China's AI Education Experiment

A deep dive.

Pilot schools in China are already using AI to grade children’s artwork, monitor their facial expressions during lectures, and screen them for psychological problems — and the Ministry of Education (MOE) wants schools across the country to follow suit.

Integrating AI into the education system has rapidly become a top priority of the Chinese central government, which is betting that AI tools can eliminate China’s vast educational inequities and make the next generation of workers more productive. The State Council highlighted education as a key area of focus in the “AI+” plan, it received a shout-out in the 15th Five-Year Plan, and in May 2025, the Ministry of Education (MOE) released a white paper on AI for education. This MOE document proclaims that 2025 marks the dawn of an era (“智慧教育元年”), the beginning of a system-wide effort to “intelligentize” 智能化 education using AI tools. The MOE’s goal: universalize basic AI access in primary and secondary schools by 2030. Industry received that signal and responded rapidly, with Alibaba Cloud releasing its own AI+education white paper the following month. But the gap between Beijing’s (and Hangzhou’s) techno-optimism and rural China’s reality is enormous.

This report explores why the Party wants to integrate AI into education, what applications the MOE is most optimistic about, and where the barriers to successful rollout lie. We’ll limit our analysis to K-12 education today, but university AI initiatives will be the focus of our next report in this series!

Institutional History

In official discourse, China is said to have entered a “post-equity era” 后均衡时代 since the MOE announced that all counties had met the baseline quality level for compulsory schooling in 2021. Now, the focus is shifting from access to education to improving the quality of that education. The 14th 5-year plan (2021-2025) prioritized expanding infrastructure in rural schools through the “county-level high school revitalization initiative” (县中振兴), part of which involved equipping classrooms with ‘smart hardware’ such as digitized blackboards. During this period, the party spent significant resources to provide nearly every school with an internet connection.

Still, rural education in China faces serious structural challenges. I spoke with Leo He — a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who did NGO work in rural China from 2019 to 2023 — for a firsthand account of the situation. Every locality, he explained, has designated “elite” schools that talented students from surrounding areas compete to transfer into. The result is a system where “educational resources are systematically sucked up to the center from the periphery, leaving rural areas incredibly depleted.” While this arguably gives academically gifted students opportunities to develop their talents, it deprives most students of educational resources.

According to China’s 2020 census, only 30.6% of the population has ever attended high school (including non-academic vocational secondary school), which Stanford professor Scott Rozelle notes, “is lower than South Africa, lower than Turkey and lower than Mexico.” In 2022, roughly 40% of China’s middle school graduates didn’t go on to attend high school of any kind, and among the students that do continue their education, national policy stipulates that roughly half (“五五分流”) are funneled into non-academic vocational high schools with no path to enter college.

To understand how AI could fit into this picture, we first need to understand the political and economic factors that incentivize Beijing to care about students in the countryside. It’s not clear that more investment in education will translate to high economic growth at this point in China’s development path — the real youth unemployment rate is probably still around 20%, and there are fewer entry-level positions available just as a record number of new graduates enter the workforce. Rather, this is a priority for the Party because improving the education system is so popular.

When Rozelle’s team surveyed 1,800 rural mothers and asked what they wanted their children to aspire to, over 95% said, “I want my child to go to college.” In China, a degree from an elite college doesn’t just translate to higher earnings — it unlocks better healthcare via the hukou system, cushy “iron rice bowl” 铁饭碗 jobs, and above all, social prestige. In 2023, researchers at Stanford found that Chinese families spent an average of 17.1% of their annual household income on education, which amounts to 7.9% of annual household expenditures. (Households in the US and Japan, by comparison, dedicate just 1-2% of annual expenditures to education.) The poorest quartile of families in China devotes a staggering 56.8% of income to education, and education spending is inelastic — that is, it’s prioritized as a necessary expense — across all income levels.

As Andrew Kipnis, the anthropologist who wrote Governing Educational Desire, explained to ChinaTalk, educational reform is a priority for the party “because it’s a way of keeping people happy. If they think there’s some hope their child will attend university, that gives them some investment in the system.” But not every child can become part of the elite: “People who have gone to university won’t work in factories,” as Kipnis put it. No matter how popular it would be, Beijing is not interested in building a system where a college education is available to anyone who wants one. But within this zero-sum system, where anyone who receives an advantage is inherently disadvantaging someone else, the party still needs to make parents feel like their child is getting ahead. Infrastructure is pretty much the perfect tool for this. It makes schools feel luxurious on the ground without changing the fundamentals that make the system so unfair. Shiny new facilities deliver popularity gains immediately, and if your child doesn’t get into university years later, it’s their own damn fault.

Those incentives are shaping the world’s largest AI education experiment. China is not the only country betting that AI will transform education, but the scale and style of China’s ambitions are unmatched globally. While China started with pilot programs, South Korea’s government led with inflexible national-level implementation, spending US$850 million on an ambitious AI textbook initiative that collapsed after just 4 months. India’s edtech ecosystem is private-sector-led with little top-down guidance or regulation, which resulted in the high-profile implosion of Byju’s and a proliferation of predatory practices targeting low-income families. Japan, unlike China, pledged to make sure every student had a device before implementing AI teaching tools.

Ultimately, China stands out globally for the sheer scale of its AI education ambitions — and the scope of applications its edtech industry is targeting for AI integration.

by Lily Ottinger, China Talks |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration (Nature). National Science Foundation.]

Dating Apps: Giving Men What They Want But Not What They Need

Dating apps were built on the bones of Grindr. I have been known to joke that everything wrong with dating apps is divine retribution for culturally appropriating them from the gays.

Gay men, specifically, that’s important - the overwhelming majority of people making apps are still men, and most of those are still straight men, and while I don’t exactly have insider knowledge on this, it couldn’t be clearer to me that some open-ish minded straight tech boy heard from one of his gay male friends about being able to summon sex partners to his bed from the immediate vicinity after filtering on a bunch of lewd photos and thought: “There isn’t a straight man alive who wouldn’t consider giving up his left hand to have this experience with women. I could make a billion dollars making straight Grindr.”

