Scientists Unlock Secret to Venus Flytrap’s Hair-Trigger Response

To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported, the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016, Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

And in 2023, scientists developed a bioelectronic device to better understand the Venus flytrap's complex signaling mechanism by mapping how those signals propagate. They confirmed that the electrical signal starts in the plant's sensory hairs and then spreads radially outward with no clear preferred direction. And sometimes the signals were spontaneous, originating in sensory hairs that had not been stimulated.

Glowing green

This latest research is an outgrowth of a 2020 paper detailing how the Japanese authors genetically altered a Venus flytrap to gain important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works. They introduced a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle. They concluded that the waxing and waning of calcium concentrations in the leaf cells seem to serve as a kind of short-term memory for the Venus flytrap, though precisely how calcium concentrations work with the plant's electrical network remained unclear.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Naturfoto Honal|Getty

I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me.

“Please hold,” the caller said, “while I transfer you to my supervisor.”

It was a Wednesday in August, a little before lunch. The call came from a 212 number, which for a New Yorker could be almost anything — the school, the pharmacy, the roof guy — so I answered.

The caller asked for me by name and stated in measured tones that he was from Chase Bank and he wanted to verify transfers being made from my account to someone in Texas.

Wrong number, I said. I don’t have a Chase account.

But one was recently opened in your name, he replied, with two Zelle transfers. And minutes ago, someone tried to transfer those funds, $2,100, to San Antonio.

Now, this carried the whiff of plausibility. I’m one of some 150 million people who have access to Zelle, the payments platform that lets you send and receive money from your phone. But my scam radar was also fully operational and pinging.

“How do I know this isn’t a scam?” I asked, sounding like that guy in every movie who asks an undercover cop if he’s a cop.

He had a quick answer. Look at the number showing on your phone and Google it, he replied. “Now look up the Chase branch at 3 Times Square,” he instructed. “See the office phone number?” I did, and it matched the one on my phone’s screen.

Then he added, “Here at Chase, we’ll never ask for your personal information or passwords.” On the contrary, he gave me more information — two “cancellation codes” and a long case number with four letters and 10 digits.

That’s when he offered to transfer me to his supervisor. That simple phrase, familiar from countless customer-service calls, draped a cloak of corporate competence over this unfolding drama. His supervisor. I mean, would a scammer have a supervisor?

The line went mute for a few seconds, and a second man greeted me with a voice of authority. “My name is Mike Wallace,” he said, and asked for my case number from the first guy. I dutifully read it back to him.

“Yes, yes, I see,” the man said, as if looking at a screen. He explained the situation — new account, Zelle transfers, Texas — and suggested we reverse the attempted withdrawal.

I’m not proud to report that by now, he had my full attention, and I was ready to proceed with whatever plan he had in mind. 

Internet fraud has grown steadily, with 2024 setting new record-high losses — “a staggering $16.6 billion,” the F.B.I.’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center wrote in a recent report. These crimes include elaborate cryptocurrency schemes and ransomware attacks on entire cities, but phishing and spoofing — the cloning of an actual phone number — still lead the list of some 860,000 complaints last year.

Are these scams entering some sort of improved, 2.0 version of the old-school Nigerian-prince-type setup?

“I wouldn’t call it an improvement,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York offices of the F.B.I. “It’s an adaptation. As the public becomes more aware of schemes, they need to adjust.”

The man claiming to be a Chase supervisor asked me to open Zelle. Where it says, “Enter an amount,” he instructed me to type $2,100, the amount of the withdrawals he was going to help me reverse.

Then, in the “Enter phone number or email” window — where the other party in a Zelle transaction goes — he instructed me to type the case number the first caller had given me, but to leave out the four letters. Numbers only. I dutifully entered the 10 digits, but my skepticism was finally showing up.

“Mr. Wallace,” I said, somewhat apologetically. “This case number sure looks like a phone number, and I’m about to send that number $2,100.”

No, he replied, because of this important next step. In the window that says “What’s this for? ” where you might add “babysitter” or “block party donation,” he told me to enter a unique code that would alert his team that this transaction should be reversed.

It was incredibly long, and he read it out slowly — “S, T, P, P, six, seven, one, two …” — and I typed along. Now and then he even threw in some military-style lingo: “… zero, zero, Charlie, X-ray, nine, eight …”

Once we were done, he had me read the whole 19-character code back to him.

Now, he said, press “Send.”

But one word above the “What’s this for?” box containing our special code with the X-ray and the Charlie kept bothering me: “Optional.”

Then I had an idea, and asked the supervisor if he was calling from 3 Times Square. Yes, he said.

I’ll come to you, I said, and we’ll fix this together.

By then it will probably be too late, he said.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and he said that would be fine, and I hung up.

I called my bank and confirmed what I’d come to suspect. There had been no recent Zelle activity.

My jaw dropped when I went back and looked at my call history. Sixteen minutes — that’s how long they had me on the line.

In decades as a crime reporter, I’ve covered many, many scams — psychic scams, sweetheart swindles, real-estate scams, even the obscure “nanny scam,” where a fake mother reaches out to a young caregiver to try to rip her off.

I should be able to spot a scam in under 16 seconds, I thought — but 16 minutes?

I wanted to know why this scam seemed to work so much better than others.

by Michael Wilson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jordan Speer/Chase

There's Just Too Many Damn Elites

In a recent piece on James Burnham we discussed the rise of managerialism, or the idea that society is dominated neither by capitalists/owners or workers/proletariat.

