Daydreaming Proust

Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.

If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.

Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.

And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.

How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.

It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.

How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.

Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.

In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.

I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust

James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—

One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.

We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.

In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: TLS: "Café in Paris by Night" by Konstantin Korovin, 1936

America Has a Pangram Problem

AI-detection tools are getting better. But they still aren’t good enough.

Basically every recent, high-profile accusation of someone passing off AI-generated writing as their own has started in the same way: with a tool called Pangram. In March, when a horror novel from a major publishing house was pulled just days before its scheduled U.S. release date, it was in part because Pangram, an AI-detection program, had identified the text as AI-generated. Other people have fed text into Pangram to suggest that chatbots have been used to write articles in major newspapers including The New York Times, multiple short stories awarded a prestigious literary prize, and most recently, significant chunks of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical warning about the dangers of AI. The tool is also used by universities to vet student work and scientific associations to scan research papers. As panic builds over AI-generated writing, Pangram is at the foundation.

Just a few years ago, it seemed like it might never be possible to instantly and reliably determine whether a piece of text was written by a bot or a person. In 2023, one detection tool, ZeroGPT, declared the U.S. Constitution to be AI-written; the same year, OpenAI abandoned its AI detector altogether owing to a “low rate of accuracy.” And that was when the quality of ChatGPT’s writing was markedly worse than it is today. But detection tools have gotten much better of late—and Pangram, in particular, has emerged as the gold standard: Paste a chunk of text into Pangram, and the model appraises what portions were “AI Generated,” “AI Assisted,” or “Human Written.”

Yet an AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one. While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.

Pangram says its algorithm is so accurate that it incorrectly identifies text as an AI output only about one in every 10,000 times. “There is a great responsibility, a huge weight” in saying something is AI-generated, Max Spero, Pangram’s CEO, told me. “The only reason we do so is because we’re extremely confident.” Several independent analyses have also confirmed that it is quite good. One paper, from the University of Chicago, found that Pangram had almost no false positives on some 3,000 sample texts of roughly 500 to 1,000 words.

But Pangram’s ability to guarantee something was written by a human is shakier. Spero pointed me to a test showing that Pangram’s false-negative rate, or how frequently the model incorrectly labels text as human, is closer to one-in-70 (although some other assessments say it is more accurate than that).

Part of the problem is that Pangram is in an arms race with the major AI labs, which have an interest in making the writing of ChatGPT and Claude sound as natural and human as possible. And at the same time, Pangram has to deal with AI “humanizers”—programs designed explicitly to disguise AI text as your own. Reddit users rave about a humanizer called Walter Writes AI, which I decided to test out for myself. I had ChatGPT and Claude write brief articles, then pasted them into Walter Writes AI. The program, like other humanizer tools, does some anodyne rewording, swaps one clunky transition clause for another, and introduces grammatical oddities. For instance, ChatGPT’s “The numbers are no longer small enough to ignore” became “The sheer size of these usage figures can no longer be ignored.” When I pasted any output from Walter Writes AI into Pangram, it invariably told me that the twice-baked AI article was human-written. (It’s worth mentioning that The Atlantic forbids using AI-generated text unless labeled as such, and that I do not use AI for research.) [...]

Further complicating matters are the opaque ways in which Pangram and similar tools are designed. The model was trained by feeding it mountains of examples written by a human and by a bot—a book review in an actual magazine, then a review about the same book in the style of the same magazine, but produced by ChatGPT—until it can tell the two apart. This is akin to feeding millions of photos of cats and dogs into an image-recognition algorithm until it learns to spot the differences. Pangram cannot point to much specific evidence or patterns in diction, phrasing, or punctuation to support why it deems something AI or human. (I do not, for instance, understand why “these usage figures” was more human than “the numbers.”) Moreover, while Pangram distinguishes between “lightly” and “moderately AI-assisted,” these broad categories can mean just about anything short of copy-pasting from Claude—using AI for research, coming up with counterarguments, as a thesaurus, for a grammar check. The algorithm’s inner workings are “pretty uninterpretable,” Spero said, and although he wants to make Pangram’s “AI-assisted” label more granular, he is also “still not sure how possible it is.” Amid concerns of overreliance on AI chatbots, we risk simply layering on dependence on yet another black-box algorithm.