And thus Tinder was born. Blah blah blah lust and greed sullying the purity of romantic and sexual love; a direction I could go, but instead we’re going to talk about the ways that playing to male preferences in the short term can easily ruin their entire lives, even when it was men’s idea.

Dating apps aggressively reflect male preferences, sexuality neutral. They’re long on photos, short on text. They filter primarily on location, which has some usefulness, but is most useful if the question is “who’s geographically close enough to me that walking to my place for sex is a realistic option” .

Men love flipping through photos of people they’re attracted to - that alone drove much of the traffic to Facebook’s precursor, Hot or Not. This app is built to give men a sexual scrolling experience as soothingly magnetic as any social media site while providing enough mystery to feel less degenerate than porn (the better for large doses and intermittent rewards).

For women, it’s grim. Yes, they get matches much more often than men do (largely because these extremely male-centric UI decisions lure vastly more male users than women; what economist could have predicted this problem with a heterosexual dating app). They don’t enjoy using these apps, not nearly to the degree or as often as men do. For most women, sifting through men feels dehumanizing, and sorting on pictures feels painfully limited (the male equivalent might be having to swipe based on photos of a woman’s favorite outfit, laid out on her bed. Vaguely boring and frustrating to have to make important decisions with so little information about the things you care about).

This isn’t just because of blackpill stuff about how men aren’t hot to women - that topic has been covered to death, yes women find men physically hot but no it doesn’t always work in such a way that static photos capture, so men are impossibly screwed by efforts to appeal to women with photos alone. There’s also the fact that men suck at taking pictures, because the market for photos of people is overwhelmingly men as buyers and women as suppliers, with the demand being for sexually attractive photos of women. Looking at photos of men is like driving a Nissan truck: it couldn’t be clearer that it is not your specialty and significantly worse than other products that your entire factory line was designed for.

You might think that dating apps are bad for men because they lead to men experiencing significant rejection - even the way my post is framed up until this point sort of implies as much. That framework, like much about dating apps, gets the whole picture subtly, insidiously wrong in a way that leaves people who take them at face value much worse off. You know who takes things at face value most often? You’re not going to believe this,

No, the greatest deprivation created by dating apps is specifically denying women and men the opportunity for women to keep men around in a general capacity. (If this idea makes you freak out about the friend zone, I’m almost impressed with you because young people seem to do so little socializing that no one complains about the friend zone anymore. Pat yourself on the back for having friends if you’ve managed to develop a resentment complex around the friend zone).

Most women develop attraction to men via proximity and time. Force a woman to choose if she wants the option to sleep with a man the second she meets him, and she will default to no in almost every single case. For many men, this means that any men who enjoy the attention of women who are open to sleeping with them at first glance are the only men women authentically want. Respectfully, you’re thinking like a guy, and if you believe that men and women are extremely different, I’m going to need you to trust that women develop affection for men differently than men do for women, such that you’ll ruin your life trying to figure out why women don’t desire you in the exact same way that you desire them...

One of the worst things you can do if you date women is to push them into a choice of yes or no as early as possible. You are simply too much of a risk on too many axes to get something other than a no unless you look like Chris Hemsworth, and even that wouldn’t get you yeses from 100% of the women you might ask out (hot men can still be shitty in about a thousand ways, and women often aren’t willing to take risks even for hotness. Again. They are not men). You might think that your goal should be to look like Chris Hemsworth, or alternatively to despair that you don’t look like Chris Hemsworth and go sulkily into that good night, but that’s you thinking like a guy and assuming that how women feel has to match how you feel. Frankly, that’s what got you into this mess: by trusting tech men who told you that you could game heterosexual dating by giving you an interface that pinged all your dopamine sensors while curiously robbing you of a lot of opportunities to find and develop a fulfilling relationship. [...]

The major product provided by a dating app is the illusion of participating in dating at all - some time swiping through faces, and congratulations, you are “dating”, you Tried, you do not need to do anything scarier or riskier or less fun than this.

by Eurydice, Eurydice Lives |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Fuck's Fucking Fucked

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote a little after 8 a.m. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”  ~ Donald Trump, 4/5/2026

Fuck had run its course. For the beloved curse word, the future did not bode well. Gross overuse of fuck had continued to degrade TV and film, music and prose. Rap, the musical genre in which fuck had become most unironically parodic was a fat, ripe, slow-moving target and was the first to be hit. Pop a cap in your bottom? No, not that dire. The minor profanities seemed fine. Even the nastier ones looked to be okay. Only the fucks were fading. What were fans saying? 

Soon to follow their fuck-dependent rap brethren, standup comics were next to feel these winds of change, the gentle breeze starting to gust. Most starkly and notably, the fuck that is delivered by the comic to get the customary post-punchline second laugh, a laugh as good as guaranteed, no longer seemed to be working.

You know the bit, we all do.

The comic delivers his punchline, which is, let’s say, “The guy has no clue.” As the audience laughs at the punchline, the comic walks the few steps to his stool for a sip of bottled water. Lifting the bottle to his lips as the laughter generated by the “no clue” punchline begins to wane, the comic aborts his sip and says, “No fucking clue.”

According to a longstanding formula, the repeating of the punchline here, reinforced by the strut that is fuck, should be an easy second laugh. Not anymore. Such was indicative of the diminishing power of fuck, an early warning sign, the not-funny-a-second-time-unless-supported-by-fuck punchline no longer getting those easy second laughs. The comic may hear more chortle than laugh, a laugh of manners, a laugh forced not earned, or, there may be no laugh at all. Among the comics, fears of fuck failing in its role as reinforcer is why deliveries of the second, fuck-dependent punchline would usually occur during the sip of water, for should you find yourself sipping in silence at least you have something to do.

This was the moment in entertainment when audiences were letting it be known that they weren’t finding the word funny or shocking or dramatic anymore. To the artist, the audience was saying, “We need more than your cursing. We don’t find it impactful. We’re not twelve years old. It’s kind of insulting.”

