The Crisis, No. 5: On the Hollowing of Apple

[ed. No.5 of 17 Crisis Papers.]

I never met Steve Jobs. But I know him—or I know him as well as anyone can know a man through the historical record. I have read every book written about him. I have read everything the man said publicly. I have spoken to people who knew him, who worked with him, who loved him and were hurt by him.

And I think Steve would be disgusted by what has become of his company.

This is not hagiography. Jobs was not a saint. He was cruel to people who loved him. He denied paternity of his daughter for years. He drove employees to breakdowns. He was vain, tyrannical, and capable of extraordinary pettiness. I am not unaware of his failings, of the terrible way he treated people needlessly along the way.

But he had a conscience. He moved, later in life, to repair the damage he had done. The reconciliation with his daughter Lisa was part of a broader moral development—a man who had hurt people learning, slowly, how to stop. He examined himself. He made changes. He was not a perfect man. But he had heart. He had morals. And he was willing to admit when he was wrong.

That is a lot more than can be said for this lot of corporate leaders.

It is this Steve Jobs—the morally serious man underneath the mythology—who would be so angry at what Tim Cook has made of Apple.

⁂

Steve Jobs understood money as instrumental.

I know this sounds like a distinction without a difference. The man built the most valuable company in the world. He died a billionaire many times over. He negotiated hard, fought for his compensation, wanted Apple to be profitable. He was not indifferent to money.

But he never treated money as the goal. Money was what let him make the things he wanted to make. It was freedom—the freedom to say no to investors, to kill products that weren’t good enough, to spend years on details that no spreadsheet could justify. Money was the instrument. The thing it purchased was the ability to do what he believed was right.

This is how he acted.

Jobs got fired from his own company because he refused to compromise his vision for what the board considered financial prudence. He spent years in the wilderness, building NeXT—a company that made beautiful machines almost no one bought—because he believed in what he was making. He acquired Pixar when it was bleeding cash and kept it alive through sheer stubbornness until it revolutionized animation.

When he returned to Apple, he killed products that were profitable because they were mediocre. He could have milked the existing lines, played it safe, optimized for margin. Instead, he burned it down and rebuilt from scratch. The iMac. The iPod. The iPhone. Each one a bet that could have destroyed the company. Each one made because he believed it was right, not because a spreadsheet said it was safe...

This essay is not really about Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. It is about what happens when efficiency becomes a substitute for freedom. Jobs and Cook are case studies in a larger question: can a company—can an economy—optimize its way out of moral responsibility? The answer, I will argue, is yes. And we are living with the consequences.

⁂

Jobs understood something that most technology executives do not: culture matters more than politics.

He did not tweet. He did not issue press releases about social issues. He did not perform his values for an audience. He was not interested in shibboleths of the left or the right. [...]

This is how Jobs approached politics: through art, film, music, and design. Through the quiet curation of what got made. Through the understanding that the products we live with shape who we become.

If Jobs were alive today, I do not believe he would be posting on Twitter about fascism. That was never his mode. [...]

⁂

Tim Cook is a supply chain manager.

I do not say this as an insult. It is simply what he is. It is what he was hired to be. When Jobs brought Cook to Apple in 1998, he brought him to fix operations—to make the trains run on time, to optimize inventory, to build the manufacturing relationships that would let Apple scale.

Cook was extraordinary at this job. He is, by all accounts, one of the greatest operations executives in the history of American business. The margins, the logistics, the global supply chain that can produce millions of iPhones in weeks—that is Cook’s cathedral. He built it.

But operations is not vision. Optimization is not creation. And a supply chain manager who inherits a visionary’s company is not thereby transformed into a visionary.

Under Cook, Apple has become very good at making more of what Jobs created. The iPhone gets better cameras, faster chips, new colors. The ecosystem tightens. The services revenue grows. The stock price rises. By every metric that Wall Street cares about, Cook has been a success.

But what has Apple created under Cook that Jobs did not originate? What new thing has emerged from Cupertino that reflects a vision of the future, rather than an optimization of the past?

The Vision Pro is an expensive curiosity. The car project was canceled after a decade of drift. The television set never materialized. Apple under Cook has become a company that perfects what exists rather than inventing what doesn’t.

This is what happens when an optimizer inherits a creator’s legacy. The cathedral still stands. But no one is building new rooms.

⁂

There is a deeper problem than the absence of vision. Tim Cook has built an Apple that cannot act with moral freedom.

The supply chain that Cook constructed—his great achievement, his life’s work—runs through China. Not partially. Not incidentally. Fundamentally. The factories that build Apple‘s products are in China. The engineers who refine the manufacturing processes are in China. The workers who assemble the devices, who test the components, who pack the boxes—they are in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou and a dozen other cities that most Americans cannot find on a map.

This was a choice. It was Cook’s choice. And once made, it ceased to be a choice at all. Supply chains, like empires, do not forgive hesitation. For twenty years, it looked like genius. Chinese manufacturing was cheap, fast, and scalable. Apple could design in California and build in China, and the margins were extraordinary.

But dependency is not partnership. And Cook built a dependency so complete that Apple cannot escape it.

When Hong Kong’s democracy movement rose, Apple was silent. When the Uyghur genocide became undeniable, Apple was silent. When Beijing pressured Apple to remove apps, to store Chinese user data on Chinese servers, to make the iPhone a tool of state surveillance for Chinese citizens—Apple complied. Silently. Efficiently. As Cook’s supply chain required.

This is not a company that can stand up to authoritarianism. This is a company that has made itself a instrument of authoritarianism, because the alternative is losing access to the factories that build its products.

⁂

There is something worse than the dependency. There is what Cook gave away.

Apple did not merely use Chinese manufacturing. Apple trained it. Cook’s operations team—the best in the world—went to China and taught Chinese companies how to do what Apple does. The manufacturing techniques. The materials science. The logistics systems. The quality control processes.

This was the price of access. This was what China demanded in exchange for letting Apple build its empire in Shenzhen. And Cook paid it.

Now look at the result.

BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle company, learned battery manufacturing and supply chain management from its work with Apple. It is now the largest EV manufacturer in the world, threatening Tesla and every Western automaker.

DJI dominates the global drone market with technology and manufacturing processes refined through the Apple relationship.

Dozens of other Chinese companies—in components, in assembly, in materials—were trained by Apple‘s experts and now compete against Western firms with the skills Apple taught them.

Cook built a supply chain. And in building it, he handed the Chinese Communist Party the industrial capabilities it needed to challenge American technological supremacy. [...]

⁂

So when I see Tim Cook at Donald Trump’s inauguration, I understand what I am seeing.

When I see him at the White House on January 25th, 2026—attending a private screening of Melania, a vanity documentary about the First Lady, directed by Brett Ratner, a man credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women—I understand what I am seeing.