Spero told me that Pangram should “never be the ending arbiter” but instead a starting point for a more thorough investigation, and that the company looks into every reported error its model makes. He also noted that all sorts of detection technology we rely on—smoke detectors, TSA scanners—have base error rates too. On some level, in all these cases the biggest problems lie not in the technologies themselves but in what they’re trying to detect. It’s a problem that buildings catch on fire. It’s a problem that AI is seeping haphazardly into every facet of written communication.

by Matteo Wong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty
[ed. This seems like a transient issue to me. If AI is eventually able to write something (or create art) that's undetectable from what a human would produce, who cares? (except for writers and artists, obviously). You don't see this controversy in coding. See also: AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing (Atlantic). Also via DWAtV:

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Again, we learn not that AI is a good writer, or that humans are bad writers, but that the literary prize judgment processes are worthless.

Jack: That which can be won with undisclosed AI output should be

Nabeel S. Qureshi: *Another* apparently AI-generated story wins a literary prize, this time judged by a panel including the novelist Ruth Ozeki.

Literary prizes need to start including Pangram checks in their process, or else change the rules to make AI writing ok. It’s very simple! [...]

How should we think about ‘witch hunts’ where people identify writing as AI?

Shashank Joshi: One of the worst trends of recent months: pseudoscientific witch-hunts using AI detection tools

The hunts are fully scientific. The detection tools work, at least for now. I have yet to see a case where Pangram said something was AI, and the piece was neither written using AI nor crafted intentionally to fool Pangram. There are some cases of heavy copyediting that trigger Pangram, but if it’s heavy enough to trigger Pangram then I consider that to be on you.

In Praise of Shadows

What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a familiy and lives I the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life—heating, electric lights, sanitary facilities— merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way. The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches in a closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary mild glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it. Seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant. [...]

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the faroff shrill of an insect, lost in contemplation of flavors to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance. The experience must be something like that of the tea master who, at the sound of the kettle, is taken from himself as if upon the sigh of the wind in the legendary pines of Onoe. 

It has been said of Japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark. Natsume Sōseki, in Pillow of Grass, praises the color of the confection yōkan; it is not indeed a color to call forth meditation? The cloudly translucence, like that of jade; the faint, dreamlike glow that suffuses it, as if it had drunk into its very depths the light of the sun; the complexity and profundity of the color— nothing of the sort is to be found in Western candies. How simple and insignificant cream-filled chocolates seem by comparison. And when yōkan is served in a lacquer dish within whose dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue; even undistinguished yōkan can then take on a mysteriously intriguing flavor. 

In the cuisine of any country efforts no doubt are made to have the food harmonize with the tableware and the walls; but with Japanese food, a brightly lighted room and shining tableware cut the appetite in half. The dark miso soup that we eat every morning is one dish from the dimly lit houses of the past. I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served; and when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth, and to become infinitely more appetizing as well. Much the same may be said of soy sauce. In the Kyoto-Osaka region a particularly thick variety of soy is served with raw fish, pickles, and greens; and how rich in shadows is the viscous sheen of the liquid, how beautifully it blends with the darkness. White foods too—white miso, bean curn, fish cake, the white meat of fish—lose much of their beauty in a bright room. And above all there is rice. A glistening black lacquer rice cask set off in a dark corner is both beautiful to behold and a powerful stimulus to the appetite. Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam—here is a sight no Japanese can fail to be moved by. Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness. 

I possess no specialized knowledge of architecture, but I understand that in the Gothic cathedral of the West, the roof is thrust up and up so as to place its pinnacle as high in the heavens as possible—and that herein is thought to lie its special beauty. In the temples of Japan, on the other hand, a roof of heavy tiles is first laid out, and in the deep, spacious shadows creates by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. Nor is this true only of temples; in the palaces of the nobility and the houses of the common people, what first strikes the eye is the massive roof of tile or thatch and the heavy darkness that hangs beneath the eaves. Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge, making entryway, doors, walls, and pillars all but invisible. The grand temples of Kyoto—Chion’in, Honganji—and the farmhouses of the remote countryside are alike in this respect: like most buildings of the past their roofs give the impression of possessing far greater weight, height, and surface than all that stands beneath the eaves. 