For comedians, the message was clear enough. They abandoned the formula that is the fuck-supported second laugh—but it didn’t stop there. Even the fuck-supported first laugh, the fuck-supported laugh in general, was losing traction, losing its cultural standing, the comics coming to fear that even to use fuck, let alone overuse it, had become cliché. The “fuck comics,” the comics who continued to use fuck, soon became less appealing to audiences and then unappealing, the least funny of the comics. There was no question by this time, with rappers and comedians blatantly beginning to tidy up their vocabularies, that the demise of fuck was upon us. The people were making it clear: they were not just tiring of the word, they were telling artists that they needed to do more than lean on the creative crutch that is fuck. For fuck, the writing was on the wall. Amongst themselves, the fucks were talking. 

“Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

“Fucked if I know.”

All fucks were nervous, all were concerned. The fucks knew that a cultural shift of this magnitude would result, more or less, in their immediate extinction. There was confusion and fear. Lots of questions. The union would be no help on this one. There were jobs, families. The future.

“Fuck. Fuuuuuck. Bro, this fucking sucks.”

“And like, zero fucking warning, bro.”

“And that German fuck. He didn’t fucking help. That German fucker fucking fucked us.”

“Not only him, fucking him and a whole fucking movement.”

The “German fuck” was Dr. Kalba Brenin, the German linguist and film critic. Dr. Brenin engaged the fuck catastrophe innocently enough. He had commented on his podcast that a limited series he had been watching and was intending to review used fuck so often that he stopped watching after two of eight episodes. A highly touted series about sexy young corporate lawyers dispatched to the world’s largest cities to ply their trade and defend and sustain capitalism, Dr. Brenin became frustrated by the “near constant” use of fuck that would commence in any scene that “required dramatic acting.” Rolling his eyes and ultimately laughing at fuck-choked so-called dramatic scene after fuck-choked so-called dramatic scene—the excessive fucks turning the drama into unintended comedy—instead of a review Dr. Brenin wrote his now infamous essay, A Welcome Overstayed, in which he called for fuck to be banned from all recorded entertainment—not for reasons of censorship of profanity—but “for the sake of preserving what human beings have for five millennia called art.”

In his essay, Dr. Brenin transcribes an exchange from the show.

“Becca should be told this case is now a fucking homicide.”

“Becca’s in the Andes, mountain climbing, off the grid, how the fuck am I supposed to get in touch with her?”

“Well she’s fucking president of this firm, you fucking better find a way.”

“Fuck you, Tristan.”

“Fuck you, too, Emma. And fuck Becca.”

Exeunt Tristan.

Dr. Brenin was relentless in his criticism.

“Fuck is anti-art. Fuck is an art killer. Writers, as of now, you must remove fuck from your lexicon. Distance yourself. Save yourself while there’s still time. It’s over.” [...]

For the linguists and pop culture scholars who attempted to explain the decline of fuck, the similarities to tattoos were often cited, that the way in which tattoos had lost their edge, their cred, their cool, should have been seen by fuck as a cautionary tale.

Tattoos had gone from ships-at-sea and prisons and cheap boarding rooms to spas and moms and pretty junior bank tellers with full sleeves. The tattoo was defanged. The tattoo had been corporatized, commercialized and, of special concern to men, feminized, as tattoos had become, near the final stages of the tattoo era and the rise of the tattoo removal era, more popular with women than men. Once the lone province of the hairy forearm, the tattoo had spread all over the body, a metastatic migration that could only result in homogenization. Fuck was on a similar trajectory. The word had become homogenous. It was as if once the film and television industries were finally permitted to say fuck, after years of censorship, fuck was all they wanted to say and now, after decades of relentless and unforgiving fuckery the people were tired, they had heard enough, they didn’t want to hear it anymore.

by Brutus Macdonald, Substack | Read more:
Image: George Carlin via: "the seven words you can't say on tv".

A Ride Through the Ages

via:

Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.

Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

BAD WRITER [touchily]: “Actually, I do use AI to help me write.”

Okay. That checks out. Carry on.

Want to use AI as a Valuable Part of Your Writing Process? Want to use it to “generate pushback on my column thesis” and be “more comprehensible” and “craft unique angles” and offer “positive and negative feedback” and “scale the quantity” of your “output?”

Knock yourself out.

You have my blessing.

Hey buddy— go for it!

Some in the “real writer” community find this sort of rampant outsourcing of the writing process to AI to be distressing. Not me. Would I do it myself? No. I have self-respect. But I want to tell you, my friends, that you have my full support for all of it. Want to throw your dashed-off notes into ChatGPT and have it spit a draft back at you and then edit that and call it your own? Want to toss a few hastily written headlines at Claude and have it generate the outline of your piece? Want to dump your entire career archives into a chatbot and then order it to replicate your own voice so you don’t have to?

Do you, a grown man, a successful professional writer who has received a book deal paying you real US currency, want to use AI for the purpose of “making sure the book matches [your own] writing style”[???]? Guess what, brother: I support you. I affirm you. I am right here offering you a classic thumbs-up gesture of affirmation.

“Whoa, a writer who I have never regarded as particularly inventive is using AI? I am surprised and disappointed.” There’s a sentence I would never utter. Instead, I would accept the news of your AI use with total equanimity, nodding almost imperceptibly to indicate that this is not something worth raising my eyebrows over.

No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mots stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.

You’ll be all, “Politics in America is divided—but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s discuss how to bridge the partisan divide.” Your sense of joy at the possibilities of the English language will have been so eroded that you won’t even understand why that sucks shit. Meanwhile I’ll be dropping some wild similes you could never even imagine. “Politics is like a sea slug.” What?? How?? Readers will flock to me to find out. Too bad your AI editor struck that line from your piece as “indecipherable.”

You and your friend “Claude” wouldn’t last two seconds in my cipher.

Maybe you read the studies about how AI use causes “cognitive surrender” that slowly destroys your ability to think critically about the linguistic cud that the machine is serving you. Or about how it causes “cognitive foreclosure” that prevents you from ever developing the skills to critique AI output even if you wanted to. Maybe these studies give you pause, when you think about introducing these inscrutable tools of mental paralysis into your own creative process.