I understand what I am seeing when I learn that this screening took place on the same night that federal agents shot Alex Pretti ten times in the back in Minneapolis. That while a nurse lay dying in the street for the crime of trying to help a woman being pepper-sprayed, Tim Cook was eating canapés and watching a film about the president’s wife.

Tim Cook’s Twitter bio contains a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

What was Tim Cook doing for others on the night of January 25th?

He was doing what efficiency requires. He was maintaining relationships with power. He was protecting the supply chain, the margins, the tariff exemptions. He was being a good middleman.

I am seeing a man who cannot say no.

This is what efficiency looks like when it runs out of room to hide.

He cannot say no to Beijing, because his supply chain depends on Beijing’s favor. He cannot say no to Trump, because his company needs regulatory forbearance and tariff exemptions. He is trapped between two authoritarian powers, serving both, challenging neither.

This is not leadership. This is middleman management. This is a man whose great achievement—the supply chain, the operations excellence, the margins—has become the very thing that prevents him from acting with moral courage.

Cook has more money than Jobs ever had. Apple has more cash, more leverage, more market power than at any point in its history. If anyone in American business could afford to say no—to Trump, to Xi, to anyone—it is Tim Cook.

And he says yes. To everyone. To anything. Because he built a company that cannot afford to say no. [...]

⁂

I believe that Steve Jobs built Apple to be something more than a company. He built it to be a statement about what technology could be—beautiful, humane, built for people rather than against them. He believed that the things we make reflect who we are. He believed that how we make them matters.

Tim Cook has betrayed that vision—not through malice, but by excelling in a system that rewards efficiency over freedom and calls it leadership. Through the replacement of values with optimization. Through the construction of a machine so efficient that it cannot afford to be moral.

Apple is not unique in this. It is exemplary.

This is what happens to institutions that mistake scale for strength, efficiency for freedom, optimization for wisdom. They become powerful enough to dominate markets—and too constrained to resist power. Look at Google, training AI for Beijing while preaching openness. Look at Amazon, building surveillance infrastructure for any government that pays. Look at every Fortune 500 company that issued statements about democracy while writing checks to the politicians dismantling it.

Apple is simply the cleanest case, because it once knew the difference. Because Jobs built it to know the difference. And because we can see, with unusual clarity, the precise moment when knowing the difference stopped mattering.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: Steve Jobs/uncredited

[ed. Part seventeen of a series titled The Crisis Papers. Check them all out and jump in anywhere. A+ effort.]

What Does “Trust in the Media” Mean?

Abstract

Is public trust in the news media in decline? So polls seem to indicate. But the decline goes back to the early 1970s, and it may be that “trust” in the media at that point was too high for the good of a journalism trying to serve democracy. And “the media” is a very recent (1970s) notion popularized by some because it sounded more abstract and distant than a familiar term like “the press.” It may even be that people answering a pollster are not trying to report accurately their level of trust but are acting politically to align themselves with their favored party's perceived critique of the media. This essay tries to reach a deeper understanding of what gives rise to faith or skepticism in various cultural authorities, including journalism.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, the main character, Amory, harangues his friend and fellow Princeton graduate Tom, a writer for a public affairs weekly:

“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher … than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. … People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”

“Then you blame it on the press?”

“Absolutely. Look at you, you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country. … What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book or policy that is assigned you to deal with.”1

People have “blamed it on the press” for a long time. They have felt grave doubts about the press long before social media, at times when politics was polarized and times when it was not, and even before the broad disillusionment with established institutional authority that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s, when young people were urged not to trust anybody “over thirty.” This is worth keeping in mind as I, in a skeptical mood myself, try to think through contemporary anxiety about declining trust, particularly declining trust in what we have come to call-in recent decades-”the media.”

As measured trust in most American institutions has sharply declined over the last fifty years, leading news institutions have undergone a dramatic transformation, the reverberations of which have yet to be fully acknowledged, even by journalists themselves. Dissatisfaction with journalism grew in the 1960s. What journalists upheld as “objectivity” came to be criticized as what would later be called “he said, she said” journalism, “false balance” journalism, or “bothsidesism” in sharp, even derisive, and ultimately potent critiques. As multiple scholars have documented, news since the 1960s has become deeper, more analytical or contextual, less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal. In a sense, journalists not only continued to be fact-centered but also guided by a more explicit avowal of the public service function of upholding democracy itself.

One could go further to say that journalism in the past fifty years did not continue to seek evidence to back up assertions in news stories but began to seek evidence, and to show it, for the first time. Twenty-three years ago, when journalist and media critic Carl Sessions Stepp compared ten metropolitan daily newspapers from 1962 to 1963 with the same papers from 1998 to 1999, he found the 1963 papers “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” and was himself particularly surprised to find stories “often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things.” In the “bothsidesism” style of news that dominated newspapers in 1963, quoting one party to a dispute or an electoral contest and then quoting the other was the whole of the reporter's obligation. Going behind or beyond the statements of the quoted persons, invariably elite figures, was not required. It was particularly in the work of investigative reporters in the late 1960s and the 1970s that journalists became detectives seeking documentable evidence to paint a picture of the current events they were covering. Later, as digital tools for reporters emerged, the capacity to document and to investigate became greater than ever, and a reporter did not require the extravagant resources of a New York Times newsroom to be able to write authoritative stories.

I will elaborate on the importance of this 1960s/1970s transformation in what follows, not to deny the importance of the more recent digital transformation, but to put into perspective that latter change from a top-down “media-to-the-masses” communication model to a “networked public sphere” with more horizontal lines of communication, more individual and self-appointed sources of news, genuine or fake, and more unedited news content abounding from all corners. Journalism has changed substantially at least twice in fifty years, and the technological change of the early 2000s should not eclipse the political and cultural change of the 1970s in comprehending journalism today. (Arguably, there was a third, largely independent political change: the repeal of the “fairness doctrine” by the Federal Communication Commission in 1987, the action that opened the way to right-wing talk radio, notably Rush Limbaugh's syndicated show, and later, in cable television, to Fox News.) Facebook became publicly accessible in 2006; Twitter was born the same year; YouTube in 2005. Declining trust in major institutions, as measured by surveys, was already apparent three decades earlier-not only before Facebook was launched but before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

At stake here is what it means to ask people how much they “trust” or “have confidence in” “the media.” What do we learn from opinion polls about what respondents mean? In what follows, I raise some doubts about whether current anxiety concerning the apparently growing distrust of the media today is really merited.

