The Real Story Behind ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

A Korean War veteran is floundering. His career is an endless bumpy road, and includes work as a teacher, a technical writer for Honeywell, and even a Nevada casino employee. But our ambitious vet also studies philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University in India—and starts to develop his own philosophy of life, an unconventional merging of Eastern and Western currents.

Then comes a mental breakdown that sends him to a psychiatric hospital. Here he undergoes repeated electroshock therapy. He finally emerges a changed person.

But maybe he changed too much—he can hardly remember the person he once was. It’s almost as if his life got cleaved in two at this juncture. His wife leaves him. He holds on to his relationship with his son—but that ends tragically with the son’s murder in San Francisco at age 22.

While working for Honeywell, our aspiring philosopher stays awake from 2 AM to 6 AM in a small apartment above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Here he writes a novel destined to become one of the defining books of the era. But he has to pitch it to 121 editors before he gets a contract and a $3,000 advance.

The editor, J.D. Landis, admitted that he only accepted the novel because this “book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” But the author, he insisted, shouldn’t expect to make more than his tiny advance. Then Landis added: “Money isn’t the point with a book like this.”

That’s the story of how Robert Pirsig published of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But the editor was wrong. The book sold 5 million copies, and for a spell in the 1970s you would see copies everywhere, even in the hands of people who didn’t read novels.

And that was just the start. Robert Redford tried to buy movie rights, but the author said no. Highbrow literary critic George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky—which is especially meaningful when you know that Steiner wrote a book on Dostoevsky. The Smithsonian acquired the titular motorcycle for its permanent collection.

The book is simple enough to describe. It tells the story of a 17-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrator tries to figure out many things—but especially his own past before his life split in two.

At one point in the novel, Pirsig writes:

“Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court….I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What’s left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.”

The electroshock treatment was done without Pirsig’s consent. That would be illegal nowadays.

In the aftermath, Pirsig felt so disconnected from his past that he included his pre-treatment self as a separate character in the novel. He calls that abandoned part of himself Phaedrus, a name drawn from Plato’s dialogues.

So you can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a dialogue between a man and his past self. Or you can treat it as a travel story or as a philosophical discussion (what Pirsig describes as a chautauqua, a name drawn from a populist adult education movement of the late 1800s). And, yes, it’s also a guide to motorcycle maintenance.

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For that reason, it just might be the strangest travel book ever written—because most of the journey happens inside the narrator’s head.

But maybe that’s part of the story too. Pirsig worked as a college writing teacher, and was frustrated by the rules he was expected to impart to his students. He felt that good writing was indefinable. It violated accepted rules, and created its own. The whole process was mysterious.

Solving that mystery of Quality—also called goodness, excellence, or worth—is the main theme of the novel. Indeed, it’s the overarching theme of Pirsig’s entire life’s work. He wrote one more novel after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the seldom read Lila, and it continues the discussion on quality. And the same topic takes center stage in the posthumous collection of writings published under the title On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. [...]

But let’s be honest: Pirsig was a better mystic than philosopher, and the deeper Pirsig digs into his personal notion of Quality, the more interesting—and metaphysical—his thinking becomes. Quality, he insists, can never be defined. He eventually embraces it as a kind of Tao, a force underlying all our experiences—hence resisting empirical analysis. He is now leaving philosophy behind, and perhaps for the better.

So he eventually aligns himself with a profound idea drawn from the ancient Greeks—but not the philosophers. Instead he goes back to the Homeric mythos, five hundred years older than rational philosophy, and discoveres the source of his Quality in the Greek concept of aretḗ, or excellence (sometimes translated as virtue). Aretḗ, Pirsig believes, is more powerful than Aristotelian logic, and closer in spirit to the Hindu dharma.

He quotes a passage from classicist H.D.F. Kitto, which I want to share in its entirety—not only because it is essential to Pirsig’s worldview, but because it’s invaluable to us today. Many are struggling to understand a place for humans in a world of AI and super-smart machines. From a purely rational perspective, the robots can beat us in terms of data generation and analysis. But in a world of aretḗ (or Quality), they fall far short.

This is where Pirsig earns my admiration and loyalty. Some things really are more powerful than logic.

Back in 1952 Kitto anticipated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and provided the missing piece to Pirsig’s worldview—when he wrote:

[If aretḗ refers to a person] it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent—morally, intellectually, physically, practically. Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arête.

Aretḗ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

We are now at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you read Kitto, you are already prepared for Pirsig—maybe you can even skip the novel. But, much better, you have a game plan for living a human life in the face of encroaching machines.

Pirsig understood this more than fifty years ago. He saw that we made a Faustian bargain when we put rationality ahead of the Good, and data ahead of human excellence. He grasped that science should be subservient to human needs, not the other way around. And the price we’re paying now is much higher than it was back then.

In an extraordinary passage, the narrator of Pirsig’s novel picks up a copy the Tao Te Ching, and recites it aloud—but substituting the word Quality for Tao. This is strange and unprecedented, but hits at the heart of this mystic work from the fourth century BC:

The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality….
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names.
It is the origin of heaven and earth.
When named it is the mother of all things….

