Friday, October 9, 2026
Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell
[ed. Nice tribute.]
But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.
He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.
Campbell was that good.
“In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.”
There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.
He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.
But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked. [...]
Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.
Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.
At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.
That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.
During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969. [...]
Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.
His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.
But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.
In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.
The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.”
His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.
He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.
But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.
In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.
The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.”
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: uncredited; publicity photo
Mathematics Reels After New OpenAI Release
"If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.”
That’s how Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, responded to an A.I.-generated proof that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant, released on Tuesday.
Not all of them were quite so remarkable. But Martin Bridson, a mathematician at Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which established the coveted Millennium Prize Problems, called OpenAI’s release “breathtaking.” [...]
If there had been any doubt that the leaps achieved by artificial intelligence this year would transform the discipline of mathematics, the tens of thousands of pages let loose on Tuesday have put that doubt to rest. The puzzles apparently conquered by OpenAI include crucial open questions in nearly every subfield of math, including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science, mathematical logic and topology.
None of the proofs fully resolve any of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, which were designated at the turn of the century as a way of celebrating mathematics and its vast frontier of mysteries. But the trove of findings seemed to include results that make tangential or related progress on all of them. Perhaps the most significant result — the one Dr. Kontorovich was responding to — was a proof of the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis,” a conjecture related to the best known of the Millennium problems, the Riemann hypothesis, and a possible steppingstone of sorts to its resolution. [...]
‘Exciting for Many, Frightening for Others, Devastating for Some’
Talking to mathematicians after the release, it is clear that it is a highly conflicting environment, motivating a wild range of reactions. [...]
For Bryna Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University, problem No. 145 on the list was of great interest — “the Rokhlin problem on mixing implying higher order mixing,” which answers a question from the 1940s. “The writing, however, makes it impossible to understand,” said Dr. Kra, former president of the American Mathematical Society, who is among a group of mathematicians who are proactively working to chart a course for the field through this period of “uncertainty and seismic change,” as she described it.
Overall, the results are “amazing,” Dr. Kra said, but now tens of thousands of pages of mathematical results need to be carefully checked. Typically checking and verification are done by peer review. “Peer review is gone in this process,” she said. “So, the question is, what kind of impact will these A.I.-generated results have? This is going to take a long time for the math community to digest.”
“Perhaps the most relevant issue is that by releasing this trove of material in this manner, the companies are in the process of destroying the ecosystem that made it possible for this work,” she said. “While this batch of papers has improved in the citations to the past literature, there are numerous indications that they have benefited from access to many arguments, only some of which are published. The mathematician who wants to make use of these amazing tools to advance their research instead risks giving their ideas away.”
The French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre, an emeritus professor at the Collège de France in Paris — who has won two of math’s top prizes, the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, and celebrated his 100th birthday last month — was naturally attracted to finding No. 46 in OpenAI’s list, which solves positively a conjecture he made almost 70 years ago.
But Dr. Serre is conflicted about doing math with A.I. He uses the technology for things like references, and, with the help of friends, for chasing down hunches about errors. “Mathematicians take pleasure in doing maths in two different ways: learning and finding new things,” Dr. Serre said. “Hence a conflict: A.I. increases the first pleasure and lowers the second one. The problem is it may lower the pleasure too much; that is especially serious for young mathematicians.”
by Siobhan Roberts, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ian C. Bates
Also, if you were wondering: apparently they tried the model on about 8,000 problems. So, right now it “merely” solves ~5% of the longstanding open mathematical problems that it’s asked about, the problems that whole communities have spent years on, after a single 3-hour attempt on them. [...]
Update: As several people have pointed out, cryptography is a subfield that’s extremely conspicuous by its absence from OpenAI’s list of 376 papers! But my sources tell me that the AI companies have now started, gingerly and discreetly, investigating whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives. If they can, then it would certainly be nice to get ahead of things before the rest of the world figures out the same.
That’s how Alex Kontorovich, chair of the department of mathematics at Rutgers, responded to an A.I.-generated proof that OpenAI, the artificial intelligence giant, released on Tuesday.
And that single proof — worthy, in Dr. Kontorovich’s assessment on social media, of arguably the highest honor in the field of mathematics — was just one among more than 350 findings that the firm released that day, all at once.
Not all of them were quite so remarkable. But Martin Bridson, a mathematician at Oxford and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which established the coveted Millennium Prize Problems, called OpenAI’s release “breathtaking.” [...]
None of the proofs fully resolve any of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, which were designated at the turn of the century as a way of celebrating mathematics and its vast frontier of mysteries. But the trove of findings seemed to include results that make tangential or related progress on all of them. Perhaps the most significant result — the one Dr. Kontorovich was responding to — was a proof of the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis,” a conjecture related to the best known of the Millennium problems, the Riemann hypothesis, and a possible steppingstone of sorts to its resolution. [...]
(As of Thursday, OpenAI had made a number of updates to the public online repository; withdrawing three papers and making fixes to several others. A spokeswoman said: “Where errors are identified, we will work to correct them promptly and withdraw papers if no fixes can be found. As with other research manuscripts, this is an iterative process.” )
‘Exciting for Many, Frightening for Others, Devastating for Some’
Talking to mathematicians after the release, it is clear that it is a highly conflicting environment, motivating a wild range of reactions. [...]