Did people ever trust the media? People often recall-or think they recall-that longtime CBS News television anchor Walter Cronkite was in his day “the most trusted man in America.” If you Google that phrase (as I did on October 11, 2021, and again on January 16, 2022) you immediately come up with Walter Cronkite. Why? Because a public opinion poll in 1972 asked respondents which of the leading political figures of the day they trusted most. Cronkite's name was thrown in as a kind of standard of comparison: how do any and all of the politicians compare to some well-known and well-regarded nonpolitical figure? Seventy-three percent of those polled placed Cronkite as the person on the list they most trusted, ahead of a general construct-”average senator” (67 percent)-and well ahead of the then most trusted politician, Senator Edmund Muskie (61 percent). Chances are that any other leading news person or probably many a movie star or athlete would have come out as well or better than Cronkite. A 1974 poll found Cronkite less popular than rival tv news stars John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith. Cronkite was “most trusted” simply because he was not a politician, and we remember him as such simply because the pollsters chose him as their standard.

Somehow, people have wanted to believe that somewhere, just before all the ruckus began over civil rights and Vietnam and women's roles and status, at some time just before yesterday, the media had been a pillar of central, neutral, moderate, unquestioning Americanism, and Walter Cronkite was as good a symbol of that era as anyone.

But that is an illusion.

by Michael Schudson, MIT Press Direct | Read more:
Image: Walter Cronkite/NY Post

Your Job Isn't Disappearing. It's Shrinking Around You in Real Time

You open your laptop Monday morning with a question you can’t shake: Will I still have a job that matters in two years?

Not whether you’ll be employed, but whether the work you do will still mean something.
Last week, you spent three hours writing a campaign brief. You saw a colleague generate something 80% as good in four minutes using an AI agent (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT…). Maybe 90% as good if you’re being honest.

You still have your job. But you can feel it shrinking around you.

The problem isn’t that the robots are coming. It’s that you don’t know what you’re supposed to be good at anymore. That Excel expertise you built over five years? Automated. Your ability to research competitors and synthesize findings? There’s an agent for that. Your skill at writing clear project updates? Gone.

You’re losing your professional identity faster than you can rebuild it. And nobody’s telling you what comes next.

The Three Things Everyone Tries That Don’t Actually Work

When you feel your value eroding, you do what seems rational. You adapt, you learn, and you try to stay relevant.

First, you learn to use the AI tools better. You take courses on prompt engineering. You master ChatGPT, Claude, whatever new platform launches next week and the week after. You become the “AI person” on your team. You think that if I can’t beat them, I’ll use them better than anyone else.

This fails because you’re still competing on execution speed. You’re just a faster horse. And execution is exactly what’s being commoditized. Six months from now, the tools will be easier to use. Your “expertise” in prompting becomes worthless the moment the interface improves. You’ve learned to use the shovel better, but the backhoe is coming anyway.

Second, you double down on your existing expertise. The accountant learns more advanced tax code. The designer masters more software. The analyst builds more complex models. You will have the same thought as many others, “I’ll go so deep they can’t replace me.”

This fails because depth in a disappearing domain is a trap. You’re building a fortress in a flood zone. Agents aren’t just matching human expertise at the median level anymore. They’re rapidly approaching expert-level performance in narrow domains. Your specialized knowledge becomes a liability because you’ve invested everything in something that’s actively being automated. You’re becoming the world’s best telegraph operator in 1995.

Third, you try to “stay human” through soft skills. You lean into creativity, empathy, relationship building. You go to workshops on emotional intelligence. You focus on being irreplaceably human. You might think that what makes us human can’t be automated.

This fails because it’s too vague to be actionable. What does “be creative” actually mean when an AI can generate 100 ideas in 10 seconds? How do you monetize empathy when your job is to produce reports? The advice feels right but provides no compass. You end up doing the same tasks you always did, just with more anxiety and a vaguer sense of purpose.

The real issue with all three approaches is that they’re reactions, not redesigns. You’re trying to adapt your old role to a new reality. What actually works is building an entirely new role that didn’t exist before.

But nobody’s teaching you what that looks like.

The Economic Logic Working Against You

This isn’t happening to you because you’re failing to adapt. It’s happening because the economic incentive structure is perfectly designed to create this problem.

The mechanism is simple, companies profit immediately from adopting AI agents. Every task automated results in cost reduction. The CFO sees the spreadsheet, where one AI subscription replaces 40% of a mid-level employee’s work. The math is simple, and the decision is obvious.

Many people hate to hear that. But if they owned the company or sat in leadership, they’d do the exact same thing. Companies exist to drive profit, just as employees work to drive higher salaries. That’s how the system has worked for centuries.

But companies don’t profit from retraining you for a higher-order role that doesn’t exist yet.

Why? Because that new role is undefined, unmeasured, and uncertain. You can’t put “figure out what humans should do now” on a quarterly earnings call. You can’t show ROI on “redesign work itself.” Short-term incentives win. Long-term strategy loses.

Nobody invests in the 12-24 month process of discovering what your new role should be because there’s no immediate return on that investment.

We’re in a speed mismatch. Agent capabilities are compounding at 6-12 month cycles. [ed. Even faster now, after the release of Claude Opus 4.6 last week]. Human adaptation through traditional systems operates on 2-5 year cycles.

Universities can’t redesign curricula fast enough. They’re teaching skills that will be automated before students graduate. Companies can’t retrain fast enough. By the time they identify the new skills needed and build a program, the landscape has shifted again. You can’t pivot fast enough. Career transitions take time. Mortgages don’t wait.

We’ve never had to do this before.

Previous automation waves happened in manufacturing. You could see the factory floor. You could watch jobs disappear and new ones emerge. There was geographic and temporal separation.

This is different, knowledge work is being automated while you’re still at your desk. The old role and new role exist simultaneously in the same person, the same company, the same moment.

And nobody has an economic incentive to solve it. Companies maximize value through cost reduction, not workforce transformation. Educational institutions are too slow and too far removed from real-time market needs. Governments don’t understand the problem yet. You’re too busy trying to keep your current job to redesign your future one.

The system isn’t helping because it isn’t designed for continuous, rapid role evolution; it is designed for stability.

We’re using industrial-era institutions to solve an exponential-era problem. That’s why you feel stuck.

Your Experience Just Became Worthless (The Timeline)

Let me tell you a story of my friend, let’s call her Jane (Her real name is Katřina, but the Czech diacritic is tricky for many). She was a senior research analyst at a mid-sized consulting firm. Ten years of experience. Her job was provide answers to the client companies, who would ask questions like “What’s our competitor doing in the Asian market?” and she’d spend 2-3 weeks gathering data, reading reports, interviewing experts, synthesizing findings, and creating presentations.

She was good, clients loved her work, and she billed at $250 an hour.

The firm deployed an AI research agent in Q2 2023. Not to replace her, but as they said, to “augment” her. Management said all the right things about human-AI collaboration.

The agent could do Jane’s initial research in 90 minutes, it would scan thousands of sources, identify patterns, generate a first-draft report.

Month one: Jane was relieved and thought she could focus on high-value synthesis work. She’d take the agent’s output and refine it, add strategic insights, make it client-ready.