He declares: “Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.”

I worked with many quality control engineers in the business world and often walked with them on the factory floor. I’m sure they would be shocked by Pirsig’s statement that “Quality is the Buddha.” But that’s exactly the kind of journey we’re on in this book.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Heritage Preservation Department - MNHS; uncredited book cover

Why Libraries Don't Stock Many Audiobooks

Have you ever wondered …

Why can’t my library get more copies of e-books and digital audiobooks?

You’re not alone! And there are a couple of reasons you might find yourself on a long wait list for e-content:

• Most materials are licensed, not owned by the library like print books are, and publishers put limits on how long and/or how often the content can be used. Once the limit is reached, the library must re-purchase the license if we want to keep offering the e-content to our community. 
• At the same time, e-books and digital audiobooks cost libraries more than print copies and more than what consumers would pay to purchase them commercially.

Here’s a real-time example:

How can you help?

• If you finish with e-content early, please return it so the next person can jump off the waiting list and into the book! Just go to Manage Loan and select Return Early in the Libby App.
• And keep borrowing e-content from your library! The numbers help us advocate for funding.

by Hawaii State Library Association 

[ed. Would it hurt publishers or whoever's collecting these licensing fees to be a little more civic-minded by providing complimentary copies to libraries? (or at least getting rid of repurchasing requirements?) Guess so.]

Tom Bukovac And Guthrie Trapp

Nashville Cats

[ed. Two of the best. Also really love this recording of a song with Nashville session players and Bukovac handling guitar duties.]

Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks 'is guitar could play
Twice as better than I will

                           ~ John Sebastian

Thanks For All the Fish

We were honored as Alaska Teachers of the Year. Now we can no longer stay.

In 2019, after being selected as Alaska’s 2018 State Teacher of the Year, I worked with other award-winning educators to pen an op-ed: “Why teach in Alaska?” At the time, we eagerly co-signed as we believed in dedicating a career to Alaska students and that our legislators and community wanted a thriving public education system.

My answer now is a heavy “I can’t.” My wife, Catherine Walker — the 2024 Alaska Teacher of the Year and one of four National Teacher of the Year finalists — and I are leaving. When two people recognized among the most dedicated by the state itself decide they no longer see a future, the “Alaska is a great place to teach” narrative hasn’t just frayed; it has disintegrated.

Leaving Alaska isn’t a choice made lightly. It is a heartbreaking conclusion forced by two decades of witnessing leadership denigrate and undervalue the profession we love. Let’s start at the top: Gov. Mike Dunleavy is possibly the most anti-public education governor in the history of Alaska. Over eight years, he has done little to improve the educational experience of the 95% of young Alaskans coming through public schools every day. He has vetoed nearly every bill aimed at bettering public education, whether it be funding, improving the lives of public school teachers or even taking care of the one school directly in the state’s care. While he pulls a public pension from our state coffers as a public school educator, he has systematically torn down public education through administration hires, funding vetoes, rhetoric and policy changes, and has been outwardly anti-teacher with the not-so-hidden purpose of funneling public money to inequitable and unaccountable private and religious schools. [...]

The reality is that Alaska is the only state in the union that offers its teachers neither a defined-benefit pension nor Social Security. This retirement crisis is fueling the fire of our education system’s collapse. We have the worst educator turnover in the country, and it is proven that high teacher turnover directly impacts student outcomes. When a student loses a teacher midyear or when a school replaces 30% of its staff annually, the continuity of learning is shattered...

In Alaska, our retirement is not only the worst in the nation for teachers, it is the worst in the nation among all professionals. If any of us worked in the private sector with the educational level we have, we would have a 401(k) with an employer match. This is basically what we have with the state of Alaska. But that is where it stops. In the private sector, we would also be paying into Social Security, as would our employer. This is not an option for Alaska teachers. So we end up dead last in not only teacher retirement but retirement in general. And it is not just teachers; all public service areas, including state troopers and firefighters, are being decimated and finding it impossible to staff at the levels needed to provide a high quality of life to Alaskans.

“Alaska is open for business” seems to be a favorite refrain of those refusing to fulfill their constitutional duty to fund services while also refusing to get Alaskans’ fair share from resource extraction. The funny thing is, 49 other states are also open for business, and all 49 arguably have better environments for teachers than Alaska. Alaska is a beautiful state and was a great place for us to raise our children outside and be active. But Alaska needs to realize you can kayak and fish in plenty of other states while also being treated like a professional and earning a secure pension, in addition to having a high quality of life due to funded and respected public sector services and employees.

Cat and I didn’t want to leave. I’ve lived in Alaska since I was 2, and Cat was born here. We’ve raised two kids here and have family here. We wanted to stay and help build the world-class education system our leaders love to talk about. But you cannot have a world-class system when your leaders treat people like a disposable commodity or are actively working to destroy it.