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves. There are no doubt all sorts of reasons—climate, building materials—for the deep Japanese eaves. The fact that we did not use glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. 

And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose. The storehouse, kitchen, hallways, and such may have a glossy finish, but the walls of the sitting room will almost always be of clay textured with fine sand. A luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light. We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them. We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. And so, as we must if we are not to disturb the glow, we finish the walls with sand in a single neutral color. The hue may differ from room to room, but the degree of difference in color as in shade, a difference that will seem to exist only in the mood of the viewer. And from these delicate differences in the hue of the walls, the shadows in each room take on a tinge particularly their own. 

Of course the Japanese room does have its picture alcove, and in it a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. But the scroll and the flowers serve not as ornament but rather to give depth to the shadows. We value a scroll above all for the way it blends with the walls of the alcove, and thus we consider the mounting quite as important as the calligraphy or painting. Even if the greatest masterpiece will lose its worth as a scroll if it fails to blend with the alcove, while a work of no particular distinction may blend beautifully with the room and set off to unexpected advantage both itself and its surroundings. Wherein lies the power of otherwise ordinary work to produce such an effect? Most often the paper, the ink, the fabric of the mounting will possess a certain look of antiquity, and this look of antiquity will strike just the right balance with the darkness of the alcove and room. 

We have all had the experience, on a visit to one of the great temples of Kyoto or Nara, of being shown a scroll, one of the temple’s treasures, hanging in a large, deeply recessed alcove. So dark are these alcoves, even in bright daylight, that we can hardly discern the outlines of the work; all we can do is listen to the explanation of the guide, follow as best we can the all-but-invisible brush strokes, and tell ourselves how magnificent a painting it must be. Yet the combination of that blurred old painting and the dark alcove is one of absolute harmony. The lack of clarity, far from disturbing us, seems rather to suit the painting perfectly. For the painting here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can play; it performs precisely the same function as the sand-textured wall. This is why we attach such importance to age and patina. A new painting, even one done in ink monochrome or subtle pastels, can quite destroy the shadows of an alcove, unless it is selected with the greatest care. 

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is the darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. 

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little difficulty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white glow of the shoji in the sturdy bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time. 

The sturdy bay, as the name suggests, was originally a projecting window built to provide a place for reading. Over the years it came to be regarded as no more than a source of light for the alcove; but most often it serves not so much to illuminate the alcove as to soften the sidelong rays from without, to filter them through paper panels. There is a cold and desolate tinge to the light by the time it reaches these panels. The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do no more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper. I sometimes linger before these panels and study the surface of the paper, bright, but giving no impression of brilliance. 

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning, midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, (Leete’s Island Books, 1977) |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. When I realized this famous Tanizaki essay was published in 1933, I thought surely it must be out of copyright by now. And here it is. From Wikipedia:]

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In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In'ei Raisan) is an essay by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki's observations include cultural notes on customs and tradition, people, historical places and buildings, discussion of various materials and craft techniques, as well as food and even unusual recipes as seen through the author's metaphorical lens of light and shadow. [...]

The essay consists of 16 sections that discuss traditional Japanese aesthetics in contrast with change. Comparisons of light with darkness are used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. The West, in its striving for progress, is presented as continuously searching for light and clarity, while the subtle and subdued forms of East Asian art and literature are seen by Tanizaki to represent an appreciation of shadow and subtlety, closely relating to the traditional Japanese concept of sabi. In addition to contrasting light and dark, Tanizaki further considers the layered tones of various kinds of shadows and their power to reflect low sheen materials like gold embroidery, patina and cloudy crystals. In addition, he distinguishes between the values of gleam and shine.