Instead they are run by a middle layer of managers who have entirely different incentives from the owners or the shareholders. (...)

While Burnham introduced the concept of managerialism, Barbara Ehrenreich coined the term “Professional Managerial Class” in her similarly-titled 1977 essay. Since her piece, the PMC has only grown in power: eating up most of the money in our society while acting rebellious and aggrieved while doing it.

Marc Andreessen called the PMC the ‘laptop class’:

Laptop Class (noun): Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs.

The professional–managerial class tends to have incomes above the average for their country, with major exceptions being academia and print journalism." [Who are compensated with power instead.]

The PMC exists somewhere between what we think of as the traditional working class and the ruling class. While they aren’t capitalists and don't own the means of production, they do play a big role in upholding and extending capitalism’s reign.

In other words, managers are a specific type of employee that are materially on the side of labor—but symbolically on the side of capital.

What Ehrenreich noted was a bifurcation: On the higher end more commercial PMCs were peeling off to join the elite tier of wealthy CEOs and managers, while on the lower end the PMCs were suffering from a collapse of many of their preexisting professions (e.g. academics, journalists, etc).

And so the academics and journalists had to make a choice: they could either join the traditional working class to fight against the capitalists or they could join the capitalists against the working class in the hope of getting rich in the process.

Post 2008, we saw the PMC join the working class to fight the capitalists in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The majority of Occupy’s participants were college grads who had experienced massive student debt, unemployment, and downward mobility during the economic downturn. The language of “We are the 99%” reflected the fact that the movement’s participants saw themselves as part of the exploited masses.

But the Occupy movement quickly came and went. Corporations obviously didn’t support it because unlike more recent social movements, Occupy required real sacrifice on the part of the corporation. Bernie Sanders ended up losing to Hillary and that was that.

In an attempt to create these new social conflicts (anti-racism, anti-fascism, the gender wars), the PMC altogether ignored and suppressed class wars. When Nike says they’re committed to fighting anti-racism or anti-semitism, it buys them social capital that allows them to deflect against inquiries into how they treat their workers.

Over the next decade that PMC would eventually switch from working class to social justice rhetoric. After all, Wall Street couldn’t support Occupy Wall Street or broader unionization efforts while remaining in business, but they could fund activist efforts with billions of dollars while signaling to the type of elites they’d like to hire and do business with.

To further distinguish the PMC from the working class, colleges initiated the PMC into this esoteric language which made non-college goers feel left out and left behind. A great deal of what constitutes activism is an elaborate set of rules about what you can and can’t say about this or that group. The complexity of the rules is itself strategic — it’s a way of doling out power to the college grads who learned all the rules while taking away power from the non-elites who didn’t.

Activism became not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker. As David Brooks once put it, “You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx”. More specifically, you have to go to college to learn those words, which excludes two-thirds of the country.

Activism also became a strategy for professional advancement beyond college. By calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them in the corporate pecking order, young elites became able to intimidate Boomer administrators and usurp power from them.

This isn’t all just ideological posturing, it’s also a practical necessity. The truth is that we have too many college educated people without technical skills who expect high-status and high-paying jobs and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them.

by Erik Torenberg |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The End of Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

Time Under Tension

… or, you know, maybe not!

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

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

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

by Derek Thompson |  Read more:

Image: Sanika V on Unsplash

Mai Tai Love

I’ve written about the Mai Tai many, many, many, many times in the past. There’s a reason for that. It’s my favorite cocktail of all time. It might not be the best cocktail in the world, but it’s pretty darn close. If I could only drink one cocktail for the rest of my life, this would be the one. I love rum passionately, and this drink is designed from the ground up to celebrate my favorite spirit. 

House Mai Tai

• 2 oz Hamilton 86 Rum
• 1 oz fresh lime juice
• 1 oz house orgeat
• 1 oz Ferrand Dry Curacao

Shake all ingredients over ice. Strain into a mai tai glass over ice and garnish with a lime wheel, cherry, and mint sprig.

House Orgeat

• 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 2 cups white sugar
• ¼ t orange blossom water
• ¼ sea salt

Place all ingredients in a small saucepan. Simmer over low heat until the sugar has completely dissolved. Pour into a sealable bottle and refrigerate. Keeps indefinitely.

The history of the Mai Tai is a tiki legend. As the story goes, Trader Vic was working late at the bar with some Polynesian friends, trying to find a good recipe for a bottle of 17-year-old Wray and Nephew rum that had fallen into his possession. He shook up the original Mai Tai and handed it to his friend, who exclaimed, “Mai tai!” —Polynesian for “you nailed it!’ The original 17-year-old rum is long gone, but Mai Tai enthusiasts have used a blend of excellent rums to recreate the original.

Mai Tais and margaritas are kissing cousins. If you squint your eyes and look at both recipes together, you can see how each ingredient replaces the other. Rum for tequila, curaçao for triple sec, lime juice, orgeat for agave syrup — it makes sense, kinda. It’s a useful analogy for bartenders. The margarita is the most popular cocktail in America; if you’re behind the pine, you’ve cranked out dozens by now, and you understand how to make one tarter, sweeter, or more spirit-forward for a given customer. Mai Tais are no different. The recipe I’ve provided is pretty balanced, but if you prefer a sharper, sweeter, or more rum-laden Mai Tai, it should be easy to tweak the recipe to your tastes. (It’s worth noting that Vic put a tequila version of the Mai Tai on the menu in the ‘70s, called the Pinky Gonzales.)

