An Ode to Miller Lite

One of the many humiliations that arrive in your 30s is the grudging recognition that a parent was right about something. For some people, their parents were right about a financial decision they recommended, or a romantic relationship they disapproved of. My dad was right about a 96-calorie American lager produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.

In my 20s, I turned enjoying craft beer—and booze in general—into a minor hobby. I stood in long lines to buy limited releases from various “gypsy brewers.” I nursed recurring obsessions with Monastrell wines from Jumilla. I hunted down vintage bourbon; National Distillers–era Old Grand-Dad was a particular fixation.

In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.

The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.

The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

by Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Pinterest via
[ed. 100%. Lite is the archetypal go anywhere beer. Always remembered for bringing the concept of "light" (as in "less calories"), into the public consciousness. Interestingly, where I live, you can only find it in 16oz 12 packs; regular 12oz cans only come in cases (no 6 packs). Not sure of the message there...]

The Desert Safety Net

Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.

Every autumn across North America, migration begins.

And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.

They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.

Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.

Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.

“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.

In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.

It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.

Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.

In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.

With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.

In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.

A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.

*****

For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.

Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.

According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.

But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.

But not everyone keeps moving.

Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.

Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.

Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.

“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.

Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.

Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]

Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.

He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.

“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.

“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”

For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.

“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”

by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Jackson

Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—once famous for building aircraft carriers, now better known for creative studios—a company called Crye Precision is one of the biggest tenants. Its footprint in the building is 100,000 square feet. Inside its gigantic warehouse space, rows of whirring sewing machines are stitching together garments made out of the most popular, renowned, and confusing textile of our time: MultiCam.

MultiCam is so ubiquitous that you can buy a camping chair or baby carrier in the camouflage pattern. Arc’teryx and Outdoor Research make jackets in MultiCam. Perhaps most importantly, you may see this iteration of camo on police officers, SWAT teams, ICE agents, or your average January 6 rioter.

For its influence, the pattern has earned a place in MoMA’s permanent collection, a thrill to the Cooper Union art students who created it. “They gave us a lifetime membership, which is cool,” says Gregg Thompson, who was still in graduate school in 1999 when a Cooper Union alumnus, Caleb Crye, reached out to him about a collaboration. “We always had an interest in all things military,” says Thompson. “It’s boy stuff—monster trucks and that kind of thing.”

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in. “When guys deploy, they’re wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor,” Thompson explains. What if, they thought, there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere? It could be a “75 percent solution to environments in general,” Thompson says.

There are a few ways to make a camouflage pattern work in multiple environments. One is to make sure it has the right number of colors. “Three would not be enough; 12 would be too many, because they would just get lost,” Thompson says. He thinks seven is the sweet spot. These colors—greens and browns and beiges—all need to have warm overtones. “Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them,” he says. “Even a building—it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Very few things remain cold.” Also very important for a camo pattern is that it should have a lot of highlights, lowlights, gradients, and fades; no two outfits should be identical. As Thompson notes: “If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out the rest, right?”

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says.

And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who could essentially opt out of wearing UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get a little more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what’s called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will outline the “third-party items you’re allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually pretty lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he has heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.

As such, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camo started being worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the United States military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff.” Crye started to produce runs of their camo, selling their own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.

Around this time, the culture of the Special Forces started to change. Before the War on Terror, elite teams were small and secretive; very few members of the military knew what they were doing. “Look at photos of the first Special Forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001,” says McFarlane. “They look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.” As the number of special operators grew, the whole Army could see them fast-roping down from helicopters, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists—often in MultiCam. Same with the popular video game Call of Duty and movies like Zero Dark 30, American Sniper, and Act of Valor (which featured active-duty Navy SEALs). In a confusing and unpopular war, stories of Special Operators offered rare victories the United States military could claim.

Special Forces started to develop a new image in the popular imagination, says McFarlane: “Dudes with huge beards and long hair and just totally ripped and just wearing lots of technical gear.” Because Special Forces were so admired and idolized, regular infantry soldiers would buy MultiCam backpacks or accessories to emulate them. Everyone wanted to wear MultiCam—not only to cosplay but also to get away from the ugly digital UCP pattern. Including, eventually, the US Army itself.