The text presents personal reflections on topics as diverse as architecture and its fittings, traditional crafts, finishes, jade, food, cosmetics and mono no aware (the art of impermanence). Tanizaki explores in close description the use of space in buildings, lacquerware by candlelight, monastery toilets and women in the dark of a brothel. The essay acts as "a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age".

The Kissing Booth

The kissing booth was my daughter’s idea. Here’s how it was supposed to work. Ella and her friend Audrey would set up near the polling place at the Seventh-day Adventist temple. Their Get Out the Vote operation would rely on a repurposed lemonade stand they’d found in Audrey’s basement. Audrey’s mom once ran tech for a theater in Miami, and this lemonade stand was an impressive affair: a wooden counter with a framed opening above a painted wooden sign, looped with bright triangular flags cut out of felt. The sign used to say “Lemonade, 50¢” and below that “Save the Tigers!”

They repainted the sign to say #KissingBooth2024. Of course they didn’t need our help this time. They were fifteen. They traveled around the city on their own and understood precalculus. Their skin was incredible, even when they hadn’t slept enough, and their eyes were clear like marbles. Still, Ella sometimes complained about how she looked. I’d heard that the right response to this was always “You look beautiful.” No details. One weekend she emerged from her room dressed for a party in a lavender slip dress, her dark hair meticulously straightened, tiny dabs of silver glitter at the corner of each eye. I looked at her eleven-year-old brother, Ben, the only other person in the house, and saw him tear up.

“You’re crying!” Ella crowed.

“No I’m not,” Ben said, turning to hide it. I don’t think he knew why he was upset.

Audrey’s mother, Jen, and I had some concerns about the kissing booth from the beginning—namely, predation, germs, and public opinion. Also something else that was harder to put into words. But when we raised the first issue with our daughters, they became defensive.

“You think we can’t decide what to do with our own bodies,” Ella suggested. “You think it’s ‘inappropriate.’”

Audrey looked smug. “That’s what I said they’d say.”

“This is a big city . . .” Jen began.

I tried to help. “It would be different if—”

“If we lived in the suburbs?” Ella glanced at Audrey, incredulous.

Audrey shook her head in disgust. “See?”

Jen and I insisted that we would have the same concerns about a suburban kissing booth. We’d already agreed it never would’ve occurred to us to do something like this at their age, because it was a different political moment—and also a different kissing moment. Most of the teenagers we knew, including our own daughters, didn’t seem to be kissing anyone. They gently mocked the ones who were, as if the sort of dating our generation had done—the pairing up and sneaking out, the baseball metaphors—was a quaint vestige of the past. Maybe they were right. When our daughters first became teenagers, we’d been eager to show them the movies of our adolescence. We’d made popcorn and settled onto the couch, but it hadn’t taken long for them to be appalled or for us to be ashamed. How could we be nostalgic for those days?

That fall, I started running in the park. I could do this at night, while the kids finished their homework. I couldn’t help with homework the way I used to, because everything had changed: long division was now short division, the atom was an electron cloud, and Pluto—which had seemed so far away as to be unassailable—was just a lump of rock and ice in the Kuiper Belt. “Don’t use the algorithm!” Ben warned. “It’s not allowed!” Ella, meanwhile, studied the modern Middle East and didn’t have a single textbook. She had some tasks that had to be done with AI and others for which those programs were expressly forbidden. So I went for a run.

I had time to run during the day, too, especially with the kids spending half of each week at their father’s new apartment. But there was something about the halo around the lights in the park at night, especially if it was drizzling, and the adrenaline I got from needing to stay alert. Also from doing something that was supposedly inadvisable. [...]

If I ran during the day, I listened to a podcast, occasionally one about parenting. There were helpful tips for talking to your teenager: for example, when she said something offensive—such as “All the girls in my grade are bitches” or “You are exactly like Grandma”—I could say, “Let’s try that again,” or “I don’t think that came out the way you meant it.” This hadn’t been supereffective in practice, but I may not have had the right inflection. The psychologist’s voice was low and soothing, and sometimes I found myself letting one episode run into the next, even when the topics weren’t relevant to my children. “My Teen Is into Sports Betting . . . Help!” Or: “My Daughter’s Nude Selfie Got Out. What Do We Do Now?” Each one was like a little pat on the back—nope, not my problem.

