all of its warning about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe that kills literally everyone on the planet, Anthropic’s proposed federal law likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models? WTF??
There are also a bunch of others things that I would like to see improved - the substantive details of the auditing section and the potential for rule-making on substantive safety standards both come to mind - but I think these stand out as particularly indefensible.
Charlie Bullock: Nathan’s righteous anger has inspired me to make one more mildly disapproving observation: it’s kind of wild that the Anthropic bill has no government licensing for the independent auditors.
Licensing is, IMO, the bare minimum thing that you need to even be able to pretend that your auditing regime isn’t just going to devolve into a race to the bottom. Without it, auditors will inevitably compete with each other to offer their customers, the labs, the least bothersome audits available at the lowest possible price point. Obviously Anthropic trusts itself to do a great job of picking great auditors, but do they trust OpenAI to do the same? What about SpaceXSI?
Why Would Anthropic Do This?
The new Anthropic bill is weaker than their June framework, and offers both forward-looking and backward-looking preemption in exchange, despite months of movement to enable us to do more. What are we even doing? [...]
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV | Read more:
Image: Draft bill
[ed. Best I can tell (haven't RTFB) the draft seeks to: 1) preempt state's rights to write and enforce stronger safety provisions - so, in effect, we get a single point of federal decision-making/enforcement vs. 50 votes; 2) install "independent auditors" to evaluate model safety who's credentials and funding sources are undefined; and 3) set an arbitrary trigger for a single federal judge to intervene/block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people - all to be decided using a set of process provisions that are ambiguous at best - see the REQUIRED FINDINGS above - and over some unspecified period of time. So, all in all, not good. And, even more not good - other frontier labs don't seem to be on board with even these few minimal restrictions. As one commenter notes: there aren't really any Good Guys in this race anymore (if there ever really were), just Bad, Badder, and Baddest. Good Intentions Paving Company secures lucrative "Hell" contract, news at 11.]
Sunday, October 18, 2026
Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song
Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song
Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.
If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]
Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.
If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]
If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.
But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.
But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: YouTube
Anthony Scaramucci Says the Universe Did Katie Zacharia a Favor
The former White House communications director reflects on his record for occupational brevity being broken.
No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”
Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Zacharia brought to her work a gossamer résumé in the field of communications: a brief stint as a commentator at Newsmax and less than two months as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”
Zacharia’s one and only appearance in the White House press room took place on October 13th. It lasted fourteen minutes. She wore a pained smile and stumbled nervously through a written script. She took questions from Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail and delivered a terse announcement that the ineffable Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. Ambassador to Greece and former paramour of the President’s son Donald, Jr., would now be pursuing other career opportunities. At one point, Zacharia referred to her husband as “my president.” Jen Psaki, who had done the same job for Joe Biden, remarked, perhaps uncharitably, that the briefing “was basically an SNL skit . . . except it wasn’t.” After it was revealed that Zacharia had overstated her status as an attorney (she is not an attorney), and after a peculiar and decidedly disastrous appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News, she was out.
To get some perspective on this episode, I reached out to Anthony Scaramucci, who, in the early days of the first Trump Presidency, lasted ten days as White House communications director before being shown the door. “Records are made to be broken,” he told me cheerfully while on vacation in Hawaii. “I am trying to lay low on this. I don’t believe in grave stomping,” he went on. “That podium is a hard podium, as we all know. But the universe did her a favor. She shouldn’t be in that job.”
Scaramucci, known to all as the Mooch, took pains to be gracious to Zacharia. “I’m not a hater of hers,” he said. “I don’t know her.” Though he added, dryly, that his emotions now were what Joe DiMaggio’s might have been if the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, set in 1941, had been eclipsed. (It still stands.) [...]
Scaramucci’s only appearance at the press-room podium went more smoothly than anything managed by Zacharia, but it was soon evident that he was not going to countenance leaking—which, even in the earliest days, was rife in the Trump White House. With the reporter’s tape rolling, Scaramucci charged into a long string of invective, threats, and fury. [...]
Scaramucci insinuated that disloyal aides around Trump would soon be on the receiving end of his ire and would be out of a job: “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” By way of ending the call, Scaramucci said, “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.” [...]
Scaramucci, who grew up on Long Island, had a career in finance before his truncated White House career. His politics veered all over the road. He supported Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and, in 2016, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Before joining the Trump campaign that year, he had called Trump a “hack politician.” Scaramucci now regards the Trump Presidency, he told me, as a “disaster,” but quickly adds that, as a patriot, he wishes it were otherwise. These days, he writes books and hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics US,” with Katty Kay, a British journalist. He has called Trump “an orange wrecking ball” and a “sociopathic reality-TV star.” Recently, on the podcast “How to Fail,” he said the President grew “more malevolent” during the Biden years: “He’s, like, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t steal enough in the first term.’ He had four years to figure out how to steal more.”