Unfortunately, modern pop culture seems to think that a “mai tai” is any sort of sweet rum and fruit juice combination, which results in some … interesting drinks. Captain Morgan is currently selling a canned (rumless) “Mango Mai Tai,” and a few cans of (coconut water flavored?) Cutwater Tiki Mai Tai cocktails are lurking in my pantry. I swear that the local hibachi joint once served me a “Mai Tai” with none of the original ingredients, up to and including the rum. Drink the original. Make it yourself. I’m on vacation. You deserve a treat.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Hamilton 86 Rum: My favorite rum of all time. Use your favorite. I’ve seen recipes for the Mai Tai that use no less than four different rums, including Smith and Cross, Plantation OFTD, and other rums I’d love to have in my liquor cabinet. An unaged Jamaican rum like Probitas would be great. If you’re using Bacardi, dial up the other ingredients and push the rum into the background a touch. Don’t use Captain Morgan. Please. I’m begging you.

Fresh Lime Juice: It is proving absurdly hard to get good limes in my corner of the world. Tiny, dry, juiceless limes are all too common. Look for a lime that’s the size of a decent lemon that isn’t rock hard to the touch.

Orgeat: It’s pronounced “Orzeat,” like Zsa Zsa Gabot. I can order some good almond syrups online, but they’re expensive and a pain in the butt to have delivered. This grocery-store version of the cocktail ingredient works just fine.

Ferrand Dry Curacao: This curacao is less sweet than Grand Marnier, which lets other flavors in the drink come forward. Use Grand Marnier in a pinch, but dial back the orgeat to compensate.

by Matthew Hooper, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For future reference. Best cocktail, ever. See also: 196 Flavors: Mai Tai.]

How I Joined the Resistance

The religious evolution of J.D. Vance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by J.D. Vance, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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

Reichstag Moment

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s fire, conspiracy theories are sure to follow. At least, that’s what happened in Germany on February 27, 1933, when a sizeable portion of the parliamentary building in Berlin, the Reichstag, went up in flames from an arson attack.

It was the canary in the political coal mine—a flashpoint event when Adolf Hitler played upon public and political fears to consolidate power, setting the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. Since then, it’s become a powerful political metaphor. Whenever citizens and politicians feel threatened by executive overreach, the “Reichstag Fire” is referenced as a cautionary tale.

The True Story of the Reichstag Fire and the Nazi Rise to Power (Smithsonian)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

[ed. It's like princess Diana just died. See also: Antisemitism flares and ‘Reichstag’ mentions soar (JTA); and, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way (Ezra Klein, NYT):]

***

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.

We’ve been edging closer for some time now. In 2020, a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, was foiled by the F.B.I. In 2021, a mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the result of the election and pipe bombs were found at the Democratic and the Republican National Committee headquarters. In 2022, a man broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House at the time, intending to kidnap her. She was absent, but the intruder assaulted her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In 2024, President Trump was nearly assassinated. That same year, Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was murdered.

In 2025, Molotov cocktails were thrown into the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania during Passover. Melissa Hortman, the former House speaker of Minnesota, and her husband were murdered, and State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were severely injured by a gunman. And on Wednesday, Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was gunned down during a speech at Utah Valley University. (...)

On social media, I’ve seen mostly decent reactions to Kirk’s murder. There is grief and shock from both the left and the right. But I’ve seen two forms of reaction that are misguided, however comprehensible the rage or horror that provoked them. One is a move on the left to wrap Kirk’s death around his views — after all, he defended the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths. Another is on the right, to turn his murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time.

But as the list above reveals, there is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes. Even if that were possible, it would still be a world of horrors, a society that had collapsed into the most irreversible form of unfreedom.

Writing Workshops Are F**king Useless

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

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

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

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

by Republic of Letters |  Read more:

Image: Unterberg Poetry Center (404)

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

***

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

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

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

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

Universal Music Group is Going After Rick Beato

Just when you thought major labels couldn't get more stupid...

I lost faith in the music industry decades ago, and I’ll never get it back. You will have an easier time convincing me that Elvis still lives in Graceland or Santa Claus delivers gifts from an Amazon truck.

I’ve heard too many horror stories and I’ve seen too much firsthand. I eventually came up with my “Idiot Nephew Theory” to explain why major record labels seem so much more stupid than other businesses.

Here’s how I’ve described it:

THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY: Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss’s idiot nephew thinks is best.

And what do idiot nephews decide? That’s easy—they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.

But just when I think I’ve seen it all, some new kind of stupid comes my way via the music biz.

And that’s the case right now. Universal Music Group has gone to war with Rick Beato.

If UMG were wise, they would thank Mr. Beato, who works tirelessly to grow the audience for their recording artists. Rick is smart and trustworthy, and is probably the most influential music educator in the world right now.

He does his work on YouTube, where he has more than five million subscribers. I’m one of them. I learn a lot from Rick’s videos, and have been fortunate to be his guest on two occasions (here and here).

He offers sharp commentary, and has conducted smart interviews with Sting, Pat Metheny, Rick Rubin, David Gilmour, Ron Carter, George Benson, Keith Jarrett, Michael McDonald, Jimmy Webb, and many other legends. These artists open up with Rick, because he is so knowledgeable, with big ears and a big heart.

So why is Universal Music upset?

Like any music educator, Beato plays a few seconds of the songs he discusses on these videos. But he’s very careful to limit himself to just a short extract—and this is allowed by law.

It’s called fair use. And it’s part of our copyright law.