Don’t worry about it!

Life is hard enough already. You’re busy. You have lots of things to do—laundry, making lunch, and more. The last thing you need is a bunch of jealous (Brooklyn hipster) writers lecturing you about how this magical productivity booster is somehow “bad” for you. Those are probably the same haters who told you to stop doing so much crystal meth. Some people can’t stand to see you succeed!

I just checked a calendar—it’s 2026. AI is here to stay and you might as well beat the rush by using it more and more, right? Right. In the name of efficiency, it just makes sense for you to turn over ever greater portions of your thought process to this seductive helper, never stopping to ask yourself what it is costing you. You are a nice person and your job (writing) deserves to be easy. There, there. Allow yourself to sink into the warm opiate of cerebral ease. This is better. Yes. This is much better.

By all means—proceed.

And then, when you have settled into this comfortable pattern, sit back and watch me unsheath my massive, work-hardened intellect, built to staggering strength through a daily regimen of thinking about stuff. I think you’ll find that your panicked efforts to resist my onslaught will prove unsuccessful, hampered as you are by atrophied muscles of the mind. Ask your AI companion for some final words of comfort. The hour of your doom draws near.

I will crush you with ease.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Haha...yep. : ) See also: Who Goes AI? (with respect to Dorothy Thompson's 'Who Goes Nazi', gracefully acknowledged by the author).]

The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides

The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie

It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation—one that, inevitable though it may seem in retrospect, nearly nobody predicted: The bourgeoisie has switched sides.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proletariat was the political stronghold of the left. The bourgeoisie was the stronghold of the right. Indeed, the assumption that affluent professionals would tend to be conservative is reflected in the most famous political treatises and pieces of art that the period produced.

Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. The origins of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, of Britain’s Labour Party, and even of the modern-day Democratic Party in the United States lie with factory workers and trade unionists. In Jacques Brel’s song “Les Bourgeois,” three young men mock the conservative pieties of their elders by mooning the notaries of a small French town; when, by song’s end, the protagonists, themselves now middle-aged notaries, respond in anger to being mooned in turn, the obvious implication is that they too have turned into conservatives.

But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics. It is astonishing, for example, that according to The Economist, the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, most closely resembles the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1996. (Unsurprisingly, both lost.)

This transformation is even visible in the realm of popular culture. Take, as an example, the most famous American cartoon of the last decades. When The Simpsons first aired, Homer Simpson was likely a Democrat, his pious neighbor Ned Flanders definitely a Republican. But over the three decades that the show has been on air, the nature of America’s partisan divide has shifted so much that any politically astute viewer would now assume these characters to have rather different loyalties. Flanders may be sufficiently alienated by the coarseness of the populist right to vote for the Democrats; Homer would undoubtedly support Donald Trump.

This transformation has been called by a variety of names. Thomas Piketty has described it as the rise of the Brahmin left. David Brooks has written about the rise of the Bobo. Matthew Yglesias has lamented the rise of The Groups. I propose to call it the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie: New York’s wealthy used to live on the Upper East Side, to pride themselves on their old family ties, to value markers of high culture like the opera, and to vote conservative; today, they live in Brooklyn, believe that they have earned their place in the upper echelons of society thanks to succeeding in a meritocratic competition, are more likely to care about rock bands or microbrews, and think of themselves as progressive.

That same transformation also helps to explain the Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds. The population of the United States, and of many other Western democracies, is now deeply stratified by educational achievement. The affluent and highly credentialed are mostly on the political left. The working class is increasingly drifting to the political right. And that has deeply transformed the composition, the values, and even the actions of the professional class.

Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for “experts” is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world.

The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie also has another side effect. Lawyers, university professors, and civil servants have outsized influence on the rules, norms, and decisions that structure a lot of day-to-day life. And that leaves many less-affluent and less-educated citizens feeling that the democracy they were promised is a sham. “We are the majority,” they complain, “but no one listens to us.”

The resulting state of affairs leaves both sides equally unhappy. Many citizens feel ignored, besieged, and detested by a professional class which believes that it is entitled to rule, and finds the views of many of their compatriots intolerably bigoted. That is of great political significance because, even in highly affluent countries, there are more tradespeople, cab drivers, and police officers than there are lawyers, university professors, and civil servants. Meanwhile, members of the professional class feel bewildered at the lack of respect for their expertise, and fearful that the barbarians at the political gates will soon come for their heads.

What one side perceives as flagrantly unjust domination by the well-credentialed, the other interprets as the perils of revanchist demagoguery.

How Not to MAGA

Populists are able to win power in good part because they promise their voters that they will do what they can to close this representation gap. Legislators, they say, will finally start listening to the views of the people. Professions that have been captured by ideologues enforcing a narrow orthodoxy will be forced to become more representative. Institutions which once had disdain for ordinary people will finally feel their wrath.

There are real reasons why these promises have proven so enticing. Anybody who completely dismisses the fact that this anger is based in real failings of the professional elite is refusing to grapple seriously with this political moment. And yet, the record of populists in India and Turkey, in Hungary and Venezuela suggests that these promises are rarely fulfilled—and the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration in the United States only serves to reinforce that suspicion.

by Yascha Mounk, Persuasion | Read more:
Image: Getty

***

Lind’s response, which I am sharing with you today, makes a strong point: that we should, really, be distinguishing between two different segments of the middle class. The first segment includes lawyers, doctors, academics, and others who have advanced to their positions by accruing formal meritocratic credentials; the German term for it is the Bildungsbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the educated). The second segment includes business owners and prosperous artisans who have advanced to their positions by competing more directly in the free market; the German term for it is the Besitzbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the owners). Without preempting Michael’s fire, I will just note that the way in which I used the term “bourgeoisie” in last week’s essay was primarily meant to refer to the first group, since that—perhaps to the detriment of our collective conceptual clarity—is how that term now tends to be used in the United States.

