Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist

Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.

In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)

Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.

The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.

Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)

Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?

Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.

As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.

Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.

As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.

Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.

Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?

Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.

But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.

Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.

You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.

Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?

Osman: Yeah.

Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?

Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.

My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.

In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)

Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —

Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”

When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.

In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.

Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.

But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.

Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.

But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.

My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.

My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)

Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.

Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.

The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.

Cottle: That’s my goal.

Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?

That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.

And that feels like a revolutionary act.

by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse.  I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]

Devour the Flesh

In the sterile womb of Jersey City, if you sit and watch a while, you can bear witness to the beating heart of corporate America. Here, along the waterfront, where banks and commercial entities alike feign importance, you can watch this organ function in all its pulsating, bloody, slimy glory: senior managers in starchy button-downs, shouldering duffel bags, talking about frenetic nothings on the phone; junior analysts, hiding happy hour hangovers with oat lattes and Chill Mint nicotine gum; women wearing ballet flats and cropped fit Zara blazers; men disguising receding hairlines with gelled crew cuts, swaggering in and out of glass buildings with their artfully hidden secrets. Everyone has been reduced to the same amount of nothing—no more than cells delivering oxygen to the vascular organ, ciphers turning around and around in revolving doors. Everyone is equally insignificant in the face of A Business Plan. They coagulate into a viscous soup, being pulled through aortas that channel them from the train station to the office door. The line for Just Salad in the adjoining mall wraps around the floor during lunch. They have a system so you won’t ever have to wait more than fifteen minutes for your Crispy Chicken Poblano.

There is a strong idea of fraternity here, not because of a shared commonality between individuals, but rather the compulsion that you are nothings beating within the same fleshy walls, so there must be inherent community within it. It must be true. The men sitting atop this system, who hide their sexual hunger and bloodthirst and baldness, spread their pink legs wide across leather seats and rhapsodize about how everyone here is part of a family, a community, a team. They wax lyrical about it like they are preparing to make everyone jerk off over a cookie. Of course, they have no qualms about turning on these idealisms in the face of a dangling carrot. Money is the siren’s call; greed, a Hydra. True sustenance is slim. They want people who are hungry, they say. They want people who are insatiable.

I do not think fondly of the limited time I spent on the waterfront in Jersey City last year. I think about the months I felt disrespected, belittled, objectified. I think about the Mexican restaurant where blazered ciphers would gather for company tab margaritas and I felt a self-disgust so deep in my bones I thought I might be having some kind of deathly allergic reaction to cotija cheese. I think about the route I would take along the water in the moments I had alone, walking past the starchy shirts, the hungover interns, the brassy highlights and misshapen executives, staring at my hollowing reflection in the Hudson River, wondering if it would please get eaten by the water: Drown drown drown drown drown.

All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.

When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”

I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it. 

by Steffi Cao, It's Steffi |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always nice to discover a new young writer with talent, wit, and deadly aim. See also: The Whimsy War Manifesto:]

***

Here is my synthesis of 2025 so far: the status quo is a bad day, and the likelihood of a world-ending day is far likelier than a good one, so when a good day does come around, it feels like licking the Pearly Gates with your own parched tongue.

Most of this is because of politics. Politics, we say, tearing our hair out once more! Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy, intended to make news outlets and the public alike feel like we’re being whiplashed with news while explicitly and covertly executing fascist policy, has entered in full force in the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term. Every day feels like you’re being bashed in the face like a birthday piñata: No more Department of Education! The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America! Tariffs! No tariffs! We’re gutting USAID and the CFPB—you didn’t know what they did for you as an America? No one taught you that in school? You didn’t read about it in the news that was paywalled because Marc Benioff bought TIME and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post? That’s your own fault! Fuck you! Tariffs again! Mass deportations! AI is gutting white collar jobs! They’re bombing Iran for fun! World War III! And now, here’s Elon Musk being ugly.

It is difficult to be online, to read the news, to open up your phone without your brain activating your fight-or-flight response because all of your synapses lit up like a Christmas tree. The future seems to be at a crossroads, every decision unsure and halting about what is really coming next. On the bad days, we are all just grasping to the last life raft of a boat being blown up by a bunch of the un-funniest losers you’ve ever seen in your life. Rent is skyrocketing, people are asking ChatGPT to make them weekly grocery lists, the rich are only getting richer. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet we scroll onto the next post anyway.

Nihilism and doomerism run rampant as a result. Trust in the government, in media and in society is at an all-time low. Everyone asks, are we cooked? For the first time in a long time, it really seems that way.

The End of Thinking

As writing skills have declined, reading has declined even more. “Most of our students are functionally illiterate,” a pseudonymous college professor using the name Hilarius Bookbinder wrote in a March Substack essay on the state of college campuses. “This is not a joke.” Nor is it hyperbole. Achievement scores in literacy and numeracy are declining across the West for the first time in decades, leading the Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch to wonder if humans have “passed peak brain power” at the very moment that we are building machines to think for us.

In the U.S., the so-called National Report Card published by the NAEP recently found that average reading scores hit a 32-year low — which is troubling, as the data series only goes back 32 years.

Americans are reading words all the time: email, texts, social media newsfeeds, subtitles on Netflix shows. But these words live in fragments that hardly require any kind of sustained focus; and, indeed, Americans in the digital age don’t seem interested in, or capable of, sitting with anything linguistically weightier than a tweet. The share of Americans overall who say they read books for leisure has declined by nearly 50 percent since the 2000s. (...)