Universal Music can’t change fair use standards. But it can file a constant stream of copyright infringement complaints with YouTube. And this puts Beato in a difficult situation—because he will get banned from YouTube after just three copyright strikes.

If that happens, his 2,000 videos disappear from the web—including all those historic interviews. His five million subscribers lose a trusted voice.

That may be what Universal Music wants. Listen to Beato explain this dire situation:

Universal Music is making surprising claims. On a short 42-second video on Olivia Rodrigo, Beato included just ten seconds of a song. But UMG still charged him with copyright violation—although this seems a straightforward example of fair use.

Beato pushes back and successfully defends his fair use rights—but the disputes keep coming. He showed us his email box on the recent video.

Rick has been forced to hire a fulltime lawyer to handle the endless stream of infringement claims. He has won repeatedly—but maybe that’s what gets the label so upset.

“We have successfully fought thousands of these now,” Rick explains in the video. “But it literally has cost me so much money to do this. Since we’ve been fighting these things and have never lost one, they still keep coming in….And they’re all Universal Music Group.”

“It looks to me like Rick Beato was targeted,” claims lawyer Krystle Delgado, who runs the Top Music Attorney channel on YouTube. “What the major labels have said in their closed door meetings to me is nothing short of shocking.”

“If you try fighting them, they get upset,” she adds. “And that’s when this thing starts to escalate.” She notes that her other clients run into this problem and one company—Universal Music Group—is the leading instigator. (...)

I could share many other videos expressing support of Beato. But you get the idea—the wider community of music educators and commentators is alarmed.

This is sad confirming evidence for my Idiot Nephew Theory. Maybe some corporate lawyer thinks this is a smart strategy for UMG. But people who care about music see it differently—they know how destructive this kind of behavior really is. (...)

His audience knows how much good Beato does. We see how much he loves the music and how much he supports the record labels and their artists. They should give him their support in return.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Rick Beato

[ed. Everyone knows about Rick, right? If you don't, choose any musical artist that comes to mind and you'll probably find an interview or analysis of their music on his channel. A great educator, historian, and fine musician in his own right. Also, for an additional dose of stupidity, see: We've Reached the Sad Cracker Barrel Stage of Cultural Evolution (HB):]

***

"Hey, I love American traditions as much as the next bumpkin. But Cracker Barrel isn’t a tradition by any stretch of the imagination. The company was founded on September 19, 1969. That’s exactly one month after the end of Woodstock.

Even Jed Clampett could sniff out the phoniness at this chain restaurant.

Cracker Barrel is a postmodern pastiche of rural tropes. Jean Baudrillard would call it a simulacrum. By that he means that it’s a symbol disconnected from reality—it merely refers vaguely to other symbols.

So you can’t bring back my grandpa’s Cracker Barrel—because my paw-paw never saw a Cracker Barrel. (...)

The biggest shareholder is BlackRock. Did you think it was Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson?"

For Bill Belichick’s Debut, UNC Came to Party — But Got a Buzzkill Instead

Chapel Hill, N.C. — At least the party was fun, right?

Right?

It better have been, for what came after: North Carolina, high on nine months’ worth of Bill Belichick-induced hope, being completely humiliated, 48-14, by TCU in a prime-time Labor Day opener.

Not only is that the most points UNC has ever allowed in a season opener, it’s also the most points Belichick has ever allowed as a head coach.

“Look, they just outplayed us. They out-coached us,” said a red-faced Belichick from behind a postgame podium Monday night. “I mean, they were just better than we were tonight.”

That’s a tough truth to swallow, especially considering the larger circumstances. Ever since December, when the Tar Heels pushed their chips to the center on a 73-year-old who’d never coached a game in college, the spotlight has been on this one night. On B-Day — Belichick Day, the day when the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach would signal a new era of football in Chapel Hill.

Which is why, understandably, UNC threw the pregame party to end all pregames. Everything, on 10, everywhere. Even on the fringes of town — in parking lots, on Franklin Street — you had fans tailgating in crevices and alleys, smoking cigars while sitting in baby blue picnic chairs, the soft thud of bean bags slapping against cornhole boards around every bend. Closer to campus, fraternity ragers spilled into the streets, while gigantic banners — like one that read “What the f— is a Horned Frog?” — hung in the background. And the soundtrack to it all? Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” the pop star’s apt lyrics reverberating throughout fraternity court: “I can take you for a ride…”

STRONG pregame vibes in Chapel Hill pic.twitter.com/fMUjdqTHWe
— Brendan Marks (@BrendanRMarks) September 1, 2025

Meanwhile, at He’s Not Here — one of UNC’s most popular bars, famous for its 32-ounce blue cups — liquid courage flowed freely hours before kickoff. “This is like the Duke game!” hollered one fan, barely able to move through the masses after the three empty cups in his grasp. Clearly, plenty of the season ticket-holders who signed up for the Belichick experience wound up here, elbow to elbow, marinating in pregame enthusiasm. Another late-arriving customer, seeing the beer line wrapping outside the bar and down a black metal staircase, had to talk himself into even attempting to buy a drink: “Lord, have mercy.”

By that point, two and a half hours before everything unraveled, the buzz had migrated to the Old Well, the iconic drinking fountain that serves as a UNC emblem. As part of Belichick’s push to elevate Tar Heels football, the coach said he wanted to bring back certain elements of the school’s football history — including the Old Well Walk, which originated under Carl Torbush in 2000. And there fans were, four-deep, walling off the space around the fountain, where buses would deliver North Carolina’s players and coaches. The only issue? Those buses arrived minutes before the designated 5:30 p.m. start time … leaving dozens of stragglers, from across a wide quad, late for the party. (...)