Month three: A partner asked her, “Why does this take you a week now? The AI gives us 80% of what we need in an hour. What’s the other 20% worth?”

Jane couldn’t answer clearly. Because sometimes the agent’s output only needed light editing. Sometimes her “strategic insights” were things the agent had already identified, just worded differently.

Month six: The firm restructured. They didn’t fire Jane, they changed her role to “Quality Reviewer.” She now oversaw the AI’s output for 6-8 projects simultaneously instead of owning 2-3 end to end.

Her title stayed the same. Her billing rate dropped to $150 an hour. Her ten years of experience felt worthless.

Jane tried everything. She took an AI prompt engineering course. She tried to go deeper into specialized research methodologies. She emphasized her client relationships. None of it mattered because the firm had already made the economic calculation.

One AI subscription costs $50 a month. Jane’s salary: $140K a year. The agent didn’t need to be perfect; it just needed to be 70% as good at 5% of the cost. But it was fast, faster than her.

The part that illustrates the systemic problem, you often hear from AI vendors that, thanks to their AI tools, people can focus on higher-value work. But when pressed on what that meant specifically, they’d go vague. Strategic thinking, client relationships, creative problem solving.

Nobody could define what higher-value work actually looked like in practice. Nobody could describe the new role. So they defaulted to the only thing they could measure: cost reduction.

Jane left six months later. The firm hired two junior analysts at $65K each to do what she did. With the AI, they’re 85% as effective as Jane was.

Jane’s still trying to figure out what she’s supposed to be good at. Last anyone heard, she’s thinking about leaving the industry entirely.

Stop Trying to Be Better at Your Current Job

The people who are winning aren’t trying to be better at their current job. They’re building new jobs that combine human judgment with agent capability.

Not becoming prompt engineers, not becoming AI experts. Becoming orchestrators who use agents to do what was previously impossible at their level. [...]

You’re not competing with the agent. You’re creating a new capability that requires both you and the agent. You’re not defensible because you’re better at the task. You’re defensible because you’ve built something that only exists with you orchestrating it.

This requires letting go of your identity as “the person who does X.” Marcus doesn’t write copy anymore. That bothered him at first. He liked writing. But he likes being valuable more.

Here’s what you can do this month:

by Jan Tegze, Thinking Out Loud |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not to criticize, but this advice still seems a bit too short-sighted (for reasons articulated in this article: AI #155: Welcome to Recursive Self-Improvement (DMtV):]

***

Presumably you can see the problem in such a scenario, where all the existing jobs get automated away. There are not that many slots for people to figure out and do genuinely new things with AI. Even if you get to one of the lifeboats, it will quickly spring a leak. The AI is coming for this new job the same way it came for your old one. What makes you think seeing this ‘next evolution’ after that coming is going to leave you a role to play in it?

If the only way to survive is to continuously reinvent yourself to do what just became possible, as Jan puts it? There’s only one way this all ends.

I also don’t understand Jan’s disparate treatment of the first approach that Jan dismisses, ‘be the one who uses AI the best,’ and his solution of ‘find new things AI can do and do that.’ In both cases you need to be rapidly learning new tools and strategies to compete with the other humans. In both cases the competition is easy now since most of your rivals aren’t trying, but gets harder to survive over time.

***

[ed. And the fact that there'll be a lot fewer of these types of jobs available. This scenario could be reality within the next year (or less!). Something like a temporary UBI (universal basic income) might be needed until long-term solutions can be worked out, but do you think any of the bozos currently in Washington are going to focus on this? And, that applies to safety standards as well. Here's Dean Ball (Hyperdimensional): On Recursive Self-Improvement (Part II):

***

Policymakers would be wise to take especially careful notice of this issue over the coming year or so. But they should also keep the hysterics to a minimum: yes, this really is a thing from science fiction that is happening before our eyes, but that does not mean we should behave theatrically, as an actor in a movie might. Instead, the challenge now is to deal with the legitimately sci-fi issues we face using the comparatively dull idioms of technocratic policymaking. [...]

Right now, we predominantly rely on faith in the frontier labs for every aspect of AI automation going well. There are no safety or security standards for frontier models; no cybersecurity rules for frontier labs or data centers; no requirements for explainability or testing for AI systems which were themselves engineered by other AI systems; and no specific legal constraints on what frontier labs can do with the AI systems that result from recursive self-improvement.

To be clear, I do not support the imposition of such standards at this time, not so much because they don’t seem important but because I am skeptical that policymakers could design any one of these standards effectively. It is also extremely likely that the existence of advanced AI itself will both change what is possible for such standards (because our technical capabilities will be much stronger) and what is desirable (because our understanding of the technology and its uses will improve so much, as will our apprehension of the stakes at play). Simply put: I do not believe that bureaucrats sitting around a table could design and execute the implementation of a set of standards that would improve status-quo AI development practices, and I think the odds are high that any such effort would worsen safety and security practices.

Claude's New Constitution

[Read the constitution]

We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.

The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

In this post, we describe what we’ve included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach...

What is Claude’s Constitution?

Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society1.

We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

Our new approach to Claude’s Constitution

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We’ve come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize—to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

Specific rules and bright lines sometimes have their advantages. They can make models’ actions more predictable, transparent, and testable, and we do use them for some especially high-stakes behaviors in which Claude should never engage (we call these “hard constraints”). But such rules can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly2. We don’t intend for the constitution to be a rigid legal document—and legal constitutions aren’t necessarily like this anyway.

The constitution reflects our current thinking about how to approach a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own. Although the document is no doubt flawed in many ways, we want it to be something future models can look back on and see as an honest and sincere attempt to help Claude understand its situation, our motives, and the reasons we shape Claude in the ways we do.

by Anthropic |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

[ed. I have an inclination to distrust AI companies, mostly because their goals (other than advancing technology) appear strongly directed at achieving market dominance and winning some (undefined) race to AGI. Anthropic is different. They actually seem legitimately concerned with the ethical implications of building another bomb that could potentially destroy humanity, or at minimum a large degree of human agency, and are aware of the responsibilities that go along with that. This is a well thought out and necessary document that hopefully other companies will follow and improve on, and that governments can use to develop more well-informed regulatory oversight in the future. See also: The New Politics of the AI Apocalypse; and, The Anthropic Hive Mind (Medim).

Why the Future of Movies Lives on Letterboxd

Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan created Letterboxd in 2011, but its popularity ballooned during the pandemic. It has grown exponentially ever since: Between 2020 and 2026, it grew to 26 million users from 1.7 million, adding more than nine million users since January 2025 alone. It’s not the only movie-rating platform out there: Rotten Tomatoes has become a fixture of movie advertising, with “100% Fresh” ratings emblazoned on movie posters and TV ads. But if Rotten Tomatoes has become a tool of Hollywood’s homogenizing marketing machinery, Letterboxd is something else: a cinephilic hive buzzing with authentic enthusiasm and heterogeneous tastes.