By way of wishing his distant successor and record-breaker well, Scaramucci told me that after some initial struggles, he found his way. There was life after the White House press room. “I didn’t blame the firing on anyone but me,” he said. “If you play in the N.F.L. and get a concussion, you don’t blame the N.F.L.”
The truth was, he said, “I didn’t like the job. I can’t speak for [Zacharia], but for me the firing came with some level of relief. There is a feeling of humiliation, but also relief.”
Why was there relief? I asked.
“Have you ever worked for Donald Trump?” he said.
Not so far. Has he changed much?
“I think he is similar to the way he was, maybe more unhinged now, and people around him now—there are more lackeys. There are no John Kellys around.”
Does the President seem like a lesser person to you now?
“He could have age-related neurodegeneration, but he is the same person,” Scaramucci said. “Age is slowing him down, but he is an energetic eighty years old.”
by David Remnick, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Abaca/Reuters
[ed. Comedy gold. I miss the Mooch, especially given his successors. "Occupational brevity" (lol) that's a new one.]
No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”
Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Zacharia’s one and only appearance in the White House press room took place on October 13th. It lasted fourteen minutes. She wore a pained smile and stumbled nervously through a written script. She took questions from Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail and delivered a terse announcement that the ineffable Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. Ambassador to Greece and former paramour of the President’s son Donald, Jr., would now be pursuing other career opportunities. At one point, Zacharia referred to her husband as “my president.” Jen Psaki, who had done the same job for Joe Biden, remarked, perhaps uncharitably, that the briefing “was basically an SNL skit . . . except it wasn’t.” After it was revealed that Zacharia had overstated her status as an attorney (she is not an attorney), and after a peculiar and decidedly disastrous appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News, she was out.
To get some perspective on this episode, I reached out to Anthony Scaramucci, who, in the early days of the first Trump Presidency, lasted ten days as White House communications director before being shown the door. “Records are made to be broken,” he told me cheerfully while on vacation in Hawaii. “I am trying to lay low on this. I don’t believe in grave stomping,” he went on. “That podium is a hard podium, as we all know. But the universe did her a favor. She shouldn’t be in that job.”
Scaramucci, known to all as the Mooch, took pains to be gracious to Zacharia. “I’m not a hater of hers,” he said. “I don’t know her.” Though he added, dryly, that his emotions now were what Joe DiMaggio’s might have been if the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, set in 1941, had been eclipsed. (It still stands.) [...]
Scaramucci’s only appearance at the press-room podium went more smoothly than anything managed by Zacharia, but it was soon evident that he was not going to countenance leaking—which, even in the earliest days, was rife in the Trump White House. With the reporter’s tape rolling, Scaramucci charged into a long string of invective, threats, and fury. [...]
Scaramucci insinuated that disloyal aides around Trump would soon be on the receiving end of his ire and would be out of a job: “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” By way of ending the call, Scaramucci said, “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.” [...]
Scaramucci, who grew up on Long Island, had a career in finance before his truncated White House career. His politics veered all over the road. He supported Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and, in 2016, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Before joining the Trump campaign that year, he had called Trump a “hack politician.” Scaramucci now regards the Trump Presidency, he told me, as a “disaster,” but quickly adds that, as a patriot, he wishes it were otherwise. These days, he writes books and hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics US,” with Katty Kay, a British journalist. He has called Trump “an orange wrecking ball” and a “sociopathic reality-TV star.” Recently, on the podcast “How to Fail,” he said the President grew “more malevolent” during the Biden years: “He’s, like, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t steal enough in the first term.’ He had four years to figure out how to steal more.”
By way of wishing his distant successor and record-breaker well, Scaramucci told me that after some initial struggles, he found his way. There was life after the White House press room. “I didn’t blame the firing on anyone but me,” he said. “If you play in the N.F.L. and get a concussion, you don’t blame the N.F.L.”
The truth was, he said, “I didn’t like the job. I can’t speak for [Zacharia], but for me the firing came with some level of relief. There is a feeling of humiliation, but also relief.”
Why was there relief? I asked.
“Have you ever worked for Donald Trump?” he said.
Not so far. Has he changed much?
“I think he is similar to the way he was, maybe more unhinged now, and people around him now—there are more lackeys. There are no John Kellys around.”
Does the President seem like a lesser person to you now?
“He could have age-related neurodegeneration, but he is the same person,” Scaramucci said. “Age is slowing him down, but he is an energetic eighty years old.”
by David Remnick, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Abaca/Reuters
[ed. Comedy gold. I miss the Mooch, especially given his successors. "Occupational brevity" (lol) that's a new one.]
Friday, October 16, 2026
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