The Two Bourgeoisies

Yascha Mounk’s essay “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” is as insightful as his phrase “the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie” is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.

In Germany, there has long been a distinction between the “educated middle class,” or Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, on the one hand, and the “propertied” middle class, or Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), and prosperous, self-employed artisans, on the other.

This social division, if not the terminology, is familiar in the United States. The politics of “expert progressivism” has been based in America’s educated bourgeoisie, who since the 1900s have favored variants of would-be enlightened technocratic government as an alternative to the dreaded extremes of mob rule and plutocracy. Meanwhile, for a century, American businessmen and the politicians and pundits they have funded have denounced “meddling bureaucrats” and “long-haired professors” in pseudo-populist campaigns to delegitimize rival non-capitalist elites.

The growth of giant corporations run by managers rather than founders, and the bureaucratization of higher education and philanthropy in the United States and Europe, has greatly expanded the offices that can be filled by professionals educated and credentialed as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. These meritocratic managers can easily circulate among the bureaucracies of business, banking, government, and the nonprofit sector, and they tend to share common values instilled in them by prestigious universities.

Today’s propertied bourgeoisie is made up both of small business owners and of entrepreneurs who found companies that grow to immense size. Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages.

Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass. A model for today’s anti-intellectual, anti-tax, anti-state demagogic populism can be found in postwar poujadism—the revolt of small proprietors in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders, as opposed to the CEOs and other temporary, professional managers of bureaucratic corporations and megabanks with many stakeholders.

If I am right, the pattern that Mounk has described so well can be described as a clash of the two bourgeoisies. On one side, technocratic professionals in large organizations of all kinds appeal to science and reason as they define them. On the other side, small capitalists and big entrepreneurs hire demagogic politicians to represent them while posing as anti-system populists. Except in the run-up to elections when they need working-class voters, both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West.

by Michael Lind

‘Project Hail Mary’ Adds to a Winning Streak for Originality at the Movies

Franchise movies have been the dominant currency in Hollywood for years, but, lately, the upside of originality has been hard to miss.

A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”

All of these successes came at considerable expense. “Project Hail Mary,” based on the Andy Weir bestseller, cost close to $200 million to make. But its $80.5 million debut vindicated Amazon MGM’s big bet, and gave the studio its largest box-office hit yet.

“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”

“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.

But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.

“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.

“So it’s good business.”

Franchise domination

Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.

So, yes, franchises still very much rule the day. But waves upon waves of sequels, reboots and remakes have made the few big-budget originals that manage to get made all the more singular.

“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.

Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.

“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.

Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]

An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.

“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”

Streaming economics change the calculus

In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.

Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).

As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.

In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.

“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”

As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.

by Jake Coyle, AP/ST |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]

Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta feat. Malinda

“Eileanóir na Rún”. An Irish song performed in the sean-nós style, originally composed by Cearbhall Óg Ó Dálaigh in the 17th century.

[ed. Beautiful and heartfelt. No wonder this song has survived for centuries.]

Vietnamese men on a vintage postcard, mailed in 1907

via:

A Theory about Dishes

“Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees

In 2016, an article by Matthew Fray titled, “She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by The Sink” went viral. It begins by addressing the ridiculousness of the title.

It seems so unreasonable when you put it that way: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink.

It makes her seem ridiculous; and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations.

The author then goes on to talk about why his wife cared about the dishes he left and how it reflected her broader concerns about not feeling respected and wanting her partner to share the mental load of managing a house. Toward the end, he summarizes the real problem his wife and other women in her situation have.

The wife doesn’t want to divorce her husband because he leaves used drinking glasses by the sink.

She wants to divorce him because she feels like he doesn’t respect or appreciate her, which suggests he doesn’t love her, and she can’t count on him to be her lifelong partner.

In the end, it was not about the dishes but about a broader pattern of behavior that left the wife feeling unsupported in their marriage. The dishes are a symbol, an artistic flourish to represent one piece of the frustration many couples, especially straight ones, have when it comes to dividing household labor. But what if this is not the whole story? What if dishes have a unique ability to create resentment and domestic misery?

There was a group of friends I knew who decided to all live together after high school. When their lease was up, they did not renew and there were some bitter feelings. At least one person claims that the reason their setup did not work out was because of conflict over the dishes. Maybe the dishes were a symptom of a bigger problem related to communication or willingness of everyone to share in household labor. But what if we take this reason seriously? What if that household did fall apart because of the dishes?

Conflict over dishes is so common that I am willing to bet every person reading this has argued about dishes at some point in their life whether that be with their parents, their own children, their partners or their roommates. There are always dishes to wash and most people find washing them to be unpleasant. Over time after hearing about other people’s conflicts and dealing with my own, I have come to think much more seriously about dishwashing than any sane person should. I have read empirical research on the division of dishwashing labor and its effects on relationships (most of which, oddly enough, focus on sexual satisfaction). I have read multiple takes by Christians who argue that dishwashing is part of God’s punishment for Eve eating the apple. Then I explored the many articles whose title is a play on “everyone wants a community/village/commune but no one wants to do the dishes.”

My radical conclusion after reading the dishwashing literature is that who does the dishes is not a petty concern and the fact that people see it as petty is the main reason it can prove to be such a destructive force in households whether those houses consists of married couples, roommates, or income sharing commune dwellers.

Evidence for the Surprising Importance of Dishwashing

Out of the few scientific studies on the division of dishwashing labor, the most relevant is Carlson, Miller and Sassler’s (2018) study that compared how the division of labor of different household tasks affects relationship satisfaction (including its effects on sex). Out of all the tasks they included (preparing/cooking meals, house cleaning, shopping, laundry, home maintenance, and paying bills), the “most consequential to relationship quality” was washing the dishes. When women were doing much more of the dishwashing, there was lower relationships satisfaction, more reports of relationship troubles, higher likelihood of having talked about separating, and a higher likelihood of physical arguments. Dishwashing was unique in its ability to cause discord and unhappiness.