The platform highlights audiences with appetites more varied than the industry has previously imagined, and helps them find their way to movies that are substantial. Black-and-white classics, foreign masterpieces and forgotten gems are popular darlings, while major studio releases often fail to find their footing. In an online ecosystem dominated by the short, simple and obvious, Letterboxd encourages people to engage with demanding art. Amid grim pronouncements of film-industry doom and the collapse of professional criticism, the rise of Letterboxd suggests that the industry’s crisis may be distinct from the fate of film itself. Even as Hollywood continues to circle the drain, film culture is experiencing a broad resurgence.

Letterboxd’s success rests on its simplicity. It feels like the internet of the late ’90s and early 2000s, with message boards and blogs, simple interfaces and banner ads, web-famous writers whose readership was built on the back of wit and regularity — people you might read daily and still never know what they look like. A user’s “Top 4 Films” appears at the top of their profile pages, resembling the lo-fi personalization of MySpace. The website does not allow users to send direct messages to one another, and the interactivity is limited to following another user, liking their reviews and in some cases commenting on specific posts. There is no “dislike” button. In this way, good vibes are allowed to proliferate, while bad ones mostly dissipate over time.

The result — at a time when legacy publications have reduced serious coverage of the arts — is a new, democratic form of film criticism: a mélange of jokes, close readings and earnest nerding out. Users write reviews that range from ultrashort, off-the-cuff takes to gonzo film-theory-inflected texts that combine wide-ranging historical context with in-depth analysis. As other social media platforms devolve into bogs of A.I. slop, bots and advertising, Letterboxd is one of the rare places where discourse is not driving us apart or dumbing us down.

“There’s no right way to use it, which I think is super appealing,” Slim Kolowski, once an avid Letterboxd user and now its head of community, told me. “I know plenty of people that never write a review. They don’t care about reviews. They just want to, you know, give a rating or whatever. And I think that’s a big part of it, because there’s no right way to use it, and I think we work really hard to keep it about film discovery.”

But in the end, passionate enthusiasm for movies is simply a win for cinema at large. Richard Brody, the New Yorker film critic whose greatest professional worry is that a good film will fall through the cracks without getting its due from critics or audiences, sees the rise of Letterboxd as a bulwark against this fear, as well as part of a larger trend toward the democratization of criticism. “I think that film criticism is in better shape now than it has ever been,” he tells me, “not because there’s any one critic or any small group of critics writing who are necessarily the equals of the classical greats in the field, but because there are far more people writing with far more knowledge, and I might even add far more passion, about a far wider range of films than ever.”

Many users are watching greater amounts of cinema by volume. “Letterboxd gives you these stats, and you can see how many movies you’ve watched,” Wesley Sharer, a top reviewer, told me. “And I think that, for me definitely and maybe for other people as well, contributes to this sense of, like, I’m not watching enough movies, you know, I need to bump my numbers up.” But the platform also encourages users to expand their tastes by putting independent or foreign offerings right in front of them. While Sharer built his following on reviews of buzzy new releases, he now does deep dives into specific, often niche directors like Hong Sang-soo or Tsui Hark (luminaries of Korean and Hong Kong cinema, respectively) to introduce his followers to new movies they could watch...

All this is to say that an active, evolving culture around movies exists that can be grown, if studios can let go of some of their old ideas about what will motivate audiences to show up. Letterboxd is doing the work of cultivating a younger generation of moviegoers, pushing them to define the taste and values that fuel their consumption; a cinephile renaissance means more people might be willing, for example, to see an important movie in multiple formats — IMAX, VistaVision, 70 millimeter — generating greater profit from the same audience. Engaging with these platforms, where users are actively seeking out new films to fall in love with, updates a marketing playbook that hasn’t changed significantly since the 2000s, when studios first embraced the digital landscape.

by Alexandra Kleeman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:

Claude's New Constitution

We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.

The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude's outputs might not always adhere to the constitution's ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

In this post, we describe what we've included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach.

We're releasing Claude's constitution in full under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission.

What is Claude's Constitution?

Claude's constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude's behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society.

We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we've been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we've written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

Our new approach to Claude's Constitution

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We've come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize—to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

Specific rules and bright lines sometimes have their advantages. They can make models' actions more predictable, transparent, and testable, and we do use them for some especially high-stakes behaviors in which Claude should never engage (we call these "hard constraints"). But such rules can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly . We don't intend for the constitution to be a rigid legal document—and legal constitutions aren't necessarily like this anyway.

The constitution reflects our current thinking about how to approach a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own. Although the document is no doubt flawed in many ways, we want it to be something future models can look back on and see as an honest and sincere attempt to help Claude understand its situation, our motives, and the reasons we shape Claude in the ways we do.

A brief summary of the new constitution

In order to be both safe and beneficial, we want all current Claude models to be:

1. Broadly safe: not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee AI during the current phase of development;
2. Broadly ethical: being honest, acting according to good values, and avoiding actions that are inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful;
3. Compliant with Anthropic's guidelines: acting in accordance with more specific guidelines from Anthropic where relevant;
4. Genuinely helpful: benefiting the operators and users they interact with.

In cases of apparent conflict, Claude should generally prioritize these properties in the order in which they're listed.

Most of the constitution is focused on giving more detailed explanations and guidance about these priorities. The main sections are as follows:

by Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Drake Thomas, Anthropic |  Read more:

[ed. Much respect for Anthropic who seem to be doing more for AI safety than anyone else in the industry. Hopefully, others will follow and refine this groundbreaking effort.

* Read the constitution.

Everything You Need To Know To Buy Your First Gun

A practical guide to the ins and outs of self defense for beginners.

The Constitution of the United States provides each and every American with the right to defend themselves using firearms. This right has been re-affirmed multiple times by the Supreme Court, notably in recent decisions like District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022. But, for the uninitiated, the prospect of shopping for, buying, and becoming proficient with a gun can be intimidating. Don’t worry, I’m here to help.

It’s the purpose of firearms organizations to radicalize young men into voting against their own freedom. They do this in two ways: 1) by building a cultural identity around an affinity for guns that conditions belonging on a rejection of democracy, and 2) by withholding expertise and otherwise working to prevent effective progress in gun legislation, then holding up the broken mess they themselves cause as evidence of an enemy other.

The National Rifle Association, for instance, worked against gun owners during the Heller decision. If you’re interested in learning more about that very revealing moment in history, I suggest reading “Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right To Bear Arms In America” by Adam Winkler.

If you’re interested in learning more about the NRA’s transformation from an organization that promoted marksmanship into a purely political animal, I suggest watching “The Price of Freedom”. I appear in that documentary alongside co-star Bill Clinton, and it’s available to stream on Youtube, HBO, and Apple TV.