For Bryna Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University, problem No. 145 on the list was of great interest — “the Rokhlin problem on mixing implying higher order mixing,” which answers a question from the 1940s. “The writing, however, makes it impossible to understand,” said Dr. Kra, former president of the American Mathematical Society, who is among a group of mathematicians who are proactively working to chart a course for the field through this period of “uncertainty and seismic change,” as she described it.
Overall, the results are “amazing,” Dr. Kra said, but now tens of thousands of pages of mathematical results need to be carefully checked. Typically checking and verification are done by peer review. “Peer review is gone in this process,” she said. “So, the question is, what kind of impact will these A.I.-generated results have? This is going to take a long time for the math community to digest.”
“Perhaps the most relevant issue is that by releasing this trove of material in this manner, the companies are in the process of destroying the ecosystem that made it possible for this work,” she said. “While this batch of papers has improved in the citations to the past literature, there are numerous indications that they have benefited from access to many arguments, only some of which are published. The mathematician who wants to make use of these amazing tools to advance their research instead risks giving their ideas away.”
The French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre, an emeritus professor at the Collège de France in Paris — who has won two of math’s top prizes, the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, and celebrated his 100th birthday last month — was naturally attracted to finding No. 46 in OpenAI’s list, which solves positively a conjecture he made almost 70 years ago.
But Dr. Serre is conflicted about doing math with A.I. He uses the technology for things like references, and, with the help of friends, for chasing down hunches about errors. “Mathematicians take pleasure in doing maths in two different ways: learning and finding new things,” Dr. Serre said. “Hence a conflict: A.I. increases the first pleasure and lowers the second one. The problem is it may lower the pleasure too much; that is especially serious for young mathematicians.”
by Siobhan Roberts, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ian C. Bates
[ed. See also: New Math from OpenAI (DWAV); and, The Mathocalypse (Shtetl-Optimized):]
***
For those who are wondering: apparently, the AI model that produced all these wonders was not bespoke contraption of 10,000 agents burning millions of dollars worth of compute, as was used for example to construct a finite-time blowup for the Navier-Stokes equations. Instead, it was simply the latest internal OpenAI model—one that might be released to paying ChatGPT customers within the next couple of months, depending on the recommendations of OpenAI’s safety board! (My 9-year-old son: “Oh they definitely shouldn’t release that. If it could solve all those math problems, it can’t possibly be safe.”) Apparently they used about 3 hours of GPT-Pro level compute on average per problem solved.Also, if you were wondering: apparently they tried the model on about 8,000 problems. So, right now it “merely” solves ~5% of the longstanding open mathematical problems that it’s asked about, the problems that whole communities have spent years on, after a single 3-hour attempt on them. [...]
Update: As several people have pointed out, cryptography is a subfield that’s extremely conspicuous by its absence from OpenAI’s list of 376 papers! But my sources tell me that the AI companies have now started, gingerly and discreetly, investigating whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives. If they can, then it would certainly be nice to get ahead of things before the rest of the world figures out the same.
Thursday, October 8, 2026
Mamdani Is Showing the World How It’s Done
A few days before the leaders of the world streamed into the cavernous, marble-lined General Assembly Hall to deliver their speeches on the grave crises convulsing our combustible world, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered his own, somewhat surprising solution to the problem of rising authoritarianism: filling potholes.
“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live, why would you trust it to deliver anywhere?” Mamdani asked a gathering of mayors from big cities across the world, explaining his obsession with potholes, more than 200,000 of which have been filled across the city since he took office. “If you are making a New Yorker’s life a little smoother, so too you are making their journey to believe in government’s ability to deliver for them.”
It is commonplace to lament the ineffectual talking shop that the United Nations General Assembly has become, with its blustering speeches and endless unread communiqués. Wars of aggression are raging in Ukraine and Iran; Israel has carried out a genocide in Gaza; climate catastrophes impoverish and kill. In the face of these calamities, the organization appears powerless.
Today, the body’s soaring aims — to create a more peaceful, humane world that respects the sovereignty of each nation and the dignity of each human being — seem like a fantasy from another dimension. Citizens the world over are dissatisfied with their governments and in many places are souring on democracy itself. Can it be any surprise that this supranational body comes in for such contempt?
And yet Mamdani sensed an opportunity to reclaim some of its founding spirit. Racing across the city last week, he seemed to be offering an antidote to globe-spanning distemper. To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. Politics, as he put it, “has to translate to the pavement.”
New York City has long held a singular spot on the international stage, and its mayors have become global figures. But Mamdani, by dint of his youth, his improbable rise and his unusual background, brings a vivid symbolism to the role. African by birth, South Asian by heritage, American by choice, Mamdani in many ways embodies the cosmopolitan ideal at the heart of the United Nations’ founding.
World leaders lined up to spend time with him. He went to Queens with Ireland’s prime minister for a bingo game at an Irish American community center. He met with Brazil’s octogenarian leftist president and breakfasted with Spain’s dashing left-wing prime minister. Norway’s prime minister tagged along with him to visit a New York City classroom and talk about artificial intelligence in education.