Unfortunately, most research on division of household labor does not separate out dishwashing from other tasks so the rest of my evidence is anecdotal. After Mathew Fray wrote the above mentioned article about his wife leaving him over the dishes, he became a relationship coach and wrote a book about how men can save their marriages. His article about dishes resonated so much that he spun it into an entire career. [...]

My Guesses as to Why Dishwashing is so Important

Compared to other household tasks, dishwashing is more constant and has less potential to be fulfilling. There are other tasks that are gross, such as cleaning the toilet or gutters, but those aren’t daily tasks. Other tasks that are daily, such as cooking, are ones that many people enjoy and even do as a hobby. No one washes dishes as a hobby. The closest task in terms of regularity and unpleasantness might be laundry. In households where one person does everyone’s laundry then it does become a daily task of often unnoticed drudgery. But in most households laundry is not a daily issue in the way dishes are.

My main theory is that the perception of dishwashing as a petty concern is the problem. Most of the comments under Mathew Fray’s article are in the vein of “in a healthy marriage people do not care so much about dishes.” The whole reason the article went viral is the ridiculousness of the idea that dishes could be so important. When an issue is considered petty then the onus is on the resentful person to let it go rather than force a solution that everyone is satisfied with but it’s hard to let go when the dishwasher is reminded of their resentment everyday, multiple times a day. Washing the dishes does not take long but those short bursts of annoyances adds up.

by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts |  Read more:

Image: “Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees

Correct Gray

There may be 50 shades, but there’s only one Correct Grey.

Sometimes a colour name is a whole mood. Rouge Noir: the stamp of cult 1990s glamour. Millennial pink: the colour of overthinking and oversharing. Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball: the imperial age of the gastro pub.

I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.

Correct Grey nails it, because grey is absolutely correct for right now. Not just for socks, but for style top to toe, it is the coolest shade at this moment. No need to panic. Black is always fine, navy is perennially elegant. Brights are going to make a comeback this year, too. You have options. But grey is the colour that says: when it comes to fashion in 2026, I have understood the assignment.

Those Correct Grey socks are, well, the correct grey. This is a different colour to what I think of as tracksuit-bottom grey. (Was the grey tracksuit bottom the defining object of the first half of this decade? But that’s a question for another day.) Tracksuit-bottom-grey is wan and pale, with all the energy of an old photocopy. If tracksuit-bottom grey were a person, it would be scrolling its phone and not looking up when spoken to. Correct Grey is richer and more intense, with a nod to box-fresh school uniform and a new-term attitude.

But, wait. Didn’t grey used to be boring? How did it become fashion’s coolest colour? Sportswear, for a start. I was slightly rude about grey tracksuit bottoms because I’m a bit over them, but the ubiquity of grey marl flannel has done a lot to reframe grey as a fashion colour. Quiet luxury, with its emphasis on fabric and feel, has helped too, because soft neutral shades – grey, camel, navy – show off a quality fabric at its best. And psychologically, there is something about the liminal nature of grey, standing as it does in direct opposition to the notion that life is either black or white. This speaks to the blur of modern life with its lack of boundaries, of working from home in pyjamas but dealing with office emails on your phone while out at dinner.

by Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Pairs

[ed. Works for me.]

A Critical Political Season Could Decide if Alaska Is a Failed ‘Petrostate’

A governor who spent two terms cutting services to preserve Alaskans’ oil-funded annual checks is leaving office. Voters must now decide what comes next for the state’s faltering fiscal model.

Juneau, Alaska, takes pride in providing services that some larger cities would shy away from — child care and housing assistance, arts grants, three libraries, two public pools, an arboretum, a ski area and a pledge that all 250 miles of borough roads will be plowed, if possible, within 48 hours after a snowstorm ends.

But the system that has made that possible — a steady flow of revenue from oil production — is cracking like Arctic ice in spring, not just in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, but across the state. Even with the war in Iran sending oil prices sky high, the oil-dependent model that has financed generous public services while giving Alaskans annual checks from a Permanent Fund can no longer keep both promises.

And a political year that will include a wide-open governor’s race and one of the most watched Senate contests in the country could help decide the future of what has become known in some circles as a “petrostate,” for its public reliance on oil production, on the brink.

“The petrostate hasn’t quite failed yet,” said Joseph Geldhof, a Juneau lawyer, but “it will if something does not change.”

Anything that increases global oil prices is good for Alaska’s finances, and state economists expect that the Iran war will mean a revenue bump of at least $500 million this fiscal year, as well as a similar windfall next year if the fighting continues.

But that money is essentially already accounted for to fill existing budget gaps, and short-term war gains won’t solve either the immediate problem for Alaska residents — rising gas prices hit them hard, too — or the long-term supply-and-demand fundamentals, such as the spread of electric vehicles in Europe and China, the freeing up of supply from Venezuela and the long-term decline in production along Alaska’s North Slope.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican who has spent nearly eight years cutting state government services to protect Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend, is leaving office this year with one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor, according to recent polls. The crowded race to succeed him coincides with Senator Dan Sullivan’s bid for re-election against a formidable Democratic challenger, former Representative Mary Peltola.

Those elections pose a fundamental question for Alaskans: Will voters opt for more financial austerity in the name of preserving their annual payments and almost nonexistent state taxation, or will they accept a more politically fraught reimagining of the state’s fiscal structure?

The governor called it “a philosophical debate over the role of government.”

“If you look at where we are and how expensive things are here, we just don’t have the ability to do the kinds of things you can do in Texas or Iowa,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “It’s not going to be roads everywhere, schools everywhere, services everywhere. Alaska is a different place.” [ed. especially if you give away all your revenue.]

The math no longer works, even for the minimal level of services Mr. Dunleavy describes. Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League, estimated that one in 10 local governments are now “semi-functioning, unable to keep the doors open for a full year.” He predicted some will eventually close.

Brett Watson, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, agreed.

“Practically speaking, we are probably at the end of our ability to continue to pay a dividend, provide the same level of state services and not broadly pay taxes,” he said.

Alaska’s financial dilemma started in 1968 with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. Voters and elected leaders created a sovereign wealth fund, whose principal cannot be touched without a vote of the people. They legislated an annual dividend for nearly every resident and abolished the state income tax.