In a viral essay entitled “The dawn of the post-literate society and the end of civilization,” the author James Marriott writes about the decline of thinking in mythic terms that would impress Edward Gibbon. As writing and reading decline in the age of machines, Marriott forecasts that the faculties that allowed us to make sense of the world will disappear, and a pre-literate world order will emerge from the thawed permafrost of history, bringing forth such demons as “the implosion of creativity” and “the death of democracy.” “Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print,” Marriott writes, “many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants, moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking.”

Maybe he’s right. But I think the more likely scenario will be nothing so grand as the end of civilization. We will not become barbarous, violent, or remotely exciting to each other or ourselves. No Gibbon will document the decline and fall of the mind, because there will be no outward event to observe. Leisure time will rise, home life will take up more of our leisure, screen time will take up more of our home life, and AI content will take up more of our screen time. “If you want a picture of the future,” as Orwell almost wrote, “imagine a screen glowing on a human face, forever.” For most people, the tragedy won't even feel like a tragedy. We’ll have lost the wisdom to feel nostalgia for what was lost.

Time Under Tension

… or, you know, maybe not!

Culture is backlash, and there is plenty of time for us to resist the undertow of thinking machines and the quiet apocalypse of lazy consumption. I hear the groundswell of this revolution all the time. The most common question I get from parents anxious about the future of their children is: What should my kid study in an age of AI? I don’t know what field any particular student should major in, I say. But I do feel strongly about what skill they should value. It’s the very same skill that I see in decline. It’s the skill of deep thinking.

In fitness, there is a concept called “time under tension.” Take a simple squat, where you hold a weight and lower your hips from a standing position. With the same weight, a person can do a squat in two seconds or ten seconds. The latter is harder but it also builds more muscle. More time is more tension; more pain is more gain.

Thinking benefits from a similar principle of “time under tension.” It is the ability to sit patiently with a group of barely connected or disconnected ideas that allows a thinker to braid them together into something that is combinatorially new. It’s very difficult to defend this idea by describing other people’s thought processes, so I’ll describe my own. Two weeks ago, the online magazine The Argument recently asked me to write an essay evaluating the claim that AI would take all of our jobs in 18 months. My initial reaction was that the prediction was stupendously aggressive and almost certainly wrong, so perhaps there was nothing to say on the subject other than “nope.” But as I sat with the prompt, several pieces of a puzzle began to slide together: a Financial Times essay I’d read, an Atlantic article I liked, an NAEP study I’d saved in a tab, an interview with Cal Newport I’d recorded, a Walter Ong book I was encouraged to read, a stray thought I’d had in the gym recently while trying out eccentric pull ups for the first time and thinking about how time multiplies both pain and gain in fitness settings. The contours of a framework came into view. I decided that the article I would write wouldn’t be about technology taking jobs from capable humans. It would be about how humans take away their own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will out-skill us that we miss the many ways that technology can de-skill us.

by Derek Thompson |  Read more:

Image: Sanika V on Unsplash

Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?

A few days ago, The Atlantic published an article on esteemed author John Cheever (1912-1982). But the magazine is almost apologetic, and feels compelled to admit the “final indignity” suffered by this troubled author—”less than 30 years after his death, even his best books were no longer selling.”

What a comedown for a writer who, during his lifetime, was a superstar contributor to The New Yorker, and got all the awards. Those included the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature.

But that’s not enough to keep any of his books in the top 25,000 sellers at Amazon. Try suggesting any of Cheever’s prize-winning works to your local reading group, and count the blank stares around the room.

And it’s not just Cheever. Not long ago, any short list of great American novelists would include obvious names such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. But nowadays I don’t hear anybody say they are reading their books.

And they are brilliant books. But reading Updike today would be an act of rebellion. Or perhaps indulging in nostalgia for a lost era.

The list goes on—Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Agee, etc. Do they exist for readers under the age of forty?

Their era—mid-20th-century America—really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.

And what about music?

The New York Times recently noticed that mid-century American operas never get performed by the Met. It’s almost as if the 1940s and 1950s don’t exist at Lincoln Center. (...)

But I see the exact same thing in jazz. Most jazz fans want to listen to music recorded after the the emergence of high fidelity sound in the late 1950s. So they are very familiar with Kind of Blue (1959) and what happened after, but know next to nothing about jazz of earlier periods.

If I were making a list of the greatest American contributions to music, my top ten would include Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s and Charlie Parker’s recordings from the mid-1940s. But even jazz radio stations refuse to play those works nowadays. So what hope is there that these musical milestones will retain a place in the public’s cultural memory?

Jazz musicians who died in the mid-1950s, such as Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and Clifford Brown should rank among the great musicians of the century, but somehow fall through the cracks. Maybe if they had lived a few more years, they would get their deserved acclaim. But the same fans who love Monk, Miles, Ornette, and Trane often have zero knowledge of these earlier figures.

Now let’s consider cinema from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t exist on Netflix.

You might say that Netflix has eliminated the entire history of cinema from its platform. But it especially hates Hollywood black-and-white films from those postwar glory years.

Citizen Kane is the greatest American film of all time, according to the American Film Institute. But when I try to find it on Netflix, the algorithm tells me to watch a movie about McDonald’s hamburgers instead.

The second best American film of all time is Casablanca, according to the AFI. When I tried to find it on Netflix, the algorithm offered me an animated film from 2020 as a substitute.