Even President Trump couldn’t resist some time with the mayor. Last Monday he dropped by Gracie Mansion, spending about an hour behind closed doors with Mamdani — an eternity in presidential scheduling. Trump seemed in no rush to leave as the two took questions from reporters, beaming as he declared, “I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential, got great potential.”
Mamdani’s agenda, as befits a mayor, was mostly municipal. He visited a wastewater treatment facility with his counterparts from Helsinki, Rome and Barcelona; welcomed families moving into public housing with the mayors of Paris, Amsterdam and Greater Manchester; and handed out fliers to delivery workers explaining their rights with Mexico City’s mayor.
When he wasn’t hanging out with his fellow mayors, he celebrated the city’s victory in court against the delivery service DoorDash, wresting over $131 million from the company in a settlement for underpaying or not paying its workers. He also announced a new initiative to give out 70,000 free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera House, part of his push to make the city’s most exclusive cultural offerings accessible to everyday New Yorkers.
Mamdani’s many critics have tried to portray him as fixated on distant hobbyhorses, like arresting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. But if anything, it was Netanyahu who seemed obsessed with the mayor. In his thundering speech at the United Nations last week, he called Mamdani an antisemite with “Hamas buddies.” He darkly name-checked the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and even castigated Mamdani’s wife for her likes on social media.
When I caught up with Mamdani by phone late last week, I asked him what he had hoped to get out of his first General Assembly. “We are a city that is home to hundreds of nationalities and even more languages,” Mamdani told me. “If any city is an illustration of what the United Nations principles hope to achieve, it is ours.”
But no matter how admirable those principles, the weakness of institutions like the United Nations in the face of the world’s spiraling chaos is an invitation to ask deeper questions, Mamdani said: “In a moment of a rising far right and the questioning of institutions that have otherwise been durable over many decades, it is also an opportunity to rethink what has been at the heart of those institutions, and the question of who they can serve and who they seek to serve.”
“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live, why would you trust it to deliver anywhere?” Mamdani asked a gathering of mayors from big cities across the world, explaining his obsession with potholes, more than 200,000 of which have been filled across the city since he took office. “If you are making a New Yorker’s life a little smoother, so too you are making their journey to believe in government’s ability to deliver for them.”
Today, the body’s soaring aims — to create a more peaceful, humane world that respects the sovereignty of each nation and the dignity of each human being — seem like a fantasy from another dimension. Citizens the world over are dissatisfied with their governments and in many places are souring on democracy itself. Can it be any surprise that this supranational body comes in for such contempt?
And yet Mamdani sensed an opportunity to reclaim some of its founding spirit. Racing across the city last week, he seemed to be offering an antidote to globe-spanning distemper. To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. Politics, as he put it, “has to translate to the pavement.”
New York City has long held a singular spot on the international stage, and its mayors have become global figures. But Mamdani, by dint of his youth, his improbable rise and his unusual background, brings a vivid symbolism to the role. African by birth, South Asian by heritage, American by choice, Mamdani in many ways embodies the cosmopolitan ideal at the heart of the United Nations’ founding.
World leaders lined up to spend time with him. He went to Queens with Ireland’s prime minister for a bingo game at an Irish American community center. He met with Brazil’s octogenarian leftist president and breakfasted with Spain’s dashing left-wing prime minister. Norway’s prime minister tagged along with him to visit a New York City classroom and talk about artificial intelligence in education.
Even President Trump couldn’t resist some time with the mayor. Last Monday he dropped by Gracie Mansion, spending about an hour behind closed doors with Mamdani — an eternity in presidential scheduling. Trump seemed in no rush to leave as the two took questions from reporters, beaming as he declared, “I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential, got great potential.”
Mamdani’s agenda, as befits a mayor, was mostly municipal. He visited a wastewater treatment facility with his counterparts from Helsinki, Rome and Barcelona; welcomed families moving into public housing with the mayors of Paris, Amsterdam and Greater Manchester; and handed out fliers to delivery workers explaining their rights with Mexico City’s mayor.
When he wasn’t hanging out with his fellow mayors, he celebrated the city’s victory in court against the delivery service DoorDash, wresting over $131 million from the company in a settlement for underpaying or not paying its workers. He also announced a new initiative to give out 70,000 free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera House, part of his push to make the city’s most exclusive cultural offerings accessible to everyday New Yorkers.
Mamdani’s many critics have tried to portray him as fixated on distant hobbyhorses, like arresting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. But if anything, it was Netanyahu who seemed obsessed with the mayor. In his thundering speech at the United Nations last week, he called Mamdani an antisemite with “Hamas buddies.” He darkly name-checked the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and even castigated Mamdani’s wife for her likes on social media.
When I caught up with Mamdani by phone late last week, I asked him what he had hoped to get out of his first General Assembly. “We are a city that is home to hundreds of nationalities and even more languages,” Mamdani told me. “If any city is an illustration of what the United Nations principles hope to achieve, it is ours.”
But no matter how admirable those principles, the weakness of institutions like the United Nations in the face of the world’s spiraling chaos is an invitation to ask deeper questions, Mamdani said: “In a moment of a rising far right and the questioning of institutions that have otherwise been durable over many decades, it is also an opportunity to rethink what has been at the heart of those institutions, and the question of who they can serve and who they seek to serve.”
by Lydia Polgreen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: David Dee Delgado/Reuters[ed. ... aka, Socialist Commie.]