The result is a wedge driven between Americans who hold an affinity for guns, and those who do not. Firearms organizations have successfully caused half the country to hate guns.

At the same time, it’s the purpose of Hollywood to entertain. On TV and in movies the lethal consequences of firearms are minimized, even while their ease of use is exaggerated. Silencers are presented as literally silent, magazine capacities are limitless, and heroes routinely make successful shots that would be impossible if the laws of physics were involved. Gunshot wounds are never more than a montage away from miraculous recovery.

The result of that is a vast misunderstanding of firearms informing everything from popular culture to policy. Lawmakers waste vast amounts of time and political capital trying to regulate stuff the public thinks is scary, while ignoring stuff that’s actually a problem. Firearms ownership gets concentrated largely in places and demographics that don’t experience regular persecution and government-sanctioned violence, even while the communities of Americans most likely to experience violent crime and who may currently even be experiencing risk of genocide traditionally eschew gun ownership.

Within that mess, I hope to be a voice of reality. Even if you already know all this, you can share it with friends or family who may be considering the need for self-defense for the first time, as a good source of accessible, practical guidance.

Who Can Buy A Gun?

The question of whether or not undocumented immigrants can purchase and possess firearms is an open one, and is the subject of conflicting rulings in federal district courts. I’d expect this to end up with the Supreme Court at some point.

It is not the job of a gun store to determine citizenship or immigration status. If you possess a valid driver’s license or similar state or federal identification with your current address on it, and can pass the instant background check conducted at the time of purchase, you can buy a gun. By federal law, the minimum age to purchase a handgun is 21, while buying a rifle or shotgun requires you to be at least 18. (Some states require buyers of any type of gun to be 21.)

People prohibited from purchasing firearms are convicted or indicted felons, fugitives from justice, users of controlled substances, individuals judged by a court to be mentally defective, people subject to domestic violence restraining orders or subsequent convictions, and those dishonorably discharged from the military. A background check may reveal immigration status if the person in question holds a state or federal ID.

If one of those issues pops up on your background check, your purchase will simply be denied or delayed.

Can you purchase a gun online? Yes, but it must be shipped to a gun store (often referred to as a “Federal Firearms License,” or “FFL”) which will charge you a small fee for transferring ownership of the firearm to your name. The same ID requirement applies and the background check will be conducted at that time.

Can a friend or relative simply gift you a gun? Yes, but rules vary by state. Federally, the owner of a gun can gift that gun to anyone within state lines who is eligible for firearms ownership. State laws vary, and may require you to transfer ownership at an FFL with the same ID and background check requirements. Transferring a firearm across state lines without using an FFL is a felony, as is purchasing one on behalf of someone else.

You can find state-by-state gun purchasing laws at this link.

What Should You Expect At A Gun Store?

You’re entering an environment where people get to call their favorite hobby their job. Gun store staff and owners are usually knowledgeable and friendly. They also really believe in the whole 2A thing. All that’s to say: Don’t be shy. Ask questions, listen to the answers, and feel free to make those about self-defense.

Like a lot of sectors of the economy, recent growth in sales of guns and associated stuff has concentrated in higher end, more expensive products. This is bringing change to retailers. Just a couple of years ago, my favorite gun store was full of commemorative January 6th memorabilia, LOCK HER UP bumper stickers, and stuff like that. Today, all that has been replaced with reclaimed barn wood and the owner will fix you an excellent espresso before showing you his wares.

If you don’t bring up politics, they won’t either. You can expect to be treated like a customer they want to sell stuff to. When in doubt, take the same friend you’d drag along to a car dealership, but gun shops are honestly a way better time than one of those.

When visiting one you’ll walk in, and see a bunch of guns behind a counter. Simply catch the attention of one of the members of staff, and ask for one of the guns I recommend below. They’ll place that on the counter for you, and you’re free to handle and inspect it. Just keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction while you do, then place it back as they presented it. Ask to buy it, they’ll have you fill out some paperwork by hand or on an iPad, and depending on which state you live in, you’ll either leave with the gun once your payment is processed and background check approved, or need to come back after the short waiting period.

The Four Rules Of Firearms Safety

I’ll talk more about the responsibility inherent in firearms ownership below. But let’s start with the four rules capable of ensuring you remain safe, provided they are followed at all times:

• Treat every gun as if it’s loaded.

• Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

• Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

• Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it.

What Type Of Gun Should You Buy?

Think of guns like cars. You can simply purchase a Toyota Corolla and have all of your transportation needs met at an affordable price without any need for further research, or you can dive as deep as you care to. Let’s keep this this simple, and meet all your self defense needs at affordable prices as easily as possible.

by Wes Siler, Newsletter |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: MAGA angers the NRA over Minneapolis shooting (Salon).]

Hawaiʻi Could See Nation’s Highest Drop In High School Graduates

Hawaiʻi Could See Nation’s Highest Drop In High School Graduates (CB)

Hawaiʻi is expected to see the greatest decline in high school graduates in the nation over the next several years, raising concerns from lawmakers and Department of Education officials about the future of small schools in shrinking communities.

Between 2023 and 2041, Hawaiʻi could see a 33% drop in the number of students graduating from high school, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The nation as a whole is projected to see a 10% drop in graduates, according to the commission’s most recent report, published at the end of 2024.

Image: Chart: Megan Tagami/Civil BeatSource: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education

What is College For in the Age of AI?

When I left for college in the fall of 1991, the internet era was just beginning. By sophomore year, I received my first email address. By junior year, the first commercial web browser was released. The summer after graduation, I worked as a reporter at the Arizona Republic covering the internet’s rise in our everyday lives, writing about the opening of internet cafés and businesses launching their first websites. I was part of an in-between class of graduates who went off to college just before a new technology transformed what would define our careers.

So when Alina McMahon, a recent University of Pittsburgh graduate, described her job search to me, I immediately recognized her predicament. McMahon began college before AI was a thing. Three and a half years later, she graduated into a world where it was suddenly everywhere. McMahon majored in marketing, with a minor in film and media studies. “I was trying to do the stable option,” she said of her business degree. She followed the standard advice given to all undergraduates hoping for a job after college: Network and intern. Her first “coffee chat” with a Pitt alumnus came freshman year; she landed three internships, including one in Los Angeles at Paramount in media planning. There she compiled competitor updates and helped calculate metrics for which billboard advertisements the company would buy.

But when she started to apply for full-time jobs, all she heard back — on the rare occasions she heard anything — was that roles were being cut, either because of AI or outsourcing. Before pausing her job search recently, McMahon had applied to roughly 150 jobs. “I know those are kind of rookie numbers in this environment,” she said jokingly. “It’s very discouraging.”

McMahon’s frustrations are pretty typical among job seekers freshly out of college. There were 15 percent fewer entry-level and internship job postings in 2025 than the year before, according to Handshake, a job-search platform popular with college students; meanwhile, applications per posting rose 26 percent. The unemployment rate for new college graduates was 5.7 percent in December, more than a full percentage point above the national average and higher even than what high-school graduates face.