Although UCP was deployed to American troops all over the world, it became increasingly associated with Iraq: a hated, unsuccessful pattern for a hated, unsuccessful war. In 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to distance itself from Iraq, the military was instructed to get rid of the UCP pattern. And so, to quickly supply a troop surge in Afghanistan, it turned to the most readily available replacement camo: MultiCam.

Even though the US military called its pattern OEFCP (Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern), it was MultiCam from Crye Precision, bought in bulk when roughly 100,000 members of the conventional forces were deployed to Afghanistan. Then, in 2014, the Army announced that its in-house camo team had finally developed a new pattern: Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP. As McFarlane believes: OCP is “basically MultiCam without the branding.” If you view two swaths side by side, you can see that OCP is ever so slightly more brown. There’s a reason they look so similar: Both are inspired by Scorpion, the original pattern that Crye presented to the US government.

In a few niche corners of the internet, debate still simmers over whether Crye had the right to trademark MultiCam or whether the Army had the right to make its own version. Truly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, because of this whole saga, some version of MultiCam or OCP or Scorpion is everywhere. The militaries of Australia, Georgia, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and France all wear variants of MultiCam uniforms—some specifically customized by Crye Precision. Soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine do, too; they don colored armbands to tell who is on what side. Even the Taliban wear MultiCam. In January 2026, the Minnesota National Guard wore bright yellow vests over their camouflage in part “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”

MultiCam has trickled down from Special Forces to all kinds of law enforcement: American SWAT teams, municipal police, teams within the FBI, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement, and Border Patrol all dress like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. ICE also wears a mixture of civilian clothes and MultiCam, and in January, Crye Precision was awarded a nearly $40,000 contract to provide cold-weather gear for Border Patrol in Maine. Although there have been a number of camo companies attempting to rival MultiCam’s ubiquity (notably the impressionist looking A-Tacs and the animalistic Kryptek), none of them seem to hold a candle. “ I think the fact of the matter is, there’s been no other pattern that’s proven,” Thompson says proudly. [...]

It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don't even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.

by Avery Trufelman, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Berger

[ed. Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern. Seriously. Lol.]

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler

Italian Brainrot

Italian brainrot (Wikipedia)

Italian brainrot is characterized by absurd images or videos created using generative artificial intelligence. It typically features hybrid figures combining animals with everyday objects, foods, and weapons. They are given Italianized names or incorporate stereotypical Italian cultural markers and are accompanied by AI-generated audio narration in Italian, which is often nonsensical. The names of these characters often have Italian suffixes, such as -ini or -ello.

The term brain rot was named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and refers to the deteriorating effect on one's mental state when overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. The term can also refer to the content itself. Online users often use this label to acknowledge the ridiculousness of Italian brainrot, while recognising the growing amount of AI slop present online.

Images: DevonRex368; alexey_pigeon

[ed. Presented here for no other reason than to highlight another example of the decline of western civilization. I'm beginning to think that if AI is inclined to wipe us all out it'll be a mercy killing. See also: Reading is magic (Sam Kriss):]

***

"The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside. [...]

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."

Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets

John Pederson, 33, couldn’t work. The former Outback Steakhouse line cook was recovering from a car crash and running out of money. Kalshi, the prediction market, promised a quick way to fix that. He took out a variable-interest loan and started betting.

At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into $41,000 by trading on sports, using a strategy he developed with the help of AI, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his account records.

Then he placed his most audacious bet yet: All $41,000 that a celebrity would say a particular word on TV. He lost it all.

Pederson isn’t alone in walking away empty-handed from the bet-on-anything markets, which cover sports, celebrities, news and more.

Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.

 
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.

Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.

 
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site. [...]

Casual traders “have no chance. Systematically,” said Michael Boss, a former professional poker player and a statistician by training. On Kalshi, Boss places 60 trades a minute and modifies his bids and asks 30 times a second.

by By Neil Mehta, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ?iStock

[ed. No chance unless they're insiders with special access to some form of classified information. Like... maybe, half of Washington, DC.]