Eventually, I did have to listen to the divorce episode, though. The worst things you could do, it turned out, weren’t moving the kids frequently back and forth or running out of money or lying. The worst things were (1) having fights in front of them and (2) criticizing the other parent. I was three-quarters of the way through my run—in the middle of the hill—when Dr. Lisa Damour dropped this bit of wisdom, and I slowed to a walk. Ordinarily, I hated to do that because afterward it felt as if I hadn’t run at all, as if I were a failure.

One saturday that September, I met Drew at the door when he brought Ben home. For a while after we’d separated the previous spring, I would tidy up before he arrived. Drew is an architect and we’d always argued about the apartment, about the extent to which external order was tied to more fundamental issues. The fundamental issue might have been that we disagreed about which issues were fundamental. This time, though, I hadn’t bothered. His eyes moved over the living room, the laundry on the couch, and my empty coffee mug on the table. Mugs. I gave Ben a hug, inhaling his yeasty smell. I used to be relieved when the kids went on short school trips, to the museums in D.C. or camping upstate, but now that they were with their father a few nights a week, I counted the days until they got home. I had to be careful about saying “home”—because Drew said that the apartment he’d had for five months was now equally their home. “OK,” I agreed, “language is important.” That made him roll his eyes.

Ella was at volleyball practice and wasn’t going to be back at my place for a while, so it was a good time to discuss some things. Not a great time because Ben was right there in the kitchen, getting his favorite snack: a slice of Muenster cheese wrapped around a dill pickle.

“Did you know that the bar-headed goose is one of the highest-flying migratory birds?”

“Nope,” I said.

“But the Rüppell’s griffon vulture can fly even higher. One flew seven miles above the earth and hit a plane.”

“Was it OK?”

“No,” Ben said. “It got sucked into the engine. That was in the 1900s.”

“Oh, well, the 1900s,” said Drew. “Ella said to tell you she’d be here by six.”

“How’s she doing?” I didn’t mean to suggest that she wouldn’t be doing well after three days with her father. I was only trying to steel myself for whatever was coming when she got back. Her moods were various and spectacular.

“She called me an effing a-hole,” Drew said. “And so I’m just wondering where she heard that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Who’s been calling you an effing a-hole most recently?”

“Hilarious,” Drew said. “This was after I bought her the tickets, by the way.”

“You bought her the tickets?”

I think he brought up the a-hole thing just to pass along this piece of information, because we had definitely settled on not buying the tickets for Ella, because the cost was excessive and because it felt like a bribe. We had talked about not letting Ella manipulate us into things simply because we felt guilty about our separation.

“She’s so excited,” Ben said from the kitchen. “She hugged Dad, and then she called Rachel.”

Drew looked nervous. “Rachel said that it was the event of the decade, and that if she didn’t go, she would always regret it.”

“Is Rachel paying for the tickets?”

Drew sighed. “Can you leave Rachel out of it?” Then he lowered his voice, as if this were a much larger apartment and the kitchen weren’t steps from the front door. “She’s been acting perfectly toward the kids—do you know how hard that is to find?”

“She’s the needle in the haystack.”

There was a story I made up for the kids when they were little about two children who go into a closet on a rainy day and come out in a magic land. (OK, not totally made-up.) The magic land is ruled by the Balloon Witch. Early on in the story, one of the children finds a golden needle and slips it into the pocket of her overalls. At the end of the story, she uses it to poke the Balloon Witch, who zooms and buzzes around the room until she’s just a piece of rubber on the floor.

“She’s really trying,” Drew said.

“A for effort.”

“Fuck you,” Drew said.

“La, la, la!” Ben yelled from the kitchen. “I can’t hear you!”

Since I hadn’t secretly bought expensive concert tickets or used the f-word in front of our son, I decided to take the opportunity to be the grown-up in the room. “Even though we don’t love being a couple anymore, we do love parenting you together!” I called after Ben, who was running down the hall.