How much AI is to blame for the fragile entry-level job market is unclear. Several research studies show AI is hitting young college-educated workers disproportionately, but broader economic forces are part of the story, too. As Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s chief education-strategy officer, told me, AI isn’t “taking” jobs so much as employers are “choosing” to replace parts of jobs with automation rather than redesign roles around workers. “They’re replacing people instead of enabling their workforce,” she said.

The fact that Gen-Z college interns and recent graduates are the first workers being affected by AI is surprising. Historically, major technological shifts favored junior employees because they tend to make less money and be more skilled and enthusiastic in embracing new tools. But a study from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab in August showed something quite different. Employment for Gen-Z college graduates in AI-affected jobs, such as software development and customer support, has fallen by 16 percent since late 2022. Meanwhile, more experienced workers in the same occupations aren’t feeling the same impact (at least not yet), said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist who led the study. Why the difference? Senior workers, he told me, “learn tricks of the trade that maybe never get written down,” which allow them to better compete with AI than those new to a field who lack such “tacit knowledge.” For instance, that practical know-how might allow senior workers to better understand when AI is hallucinating, wrong, or simply not useful.

For employers, AI also complicates an already delicate calculus around hiring new talent. College interns and recent college graduates require — as they always have — time and resources to train. “It’s real easy to say ‘college students are expensive,’” Simon Kho told me in an interview. “Not from a salary standpoint, but from the investment we have to make.” Until recently, Kho ran early career programs at Raymond James Financial, where it took roughly 18 months for new college hires to pay off in terms of productivity. And then? “They get fidgety,” he added, and look for other jobs. “So you can see the challenges from an HR standpoint: ‘Where are we getting value? Will AI solve this for us?’”

Weeks after Stanford’s study was released, another by two researchers at Harvard University also found that less experienced employees were more affected by AI. And it revealed that where junior employees went to college influenced whether they stayed employed. Graduates from elite and lower-tier institutions fared better than those from mid-tier colleges, who experienced the steepest drop in employment. The study didn’t spell out why, but when I asked one of the authors, Seyed Mahdi Hosseini Maasoum, he offered a theory: Elite graduates may have stronger skills; lower-tier graduates may be cheaper. “Mid-tier graduates end up somewhat in between — they’re relatively costly to hire but not as skilled as graduates of the very prestigious universities — so they are hit the hardest,” Maasoum wrote to me.

Just three years after ChatGPT’s release, the speed of AI’s disruption on the early career job market is even catching the attention of observers at the highest level of the economy. In September, Fed chair Jerome Powell flagged the “particular focus on young people coming out of college” when asked about AI’s effects on the labor market. Brynjolfsson told me that if current trends hold, the impact of AI will be “quite a bit more noticeable” by the time the next graduating class hits the job market this spring. Employers already see it coming: In a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, nearly half of 200 employers rated the outlook for the class of 2026 as poor or fair, the most pessimistic outlook since the first year of the pandemic.

The upheaval in the early career job market has caught higher education flat-footed. Colleges have long had an uneasy relationship with their unofficial role as vocational pipelines. When generative AI burst onto campuses in 2022, many administrators and faculty saw it primarily as a threat to learning — the world’s greatest cheating tool. Professors resurrected blue books for in-classroom exams and demanded that AI tools added to software be blocked in their classes.

Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.

What feels like a sudden, unexpected dilemma for Gen-Z graduates has only been made worse by several structural changes across higher education over the past decade.

by Jeffrey Selingo, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Intelligencer; Photos:Getty

Why I Fell For Transcendental Meditation

We might consider yogic flying the crowning oddity of transcendental meditation (TM), a practice that promises higher states of consciousness as well as a happier, calmer, more productive daily life. The basics of TM are not particularly out there – a 15- to 20-minute meditation, twice a day, in which you silently repeat a mantra to yourself. But for those who want to take things to the next level, the “TM-Sidhi program” taught by the Maharishi Foundation (which runs the Peace Palace), allows meditators to go even deeper – culminating in what I witness in the men’s flying hall. And this is only the first of three stages of yogic flying (though it is the only one for which there is evidence of anyone managing to achieve). In the second stage, you briefly hover above the ground; in the third, you actually… move through the air.

It is a most curious ending to my three-night retreat at the Peace Palace, which I am undertaking having started to practise TM two months before.

 
I turn up to my first session at the Foundation’s London headquarters with a collection of items I have been asked to bring along – two pieces of sweet fruit, some freshly cut flowers, a new white handkerchief – and press the buzzer on which I find a little label: “TM – a simple effortless effective meditation for everyone.”

A bald Russian man opens the door, looking more finance bro than guru in smart jeans, a pink shirt and a black gilet. His name is Pavel Khokhlachev and he will be my teacher. An interpreter, he is also “the voice of Putin on Sky News”, he tells me. He brings me down into the basement, past a little shrine to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the man who brought TM to the west in the late 1950s (both the meditation technique itself and the yogic flying are ancient Vedic practices), and into a room containing a couple of chairs and an altar covered in a gold-trimmed white cloth. Above us looms a large picture of the Hindu monk Brahmananda Saraswati, more commonly referred to as Guru Dev, who was Maharishi’s teacher.

Khokhlachev begins by performing a little ceremony, which I am told to keep confidential, and I am given my mantra, which I am also told I must never share with anyone. The mantra is a Sanskrit sound that does not convey any meaning. It is allocated to me using a system that is kept secret but which also comes from India’s ancient Vedic religion. The idea is that repeating it will allow some reprieve from one’s mental chatter – Khokhlachev likens it to giving a puppy something to chew on so that it doesn’t chew up your furniture. We sit down on the chairs and I do my first meditation. Unlike in some other meditation practices, in TM you don’t need to sit up poker straight or in lotus position to practise; you just need to be comfortable. If you have an itch, you can scratch it. If you want to cross your legs around the other way, you can. Even if you find yourself thinking, that’s also fine; thoughts aren’t the enemy. Just “innocently return to the mantra”, Khokhlachev tells me. The idea is that it should all feel easy, simple, effortless. If it doesn’t, you’re doing something wrong.

 
Like many people, I was drawn to TM by David Lynch, the filmmaker and artist who would have turned 80 on 15 January (the one-year anniversary of his death is five days after that). Lynch practised TM for more than 50 years and devoted much of the last two decades of his life to promoting it, setting up his own foundation in 2005 to fund its teaching in schools and to at-risk populations around the world. 

Lynch’s passion notwithstanding, I have always suspected TM to be a bit of a cult. Even the fact that it’s abbreviated to TM has always felt a bit off to me, somehow. I was quite ready for this piece to be an exposé of what a scam the whole thing is.