The Secretive Bilderberg Group Is a Key to Understanding the Global Power Elite
Most countries in the western world operate under a practically unquestionable assumption that they are democratic, in the sense that there is a plurality of different interests in society at any given time and each of them has an equal opportunity of gaining significant political power.
The very concept of an elite class, with more influence than mostly everyone else, is deemed a relic of history. C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, explained that these understandings have a certain romantic appeal, because a supposed balance of interests, without elite interference, makes “each of them really quite impotent, then no one set of higher circles and no manageable set of institutional arrangements can be held accountable for the events and decisions of our time.”
But in a world of constant conflict, economic strife, and political hypocrites, perhaps it is at least worth considering the other side of the argument for once?
In Mills’ conceptualisation of a power elite, he explained how a uniquely powerful grouping of economic, political, and military interests emerged after World War II that had the means to make decisions with significant consequences for the whole of American society.
The narrow and centralised group of individuals at the apex of economic, political, and military hierarchies constituted an elite with the technical and institutional means of power, which are beyond the reach of ordinary people. Far from conspiratorial, this was a group seeking to maintain its position of social power via the maintenance of its own coincidence of shared interests.
Indeed, Mills argued that “to accept either view – of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift – is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.”
Writing in the 1950s, Mills’ conceptualisation of an elite was rooted in facts of power that existed, for the most part, within the nation state. One big exception to this was the Bilderberg Group that formed in 1954, which brought together elites from across the world into a transnational network. The group’s official website states that it was developed in response to opinions “expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.”
It fails to say how non-leading citizens, the general public, had a say in its organisation or operation. The World Economic Forum, Trilateral Commission, and Atlantic Council serve as similar transnational elite knowledge networks where individuals with shared, and in this case globalist, interests can work to further their own agenda. Since the era of globalisation moved political and economic power beyond any single country, so too have elites transcended the bounds of the nation. The problem, then, is that how do the masses, bound within borders, stand a chance of influencing the decisions that this transnational elite are making?
To think of institutions like the Bilderberg Group as inconsequential is to underestimate the role they play in constructing a global ideological consensus among elites that is then brought home and applied to the “nation.” Bilderberg allows elites to interact and acquire a shared education in how to think about the world in globalised terms. While it is an unofficial institution, in the sense that is it not legally constituted, the decisions it makes are subsequently endorsed by official agencies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and national governments.
This is especially true of its neoliberal economic position. If there is a global ruling class, as critical political sociologists have identified, then to constrain political analysis to only the official institutions of the nation, and omit anything akin to Bilderberg, is a major misunderstanding of the ways of the powerful in modern times.
The Bilderberg Group’s powerful members come from across the world and represent the political, economic, military, technological, and ideological spheres of globalisation. There is absolutely no representation of alternative interests and ideological positions, such as small business, populists, socialists, or nationalists. [...]
Understanding the Bilderberg Group as the center of an elite knowledge network is far more accurate than any simplistic, and often naïve, claim to the contrary; especially from those that would malign it with the catch-all, ignorant label of “conspiracy theory.”
Knowing that the locus of political, economic, and military power now resides offshore helps to explain the pandemic of political disaffectedness sweeping across the planet. Some even see this as the emergence of a global civil war, which is surely the last thing the world needs at this very moment. Apparently, Bilderberg’s secretive nature is to ensure its participants can “speak freely in an environment of trust,” but precisely what would these people, who themselves claim a proclivity for transparency and democracy, want to speak about free from public discussion, criticism, and alternative points of view?
The public, rationally, can only surmise that it is nothing good. Unless politicians revert to assuming their proper role as national, and local, leaders, responsible for their own constituents’ needs as opposed to those of transnational corporations, the global crisis of democracy is surely set to continue.
by Stuart J. Hooper, The Wire | Read more:
Image: Reuters/File
[ed. The Press are typically excluded (see list of 2026 attendees here) and all discussions are conducted under the Chatham House rule (meaning you can use and report what you learned, but you cannot share who you got it from, nor their affiliations). See also: At Bilderberg’s bigwig bash two things are guaranteed: Kissinger and secrecy (Guardian).]
The very concept of an elite class, with more influence than mostly everyone else, is deemed a relic of history. C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, explained that these understandings have a certain romantic appeal, because a supposed balance of interests, without elite interference, makes “each of them really quite impotent, then no one set of higher circles and no manageable set of institutional arrangements can be held accountable for the events and decisions of our time.”
In Mills’ conceptualisation of a power elite, he explained how a uniquely powerful grouping of economic, political, and military interests emerged after World War II that had the means to make decisions with significant consequences for the whole of American society.
The narrow and centralised group of individuals at the apex of economic, political, and military hierarchies constituted an elite with the technical and institutional means of power, which are beyond the reach of ordinary people. Far from conspiratorial, this was a group seeking to maintain its position of social power via the maintenance of its own coincidence of shared interests.
Indeed, Mills argued that “to accept either view – of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift – is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.”
Writing in the 1950s, Mills’ conceptualisation of an elite was rooted in facts of power that existed, for the most part, within the nation state. One big exception to this was the Bilderberg Group that formed in 1954, which brought together elites from across the world into a transnational network. The group’s official website states that it was developed in response to opinions “expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.”