“Don’t use your podcast-lady voice,” he shouted back.

Drew said the separation was my fault. He said he had tried and tried but I didn’t want to work on the marriage. That’s why he’d had the affair—the at-first-only-emotional affair—with the woman he met on the discreet married dating app Ashley Madison. I hadn’t heard of Ashley Madison before I learned about the emotional affair, and at first I thought Drew was having an affair with someone named Ashley Madison. I have to admit I was a tiny bit relieved when I discovered that her name was Rachel and she was a marketing executive in New Jersey.

I told Drew I was glad we’d talked about the affair before it became an actual affair, when it was mostly just texting. But I said that I also thought written conversations could be more intense than in-person ones. He said he didn’t find that to be true, but he wasn’t surprised I thought so, since it had always been obvious to him that I liked books more than people—except for the kids. Even when the books weren’t that good! He said he could stand being third in my affections but not 312th. I wondered at the time how he’d come up with that number, and how many books I actually did prefer to Drew—honestly, three hundred and change wasn’t so many if you were starting with the classics. But I said I knew what he meant, which annoyed him even more. Another of my problems, according to Drew, was that I could always see things from someone else’s point of view and so I failed over and over again to take a side.

by Nell Freudenberger, The Yale Review |  Read more:
Image: Yanmiao / iStock

[ed. See also: When Does a Divorce Begin? (Yale Review).]

Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing. [ed. me too!]

I think he's probably the best science fiction short story writer alive, and possibly the best short story writer, period. [ed. well...]

I've read every one of his stories at least twice, and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate more like seven times. I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

This review covers what he does extremely well, especially unique elements that other science fiction writers have not done as well, or at all.

He Writes “True” Science Fiction

Science fiction critics often divide the genre into:

• "hard" science fiction: aka engineering fiction, stories built on scientifically accurate extrapolations of real physics and technology (think Arthur C. Clarke)

• "soft" science fiction: aka science fantasy, which uses scientific trappings as window dressing for character-driven or sociological stories (think Star Wars).

Ted Chiang has written stories plausibly categorized as either, but more excitingly, many of his stories are neither. He often writes what I think of as true science fiction, where the principles of science themselves are meaningfully different from our world, but still internally consistent.

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

In Seventy-Two Letters, technology springs from Jewish Kabbalah. Golems and divine names drive industrial progress in a steampunk world.

Excitingly, he does this not just with natural sciences but social sciences as well. In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present.

This comes up in his other stories as well:

• In Division By Zero, mathematics itself is broken from within.

• In Hell Is the Absence of God, divine intervention is empirically observable and follows consistent rules

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expect hard science fiction; Chiang is doing something different. Chiang creates different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

Technology is Often Good

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

Now it’s hip and trendy to think of every new technology as the Torment Nexus. Most science fiction today feels like Black Mirror, which ran 7 seasons with exactly one happy ending.

Chiang bucks this trend. Joyce Carol Oates:

It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that [...] ask[s] anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.

In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. Chiang resists those cliches. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, memory augmentation technology allows the narrator to understand his own self-deceptions, and work towards becoming a better person and reconciling with loved ones and even himself. In Liking What You See: A Documentary, a technology that gives users acquired face-blindness allows the main characters to meditate on the nature of human beauty and the shallowness inherent in privileging the beautiful.

Even in situations where the story is overall tragic, like when the characters are faced with existential crisis (in the individual sense), or existential catastrophe (in the world-ending sense), technology isn't the villain but the vehicle for understanding unbearable truths (whether about the world or about ourselves).

Chiang consistently shows us the potential of technology to help us become more human, and have a deeper appreciation for the world and our place in it.

The Lived Experience of Compatibilism

“Compatibilism is a philosophical stance that reconciles free will with determinism. It argues that free will, understood as the ability to act according to one's desires, is compatible with the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by prior events. Essentially, compatibilists believe that even if our choices are predetermined, we can still be considered free and morally responsible if those choices are a result of our own internal states, like desires and intentions.” 