The Life and Times of an American Tween

Every Wednesday, at exactly 2:15 P.M., the electronic bell at San Francisco’s A. P. Giannini Middle School sounds with a dull, droning buzz, and hundreds of students stream from the building. They wear big pants and bucket hats, cropped tanks and cargo jeans, Athleta sets and Air Force 1s. They carry ergonomically unsound backpacks dripping with bag charms and key chains: athletic affiliations, memorabilia, miniature stuffies. They pull thick socks up over their leggings; fix hydrocolloid stickers, star-shaped and cutesy, atop angry, interloping zits. Their lip tint is red and thickly applied. Their water bottles are status symbols. Their press-ons are shellacked and combat-ready. There are boys, too, small and gangly. They move in packs, magnifying their bulk like synchronized minnows. They look dressed by their mothers. On early-dismissal days, the afternoon yawns with possibility. The students dash to the bus or wander the nearby commercial drag, which has little going for it save the hardware store, where there is candy. They exchange their allowance for matcha ice cream at Polly Ann; gobble Domino’s to no intestinal detriment. They buy boba and punt each other with tapioca bullets. They flock to Starbucks for magenta Cannon Ball Drinks, creamy Pink Drinks, sludgy Dubai Chocolate Mochas. They chug the unchuggable. Twelve blocks to the west, the Pacific Ocean glitters and threatens, waves dragging out in the wind.

On a Wednesday afternoon, I was joined outside A.P.G. by Mira, a sixth grader with an open, angelic face and an ebullient presence. It is often chilly and overcast in the Outer Sunset, but this was a warm and clear day, and Mira, who is interested in matters of fashion, wore low-slung cargo sweatpants and a white tube top. Her hair, which is long, dark, and curly, had recently been treated to a bathroom Manic Panic job, and the front strands were dyed a light peach. She smoothed a strand as one might the tail of a cat. Mira is good company: frank, funny, and self-deprecating in a way that suggests confidence rather than its lack. At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial”—a hands-free cartwheel—“and I can kind of do one now,” she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.

Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.

For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.

That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.

“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]

The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.

by Anna Wiener, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ok Causland

A Life Hack for the Ultra-Wealthy Is Going Mainstream

Here is the promise of a house manager. Hire one, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, prepping your meals, and completing those Amazon returns you’ve been meaning to make. They could reorganize the utensil drawer, notice if your kid is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be at home to meet the plumber. If your child needs food for a class party, a house manager could make the dish and drop it off; if that child also has a pet lizard, a house manager could buy the crickets to feed it.

House managers are not a nanny or a house cleaner. They’re a “chief of staff for the home,” a “personal assistant for Mom,” and “a clone of myself,” according to the more than a dozen people I spoke with who have either hired one or work as one. They are, in effect, what might have once been called a housekeeper—a person who helps oversee a household’s basic functioning. Middle- and upper-class families used to more commonly employ this kind of position (the title “house manager” dates back to at least the 1830s), but it has become rare enough that a couple of people I spoke with thought they may have come up with the term.

Whatever you call the job, the ultra-wealthy have maintained some version of this role in their homes for years, but more and more companies are cropping up to serve Americans with salaries in the lower six figures—a cohort that is nowhere near having a private jet but might already use a house cleaner or have a regular handyman.

Some will argue that shouldering the burden of household work is a necessary part of adulthood. But for many on the high side of the country’s wealth divide, time is at enough of a premium that buying it back feels worth the money. Kelly Hubbell, who in 2023 founded Sage Haus, a company that helps people find house managers, told me that many of her clients are dual-income households where tasks pile up beyond what two adults can handle; a house manager steps in as a third. Several women described their house manager to me as “my wife.” One company offering the service is even called “Rent A Wife—Oregon.” (Its founder, Brianna Ruelas Zuniga, knows what the name sounds like; she still likes it, she told me.)

Many house-managing businesses started around the country at about the same time. In 2022, Amy Root was running a home-organization business in central Connecticut—clearing out people’s garages and adding shelving to their closets—but she realized that even if she got the right home systems in place, “the laundry still needed to get done,” she told me. People needed “help with their regular to-dos but also the aspiration checklist,” such as finally hanging that one painting they bought a year ago, she said. In 2023, she pivoted to running a house-managing business, Personal Assistant for Mom, and now leads a team of five (soon to be seven) part-time house managers.