It fails to say how non-leading citizens, the general public, had a say in its organisation or operation. The World Economic Forum, Trilateral Commission, and Atlantic Council serve as similar transnational elite knowledge networks where individuals with shared, and in this case globalist, interests can work to further their own agenda. Since the era of globalisation moved political and economic power beyond any single country, so too have elites transcended the bounds of the nation. The problem, then, is that how do the masses, bound within borders, stand a chance of influencing the decisions that this transnational elite are making?
To think of institutions like the Bilderberg Group as inconsequential is to underestimate the role they play in constructing a global ideological consensus among elites that is then brought home and applied to the “nation.” Bilderberg allows elites to interact and acquire a shared education in how to think about the world in globalised terms. While it is an unofficial institution, in the sense that is it not legally constituted, the decisions it makes are subsequently endorsed by official agencies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and national governments.
This is especially true of its neoliberal economic position. If there is a global ruling class, as critical political sociologists have identified, then to constrain political analysis to only the official institutions of the nation, and omit anything akin to Bilderberg, is a major misunderstanding of the ways of the powerful in modern times.
The Bilderberg Group’s powerful members come from across the world and represent the political, economic, military, technological, and ideological spheres of globalisation. There is absolutely no representation of alternative interests and ideological positions, such as small business, populists, socialists, or nationalists. [...]
Understanding the Bilderberg Group as the center of an elite knowledge network is far more accurate than any simplistic, and often naïve, claim to the contrary; especially from those that would malign it with the catch-all, ignorant label of “conspiracy theory.”
Knowing that the locus of political, economic, and military power now resides offshore helps to explain the pandemic of political disaffectedness sweeping across the planet. Some even see this as the emergence of a global civil war, which is surely the last thing the world needs at this very moment. Apparently, Bilderberg’s secretive nature is to ensure its participants can “speak freely in an environment of trust,” but precisely what would these people, who themselves claim a proclivity for transparency and democracy, want to speak about free from public discussion, criticism, and alternative points of view?
The public, rationally, can only surmise that it is nothing good. Unless politicians revert to assuming their proper role as national, and local, leaders, responsible for their own constituents’ needs as opposed to those of transnational corporations, the global crisis of democracy is surely set to continue.
by Stuart J. Hooper, The Wire | Read more:
Image: Reuters/File
[ed. The Press are typically excluded (see list of 2026 attendees here) and all discussions are conducted under the Chatham House rule (meaning you can use and report what you learned, but you cannot share who you got it from, nor their affiliations). See also: At Bilderberg’s bigwig bash two things are guaranteed: Kissinger and secrecy (Guardian).]
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
AI Will Be a Boon for Savers
Sometime in the next few years, an ordinary American will give a simple instruction to an AI assistant: “Make sure my money is always working.” From that moment on, his cash may never sit still again.
The agent will sweep idle savings into whatever insured account pays the most. It will find high-paying savings accounts and ladder certificates of deposit without the owner’s learning what laddering means. This is agentic banking—software that displays your finances and acts on them—and the banking industry isn’t prepared for how fast it’s coming.
A staggering share of bank profitability rests on money that doesn’t move. This is true across the board, not only for big banks.
Americans hold roughly $10.4 trillion in savings and other liquid deposits. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s national average savings rate—the deposit-weighted average across every insured institution—is a mere 0.38%. At that rate, the system pays savers about $40 billion a year. The best nationally available savings accounts tracked by Bankrate pay around 4%. The same balances at that rate would earn more than $400 billion.
Even extremely conservative assumptions—half those balances stay put for good reasons, and top rates compress as money moves—leave Americans forgoing well over $150 billion a year. Call it the laziness tax: a quiet, regressive wealth transfer from inattentive consumers to the banking system.
AI agents will largely abolish it. The inertia that keeps a saver from spending 20 minutes to earn $1,000 disappears when the 20 minutes do. Every account becomes a shopped account. For consumers, this is unambiguously good: the largest, fastest transfer of value from financial institutions to households in generations, accomplished by software rather than regulation.
An agent working for a consumer can also flag junk fees, catch unauthorized charges, decode fine print and steer its owner away from predatory products. It can help accomplish, one household at a time, much of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to do through enforcement. The regulatory challenge will be ensuring that agents’ actions stay aligned with consumers’ best interests.
But AI agents will strain the system that makes lending possible. Banks will be funding long-duration loans with money that can leave in 30 seconds. The Silicon Valley Bank crisis of March 2023 offered a preview of what can happen when technology accelerates money: Tens of billions of dollars left one bank in a day. Agents automate and accelerate that speed. Liquidity models built on human sluggishness will become a distant memory.
To survive when AI moves money automatically, banks will need to change how they do business.
by John Delaney and Bill Foster, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Getty Images
The agent will sweep idle savings into whatever insured account pays the most. It will find high-paying savings accounts and ladder certificates of deposit without the owner’s learning what laddering means. This is agentic banking—software that displays your finances and acts on them—and the banking industry isn’t prepared for how fast it’s coming.
A staggering share of bank profitability rests on money that doesn’t move. This is true across the board, not only for big banks.