Does that make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me. In practice, compatibilism says something like “free will in the normal, pretheoretic sense of the term, doesn’t exist. Your choices still meaningfully matter nonetheless. You can’t meaningfully get out of the bind philosophically. What you can do, however, is make peace with it.” [...]

In Story of Your Life [SPOILERS], the narrator learns an atemporal alien language and begins experiencing past and future as equally real. It takes her some time to make peace with it, but eventually she fully accepts the truth of determinism. She understands that life is full of tragedy, including that her daughter will die young, but life is full of beauty too. With both regret and awe, she sets forth on the path that she was destined to take.

This is compatibilism from the inside. In both stories, the characters discover they cannot change what will happen, but this knowledge transforms how they experience what must happen: with forgiveness, acceptance, and even joy.

As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse. In Lifecycle of Software Objects, the “we are the parents of our mind-children” metaphor for building sentient AI systems becomes quite literal.

by Linch, The Linchpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Ted Chiang is truly one of the best science fiction writers out there today, and a great essayist too  (I'm also a Neal Stephenson fan). Check out this MetaFilter site: The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang, which includes most of his stories in full (but please buy his books; you'll look smart and discerning to your friends!). A couple favorites that left a lasting impression on me: Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Understand.]

Wish You Were Her

INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:37 PM

Frank Sinatra, palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.

The fact was, Sinatra had already been waiting for over an hour for his moment at the mic and at this point would have been more than fine with just heading back to his cabin. He was tired of the constant low-grade pitch in gravity under his feet. He was still annoyed that he’d nearly lost his luggage on the first day here, a fact his wife was not letting him forget; was humiliated that he never really got his onboard Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi he paid for — to work all week; had been viciously massaging his kidneys throughout the past four songs; and now, at this strangulating moment, had to sit through the noises being made by the group of veterans Monroe had just asked to join her in a conga. Sinatra, wincing, was the victim of a condition so common around here that most people accepted it as a given. But when it got to him, shot through his personal plumbing, we were looking at a man in crisis. The fact was — and he’s going to kill me for saying this — Frank Sinatra was seasick.

EXT. Deck 18, Long Island Bar, 3:08 PM

Three nights and about eight hours earlier, select members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators boarded a 169,000-ton cruise ship in civilian disguise. They crossed the gangplank by sandaled foot and standard wheelchair, in panama hats and Bermuda shorts, naked of the costumes, pancake makeup, and in some cases false breasts required to faithfully look like their look-alikes. Alongside an estimated four thousand other, non-impersonating passengers slated to set sail with them, these twenty professional plagiarists, under cover of normie human camouflage, slipped silently into the crush.

“LORD I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH COCONUT RUM IN MY LIFE,” yelled a man on his phone, jabbing his free hand into his free ear.

“MAN IT IS COMPLETELY SUNNY — I SAID SUNNY — YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M GETTING A CALL FROM DONNA — DONNA — YEAH LOOK I’M NOT TRYING TO HAVE HER TRY AND TEAR MY ASS IN HALF AGAIN SO I’M GONNA HAVE HER CALL YOU — ”

Welcome to the open-air bar on the eighteenth floor of the MSC Seashore, a luxury megaship with the fuel economy of an oil-tanker fire and the handling of a Marriott. That was the man seated to my left, silenced by the drink handed to him by a bartender. To my right was a woman in a shirt that read I DON’T GIVE A SHIP. And behind us, beyond the bar — which led out onto the pool deck, the pool deck’s smoking section, and two Jacuzzis — was the Atlantic Ocean, foamy and real under the sun above Port Canaveral, Florida.

I was seated smack in the center of the ship’s “embarkation party,” the Seashore’s farewell-to-land fiesta. In these last few hours of boarding, standard cruisegoers (reunioning families, couples, singles, swingers) were already loudly settling in for the top-hole amenities, pampering, and bacchanalia that the Seashore’s four-day boomerang voyage to the Bahamas had promised. They more or less knew what they were in for. What they didn’t know was that the impersonators of Sunburst walked among them, incognito, settling in for the same.