That crowd, more than any, provided a snapshot of modern-era UNC football. Plenty of CHAPEL BILL merch in the crowd — T-shirts, buttons, the works — but also a surprising amount of New England Patriots gear, fans of Belichick’s former team showing out for their old coach. Small clusters of students, almost apologetically proclaiming: “We’re really into football, but we just don’t know any of the players.” (And with 70 new names on Belichick’s first roster, nor should they.) Old-timers, too, in their worn Lawrence Taylor and Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice jerseys, mingling with the shiny-new Drake Maye and Omarion Hampton ones. And lastly, the curious, those who came to see the spectacle of Belichick, who could only stare with wide eyes at the sea of blue rolling across Polk Place.

As one said on the phone before the cell signal dropped out: “Mom, there are a lot of people.”

And then, hours later, there weren’t. The pregame light show, the fireworks, all that momentum swelling inside Kenan Stadium? It didn’t vanish in a flash, but rather, in gashes. (...)

What began as a celebration, as a precursor of future success, could not have turned more sour. UNC waited nine months, and spent millions of dollars, for empty stands before the fourth quarter began. For loyalists who stayed until the final whistle, so few and far between, you could quite literally count them? (Unofficially 69 in the eastern end zone, by one reporter’s count.) The countless UNC dignitaries who made the pilgrimage back to Chapel Hill — Michael Jordan, Lawrence Taylor, Mia Hamm, Julius Peppers — couldn’t leave early, for optics, but buried their heads in their phones all the same.

Anything but what was right in front of them.

The official time of death — not just for this one game, but for the larger UNC hype machine — was 11:24 p.m., a whimper of an end to a day that once held so much excitement.

by Brendan Marks, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Six games in 5 days: What a college football road trip taught me about the state of the sport (Athletic).]

Basic Phones: A Brief Guide for Parents

In 2021, Common Sense Media found that half of U.S. kids get their first smartphone by age 11. Many parents now realize that age is too young for kids to have an internet-enabled phone.

But at some point, you’re going to consider getting your kid or teen a phone. Maybe the closest school bus stop is far away and the bus isn’t always on time. Maybe you’re sick of your kid borrowing your phone to text their friends. Maybe they’re getting older and it seems like the right time. So what type of phone should you get them?

In some cases, the answer might be a flip phone, the old-school cell phone that was the standard until the smartphone came along. Flip phones have some downsides, though. Since there’s no keyboard, texting involves pressing the number keys multiple times to type one letter (if you had a cell phone in the 2000s, you probably remember this). If your kids’ friends communicate via text, replying on a flip phone is going to be awkward and time-consuming. Flip phone cameras are often low-quality, so they’re not a great option if your kid likes taking pictures. Because they don’t look like a smartphone, flip phones also stand out — and many kids don’t want to stand out.

Fortunately, parents no longer have to choose exclusively between a flip phone and an adult smartphone for their kid, thanks to the many “basic” phone options. These middle-ground phones have a screen keyboard and a higher-quality camera like a smartphone, look very similar to a smartphone, and they can use many smartphone apps (with parental limits and permissions). Unlike a regular smartphone, though, they don’t have an internet browser or social media.

Basic phones are the training wheels of phones. They’re safer for kids right out of the box, with built-in parental controls that are easier to use and harder for kids to hack than those on smartphones. With no internet or social media, it’s much less likely that unknown adults will be able to randomly contact your kid, or that kids will stumble across pornography. Basic phones are usually Androids with a modified operating system, so they look like a regular smartphone and thus don’t stand out like flip phones do. For all of these reasons, Rule #4 in 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World is “First phones should be basic phones.”

If you want your kid to have the ability to easily text their friends but don’t want them using social media or going down internet rabbit holes, basic phones are a great solution. They’re a stopgap between the age when texting and calling becomes socially useful (usually in middle school, by age 12 or 13) and the age when they’re ready for a smartphone and possibly social media (at 16; Rule #5 in 10 Rules is “Give the first smartphone with the driver’s license,” and Rule #3 is “No social media until age 16 – or later.”). My younger two children, ages 15 and 13, have basic phones.

Here’s a brief overview of some popular basic phone options to help you figure out the best choice for your kid.

Option 1. Gabb Phone 4

This is the most basic of the basic phones, with calling, texting (including text-to-speech), clean music streaming, and a camera, but no capability for adding additional third-party apps. “You can’t do anything on it,” my middle daughter once said about her Gabb phone. “That,” I replied, “is the point.” If this is what you want, make sure you’re buying the Gabb Phone 4 and not the Pro, which allows more apps.

Option 2. Pinwheel, Troomi, Gabb Phone 4 Pro, Bark

These are basic phones that have access to an app store where you can add additional features. They come with an online parent portal where you can set a schedule (like having the phone shut off at bedtime) and approve new contacts. Some allow you to see the texts your child has received and sent.

The parent portal also lets you see the apps available for the phone. You can then install those you want and approve (or reject) those your kids ask for. These phones don’t allow certain apps at all (mostly dating, pornography, and alcohol-related apps, as well as AI chatbots and those that allow contact with unknown adults). That’s a relief, but there are still tough decisions about what to allow versus not. The tradeoff for more flexibility is more complexity in managing the phone. Still, I’d much rather have this challenge than giving a 12-year-old a smartphone with unrestricted internet and social media access.

Through the parent portal, you also have the ability to remotely control bedtime shutoff, app installs, and time limits for apps even after you’ve given your kid the phone — so you don’t have to wrestle it away from them to change your parental control settings.