The sad reality is that the entire work of great filmmakers and movie stars has disappeared from the dominant platform. It wouldn’t cost Netflix much to offer a representative sample of historic films from the past, but they can’t be bothered. (...)

Not all of these works deserve lasting acclaim. Some of the tropes and attitudes are outdated. Avant-garde obsessions of the era often feel arbitrary or constraining when viewed from a later perspective. Censorship prevented artists from pursuing a more stringent realism in their works.

But those reasons don’t really justify the wholesale erasure of an extraordinary era of American creativity.

What’s happening? Why aren’t these works surviving?

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!

• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!

• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums. A visit to an Ivy League campus conveys the same intense feeling, if only via the architecture.

You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations—and with a responsibility to future ones.

The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

But it can act as if they never happened.

This is especially damaging to works from the 1940s an 1950s. These are still remembered—but only by a few people, who will soon die.

This is the moment when works from 80 years ago should pass from contemporary memory and get enshrined in history. But that won’t happen in an age that hates history and wants to live in the eternal present. (...)

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now. The same brand franchises get reheated over and over. The same song styles get repeated ad nauseam. The same clichés get served up, again and again.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image:Bettmann/Getty/reddit

How I Joined the Resistance

The religious evolution of J.D. Vance.

I prided myself on an ability to overwhelm the opposition with my logic. There was an arrogance at the heart of my worldview, emotionally and intellectually. But I comforted myself with an appeal to a philosopher whose atheism-cum-libertarianism told me everything I wanted to hear: Ayn Rand. Great, smart men were only arrogant if they were wrong, and I was anything but that. (...)

To lose my faith was to lose my cultural conservatism, and in a world that was growing increasingly aligned with the Republican party, my ideological response took the form of overcompensation: having lost my cultural conservatism, I would become even more economically conservative. The irony, of course, is that it was the economic program of the Republican party that least interested my family—none of them cared how much the Bush administration slashed tax rates for billionaires. The G.O.P. became a kind of totem—I attached myself to it ever more strongly because it gave me some common ground with my family. And the most respectable way to do so among my new college friends was through a dogged commitment to neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite. (...)

As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost. My sister once told me that the song that made her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.

It’s possible, of course, to overstate our own inadequacies. I never cheated on my would-be spouse. I never became violent with her. But there was a voice in my head that demanded better of me: that I put her interests above my own; that I master my temper for her sake as much as for mine. And I began to realize that this voice, wherever it came from, was not the same one that compelled me to climb as high as I could up our ladder of meritocracy. It came from somewhere more ancient, and more grounded—it required reflection about where I came from rather than cultural divorce from it.

As I considered these twin desires—for success and character—and how they conflicted (and didn’t), I came across a meditation from Saint Augustine on Genesis. I had been a fan of Augustine since a political theorist in college assigned City of God. But his thoughts on Genesis spoke to me, and are worth reproducing at length:

In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.

Let us suppose that in explaining the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” (Gn 1, 3), one man thinks that it was material light that was made, and another that it was spiritual. As to the actual existence of “spiritual light” in a spiritual creature, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the existence of material light, celestial or supercelestial, even existing before the heavens, a light which could have been followed by night, there will be nothing in such a supposition contrary to the faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if that should happen, this teaching was never in Holy Scripture but was an opinion proposed by man in his ignorance.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would have reacted to this passage when I was a kid: If someone had made the very same argument to me when I was 17, I would have called him a heretic. This was an accommodation to science, the kind that someone like Bill Maher rightly mocked contemporary moderate Christians for indulging. Yet here was a person telling us 1600 years ago that my own approach to Genesis was arrogance—the kind that might turn a person from his faith.

This, it turned out, was a little too on the nose, and the first crack in my proverbial armor. I began circulating the quote among friends—believers and nonbelievers alike, and I thought about it constantly.

Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household name. He would later blurb my book and become a good friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time. He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.

Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.

I began immediately planning for a career outside the law, which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford. Girard’s thought is rich enough that any effort to summarize will fail to do the man justice. His theory of mimetic rivalry—that we tend to compete over the things that other people want—spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale. But it was his related theory of the scapegoat—and what it revealed about Christianity—that made me reconsider my faith.

One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.
 (...)

To Girard, the Christian story contains a crucial difference—a difference that reveals something “hidden since the foundation of the world.” In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

People come to truth in different ways, and I’m sure some will find this account unsatisfying. But in 2013, it captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants. Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems. We fought over jobs we didn’t actually want while pretending we didn’t fight for them at all. And the end result for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.

That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things. (...)

I noticed during my research that many of those social problems came from behavior for which social scientists and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and “personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals or communities held back their own progress. And though it seemed obvious to me that there was something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little heartless. It failed to account for the fact that destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your finger at another person for failing to act a certain way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the misery that comes from those actions.

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And as I reflected on these competing views of the world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. (...)

And here, again, the words of Saint Augustine echoed from a millennium and a half earlier, articulating a truth I had felt for a long time but hadn’t spoken. This is a passage from City of God, where Augustine summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:

This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to another man’s property, than of that done to one’s own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed.

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christanity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.

by J.D. Vance, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Poor J.D. definitely lost the plot (not hard if solipsism and rationalization are your super powers). Hard to feel sorry for him though. In his present world view - Catholic or not - ambition (maybe destiny!) Trumps everything.]