But as oil production has risen, not only in the Middle East but in new parts of the United States, Russia and elsewhere, prices have become more volatile and Alaska’s revenues have plunged.

The war in Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have offered Alaska politicians reprieves, Mr. Watson said, “but waiting for global disruption isn’t a long-term strategy.”

Alaskan lawmakers now use interest, dividends and investment profits generated by the sovereign wealth fund for government operating costs, and for an annual dividend to residents. That payout peaked at $3,284 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices topped $100 a barrel, but it has averaged $1,370 over the last decade.

This year, even before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the governor asked legislators for $3,600 per person, and he proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee a dividend in perpetuity.

But such payments now compete directly with core government work like road maintenance, education and prisons. Mr. Dunleavy has used his line-item veto hundreds of times to cut programs and preserve the annual dividend, which he views as “nonnegotiable” because “the people know what to do with their money better than politicians do.”

As state government shrank, local governments either had to go without many basic services or go it alone. Juneau has chosen the second option, using local money to help keep people in a region reachable only by plane or boat, and where prices reflect that remoteness.

“Go take a look at another town that’s 32,000 people, maybe in the Midwest,” said Laura McDonnell, who owns a store selling Alaska-made crafts and jewelry just steps from where cruise ships dock. “How many performing arts centers and libraries and museums and swimming pools do those communities have?”

Plenty of communities subsidize housing construction, said Neil Steininger, who is a Juneau city and borough assemblyman and a former state budget director, “and we extend that to other things because we believe they’re important for quality of life.”

“I don’t skate, and I don’t swim, and I don’t play hockey, but those things are a big part of why I’m here,” he said. [...]

Many Republican leaders continue to maintain that Alaska is on fundamentally strong fiscal ground: Like a family that is house rich but cash poor, Alaska just needs to make some changes in its financial structure.

“We are as far from a failed petrostate as you can imagine, but we have a revenue problem,” said the co-chairman of the Alaska Senate Finance Committee, Bert Stedman, whose office is decorated with historical photos, maps and MAGA memorabilia.

Mr. Dunleavy said the dividend was created to ensure both that the natural resources fueling Alaska’s economy would belong to its residents and that future legislatures could not spend oil money recklessly.

But lawmakers have not approved his $3,600-an-Alaskan dividend request. Instead, politicians in both major parties hope upcoming elections for governor and Senate will clarify what voters actually want — changes to the dividend, a seasonal sales tax aimed at tourists, an income tax or still more cuts.

“It is going to take a governor willing to put it all on the line,” said Bryce Edgmon, who is the state House speaker and a former Democrat who is now an independent. “Just saying ‘protect the dividend’ is no longer an answer.”

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, the top four candidates will advance from an Aug. 18 primary to the November general election. Most of the prominent Republican candidates, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and the conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, echo Mr. Dunleavy’s calls to protect the dividend at almost any cost. Most of the Democrats support a more substantial remaking of the state’s fiscal structure, including by changing the formula for funding public schools and potentially making oil companies pay more in taxes.

In all, 17 people are seeking the governor’s mansion, which sits in the shadow of Mount Juneau and up a hill from the hard decisions facing Juneau’s civic leaders. As they ponder what to cut, they’re also worried that the current financial crisis, like others in the past, will not be enough to push through real structural change.

by By Anna Griffin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson

[ed. Republicans and greedy Alaskans have killed what used to be a unique and vibrant state. I say this fully acknowledging that Republicans were once the most vociferous protectors of what we'd call Alaska's culture and pioneering spirit, but that was a long time ago. When the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) was being debated shortly after oil started flowing - and even before that, when the state received $900 million in lease sale revenue for future Prudhoe Bay development - I thought it was a bad idea, giving free money away to people just for living there. I understood the reasoning - that politicians and special interest groups couldn't be trusted not to blow all the sudden wealth - which, in fact, is what they've done with most of the account's alternate savings accounts and contingency funds (interest on investments, criminal penalties, etc). Everything but the principal, which is constitutionally protected. What's worse was the decision to get rid of state income taxes. Once you do that it's almost impossible to get those taxes resinstated. Human nature. Governor Jay Hammond, who conceived of the PFD program, imagined it being based on longevity and commitment - the longer you lived in Alaska the more you'd receive in payments. But the state supreme court struck that down for being discriminatory and unconsititutional. So, anybody that came up and stayed for just a year qualified. Even the military. You can imagine how that has affected (infected?) the population and mindset of residents and politicians ever since. Red as any red state, Alaska was, and continues to be, one of the most socialist states in the country. It also receives (or used to, anyway) more federal dollars per capita than any other state. So greed and a deep sense of entitlement from these handouts became the new ethic. That's how the current govenor got elected - by promising massive PFDs that would exceed anything ever seen, while cutting govenment spending and other essential services to the bone. Which he has done every year during his tenure. Now they're broke and we'll see how much people still living there care about Alaska's future. Are they willing to make the difficult decisions that will put it on a sustainable course, or continue to push for endless freebies? I have my guesses. As an aside - if you can contribute to Mary Peltola's senate campaign for Senate, please do. She's the real deal, and cares deeply about the future of the state, its history, and its people and is running against another one of Trump's zombies that coasted in on his coattails. You can learn more about her at this link. See also: Thanks for all the fish (ADN), which also includes links to recent stories like this: Anchorage School Board approves ‘severe’ budget with hundreds of staff layoffs and 3 school closures (ST).]

China and the Future of Science

[The following post is a polished transcript of a speech I recently gave to a private gathering of American technologists. Its contents may be of interest to a larger audience. -TG.]

The Chinese socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.

In the early days of Mao, the overarching aim of the communist system was to seize state power, first through subversion and insurgency, then through more regular combined arms warfare. In the later days of Mao the newly established Chinese state and the society it intertwined were oriented around class struggle, both at home and abroad. From the 1980s through the 2010s the Chinese system was orbited a different yet still very explicitly stated goal: getting rich. In theory, if not always in practice, every action taken by every cadre, every soldier, and every state employee was subordinate to this larger, unifying aim. We must make China rich.