The crew includes retirees and empty nesters, as well as a woman training to be a doula and an artist who needed an extra gig. Rates for house managers generally are $25 to $50 an hour; some agencies take a cut. (Sage Haus charges clients a finder’s fee; house managers are paid directly.) Today’s version of the job is very much part of the gig economy, and like many gig workers, the managers are usually responsible for their own health insurance. Some of the house managers I spoke with work full-time for one family, but many are cobbling together part-time gigs with multiple families while also working as a nanny or cleaner.

When Root tells people what a house manager does, most of the time, their response is “Someone will do that for me?” A time-saving purchase like that just doesn’t occur to a lot of people, Ashley Whillans, a Harvard Business School professor who studies such spending, told me... “I’m buying back joy and time where I can right now,” Barbara Mighdoll, a mother of two and a business owner who now has a house manager for 15 hours a week, told me. Each time her house manager does a chore, she said, “that is a tab that is now closed in my brain.” When she’s with her family, she no longer has ticker tape running through her head about the laundry she needs to put away. The house manager already took care of it.

A purchase like that really can buy happiness, according to Whillans’s research. She and her colleagues have found that when people outsource bothersome chores and reinvest that time in something they actually care about, they report being more satisfied with their life. (Anyone who hates doing the dishes will not be surprised by this.) In one study, she and her co-authors found that couples who take that freed-up time and spend it on each other say that it improved their relationship. So far, Whillans has yet to see a point at which couples who off-load their to-dos stop getting happier. Some tentative evidence, she said, suggests that when given money for time-saving purchases, lower-income people report more benefits than their wealthier counterparts. But where someone in the so-called upper-middle class might consider $30 an hour a bargain, being able to buy back time is still a luxury.

by Nancy Walecki, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic
[ed. As I've gotten older, I've sometimes imagined what I really need is a personal secretary. Not a care-taker or health aide or some other limited form of assistance, but someone who's overseeing all the tasks in my frantic, highly complex, and multi-dimensional life (ha!). Actually, the thought evolved mostly after reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, then listening to an interview with Joni Mitchell where she casually mentions in passing her secretary's duties, including among other things, taking care of her scheduling, providing companionship, grocery shopping, driving, bill paying, and almost everything else. I thought wow, now that's it. That's what I need!]

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Amy Warren's “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles...

The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.

Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.

YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what’s best for their children. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google’s tools and content filters haven’t met their needs for a variety of reasons.

In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.

Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”

In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”

When Google brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google’s suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.

To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hours-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends, according to a 2016 document entitled “YouTube edu opportunities”: “Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”

A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by “inappropriately-aged children,” children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos “decreased attention spans.”

By 2019, the company was aware “the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken” due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and “trivially easy for students to bypass,” internal exchanges said.

An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children’s privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in “absolute regulatory failure,” said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.

The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices. 

by Shalini Ramachandran, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Colin E. Braley for WSJ

[ed. See also: Classroom Cope (The Point) - AI as another teaching tool:]

***

"As for outcomes: it is one thing to say that in-class practice is the best we can do in the age of AI; it is quite another to credit AI with “reviving” writing. There is nothing, nothing, to celebrate about teachers and students being forced to resort to degraded forms of learning, practice and assessment. We might as well credit a basketball hoop in the prison yard with reviving organized sports. It’s a good thing that the inmates are given a chance to exercise. It is better than nothing."

Rosalía’s LUX Listening Party in Barcelona Changes the Paradigm for Live Event Curation (Hypebot).

***

Rosalía hosted a semi-secret listening party with about 900 guests for her newly released, and highly acclaimed, album L U X at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), in Barcelona.

But this was unlike any listening event we’ve seen before.

The Spanish singer and pop sensation dressed in white, stood and sat and laid down silently and nearly motionless throughout the full hour-long event. There was no rapturous introduction, and when the last notes of the album’s final track rang out, Rosalía simply walked offstage to the sounds of her applause, without uttering a word.