A.I. Is Coming for Culture

In the 1950 book “The Human Use of Human Beings,” the computer scientist Norbert Wiener—the inventor of cybernetics, the study of how machines, bodies, and automated systems control themselves—argued that modern societies were run by means of messages. As these societies grew larger and more complex, he wrote, a greater amount of their affairs would depend upon “messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine.” Artificially intelligent machines can send and respond to messages much faster than we can, and in far greater volume—that’s one source of concern. But another is that, as they communicate in ways that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly. Partly for this reason, Wiener later wrote, “the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

The messages around us are changing, even writing themselves. From a certain angle, they seem to be silencing some of the algorithmically inflected human voices that have sought to influence and control us for the past couple of decades. In my kitchen, I enjoyed the quiet—and was unnerved by it. What will these new voices tell us? And how much space will be left in which we can speak? (...)

Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: a voice in your ear, three friends in a room. There have been a few experiments in fully automated podcasting—for a while, Perplexity published “Discover Daily,” which offered A.I.-generated “dives into tech, science, and culture”—but they’ve tended to be charmless and lacking in intellectual heft. “I take the most pride in finding and generating ideas,” Latif Nasser, a co-host of “Radiolab,” told me. A.I. is verboten in the “Radiolab” offices—using it would be “like crossing a picket line,” Nasser said—but he “will ask A.I., just out of curiosity, like, ‘O.K., pitch me five episodes.’ I’ll see what comes out, and the pitches are garbage.”

What if you furnish A.I. with your own good ideas, though? Perhaps they could be made real, through automated production. Last fall, I added a new podcast, “The Deep Dive,” to my rotation; I generated the episodes myself, using a Google system called NotebookLM. To create an episode, you upload documents into an online repository (a “notebook”) and click a button. Soon, a male-and-female podcasting duo is ready to discuss whatever you’ve uploaded, in convincing podcast voice. NotebookLM is meant to be a research tool, so, on my first try, I uploaded some scientific papers. The hosts’ artificial fascination wasn’t quite capable of eliciting my own. I had more success when I gave the A.I. a few chapters of a memoir I’m writing; it was fun to listen to the hosts’ “insights,” and initially gratifying to hear them respond positively. But I really hit the sweet spot when I tried creating podcasts based on articles I had written a long time ago, and to some extent forgotten. (...)

If A.I. continues to speed or automate creative work, the total volume of cultural “stuff”—podcasts, blog posts, videos, books, songs, articles, animations, films, shows, plays, polemics, online personae, and so on—will increase. But, because A.I. will have peculiar strengths and shortcomings, more won’t necessarily mean more of the same. New forms, or new uses for existing forms, will pull us in directions we don’t anticipate. At home, Nasser told me, he’d found that ChatGPT could quickly draft an engaging short story about his young son’s favorite element, boron, written in the style of Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.” The periodic table x “The BFG” isn’t a collab anyone’s been asking for, but, once we have it, we might find that we want it.

It’s not a real collaboration, of course. When two people collaborate, we hope for a spark as their individualities collide. A.I. has no individuality—and, because its fundamental skill is the detection of patterns, its “collaborations” tend to perpetuate the formulaic aspects of what’s combined. A further challenge is that A.I. lacks artistic agency; it must be told what’s interesting. All this suggests that A.I. culture could submerge human originality in a sea of unmotivated, formulaic art.

And yet automation might also allow for the expression of new visions. “I have a background in independent filmmaking,” Mind Wank, one of the pseudonymous creators of “AI OR DIE,” which bills itself as “the First 100% AI Sketch Comedy Show,” told me. “It was something I did for a long time. Then I stopped.” When A.I. video tools such as Runway appeared, it became possible for him to take unproduced or unproducible ideas and develop them. (...)

Traditional filmmaking, as he sees it, is linear: “You have an idea, then you turn it into a treatment, then you write a script, then you get people and money on board. Then you can finally move from preproduction into production—that’s a whole pain in the ass—and then, nine months later, you try to resurrect whatever scraps of your vision are there in the editing bay.” By contrast, A.I. allows for infinite revision at any point. For a couple of hundred dollars in monthly fees, he said, A.I. tools had unlocked “the sort of creative life I only dreamed of when I was younger. You’re so constrained in the real world, and now you can just create whole new worlds.” The technology put him in mind of “the auteur culture of the sixties and seventies.” (...)

Today’s A.I. video tools reveal themselves in tiny details, producing a recognizable aesthetic. They also work best when creating short clips. But they’re rapidly improving. “I’m waiting for the tools to achieve enough consistency to let us create an entire feature-length film using stable characters,” Wank said. At that point, one could use them to make a completely ordinary drama or rom-com. “We all love filmmaking, love cinema,” he said. “We have movies we want to make, TV shows, advertisements.” (...)

What does this fluidity imply for culture in the age of A.I.? Works of art have particular shapes (three-minute pop songs, three-act plays) and particular moods and tones (comic, tragic, romantic, elegiac). But, when boundaries between forms, moods, and modalities are so readily transgressed, will they prove durable? “Right now, we talk about, Is A.I. good or bad for content creators?,” the Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier told me. (Lanier helped invent virtual reality and now works at Microsoft.) “But it’s possible that the very notion of ‘content’ will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that’s designed to have an effect on the recipient.” Today, there are A.I.-generated songs on Spotify, but at least the songs are credited to (fake) bands. “There could come a point where it’ll just be ‘music,’ ” Lanier said. In this future scenario, when you sign in to an A.I. version of Spotify, “the first thing you hear will be ‘Hey, babe, I’m your Spotify girlfriend. I made a playlist for you. It’s kind of sexy, so don’t listen to it around other people.’ ” This “playlist” would consist of songs that have never been heard before, and might never be heard again. They will have been created, in the moment, just for you, perhaps based on facts about you that the A.I. has observed.