Even extremely conservative assumptions—half those balances stay put for good reasons, and top rates compress as money moves—leave Americans forgoing well over $150 billion a year. Call it the laziness tax: a quiet, regressive wealth transfer from inattentive consumers to the banking system.
AI agents will largely abolish it. The inertia that keeps a saver from spending 20 minutes to earn $1,000 disappears when the 20 minutes do. Every account becomes a shopped account. For consumers, this is unambiguously good: the largest, fastest transfer of value from financial institutions to households in generations, accomplished by software rather than regulation.
An agent working for a consumer can also flag junk fees, catch unauthorized charges, decode fine print and steer its owner away from predatory products. It can help accomplish, one household at a time, much of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to do through enforcement. The regulatory challenge will be ensuring that agents’ actions stay aligned with consumers’ best interests.
But AI agents will strain the system that makes lending possible. Banks will be funding long-duration loans with money that can leave in 30 seconds. The Silicon Valley Bank crisis of March 2023 offered a preview of what can happen when technology accelerates money: Tens of billions of dollars left one bank in a day. Agents automate and accelerate that speed. Liquidity models built on human sluggishness will become a distant memory.
To survive when AI moves money automatically, banks will need to change how they do business.
by John Delaney and Bill Foster, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Getty Images
[ed. Possible. But it'll take a heavy lift to get people to hand over their financial accounts (and security protections) to AI. What about criminal AIs that exploit that?]
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
The Canton Spirituals
[ed. Yeah... come back in a few years (like maybe three or four for every year you fucked up). Then maybe you'd have enough perspective to preach how you'd screwed everyone over while "making a lot of mistakes". Contrition stories will bloom like weeds after the mid-terms. Guaranteed.]
[See also: The Trump Administration is a Cesspit of Corruption (Krugman). But we already knew that.]
College is Coming Apart
Artificial intelligence arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role. Worse, some of us are offloading the drudgery of writing recommendation letters, grant proposals, and even scientific papers to AI.
But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for knowledge production, especially in the natural and applied sciences: in protein-structure prediction, materials design, and drug discovery, for example. Pressured, in part, by donors, boards, employers, and parents, college administrators have announced AI initiatives, invested in AI infrastructure, and established AI degree programs.
These two forces—students using AI to their detriment and colleges using it to their benefit—might seem to be in conflict. Students are supposed to do everything longhand to preserve the sanctity of learning, but they are also urged to meet the new professional demands created by AI. Faculty and administrators are policing the classroom for AI, largely in vain, while also using AI liberally in their own work. Campuses are defending themselves against AI as an interloper while concurrently retooling themselves for the AI future. Colleges are racing toward and away from AI simultaneously. It feels like artificial intelligence is wresting higher education apart.
That’s what I thought at first too. But I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong. Higher education is a bundle of unrelated things held together by custom, history, and accident. The college bundle was always a tenuous one. It has little reason to remain together, even as the institutions inside it are too entrenched to separate.
College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.
Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.
Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of students outside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.
But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for knowledge production, especially in the natural and applied sciences: in protein-structure prediction, materials design, and drug discovery, for example. Pressured, in part, by donors, boards, employers, and parents, college administrators have announced AI initiatives, invested in AI infrastructure, and established AI degree programs.
That’s what I thought at first too. But I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong. Higher education is a bundle of unrelated things held together by custom, history, and accident. The college bundle was always a tenuous one. It has little reason to remain together, even as the institutions inside it are too entrenched to separate.
College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.
Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.
Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of students outside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.
by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Atlantic/Getty
A Place Among the Fiddlers
I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. [...]
My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.
[ed. I used to play in song circles at parties in Alaska. They're fun. If you're not quite up to par (skills wise) just play a little softer and go with the flow. The groove will come.]
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. [...]
Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.
Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.
A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun. [...]
An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.
A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun. [...]
An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
by David Alm, Longreads | Read more:
Images:Terry Eiler; David Alm
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on 2028: ‘Life Doesn’t Wait for You to Be Ready’
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she will weigh the decision of whether to run for president after the midterm elections. The decision is clearly already weighing on her.
In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez revealed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she approaches the biggest crossroads of her political career.
Her gender. Her ethnicity. Her electability. Her eggs. Her movement. Her moment.
“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she said. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is now in her eighth year representing parts of the Bronx and Queens. She could simply keep winning re-election. But in 2028, she has two other choices: run for the White House, or seek the seat now held by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.
“Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby.
At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy.
“I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.”
“Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress as a left-wing outsider and remains one of the party’s most progressive voices. Some party strategists are urging Democrats to move to the middle. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was heartened by “the ascendance for the first time” of progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who toppled big-money candidates in this year’s Senate primaries.
“I have a tremendous amount of fear over the corruption of our political system,” she said. [...]
‘Everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?’
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knows that broaching the roles of race and gender in politics can be unpopular, even unappealing. “I often hesitate to even talk about it,” she said, “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.”
She is talking about it anyway.
“If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of running for president as a woman. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?”
She described the gender gap as a fact of American electoral politics: Roughly 27 percent of Congress is female, she said, and 0 percent of past presidents.
It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.
“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”
She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”
“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said. [...]