She existed like a living sculpture for an extended moment in time, as her courageously orchestrated and sound-designed album draped her and her audience in sound.

I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time. It started sometime after we kidnapped the president of Venezuela but before we watched Alex Pretti get shot and killed by Customs and Border Protection agents. Or maybe it was between their detaining young Liam Ramos in his bunny hat and their releasing that tranche of Epstein files and nothing happening. I definitely felt it a couple of weeks ago as I headed inside a fancy dinner party the same day our president had, via social media, threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t open by 8 p.m. The invitation was for 6:30 p.m.

Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it started. But with each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.

Like many ideas of middling wisdom, this one was fed to me by the algorithm. A woman named Stephanie Wittels Wachs was suddenly on my Instagram scroll, reminiscing, longingly, about smoking in the ’90s. Obviously, she clarified, she wasn’t going to smoke; she was just thinking about it. Because smoking kills you. And if she died, she figured, who would take care of her kids? Very solid point, I thought. Then I remembered: I don’t have any kids.

I certainly remember smoking in the ’90s — it was divine. Before we stood around staring down at our phones, we used to stand around staring at each other. Talking and talking while we blew smoke in one another’s faces.

In those early years, I was a student at an artsy Brooklyn high school in Midwood. We were “teens” in chronology only — we worked jobs, we went clubbing, we rode the subway at all hours of the night. And generally, in varying degrees, we smoked. The serious smokers were committed. You’d find them out in the school courtyard no matter the weather. Often, they were the benevolent suppliers to those of us who merely flirted with the idea of being serious smokers. Happy, if you joined them outside “for a smoke,” to trade a stick of nicotine for some interesting gossip you might have heard. Sometimes, we even smoked with our teachers. Usually, they were from the English department.

The irony of my current jonesing for a cigarette is that I was, in those days, a dabbler at best. Mainly seduced by the smell of a clove cigarette, usually found in the hands of somebody from Park Slope. But I loved the culture of the whole thing: the intimacy of someone getting close to light you up. The matches, the Zippos. The way, over the course of five minutes, small talk could fall into something like deep conversation.

There was a reason I never crossed the Rubicon into “big smoker” territory though, one I’ve been contemplating a lot in the wake of my craving: I had big dreams then. I yearned deeply to get out of Brooklyn. To get into some kind of a college and become some sort of interesting adult. It was all very vague. But the future was the thing I was really invested in. And I knew enough to know that required focus. And discipline. And that commitment to “being a smoker” seemed to take up a lot of time. All those trips outside. All those minutes, burning into ash, that I felt I probably should be spending doing something that might help with my undefined tomorrow.

In my 20s, the smoking got sexy. Dive bars and chic lounges, where we’d now have cocktails and ash into ashtrays and steal matchbooks with which to help one another light future cigarettes. Since nobody seemed to care that smoking was bad for us, our paternalistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decided he needed to care for us. Public indoor smoking was banned, and, inadvertently, we were armed with a new way to flirt. There was nothing better than breaking off from a crowd of friends with an invitation outside to share a cigarette. I realize now the excitement wasn’t in the cigarette. It was in the possibility that it raised. Would this be a brief excursion to the sidewalk? Or might it end the next morning, in a bed you didn’t really know, sharing smoke-tinged kisses?

Smoking, in this phase of life, went hand in hand with chaos. The kind that is welcome when you are trying to create from your young adult existence something like a life. Every potential mistake was also a potential opportunity. Because maybe you woke up and never saw the person next to you again. Or maybe you fell in love and married them and ended up having kids and getting a few promotions at work and being a big success.

Either way, since I was just a casual smoker, I hardly noticed that one by one, everyone decided that the mayor was right. Smoking was, obviously, very bad for you. We had jobs we needed to turn into careers. Futures ahead of us that we needed to be optimally prepared for. We no longer had chaos; we had lives. Cleanses became cool; the in-crowd suddenly put a premium on personal purification. Cigarettes became signifiers of calamity, the perfect pairing with a broken iPhone screen. Our bodies weren’t just temples, we seemed to realize. They were functioning machines that could run like well-oiled engines. We had many decades to look forward to! And that required discipline and order: eating well and exercising and sleeping more and drinking less. And, quite obviously, not smoking.