In the longer term, Lanier thought, all sorts of cultural experiences—music, video, reading, gaming, conversation—might flow from a single “A.I. hub.” There would be no artists to pay, and the owners of the hubs would be able to exercise extraordinary influence over their audiences; for these reasons, even people who don’t want to experience culture this way could find the apps they use moving in an A.I.-enabled direction.

Culture is communal. We like being part of a community of appreciators. But “there’s an option here, if computation is cheap enough, for the creation of an illusion of society,” Lanier said. “You would be getting a tailored experience, but your perception would be that it’s shared with a bunch of other people—some of whom might be real biological people, some of whom might be fake.” (I imagined this would be like Joi introducing Gosling’s character to her friends.) To inhabit this “dissociated society cut off from real life,” he went on, “people would have to change. But people do change. We’ve already gotten people used to fake friendships and fake lovers. It’s simple: it’s based on things we want.” If people yearn for something strongly enough, some of them will be willing to accept an inferior substitute. “I don’t want this to occur, and I’m not predicting that it will occur,” Lanier said, grimly. “I think naming all this is a way of increasing the chances that it doesn’t happen.”

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight

Intellectual Loneliness

via:

[ed. Sounds about right.]

Some Parts of You Only Emerge for Certain People

I think about this Virginia Woolf quote often. To me, it speaks to love’s power as an act of invention, the way certain people draw out a version of you that didn’t exist before they arrived. They witness you, and thus, rearrange you. In their presence, words you didn’t know you knew tumble out. Your thoughts sharpen, colours seem richer, you inhabit yourself more fully.

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

Every enduring friendship, every romance worth the name, behaves like a kind of psychic technology. Two minds meet, exchange a pattern of attention, and, almost invisibly, each begins to reorganise around the other. What starts as perception becomes structure.

Henrik Karlsson captures the mechanism simply: relationships are co-evolutionary loops. Beyond sociology, it feels like spiritual physics. Who we choose to orbit defines, over time, the texture and colour palette of our becoming. Love becomes a technology of transformation, a living interface between selves. To love well is to take part in someone else’s unfolding, even as they take part in yours. (...)

I’ve often felt how literal that process can be, like a slow annealing of the self under another’s attention. A few months ago, I read an essay that rearranged me: What is Love? by Qualia Computing, which frames love as a kind of neural annealing. In metallurgy, annealing is the process of heating metal until its internal structure loosens, then cooling it slowly so it hardens into a stronger, more resilient form. The lattice reorganises; the material changes.

The essay suggests that in high-energy emotional states, such as falling in love, grief, awe, psychedelics, deep meditation, the brain becomes molten, its patterns loosened, more open to reorganisation. The person we focus on in these states becomes like a mold for the cooling metal, shaping how our thoughts settle, what habits crystallise, what identities take hold.

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention becomes anchor; identity reshapes in response to their rhythms, their gaze. Perhaps this is why the right presence can feel like destiny: whole inner continents, hidden selves and latent worlds, begin to surface, shaping you into someone you hadn’t yet met. 

by Maja, Velvet Noise | Read more:
Images: Virginia Wolff; Banksy

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (Part 2, Chapter 8)

Previously: The Unlimited Horizon, part 1.

Is there really that much more progress to be made in the future? How many problems are left to solve? How much better could life really get?

After all, we are pretty comfortable today. We have electricity, clean running water, heating and air conditioning, plenty of food, comfortable clothes and beds, cars and planes to get around, entertainment on tap. What more could we ask for? Maybe life could be 10% better, but 10x? We seem to be doing just fine.

Most of the amenities we consider necessary for comfortable living, however, were invented relatively recently; the average American didn’t have this standard of living until the mid-20th century. The average person living in 1800 did not have electricity or plumbing; indeed the vast majority of people in that era lived in what we would now consider extreme poverty. But to them, it didn’t feel like extreme poverty: it felt normal. They had enough food in the larder, enough water in the well, and enough firewood to last the winter; they had a roof over their heads and their children were not clothed in rags. They, too, felt they were doing just fine.

Our sense of “enough” is not absolute, but relative: relative to our expectations and to the standard of living we grew up with. And just as the person who felt they had “enough” in 1800 was extremely poor by the standards of the present, we are all poor by the standards of the future, if exponential growth continues.

Future students will recoil in horror when they realize that we died from cancer and heart disease and car crashes, that we toiled on farms and in factories, that we wasted time commuting and shopping, that most people still cleaned their own homes by hand, that we watched our thermostats carefully and ran our laundry at night to save on electricity, that a foreign vacation was a luxury we could only indulge in once a year, that we sometimes lost our homes to hurricanes and forest fires.

Putting it positively: we are fabulously rich by the standards of 1800, and so we, or our descendants, can all be fabulously rich in the future by the standards of today.