That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state must bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.

The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.

The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.

Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States. Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.

Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”

My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?

Something similar might be said for science and China.

by Tanner Greer, The Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The China Tech Canon (Asterisk).]

Scary Cool Sad Goodbye 88

“I did not gamble, cared not at all about the Mob and even less about Howard Hughes. But there were other stories and other people, and there were days when I told myself that through the travail of others I might come to grips with myself, that I might, as it were, find absolution through voyeurism. Those were the good old days.”

                                               ~ Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, John Gregory Dunne

LED arrows inside Harry Reid Airport pointed left to the carousels and right to the liquor store: “the nation’s only non-duty free liquor store located in an airport baggage claim,” the advertisements bragged. “Stop by before getting your luggage to stock up on what you need. We know why you came to Las Vegas, and Liquor Library is here to help you.” The dusk settled into darkness as I smoked a cigarette on the second floor of the parking garage, watching the distant lights of the Strip and the rippling glow of the Sphere. The 108 bus idled at the terminal beneath me, its destination flashing: “PARADISE: EXPECT DELAYS.”

“We know why you came to Las Vegas...” Well, that made one of us. I did not care for “nightlife,” gambling gave me the willies, and I’d already gotten married on a cheap whim once before. But I had never been, and my book was through with edits, and it seemed like an opportunity for a hard personal reset plus some quality material, what others called eavesdropping. Whether or not I would “have fun” was basically beside the point. In writing, unlike in Vegas, the more you lose, the more you win.

Searching for secondhand clarity, I’d started a book on the plane. “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas,” begins John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 memoir about his six months in Sin City confronting his recent obsession with death and avoiding his wife and young child. The year is 1969, and Dunne is doing swell on paper: two published books, three-year-old daughter, oceanfront home in Malibu. And yet he exists in a state of panicked dread about his health, his writer’s block, and most of all, his marriage, which is perilously frayed. “I sometimes had the feeling that we went from crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town,” he writes, “every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays.

After months of languishing, Dunne gives himself an assignment, something to do to take his mind off of himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he writes. “There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution.” As for where he will pursue “salvation without commitment,” a random billboard on La Brea serves as inspiration — a picture of a roulette wheel and a message “with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”

And so he does, moving into a sad apartment off the Strip to watch TV and eat junk food and befriend some local characters who help him write an account of America’s most sordid city, which doubles as a portrait of one man’s personal rock-bottom. The people whom I mention are not his friends, exactly; their relationships are predicated by Dunne’s private knowledge that these eccentrics are grist for the mill. He does not much like Jackie Kasey, a painfully unfunny lounge comic who once opened for Elvis, though he still follows him from casino to casino, taking notes. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” Dunne writes with a guiltiness that I know all too well, though his shame often feels misplaced for a man who’s run off on his family under the pretense of art.

“What’s new with you?” asks his wife, Joan Didion, when he calls.

“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight,” he says. “She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”

“It’s research,” she replies, unfazed. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”

“But I don’t want to fuck her.”

A silence on the other end of the phone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she says after some time.

I checked into my room at the El Cortez, a dingy old casino full of leathery retirees glued to babbling slot machines with Orientalist themes. Far too sober to even briefly consider tossing $40 away at the roulette table, I set off on foot past the drive-through wedding chapel where Britney Spears was married, the 24-hour pawn shop from Pawn Stars, the jailhouse that I recognized from TV’s JAIL. It was too late to turn back by the time it had become clear that the only pedestrians in downtown Las Vegas were tweakers, the homeless, and confused people like myself. I speed-walked down quiet side streets in whose shadows I could sense the occasional moving presence, exhaling when I reached a strip mall where a neon sign above an unmarked door said simply “BAR.”

Open 24 hours a day since the early 1960s, the Huntridge Tavern was a windowless dive bar and package liquor store with video poker screens at almost every barstool and karaoke until 3 a.m. each Tuesday, which it was. Milling through the smoky room were locals of the alternative persuasion: aging punks, Mexican goths, women whose chests heaved from tight pleather corsets. A steampunk fellow in a sleeveless vest and kilt drank directly from a pitcher of amber ale as the karaoke MC gave a lugubrious performance of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. “Nine dollars,” said the bartender as she slid me a High Life and a full rocks glass of tequila. “Wait, no, I overcharged you. It’s just eight.”

Breaking from his keno game, a 50-something metalhead in a Bret Michaels bandana showed off his permanent eyeliner. “Yeah, that was my midlife crisis,” he said with a shrug, downing the last of his Dos Equis. “Four sessions, 90 minutes each. Hurt like a bitch.” On his phone, he scrolled through pictures of his latest ex-girlfriend. “She’s an ex-Playboy chick,” he gloated. “Hey, I like what I like.”

A pair of older men settled in beside me, wealthy-looking Boomers I initially pegged as perverts, misplaced among the grizzled lifers and polyamorous goths. In fact, they were not creeps but friendly regulars — a longtime local journalist and a prominent restaurateur whose second marriage was to a famous female magician who pioneered the illusion known as the “Drill of Death.” “What are you doing here in Vegas?” the men asked me. “The same thing I do back home,” I said. “Drinking in bars.” They liked this answer enough to pay for my next round.

The journalist shared with me a passage that his friend had written about the tavern. “A few drinks in, I’d talk to anyone — stray cats, my friends called them. A plumber. Coke dealer. A wannabe magician. Their jobs fascinated me; their confessions came easy. One was new in town. One’s card tricks failed more than they succeeded. One turned out to be a raging racist; we sent him packing. Characters with character. Every race, color, creed, gender. My mother always said you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Hey girl, you good?” a woman whispered when the men went to the bathroom. “If those guys are bothering you, you can sit with me.” I thanked her for the offer, but she had no need to worry. I did not know how to tell her I was right where I belonged.

by Meaghan Garvey, Scary Cool Sad Goodbye | Read more:
Image: uncredited