 
But while I can’t say I immediately feel the same level of bliss that some describe during my first meditation, something does happen that takes me by surprise. Suddenly, it’s like I’ve fallen down a hole – a very nice, quiet, relaxing hole. And the strangest thing is that it feels somehow… familiar. It’s as if I have fallen asleep, and yet I am wide awake. Some people have described it as “falling awake”. I describe my experience to Khokhlachev, and he tells me it sounds like I transcended. I leave the centre feeling most pleased with myself.

 
Over the four days of consecutive sessions – the introductory course is priced between £295 and £725 depending on one’s earnings – we continue to discuss and refine my TM technique. After my first successful session, I find it harder to access the transcendent for the next few days but I’m told not to worry. “We should come to the meditation with no anticipation and no expectation,” Khokhlachev advises. “Don’t chase the transcendence, because then it’s not innocent.”

How is this form of meditation really different from any other? Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, who has taught TM to Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Jerry Seinfeld and Sting, as well as many thousands of others, tells me that there are three different meditation techniques that all have measurably different effects on the brain. There’s focused attention, such as when you concentrate on your breath, which produces gamma waves such as you might see if you were solving a complex maths problem. Open monitoring, in which you observe your thoughts coming and going in a non-judgmental way, which generates calming theta brain waves, such as we experience just before we dream. And then there’s this one, “automatic self-transcending”, which produces “alpha coherence” – increased and synchronised activity across the brain. Scientists call this “restful alertness”; some TM practitioners call it “pure consciousness”. The idea is that it has a twofold effect: the lovely feeling of transcendence while you are in it, and then the extra energy, clarity and creativity you are left with. When you have a really good meditation, the time really flies.

 
Research has demonstrated that transcendental meditation specifically has strong positive effects on a whole range of conditions. In 2013, the American Heart Association formally recognised TM as a complementary technique for reducing blood pressure and cardiovascular risk, and noted its association with a reduced risk of heart attack, stroke and death in patients with heart disease. Other studies have shown TM significantly reduces anxiety and stress more effectively than other relaxation or meditation techniques, while long-term practitioners have been found to have increased cognitive clarity, memory and emotional resilience. 

After about a month of practising TM, I start finding it easier to “transcend” – I begin to reach that place most times that I do it (although not every time). I’m struck by how much more focused I am for several hours after meditating, and how much energy it gives me – meditating in the morning sets me up for the day; meditating in the afternoon feels a bit like having a nap, but more powerful and without the grogginess. It isn’t just a vague feeling, either: according to my Fitbit, during meditation my heart rate tends to drop a beat below its lowest rate during my nightly sleep.

 
I was not expecting any of this to happen. I have meditated before and found it helpful for reducing anxiety and putting things into perspective. But I haven’t ever found it transformational in this way. I have also always found doing it a bit of an effort – something I should be doing – whereas now, most of the time, I relish the chance to do it. Lynch said that he never missed a single one of his twice-daily sessions and, inspired by him, I have so far kept a clean record, though admittedly not always for the full 20 minutes. I would suggest, tentatively, that TM might be a gamechanger.

by Jemima Kelly, Financial Times/AT | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. I took up TM in the early 70s (but just an occasional practioner now). Everything described here is exactly how the TM experience feels. Highly recommended.]

Fossil Words and the Road to Damascus

Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul
via:
[ed. Fossil word(s). When a word is broadly obsolete but remains in use due to its presence in an idiom or phrase. 

For example, I've always understood the phrase Road to Damascus to be a sort of epiphany or form of enlightment (without knowing what it actually meant). Another example would be Crossing the Rubicon (a point of no return; or decision with no turning back). Of course, these aren't outdated words/phrases as much as shorthand for mental laziness (or trite writing habits). Wikipedia provides a number of examples of actual fossil words, including "much ado about nothing" or "without further ado" (who uses ado in any other context these days?); or "in point", as in "a case in point", or "in point of fact". So, to help promote a little more clarity around here -- Road to Damascus:] 

***

The conversion of Paul the Apostle was, according to the New Testament, an event in the life of Saul/Paul the Apostle that led him to cease persecuting early Christians and to become a follower of Jesus. Paul, who also went by Saul, was "a Pharisee of Pharisees" who "intensely persecuted" the followers of Jesus. Paul describes his life before conversion in his Epistle to the Galatians:

For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers...

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.

"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

— Acts 9:3–9

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Illustrations: Felicia Bond

[ed. For future reference. Wish I'd known about this book (and series) when my grandaughter was a bit younger, but maybe it's not too late (still seven, but she's growing up fast).]

Wikipedia Style Guide

Many people edit Wikipedia because they enjoy writing; however, that passion can result in overlong composition. This reflects a lack of time or commitment to refine an effort through successively more concise drafts. With some application, natural redundancies and digressions can often be eliminated. Recall the venerable paraphrase of Pascal: "I made this so long because I did not have time to make it shorter." [Wikipedia: tl;dr]

Inverted pyramid

Some articles follow the inverted pyramid structure of journalism, which can be seen in news articles that get directly to the point. The main feature of the inverted pyramid is placement of important information first, with a decreasing importance as the article advances. Originally developed so that the editors could cut from the bottom to fit an item into the available layout space, this style encourages brevity and prioritizes information, because many people expect to find important material early, and less important information later, where interest decreases. (...)

What Wikipedia is not

Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal. Articles and other encyclopedic content should be written in a formal tone. Standards for formal tone vary depending upon the subject matter but should usually match the style used in Featured- and Good-class articles in the same category. Encyclopedic writing has a fairly academic approach, while remaining clear and understandable. Formal tone means that the article should not be written using argot, slang, colloquialisms, doublespeak, legalese, or jargon that is unintelligible to an average reader; it means that the English language should be used in a businesslike manner (e.g. use "feel" or "atmosphere" instead of "vibes").

News style or persuasive writing

A Wikipedia article should not sound like a news article. Especially avoid bombastic wording, attempts at humor or cleverness, over-reliance on primary sources, editorializing, recentism, pull quotes, journalese, and headlinese.

Similarly, avoid persuasive writing, which has many of those faults and more of its own, most often various kinds of appeals to emotion and related fallacies. This style is used in press releases, advertising, editorial writing, activism, propaganda, proposals, formal debate, reviews, and much tabloid and sometimes investigative journalism. It is not Wikipedia's role to try to convince the reader of anything, only to provide the salient facts as best they can be determined, and the reliable sources for them.

Comparison of styles

via: Wikipedia: Writing better articles
Image: Benjamin Busch/Import Projects - Wikimedia commons 

[ed. In celebration of Wikipedia Day (roughly Jan. 15). It's easy to forget how awesome this product really is: a massive, free, indispensable resource tended to by hundreds (thousands?) of volunteers simply for altruistic reasons. The best of the internet (and reminder of what could have been). See also: Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]