But no such vision is part of mainstream culture. The most optimistic goals you will hear from most people are things like: stop climate change, prevent pandemics, relieve poverty. These are all the negation of negatives, and modest ones at that—as if the best we can do in the future is to raise the floor and avoid disaster. There is no bold, ambitious vision of a future in which we also raise the ceiling, a future full of positive developments.

It can be hard to make such a vision compelling. Goals that are obviously wonderful, such as curing all disease, seem like science fiction impossibilities. Those that are more clearly achievable, such as supersonic flight, feel like mere conveniences. But science fiction can come true—indeed, it already has, many times over. We live in the sci-fi future imagined long ago, from the heavier-than-air flying machines of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the hand-held communicator of Star Trek. Nor should we dismiss “mere” conveniences. Conveniences compound. What seem like trivial improvements add up, over time, to transformations. Refrigerators, electric stoves, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers were conveniences, but together they transformed domestic life, and helped to transform the role of women in society. The incremental improvement of agriculture, over centuries, eliminated famine.

So let’s envision a bold, ambitious future—a future we want to live in, and are inspired to build. This will be speculative: not a blueprint drawn up with surveyor’s tools, but a canvas painted in broad strokes. Building on a theme from Chapter 2, our vision will be one of mastery over all aspects of nature:

by Jason Crawford, Roots of Progress |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Part 2, Chapter 8. (yikes). You can see I've come late to this. Essays on the philosophy of human progress. Well worth exploring (jump in anywhere). Introduction and chapter headings (with links) found here: Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (RoP).]

Institutions

Institutions and a Lesson for Our Time from the Late Middle Ages. No institution of politics or society is immune to criticism. I have met no one who would really believe this, even if notional liberals and notional conservatives both have their protected favorites. But the spirit of the time is leading directly to the destruction of institutions that are essential for our cultural, social, political, intellectual, and individual health and survival. This is a two-way street, by the way. Both wings of the same bird of prey do it throughout the Neoliberal Dispensation in the Global North and a few other places.

I am currently reading The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance by Bernd Roeck (transl. Patrick Baker, 2025). At 949 pages and 49 chapters, I’ll complete the task in a month at 1-2 chapters per evening. I hope. We are still only just past Magna Carta (1215) in Chapter 12: “Vertical Power, Horizontal Power.” Both axes of power are essential in any society larger than a small group of hunter gatherers. Here is Professor Bernd on institutions:

Institutions – that dry term, which we have already encountered in the discussion of universities and in other contexts, denotes something very big and important. Institutions are what first allow the state to become perpetual; without them, it dies. If advisers appear as the mind and memory of the body politic, and the military its muscles, it is law and institutions that provide a skeleton for the state. They alone are capable of establishing justice over the long term. Only they can set limits to power and arbitrary will. They preserve knowledge of how to achieve success, as well as reminders of mistakes to be avoided in the future. No one knew this better than Cicero, who emphasized the Roman Republic’s special ability to gather experience and make decisions based on it. Before the advent of modernity, no section of the globe created institutions as robust and effective as those that developed in medieval Latin Europe. Moreover, these institutions were highly inclusive. The guaranteed protection under the law and the right to private property, provided education, and were relatively pluralistic (i.e., horizontally structured).

Indeed, Rome owed its success to its institutions. They then provided the states consolidating during the Middle Ages with models of compelling rationality.

This is not the place to quibble about details. But those who want to destroy our political, cultural, social, and educational institutions rather than improve them or refocus them along lines upon which reasonable people will agree? These unreasonable people are not to be respected:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought (Russell Vought, OMB Director) said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Well, it is working and the lack of imagination and humanity here is striking. These “bureaucrats” are the scientists who make sure our food is safe and that the chemical plant on the waterfront is not dumping its waste into the tidal creek. They are the scientists who hunt down the causes of emerging diseases. They are the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center who have gotten so very good at predicting the paths of cyclones. They are the men and women who sign up Vought’s parents for Social Security and Medicare. They are the people of the IRS who sent me a substantial tax refund because I overpaid, something pleasant I did not ask for nor expect. They are also the professors who teach engineers how to build bridges that will bear the load and teach medical students the basics of health and disease. And yes, they are the professors who teach us there is No Politics But Class Politics. The key here is that all of this is debatable by reasonable men and women of good will.

To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the institutions funded by our taxes are the cost of civilization. Perhaps we will remember this ancient wisdom before it is too late? Probably not. The urge to burn it all down, instead of rewiring the building and replacing the roof, is strong.

by KLG, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Writing Workshops Are F**king Useless

I am a writer and professor, with an MFA in creative writing, and I detest the writing workshop. The writing workshop is widely considered to be the best means (at least in America) of forging an existence for writers, young and old, of harvesting the best of their work and sustaining their practice. As both a writer and a professor, and furthermore as a reader, this is something I find simultaneously ridiculous, infuriating, and depressing. In a field, perhaps the only field, quite literally named in the spirit of “creativity,” how is it possible that one mode of instruction, taught most notably at a small school in Iowa, has entirely won the day when it comes to the education of artists? How has the market been so cornered? How have the options become so limited? How have professors become so convinced that this method—in a field, it needs be mentioned, constantly being asked whether it’s something that can even really be taught; and this by writers, readers, professors, deans, parents and everybody else—that this method of instruction is simply the way? Especially when we’ve got mountains—almost all of literature produced ever—of evidence to the contrary? (...)