By my mid-30s, who could believe anybody ever used to stand outside in the cold like that? What were we thinking? I’d often wonder. We now had better things to do with our time. And our hands. Like work. And check our phones. And go to spin classes and get brunch and check our phones. Or unwind from a long week of work with a yoga class. And then check our phones. Or pull out our laptop and do some work. And then check our phones. Or get together with the friends we barely got to see and then sit around and take out our phones.

Because we were not just working. We were working toward something. Charging toward a tomorrow when every girl could also be a boss if she worked hard enough. The narrow space found between working or mindlessly wandering the internet researching diets that would maximize our lifespans or shopping for serums and masks to make us look rejuvenated and vital. Preparing ourselves for the promised land of success. Readying ourselves to be perpetually “booked and busy.”

Recently, a friend my age was visiting me. She was helping me shop for clothes for my upcoming book tour. Rushing from one appointment to the next, when she suddenly stopped and pulled out a cigarette. “Do you mind?” she asked. Of course I didn’t. Instead, I salivated. Dying to ask for one, but remaining a good girl. Committed to my health. Committed to my future!

“When did you start smoking again?” I asked as I wrapped my arm in hers. We walked and talked, and she told me of a trip to Italy and questioning, at almost 50, how much damage a few cigarettes a week could really do to her. Her kids were basically teenagers; how much longer did she really need to stay perfectly healthy for? She meant this nihilistically and practically. We got to our next destination and just stood together while she finished her ciggy. It felt utterly luxurious. Slowing down and taking the time to take a drag.

So, yeah, part of this smoking thing is a yearning for the past. Not in an effort to recapture my youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life. I can’t personally slow down technology or fix media or the demands of capitalism or any of the other existential things that have crept into our lives, slowly and insidiously, and worn us down and numbed us in the name of productivity. But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion. Is it really any worse for us than the numbing digital go-go-go it feels we’ve all been engaged in?

And, truth be told, unlike in my high-school days, I’m no longer certain that the future I’ve been preserving myself for is all that promising. Sure, I can eat as clean as I want, but does it matter when there are forever chemicals in the soil? If we’re walking into dinner parties wondering if the third course will include nuclear war, is there really a point in sacrificing a quick thrill in the now?

Which is, perhaps, the biggest part of it all. If smoking loves chaos, then perhaps it is the perfect new-old bad habit for our moment. A moment that is surely being ruled by Eris, the goddess of chaos, upsetter of norms and apple carts. She is meant to be a foil for the western need to find order in everything. She insists that the only truth is chaos. Our lives may have all been in perfect order, but does it matter if the world in which we live in is burning out of control? And if it doesn’t matter, then, I suppose, why not just smoke?

by Xochitl Gonzalez, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Do you really want to live that long anyway? With all the indignities that an advanced age inflicts? It ain't pretty. See also: The Most Important Charts in the World (Zvi):]

via:

Want to Be Friends With a Bravolebrity?

 That’ll be $5,000.

It’s a scorching Sunday in Los Angeles, and Devyn Parrott, a 36-year-old mother of twins from Phoenix, has already made the pilgrimage to a few sites of celebrity worship: the Beverly Hills Erewhon for a Hailey Bieber smoothie, the Four Seasons for a massage, and SUR, the main setting of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, for a glass of wine. Then comes the highlight: a dinner with Reza Farahan and Mercedes “MJ” Javid of the reality series Shahs of Sunset, The Valley: Persian Style, and The Traitors. It’s her second time meeting Farahan. The first took place in November, when she and her mother had drinks with him at BravoCon. “It was like catching up with an old friend,” she says. “He’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.”

Parrott is a client of Fan Social, a start-up launched as a sort of Cameo on steroids: Whereas Cameo allows users to pay around a couple hundred bucks for a personalized video from a celebrity, Fan Social has its clients pay two, three, or ten times that amount to actually hang out with them in person. Parrott’s experience in L.A. would cost you $7,888 ($2,888 for Javid, $5,000 for Farahan); her drinks date at BravoCon was $2,500. On Fan Social’s menu, you can have lunch with Luann de Lesseps for $5,000, grab coffee with Jamie Kennedy for $750, dine with To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen for $3,500, or golf with former L.A. Laker Byron Scott for $20,000. For $10,000, The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Margaret Josephs will officiate your wedding. For a tenth of that, comedian Tom Arnold will virtually preside over your divorce counseling.