Why a White House run would be ‘very all or nothing’
Back in May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went viral for an answer she gave at a forum with David Axelrod, the onetime adviser to former President Barack Obama, in which she said her ambitions were not a “title or a seat.”
“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”
Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he believed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez when she spoke about her motivations.
“She is very honest in her communications. It’s what makes her disarming,” he said. “Her bottom line is producing something for the people she’s fighting for, so I think this decision is partly seen through that prism.”
In her interview with The Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeated variations of that line about her lack of interest in “my title.” But she also expressed a keen awareness of the realities that House members must seek re-election every two years and that losing would mean being out of office entirely.
“It’s very all or nothing,” she said. “If I were to run in this cycle, and not win, I would be done.”
“And I am not opposed to that,” she added. But it was also a consideration. “That, in and of itself, does not exclude the decision,” she finally said. “But it has to make it worth it.”
by Shane Goldmacher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez revealed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she approaches the biggest crossroads of her political career.
“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she said. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is now in her eighth year representing parts of the Bronx and Queens. She could simply keep winning re-election. But in 2028, she has two other choices: run for the White House, or seek the seat now held by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.
“Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby.
At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy.
“I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.”
“Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress as a left-wing outsider and remains one of the party’s most progressive voices. Some party strategists are urging Democrats to move to the middle. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was heartened by “the ascendance for the first time” of progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who toppled big-money candidates in this year’s Senate primaries.
“I have a tremendous amount of fear over the corruption of our political system,” she said. [...]
‘Everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?’
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knows that broaching the roles of race and gender in politics can be unpopular, even unappealing. “I often hesitate to even talk about it,” she said, “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.”
She is talking about it anyway.
“If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of running for president as a woman. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?”
She described the gender gap as a fact of American electoral politics: Roughly 27 percent of Congress is female, she said, and 0 percent of past presidents.
It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.
“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”
She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”
“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said. [...]
Why a White House run would be ‘very all or nothing’
Back in May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went viral for an answer she gave at a forum with David Axelrod, the onetime adviser to former President Barack Obama, in which she said her ambitions were not a “title or a seat.”
“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”
Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he believed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez when she spoke about her motivations.
“She is very honest in her communications. It’s what makes her disarming,” he said. “Her bottom line is producing something for the people she’s fighting for, so I think this decision is partly seen through that prism.”
In her interview with The Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeated variations of that line about her lack of interest in “my title.” But she also expressed a keen awareness of the realities that House members must seek re-election every two years and that losing would mean being out of office entirely.
“It’s very all or nothing,” she said. “If I were to run in this cycle, and not win, I would be done.”
“And I am not opposed to that,” she added. But it was also a consideration. “That, in and of itself, does not exclude the decision,” she finally said. “But it has to make it worth it.”
by Shane Goldmacher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
[ed. In a heartbeat. It's hard to imagine what a 'normal', boring government might feel like again, led by someone who actually came from middle class and cares about everyone.]
Is It Fascism Yet?
The following excerpts are from a journal the author kept in the first year after Donald Trump was re-elected president.—Ed.
11/12/2024
Seeing Donald Trump elected a second time is like being on LSD: “Am I tripping, or has an alcoholic Fox News host just been nominated as Secretary of Defense?”
11/28
The hippies were right about many things—but the punks were right about everything.
12/3
In my lifetime, records were replaced by cassettes, cassettes were replaced by CDs, and CDs were replaced by nothing.
12/4
The problem with these clowns Trump is nominating for his cabinet is they’re not funny. And they can’t juggle.
12/7
Instead of losing weight, I’ve decided to grow taller.
12/17
The liturgical calendar used to include both feasts and fasts—days to indulge, and days to abstain. Nowadays we only celebrate the feasts. That’s why the world is going to shit.
12/19
These days, war has too many bombs and not enough sword fights.
12/22
Time is continuous, but we pretend it can be divided into discrete pieces called minutes. Calling one part of the day “11:17” is like standing in one part of a stream and naming it “Arthur.”
12/25
There is a layer of snow outside, so my wife teaches me the animal tracks in our yard: the tiny, curving trail of a mouse, the burrowing of a mole (the ground is frozen, so they tunnel through the snow), the leaping of a fox, the deliberate steps of our neighbor’s cat.
1/2/2025
Freud discovered the unconscious; I’ve discovered the funconscious—the part inside me that’s always having fun.
1/6
Yesterday a carpet of snow covered the ground, and today it has almost vanished. Just a few pieces of white—some the size of coins—remain. Where did the snow go? It couldn’t have melted; the temperature’s been below freezing the whole time.
According to the internet, the snow has “sublimed.” It went directly from solid to gas.
1/10
Trump ran as the “peace candidate,” but he’s already planning wars with Greenland, Panama (to take back the canal), and possibly Canada—and he’s not even president yet.
1/13
It should be illegal for one person to have three podcasts.
1/18
A bare tree outside my window wriggles upward like a van Gogh sketch.
1/21
In ancient Egypt, only the priests knew how to read. There were thousands of hieroglyphs, which took years to learn. But a few young rebels devised an alphabet so they could write graffiti on the pyramids.
The alphabet was literally invented by vandals.
1/22
MAGA has a new anthem: “God Molest America.”
1/25
“Hegseth” sounds like an ancient Babylonian demon.