I think that workshops represent a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to be encouraged in the experience and expression of any young artist. They all seem tethered to history with very selective gaps that ignore the solitary plight of so many artists we now recognize as geniuses; they simply ignore what has made literature so vital and so powerful across time, and in my estimation they do so at their peril. Programs are still enjoying the novelty of their existence today—as I said, the numbers of applicants seem just fine, on the uptick even—but unwillingness to adapt and improve will almost certainly begin to strangle off this pink cloud, and reading accounts of bad experiences only hammers this home with vengeance.

Bearing this reality in mind, what are some feasible adjustments that might be made to the workshop model if this kind of discipline is not to become more of an homogenous soup than it already is, dense with justifiable complaint and dissatisfaction? If we can accept that there is a fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the model of sitting a beginning artist in a room of their peers and having their nascent works critiqued in a rote, occasionally praiseful, occasionally scornful, always misguided effort to uphold an arbitrary connection to a school in Iowa, then it would behoove us to look at that misunderstanding to find any clarities. How have writers, before the existence of any writing workshop ever, done what they did? How did Herman Melville write? How did Virginia Woolf? And here it’s important to not simply throw out the whole enterprise, because 1) I like my job, and 2) We exist in a culture already entirely hostile to this pursuit, and academic disciplines make adjustments constantly, so it doesn’t pull any rug of legitimacy out from under us to say we’re adapting, implementing new models, exploring other paths than the one that’s grown stale, and repetitive, and actively harmful in countless circumstances.

What do I do? I am presently adapting. What I’ve tended to do is preface my class with a note that workshopping is technically a requirement where I teach these courses, and thus I will give them demonstrations of the workshop experience, and I will work with them to comment on things in a useful manner in one another’s work, but that the whole of the class will not be tethered to this model. Instead, we do these things, but then I’ll introduce this notion of the literary/arts “salon,” an open environment, wherein we’re all struggling, all trying to figure shit out, and whether we might wish to share something one day, or talk about something we’ve read recently, or simply complain about how impossible it seems to be to get published, these are all treated as the real, useful stuff of writing, because, once they leave school, they are. I did this in a course where everyone tried, over the semester, to write a novella. I wrote one with everybody, based on a set of three possible prompts each week. Everybody attempted 1,000 words per week. Some days we all simply came to class and wrote. Some days we talked about novels we’d all been reading per the class list. Some days we’d circle up and share from our work, but never was it the case that one person found their work being the focus of critique for any prolonged period. This has nothing to do with discomfort. The simple fact is that art is not made by committees. Even in the cases of film, where arguably a group, i.e. a committee, is wielding influence over the whole, there are inevitably voices exerting more influence on the entire process, if not one single voice, and we as audiences are better off for this. This is an undeniable truth when it comes to writing. Writers are people, and thus they can occasionally benefit from social interaction as regards their work. Some of them might thrive on it, and might be highly receptive to critique, and might be able to implement those critiques in ways that endlessly benefit the work. This concoction of human being has yet to cross my path, but I’m sure they exist. For the rest of us, perhaps simply fostering a community where we feel comfortable pursuing our interest is the thing. Perhaps that’s plenty.

by Republic of Letters |  Read more:

Image: Unterberg Poetry Center (404)

[ed. Writing workshops - a niche topic for sure. What I found most interesting is the promotion of 'salons', or something like them ever since reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast back in college and missing old philosophical/brainstorming sessions (in contrast to rote lecture/test classes). Basically, a more interactive, open-ended, ideas-based approach to learning, with lots of applications beyond basic schooling and education, especially in business. See also: The Salons Project.]

***

Salons were an important place for the exchange of ideas. The word salon first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian salone, the large reception hall of Italian mansions; salone is actually the augmentative form of sala, room). Literary gatherings before this were often referred to by using the name of the room in which they occurred, like cabinet, réduit, ruelle, and alcôve. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room): a lady, reclining on her bed, would receive close friends who would sit on chairs or stools drawn around. (...)

Breaking down the salons into historical periods is complicated due to the various historiographical debates that surround them. Most studies stretch from the early 16th century up until around the end of the 18th century. Goodman is typical in ending her study at the French Revolution where, she writes: 'the literary public sphere was transformed into the political public'. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:

A whole world of social arrangements and attitude supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable traditions, and a certain aristocratic feminism. This world did not disappear in 1789.

In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris) gained notoriety for including Pablo Picasso and other twentieth-century luminaries like Alice B. Toklas.

Evolution of Emotions

"If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you. That they bubble up and cause you to do and say things, but that experience is an illusion that the brain creates.

Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do. When you're experiencing emotion or you're in an emotional state, what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what's happening in the world. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, and your brain isn't wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that's where those simple feelings come from.

If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present. Just in the same way that you would exercise to make yourself healthier, you can invest energy to cultivate different experiences for yourself. The fact that your brain is using your past experience to predict what you're going to see, and hear, and feel means that you are an architect of your experience, and that doesn't involve breaking predictions. It involves seeding your brain to predict differently.

PAUL EKMAN: It's my belief that the way in which emotions evolved was to deal with things like saber-toothed tigers, the current incarnation of which is the car that's suddenly lurching at your car at a high speed. You don't have time to think. In split seconds, you have to do and make very complex decisions, and if you had to think about what you were doing, you'd be dead. It's a system that evolved to deal with really important things without your thinking about it.