If you’re looking for more details about specific basic phone brands for kids, check out the pages at Wait Until 8th and Protect Young Eyes.

Option 3. The Light Phone

This is a grown-up basic phone. Unlike other basic phones, it’s not necessarily meant for kids, and it’s not an Android phone — it’s a unique device. It has a paper-like screen like a Kindle so it’s not as colorfully tempting as a smartphone. It has a maps app, calling, and texting, but does not have internet access, social media, or email. The newest version has a camera. All of the features are optional so you can choose which features your kid’s phone has.

Many adults who want a pared-down phone, sometimes just for certain situations, use Light Phones. Because their target audience is adults, Light Phones do not come with a parent portal like the phones designed for kids.

***

The biggest challenge with basic phones (with the exception of the more limited Gabb Phone 4) is deciding which apps to allow. The parent portals that come with many of these products give more information and sometimes even a rating for each app, but it’s often hard to judge what’s appropriate and what isn’t without using the app yourself (something to consider). If you allow game apps, make sure to put a time limit on them (maybe 10-20 minutes a day each) so your kid doesn’t spend too much of their free time on their phone.

One other issue to be aware of: All of these optional apps display ads, and the ads – even on a so-called “kids’ phone” – are not filtered. Your kid might be playing “Find the Cat” and be served ads for AI girlfriends. They won’t be able to download the AI girlfriend app, thank goodness, but you may find yourself explaining what an AI girlfriend is to an 11-year-old. If that’s a non-starter, you’ll have to say no to any optional app, including games and educational apps like Duolingo.

If you do allow games and music, use the parental controls to block them during school hours if your kids’ school still allows phones during the school day. That way you’ll know your kids are paying attention in class instead of playing BlockBlast. And if they say they want to play games during lunch, tell them they should be talking to their friends instead.

What if your kid says, “It’s embarrassing to have a kid phone”? My reply: Who’s going to know? Most basic phones look like a regular Android phone. My middle daughter once told me she was embarrassed when a friend asked her, “What kind of phone is that?” I told her she could honestly answer, “It’s an Android phone.” There’s also no need to disclose that the phone doesn’t allow social media or internet. If your friends ask if you have a certain app and you don’t, I told her, just say your parents don’t allow it. All kids understand that parents are lame. :)

by Jean M. Twenge, Generation Tech |  Read more:

Image: Troomi

[ed. New school year starting up...]

What About The Children?

The First Generation of Parents Who Knew What We Were Doing—and Did It Anyway

I have harmed my own children through my screen addiction.

I write those words and feel them burn. Not because they’re dramatic but because they’re true. I was a tech executive who spent years thinking about both technology and philosophy. I understood these systems from both sides—how they were built and what they were doing to us.

The technologist in me recognized the deliberate engineering: intermittent variable reward schedules, social validation loops, dark patterns designed to create dependency. The philosopher in me understood what this was doing to human consciousness—fragmenting attention, destroying sustained thought, replacing authentic relationship with parasocial bonding.

I wasn’t building these social media platforms. But I used their products. And I couldn’t stop. Even knowing exactly how they worked. Even understanding the philosophical implications of attention capture. Even seeing what they were doing to society, to democracy, to our capacity for thought itself.

Still I fell. Still I chose the screen over my family. Still I modeled for my children that they were less interesting than whatever might be happening in the infinite elsewhere of the internet.

My children learned what I valued by watching what I looked at. And too often, it wasn’t them.

This Is Not Okay

No, seriously. What about them?

We’re destroying them with social media and now AI chatbots, and we all fucking know it. If you’re a parent who’s watched your kid with a smartphone, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vacant stare. The panic when the battery dies. The meltdown when you try to set limits. This isn’t kids being kids. This is addiction, and we’re the dealers.

There’s a tech cartel in Silicon Valley that built the seeds of our modern epistemic crisis. But here’s the thing—they didn’t know what they were building either. Not at first. They thought they were connecting people, building communities, making the world more open. They discovered what they’d actually built the same way we did—by watching it consume us. And by then, they were as addicted to the money as we were to their platforms.

Their platforms have been weaponized into systems of mass distraction. They’re not competing for our business—they’re competing for our attention, buying and selling it like a commodity. And now these companies have all taken a knee to Trump to make sure no government regulation ever gets in the way of them perfectly optimizing us into consumerist supplicants.

This isn’t an anti-capitalism screed. I’m a technologist. I think self-driving cars are going to be amazing. But social media as it’s currently designed is fucking insane, and we all know it.

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

Image: Ben Wicks on Unsplash

The Gospel According to South Park

Somehow, five years have passed since the COVID summer of 2020. My son had just “finished” fourth grade. His mother and I were distracted parents of him and his seven-year-old sister, both of us teetering from cabin fever. It felt like we were hanging on to our sanity, and our marriage, by a thread.

We held on to both, thankfully. Our kids seem to have recovered, too. But by this time that summer, it’s fair to say we had completely “lost contain” of our children. Even under normal conditions, we’ve favored a loose-reins approach to parenting, with a healthy dose of Lenore Skenazy-style “Free Range Parenting.” But that summer? I gave up entirely. I let my son watch TV. A lot of TV.

By the time school resumed, he had watched every episode of The Simpsons and every episode of South Park.