The wealthy have always been able to buy access to celebrities (consider the many pop stars who appeared on My Super Sweet 16), but Fan Social seeks to standardize what were formerly backdoor negotiations with an individual’s management. The idea was born in 2024 when a fan called in to “Jeff Lewis Live,” a two-hour SiriusXM show hosted by the former star of Bravo’s Flipping Out, asking if she could take Lewis to dinner, to which he joked that she could — for $10,000. The dinner never happened, but other fans took him seriously: Soon Lewis was receiving multiple $10,000 dinner invitations over DM, which he accepted. Months later, Lewis started Fan Social along with Southern Hospitality showrunner Michael Beck and Charleston-based software and product designer Shannon Barnes. Fan Social launched with ten celebrities, mostly Lewis’s friends from the Bravoverse. Within a year, the site had hundreds of bookings; the roster now sits at around 50 and includes comedians, actors, and influencers. The founders are currently expanding Fan Social’s talent pool of athletes, who are often based in smaller cities and have local appeal; they’re also hoping to land Andy Cohen, who Lewis expects could charge up to $20,000 per dinner. Barnes describes the pitch as “Uber for celebrities,” a side hustle they can squeeze into their schedules whenever they want. “It’s such an easy way for somebody to make money for one hour of conversation — usually about themselves, which they’re happy to do,” says Beck. 

Like most Fan Social clients, Parrott had heard about the company on “Jeff Lewis Live,” which she listens to “religiously.” (Until now, the platform has done no traditional marketing or press, relying on celebrities to promote their own pages.) Along with her family, she owns three subcontracting companies and was using the trip to L.A. to “capitalize on alone time.” “Here’s the thing,” she tells me, a stack of gold designer bracelets dangling on her wrist, as we wait at the bar for Farahan and Javid to arrive. “You can spend $500 on a Cameo that you watch one time and post. This is more expensive, sure, but it’s the memory of it. That for me is what’s so cool: the memory.”  [...]

The day after Parrott’s meetup, Amy Powers, a 54-year-old from Tennessee, arrives at the SiriusXM offices in Hollywood for her “Jeff Lewis Live” studio visit — a Fan Social experience where, for $5,000, a client can listen in on the prep meeting and taping of Lewis’s show. Powers is a Fan Social power user, a tiny blonde OG Housewives fan with a southern drawl who owns a construction company with the husband she’s in the process of divorcing. ChumpCon, the convention for fans of “Jeff Lewis Live” held last year in Las Vegas, was “the best weekend ever,” she says. Last night, she had a Fan Social dinner at the West Hollywood restaurant Craig’s with Doug Budin ($2,000) and Jamison Scala ($1,500), who both work on “Jeff Lewis Live.” “Any time I’m in town, the first thing I do is call Shannon, like, ‘Where are my boys? Can they do something? Can they have lunch? Can we have dinner?’ ” she says. [...]

Not all “Jeff Lewis Live” listeners support Fan Social; posts on Lewis’s sub-Reddit have criticized him as being “desperate” and “grifting off his fans” for his $4,000 drinks and $7,500 dinner offerings. Lewis waves this off. “My guess is most of those people, if they had the opportunity to do what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure they’d be doing it. Why wouldn’t you?” he says. “You wanna go to a thousand-dollar dinner and have an amazing evening and then sometimes get a gift on top of it and be paid for it? It’s crazy.” Last year, Lewis did 33 Fan Socials and made well into the six figures on the platform (Fan Social takes a commission of around 20 to 25 percent). “I get to go to all my favorite restaurants for free,” he says; he’ll usually suggest Craig’s, the Polo Lounge, Boa, Cecconi’s, or Steak 48.

by Rebecca Jennings, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Michelle Groskopf
[ed. Sad. They'd have to pay me.]