We are the products of Alaska public schools and eagerly enrolled our kids in Anchorage public schools. All we have ever wanted, and all any of the thousands of families we have worked with over the years have ever wanted, is a robust public school experience for our children like we had growing up — one in which they have teachers who are experienced, feel supported and want to stay their entire career in one community and retire with security; schools with electives like art and music; and extracurriculars like sports, theater and clubs. Buildings that are safe and well maintained. At the same time, as community members, Alaskans deserve all public services to be well-funded and maintained and public sector workers to be compensated and taken care of after a lifetime of service to Alaskans. As adults and parents, we have been front-row witnesses to the callous degradation of the quality of life in Alaska, where corporate interests come before residents, where we choose companies over sustainability, and out-of-state workers and tourists over our children. The criminal underfunding of education may be the canary, but unless Alaskans wake up and vote to retake control from corporations and those in power who do their bidding, Alaska as so many of us have known it growing up will no longer exist.

The most maddening part is that there are solutions and other options. This is not the only way. Other resource-heavy states and countries do not have continual deficits and treat public sectors with dignity and pay and benefits requisite with their experience. This problem of billions of dollars flowing through our state but continually having fiscal problems is a uniquely Alaska experience. But when this is the case for a large chunk of someone’s lifetime, like it has been for Cat and me, you realize it is time for us to change, as it is quite possible this state never will.

There really isn’t much more to say that thousands of teachers, troopers, firefighters, families, students, business leaders and concerned community members haven’t said year after year after year about funding, retirement, rhetoric and a complete disregard for the valuable contributions of public schools, public school teachers and all public service employees.

So I’ll just end with, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.”

by Ben Walker, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Bill Roth

[ed. Sad. It's no surprise that Anchorage, and Alaska in general, has declined precipitously since its former glory days. Many reasons, but here are just a few: Republican skin flints who do nothing but advocate for more government spending cuts each year, along with big tax breaks for industry, and subsidies for any new harebrained, get-rich quick scheme; elimination of the state income tax; an annual Permanent Fund dividend from the state's oil royalty account that attracted a bunch of free-loaders and installed a sense of entitlement in the voting electorate. Many other examples. All that wealth down the drain, even with federal spending that, per capita, tops every other state in the country. See also: Anchorage School Board approves ‘severe’ budget with hundreds of staff layoffs and 3 school closures (ST); and, Lawmakers press for cuts to Department of Corrections spending amid big increases (ADN):] [ed. priorities]

***

Though the number of inmates has remained largely stable since 2019, state spending on the Department of Corrections is up more than 54%, far outpacing inflation. The budget has grown every year since Gov. Mike Dunleavy has taken office, commanding an increasing share of annual state spending. This year’s budget request exceeds $500 million for the first time. [...]

The department’s budget is driven in part by its inflexible staffing formulas. Every correctional facility must be manned by a set number of officers and support staff, determined by the department based on the type of prison and inmates housed in each facility. On average, there are between four and five inmates for every correctional officer in the department. If there aren’t enough employees to meet the requirements, the department doesn’t simply slacken the staffing ratios. Rather, it demands that existing employees work overtime. [...]

The overtime mandates led the department last year to spend over $22 million on more than 329,000 overtime hours, the equivalent of more than 158 full-time employees. Nearly 1,700 individual employees reported working at least one hour of overtime in 2025. Of them, 179 reported at least 500 hours of overtime. Two employees reported more than 2,200 overtime hours each — meaning they worked more than the equivalent of a full-time job, on top of their full-time job.

Of its more than 2,100 funded staffing positions, more than 300 are vacant. The number of filled positions went down last year compared to the year before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

Steve Jobs understood money as instrumental.

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

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

This is how he acted.

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

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

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

⁂

Tim Cook is a supply chain manager.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

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

Now look at the result.

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am seeing a man who cannot say no.

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

Apple is not unique in this. It is exemplary.

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

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

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

Image: Steve Jobs/uncredited

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

What Does “Trust in the Media” Mean?

Abstract

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

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

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

“Then you blame it on the press?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that is an illusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Three Things Everyone Tries That Don’t Actually Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But nobody’s teaching you what that looks like.

The Economic Logic Working Against You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve never had to do this before.

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

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

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

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

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

Your Experience Just Became Worthless (The Timeline)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop Trying to Be Better at Your Current Job

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

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

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

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

Here’s what you can do this month:

by Jan Tegze, Thinking Out Loud |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

Claude's New Constitution

[Read the constitution]

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

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

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

What is Claude’s Constitution?

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

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

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

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

Our new approach to Claude’s Constitution

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

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

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

by Anthropic |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

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

Why the Future of Movies Lives on Letterboxd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claude's New Constitution

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

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

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

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

What is Claude's Constitution?

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

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

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

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

Our new approach to Claude's Constitution

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

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

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

A brief summary of the new constitution

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Read the constitution.

Everything You Need To Know To Buy Your First Gun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Can Buy A Gun?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Should You Expect At A Gun Store?

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

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

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

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

The Four Rules Of Firearms Safety

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

• Treat every gun as if it’s loaded.

• Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

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

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

What Type Of Gun Should You Buy?

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

by Wes Siler, Newsletter |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is College For in the Age of AI?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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