At the time, I felt more than a little guilty about letting a 10-year-old binge-watch two decades of South Park. It was a bit early, I thought, for him to be learning proper condom application techniques from Mr. Garrison. When I told friends later, the story always got a laugh – a kind of comic confession from a parent who’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

But as my son made his way through middle school and into high school, something changed. One night over dinner, we were talking about wars when I mentioned Saddam Hussein. My son chimed in casually – he knew exactly who Saddam was. I asked him how. His answer: “South Park.”

That kept happening. From Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch, to Mormonism, to the NSA, to wokeism … my son was not only familiar with these topics, he was informed, funny, and incisively skeptical. I realized that this crash course from Butters and Cartman and Mr. Mackey had functioned like one of those downloads Neo gets in The Matrix; except that instead of instantly learning martial arts, my son had instantly become culturally literate. And, just as important, that literacy came wrapped in a sense of humor rooted in satire, absurdity, and a deep mistrust of power, regardless of party affiliation.

He jokes about Joe Biden’s senility and Trump’s grifting grossness. He refers to COVID-era masking as “chin diapers,” a phrase South Park coined while many adults were still double-masking alone in their cars. It struck me: my greatest parenting lapse had somehow turned into one of my best decisions.

Of course, it’s not just that South Park is anti-authority and unapologetically crude. So was Beavis and Butthead. The difference is that South Park is crafted. It endures not just because of what it says, but how it’s made – with discipline, speed, and storytelling intelligence.

South Park co-creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone are master storytellers. In a short video that should be required viewing for anyone who writes, they explain that if the beats, or scenes, of your story are best linked by the phrase “and then,” you’re doing it wrong. Instead, each scene should be connected by “therefore” or “but.” It’s deceptively simple, and it’s the single best explanation of narrative momentum I’ve ever seen. (Watch it here.)

Combine that storytelling mastery with a relentless work ethic that has allowed them to churn out weekly takes on almost every major current event of the last three decades, and you get the South Park that we know and (that most of us) love today. A generational institution that’s still funny.

by Jeremy Radcliffe, Epsilon Theory | Read more:
Image: South Park

[ed. Smart moronic vs dumb moronic. People are probably just grateful for any kind of resistance these days.]

Lore of the World: Field Notes for a Child's Codex: Part 2

When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.

Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.

Walmart

Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?

Teenagers are funny.

Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.

Cicadas

The surprise of this summer has been learning we share our property with what biologists call Cicada Brood XIV, who burst forth en masse every 17 years to swarm Cape Cod. Nowhere else in the world do members of this “Bourbon Brood” exist, with their long black bodies and cartoonishly red eyes. Only here, in the eastern half of the US. Writing these words, I can hear their dull and ceaseless motorcycle whine in the woods.

The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.

After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.

We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.

“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.

“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.

We observe the cicadas in the yard. They do not do much. They hang, rest, wait. They offer no resistance to being swept away by broom or shoe tip. Even their flights are lazy and ponderous and unskilled. And ultimately, this is what is eerie about cicadas. Yes, they represent the pullulating irrepressible life force, but you can barely call any individual alive. They are life removed from consciousness. Much like a patient for whom irreparable brain damage has left only a cauliflower of functional gray matter left, they are here, but not here. Other bugs will avoid humans, or even just collisions with inanimate objects. Not the cicada. Their stupidity makes their existence even more a nightmare for your mother, who goes armed into the yard with a yellow flyswatter. She knows they cannot hurt her, but has a phobia of moths, due to their mindless flight. Cicadas are even worse in that regard. Much bigger, too. She tries, mightily, to not pass down her phobia. She forces herself to walk slowly, gritting her teeth. Or, on seeing one sunning on the arm of her lawn chair, she pretends there is something urgent needed inside. But I see her through the window, and when alone, she dashes. She dashes to the car or to the shed, and she dashes onto the porch to get an errant toy, waving about her head that yellow flyswatter, eyes squinted so she can’t see the horrors around her.

I, meanwhile, am working on desensitization. Especially with your sister, who has, with the mind-reading abilities she’s renowned for, picked up that something fishy is going on, and screeches when a cicada comes too near. I sense, though, she enjoys the thrill.

“Hello Cicadaaaaaasss!” I get her to croon with me. She waves at their zombie eyes. When she goes inside, shutting the screen door behind her, she says an unreturned goodbye to them.

Despite its idiocy, the cicada possesses a strange mathematical intelligence. Why 17-year cycles? Because 17 is prime. Divisible by no other cycle, it ensures no predator can track them generation to generation. Their evolutionary strategy is to overwhelm, unexpectedly, in a surprise attack. And this gambit of “You can’t eat us all!” is clearly working. The birds here are becoming comically fat, with potbellies; in their lucky bounty, they’ve developed into gourmands who only eat the heads.

Individual cicadas are too dumb to have developed such a smart tactic, so it is evolution who is the mathematician here. But unlike we humans, who can manipulate numbers abstractly, without mortal danger, evolution must always add, subtract, multiply, and divide, solely with lives. Cicadas en masse are a type of bio-numeracy, and each brood is collectively a Sieve of Eratosthenes, sacrificing trillions to arrive at an agreed-upon prime number. In this, the cicada may be, as far as we know, the most horrific way to do math in the entire universe.

Being an embodied temporal calculation, the cicada invasion has forced upon us a new awareness of time itself. I have found your mother crying from this. She says every day now she thinks about the inherent question they pose: What will our lives be like, when the cicadas return?

Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.