So that means that sometimes, you're gonna be very unconsidered, very thoughtless. Well, these exercises that we're giving people, moving their facial muscles, concentrating on the sensations to make them more aware of an emotion when it arises, so that they will feel it at the moment and then can say, "Did she really mean to ignore me? No, it was just an accident." Or, "Maybe I shouldn't jump to the conclusion that she doesn't care about me at all."

The way in which we can improve our emotional life is to introduce conscious awareness. Nature did not want you to do that. So you have to do it yourself.

ESTHER PEREL: All relationships are colored with expectations about myself and about the other. My expectations influence that which I then see or hear. It is a filter, as well as my mood. That is one of the most important things to understand about relationships and communication — how people actually co-create each other in the context of a relationship because those people make part of who we are.

We will draw from them the very things which we expect from them, even when it's the opposite of what we really want. A lot of emphasis is put on our ability to say certain things, to say them in the right way, to articulate our needs, our feelings, our thoughts, our positions, our opinions. What is lacking is the ability to see that speaking is entirely dictated by the quality of the listening that is reflected back on us.

by Paul Ekman with Lisa Feldman Barrett, Big Think |  Read more:
Image: Jon Han

Book Review: "Breakneck"

There was a time in 2016 when I walked around downtown San Francisco with Dan Wang and gave him life advice. He asked me if he should move to China and write about it. I told him that I thought this was a good idea — that the world suffered from a strange and troubling dearth of people who write informatively about China in English, and that our country would be better off if we could understand China a little more.

Dan took my advice, and I’m very glad he did. For seven years, Dan wrote some of the best posts about China anywhere on the English-speaking internet, mostly in the form of a series of annual letters. His unique writing style is both lush and subtle. Each word or phrase feels like it should be savored, like fine dining. But don’t let this distract you — there are a multitude of small but important points buried in every paragraph. Dan Wang’s writing cannot be skimmed.

I’ve been anticipating Dan’s first book for over a year now, and it didn’t disappoint. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future brings the same style Dan used in his annual letters, and uses it to elucidate a grand thesis: America is run by lawyers, and China is run by engineers.

Dan starts the book by recapitulating an argument that I’ve often made myself — namely, that China and the United States have fundamentally similar cultures. This is from his introduction:

I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.

A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don't get in line.

It's very gratifying to see someone who has actually lived in China, and who speaks Chinese, independently come up with the same impression of the two cultures! (Though to be fair, I initially got the idea from a Chinese grad student of mine.)

If they're so culturally similar, why, then, are China and the U.S. so different in so many real and tangible ways? Why is China gobbling up global market share in every manufactured product under the sun, while America’s industrial base withers away? Why did China manage to build the world’s biggest high-speed rail network in just a few years, while California has yet to build a single mile of operational train track despite almost two decades of trying? Why does China have a glut of unused apartment buildings, while America struggles to build enough housing for its people? Why is China building over a thousand ships a year, while America builds almost zero?

Dan offers a simple explanation: The difference comes down to who runs the country. The U.S. has traditionally been run by lawyers, while the Chinese Communist Party tends to be run by engineers. The engineers want to build more stuff, while lawyers want to find a reason to not build more stuff. (...)

Breakneck’s thesis generally rings true, and Dan’s combination of deep knowledge and engrossing writing style means that this is a book you should definitely buy. Its primary useful purpose will be to make Americans aware that there’s an alternative to their block-everything, do-nothing institutions, and to get them to think a little bit about the upsides and downsides of that alternative.

I bring up my main concerns about Dan’s argument: How do we know that the U.S.-China differences he highlights are due to a deep-rooted engineer/lawyer distinction, rather than natural outgrowths of the two countries’ development levels? In other words, is it possible that most countries undergo an engineer-to-lawyer shift as they get richer, because poorer countries just tend to need engineers a lot more?

I am always wary of explanations of national development patterns that rely on the notion of deep-rooted cultural essentialism. Dan presents America’s lawyerly bent as something that has been present since the founding. But then how did the U.S. manage to build the railroads, the auto empires of Ford and GM, the interstate highway system, and the vast and sprawling suburbs? Why didn’t lawyers block those? In fact, why did the lawyers who ran FDR’s administration encourage the most massive building programs in the country’s history?

And keep in mind that America achieved this titanic share of global manufacturing while having a much smaller percent of world population than China does.

That’s an impressive feat of building! So even though most of America’s politicians were lawyers back during the 1800s and early 1900s, those lawyers made policies that let engineers do their thing — and even encouraged them. It was only after the 1970s that lawyers — and policies made by politicians trained as lawyers — began to support anti-growth policies in the U.S. (...)

There are several alternative explanations for the trends Dan Wang talks about in his book. One possibility, which Sine argues for, is that China’s key feature isn’t engineering, but communism. Engineers like to plan things, but communists really, really like to plan things — including telling people to study engineering.

Another possibility is that engineering-heavy culture is just a temporary phase that all successfully industrializing countries go through during their initial rapid growth phase. When a country is dirt poor, it has few industries, little infrastructure, and so on. Basically it just needs to build something; in econ terms, the risk of capital misallocation is low, because the returns on capital are so high in general. If you don’t have any highways or steel factories, then maybe it doesn’t matter which one you build first; you just need to build.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Jonothon P. Sine

[ed. I've mentioned Dan's annual China summaries before (see here, here and here). When 2025 rolled around and none appeared I wrote and asked if he was still planning something. That's when he told me about this book. Definitely plan to pick it up.]