1/27
Someone said to me at a party, “I paid my dues,” and suddenly I realized—I’ve never paid any dues. Maybe I forgot.
2/1
Trump is a genius at getting elected, an idiot once in office.
2/2
Over the last couple of days we’ve had multiple seven-minute blizzards, as if we’re living in a snow globe that a giant hand occasionally shakes.
2/4
You can’t spell “melancholia” without “Melania.” Also “megalomania.”
2/7
I googled myself and found a picture of me googling myself.
2/9
The creeps who work for Elon’s DOGE should be known as “Muskrats.”
2/12
I can’t play jazz, but I can play something that sounds like the French composer Erik Satie having a stroke.
2/13
Rain fell yesterday, then froze. Today the landscape looks like one large, molded piece of white plastic.
2/18
After my wife and I read Emma by Jane Austen, we decided to watch the movie Clueless, which is based on it. Recently I told a number of people this, and every person replied, “Clueless is a great movie.”
First of all, they’re wrong. Clueless is a mediocre movie with a lot of young, sexy, energetic actors in it. But also, no one commented on Emma. No one had read it or had any desire to read it. If you see a movie, everyone wants to talk about it, but if you read a book, it’s like saying, “I just went to a great workshop on building donkey carts.” No one knows how to respond. Books exist to be refashioned into melodramas or farces on the screen.
This is why conservatives ban books but never movies—even movies based on banned books. People don’t care if they are forbidden to read something they were never going to read in the first place.
11/12/2024
Seeing Donald Trump elected a second time is like being on LSD: “Am I tripping, or has an alcoholic Fox News host just been nominated as Secretary of Defense?”
11/28
The hippies were right about many things—but the punks were right about everything.
12/3
In my lifetime, records were replaced by cassettes, cassettes were replaced by CDs, and CDs were replaced by nothing.
The problem with these clowns Trump is nominating for his cabinet is they’re not funny. And they can’t juggle.
12/7
Instead of losing weight, I’ve decided to grow taller.
12/17
The liturgical calendar used to include both feasts and fasts—days to indulge, and days to abstain. Nowadays we only celebrate the feasts. That’s why the world is going to shit.
12/19
These days, war has too many bombs and not enough sword fights.
12/22
Time is continuous, but we pretend it can be divided into discrete pieces called minutes. Calling one part of the day “11:17” is like standing in one part of a stream and naming it “Arthur.”
12/25
There is a layer of snow outside, so my wife teaches me the animal tracks in our yard: the tiny, curving trail of a mouse, the burrowing of a mole (the ground is frozen, so they tunnel through the snow), the leaping of a fox, the deliberate steps of our neighbor’s cat.
1/2/2025
Freud discovered the unconscious; I’ve discovered the funconscious—the part inside me that’s always having fun.
1/6
Yesterday a carpet of snow covered the ground, and today it has almost vanished. Just a few pieces of white—some the size of coins—remain. Where did the snow go? It couldn’t have melted; the temperature’s been below freezing the whole time.
According to the internet, the snow has “sublimed.” It went directly from solid to gas.
1/10
Trump ran as the “peace candidate,” but he’s already planning wars with Greenland, Panama (to take back the canal), and possibly Canada—and he’s not even president yet.
1/13
It should be illegal for one person to have three podcasts.
1/18
A bare tree outside my window wriggles upward like a van Gogh sketch.
1/21
In ancient Egypt, only the priests knew how to read. There were thousands of hieroglyphs, which took years to learn. But a few young rebels devised an alphabet so they could write graffiti on the pyramids.
The alphabet was literally invented by vandals.
1/22
MAGA has a new anthem: “God Molest America.”
1/25
“Hegseth” sounds like an ancient Babylonian demon.
1/27
Someone said to me at a party, “I paid my dues,” and suddenly I realized—I’ve never paid any dues. Maybe I forgot.
2/1
Trump is a genius at getting elected, an idiot once in office.
2/2
Over the last couple of days we’ve had multiple seven-minute blizzards, as if we’re living in a snow globe that a giant hand occasionally shakes.
2/4
You can’t spell “melancholia” without “Melania.” Also “megalomania.”
2/7
I googled myself and found a picture of me googling myself.
2/9
The creeps who work for Elon’s DOGE should be known as “Muskrats.”
2/12
I can’t play jazz, but I can play something that sounds like the French composer Erik Satie having a stroke.
2/13
Rain fell yesterday, then froze. Today the landscape looks like one large, molded piece of white plastic.
2/18
After my wife and I read Emma by Jane Austen, we decided to watch the movie Clueless, which is based on it. Recently I told a number of people this, and every person replied, “Clueless is a great movie.”
First of all, they’re wrong. Clueless is a mediocre movie with a lot of young, sexy, energetic actors in it. But also, no one commented on Emma. No one had read it or had any desire to read it. If you see a movie, everyone wants to talk about it, but if you read a book, it’s like saying, “I just went to a great workshop on building donkey carts.” No one knows how to respond. Books exist to be refashioned into melodramas or farces on the screen.
This is why conservatives ban books but never movies—even movies based on banned books. People don’t care if they are forbidden to read something they were never going to read in the first place.
by Sparrow, The Sun | Read more:
Image: © Rabah Seffal
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