Stubbornness

God, you’re stubborn. You are so stubborn. Stubborn about which water bottle to drink from, stubborn about doing all the fairground rides twice, stubborn about going up slides before going down them, pushing buttons on elevators, being the first to go upstairs, deciding what snack to eat, wearing long-sleeved shirts in summer, wanting to hold hands, wanting not to hold hands; in general, you’re stubborn about all events, and especially about what order they should happen in. You’re stubborn about doing things beyond your ability, only to get angry when you inevitably fail. You’re stubborn in wanting the laws of physics to work the way you personally think they should. You’re stubborn in how much you love, in how determined and fierce your attachment can be.

This is true of many young children, of course, but you seem an archetypal expression of it. Even your losing battles are rarely true losses. You propose some compromise where you can snatch, from the jaws of defeat, a sliver of a draw. Arguments with you are like trading rhetorical pieces in a chess match. While you can eventually accept wearing rain boots because it’s pouring out, that acceptance hinges on putting them on in the most inconvenient spot imaginable.

So when I get frustrated—and yes, I do get frustrated—I remind myself that “stubborn” is a synonym for “willful.” Whatever human will is, you possess it in spades. You want the world to be a certain way, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it so. Luckily, most of your designs are a kind of benevolent dictatorship. And at root, I believe your willfulness comes from loving the world so much, and wanting to, like all creatures vital with life force, act in it, and so bend it to your purposes.

What I don’t think is that this willfulness is because we, as parents, are so especially lenient. Because we’re not. No, your stubbornness has felt baked in from the beginning.

This might be impossible to explain to you now, in all its details, but in the future you’ll be ready to understand that I really do mean “the beginning.” As in the literal moment of conception. Or the moment before the moment, when you were still split into halves: egg and sperm. There is much prudery around the topic, as you’ll learn, and because of its secrecy people conceptualize the entire process as fundamentally simple, like this: Egg exists (fanning itself coquettishly). Sperm swims hard (muscular and sweaty). Sperm reaches egg. Penetrates and is enveloped. The end. But this is a radical simplification of the true biology, which, like all biology, is actually about selection.

Selection is omnipresent, occurring across scales and systems. For example, the elegance of your DNA is because so many variants of individuals were generated, and of these, only some small number proved fit in the environment (your ancestors). The rest were winnowed away by natural selection. So too, at another scale, your body’s immune system internally works via what’s called “clonal selection.” Many different immune cells with all sorts of configurations are generated at low numbers, waiting as a pool of variability in your bloodstream. In the presence of an invading pathogen, the few immune cells that match (bind to) the pathogen are selected to be cloned in vast numbers, creating an army. And, at another scale and in a different way, human conception works via selection too. Even though scientists understand less about how conception selection works (these remain mysterious and primal things), the evidence indicates the process is full of it.

First, from the perspective of the sperm, they are entered into a win-or-die race inside an acidic maze with three hundred million competitors. If the pH or mucus blockades don’t get them, the fallopian tubes are a labyrinth of currents stirred by cilia. It’s a mortal race in all ways, for the woman’s body has its own protectors: white blood cells, which register the sperm as foreign and other. Non-self. So they patrol and destroy them. Imagining this, I oscillate between the silly and the serious. I picture the white blood cells patrolling like stormtroopers, and meanwhile the sperm (wearing massive helmets) attempt to rush past them. But in reality, what is this like? Did that early half of you see, ahead, some pair of competing brothers getting horrifically eaten, and smartly went the other way? What does a sperm see, exactly? We know they can sense the environment, for of the hundreds of sperm who make it close enough to potentially fertilize the egg, all must enter into a kind of dance with it, responding to the egg’s guidance cues in the form of temperature and chemical gradients (the technical jargon is “sperm chemotaxis”). We know from experiments that eggs single out sperm non-randomly, attracting the ones they like most. But for what reasons, or based on what standards, we don’t know. Regardless of why, the egg zealously protects its choice. Once a particular sperm is allowed to penetrate its outer layer, the egg transforms into a literal battle station, blasting out zinc ions at any approaching runners-up to avoid double inseminations.

Then, on the other side, there’s selection too. For which egg? Women are born with about a million of what are called “follicles.” These follicles all grow candidate eggs, called “oocytes,” but, past puberty, only a single oocyte each month is chosen to be released by the winner and become the waiting egg. In this, the ovary itself is basically a combination of biobank and proving grounds. So the bank depletes over time. Menopause is, basically, when the supply has run out. But where do they all go? Most follicles die in an initial background winnowing, a first round of selection, wherein those not developing properly are destroyed. The majority perish there. Only the strongest and most functional go on to the next stage. Each month, around 20 of these follicles enter a tournament with their sisters to see which of them ovulates, and so releases the winning egg. This competition is enigmatic, and can only be described as a kind of hormonal growth war. The winner must mature faster, but also emit chemicals to suppress the others, starving them. The losers atrophy and die. No wonder it’s hard for siblings to always get along.

Things like this explain why, the older I get, the more I am attracted to one of the first philosophies, by Empedocles. All things are either Love or Strife. Or both.

From that ancient perspective, I can’t help but feel your stubbornness is why you’re here at all. That it’s an imprint left over, etched onto your cells. I suspect you won all those mortal races and competitions, succeeded through all that strife, simply because from the beginning, in some proto-way, you wanted to be here. Out of all that potentiality, willfulness made you a reality.

Can someone be so stubborn they create themselves?

by Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Alexander Naughton

[ed. Lovely. I can see my grandaughter might already have my stubborn gene. Hope it does her more good!]

Image: Alexander Naughton
Image: Alexander Naughton

The Intrinsic Perspective

The Intrinsic Perspective