The occasion of Sunburst’s presence on the cruise was this: Time had been having its remorseless way with our look-alikes. For four days a year for the past two decades, the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators, a three-to-five-dozen-strong troupe of doppelgangers, tribute artists, and hobbyist dead ringers, had assembled in hotels and conference centers across greater Orlando. In its heyday, Sunburst’s annual congress served as the tribute industry’s largest American sanctuary. But the average age for a Sunburster now hovered around 55. The typical status of the celebrities they impersonated was “deceased.” The digital era had swallowed demand for in-person homages to golden-age Hollywood, AI was a wallop to its people en masse, folks were retiring from the trade, aging out of plausible fidelity to their chosen doubles, or, from entirely natural causes, disappearing for good. (One of Sunburst’s most redoubtable talent agents had in fact died just a few weeks before the cruise.) This made the week’s cruise purely leisurely, a hopefully happy sunset for Sunburst’s long reign.

So here I was. Shipping out. Desperately seeking someone from Sunburst. Solitary in the ark of undoubled doubles, figuring out who around here was an impersonator impersonating a non-impersonator was becoming, as you might imagine, unimaginable. In the long mirror above the bar, every woman in the pool, drifting in and out of frame on her inflatables, now had the air of a once-fabulous mid-century minx. On floated a buzzed Garbo, a browned-out Garland. Giant televisions displaying forty-foot-wide walls of text (ƎƧIUЯƆ Ƨ’TƎ⅃, or AИƎЯAƆAM OT ƎMIT Ƨ’TI) flashed before the cabanas, where Elvises of every era groped for their towels. Here walked a plausible Oprah. In came an ayatollah. And there, lanky in her tankini: a Cher. [...]

The man flailing his arms by the bathrooms fifteen yards away was Greg, Sunburst’s founder and figurehead. The phrase ENTERTAINMENT: JUST LIKE YOU REMEMBER! blazed on his T-shirt. Also he was shouting my name.

“We’re here in the back!” he yelled.

“Where?” the guy shouted.

“The BACK BACK!” Greg yelled again.

INT. Deck 8, Uptown Lounge, 3:29 PM

The back back turned out to be a lounge space ten floors down. Rodney Dangerfield, walking in with a rum and Coke, was the first to slap Greg on the shoulder.

“Damn. Wow. Smells like someone’s grilling a raccoon in here,” Dangerfield said, looking around. “You guys just get in?”

An aerial view of the piano hall in the aft of Deck 8 — aft being the rear half of the ship, and Deck 8 being the eighth of twenty floors — would have revealed concentric circles of men and women sucked into orbit around an arrangement of microsuede sofas. In the center was now Greg, struggling with a pair of armpitted clipboards. On the far outer ring was the adjacent cantina, sizzling with orders of the Fajita ‘n’ Rita Feast ($20.95). But the energy in the room emanated from the fusion of Hollywood lovelies  , B- and C-listers, dead musicians, and a few completely imaginary characters, caught in a bubble of babble.

In came the tiny and fabulous Sharon Osbourne, fresh off a flight from London. Near the exit, with his blue eyes and sensible sandals, was Boy George, who swanned over to double-cheek kiss Sharon, then peck the forehead of Martha Stewart, and — skipping over Jeff Bezos — the tip of Fran Drescher’s nose. Sinatra (A), by the banquette, had just politely pumped the hand of Sinatra (B), when both were intercepted by Dangerfield, who seemed interested in explaining the dimensions of his cabin’s toilet. The Dude from The Big Lebowski was tearing a tortilla into pieces; over by the baby grand was Jerry Garcia; Bezos left to go to the bathroom; and Greg, who was beaming richly over his dominion, looked like he might cry with pleasure when someone’s wife started talking about closing on a new condo in Mexico.

Our model of the atom collapsed toward the inner ring, at the center of which appeared a 79-year-old man with brilliant teeth, a chin-length bob, the coconutty tan of the constantly sunned.

“Guess what I am?” he asked several newcomers.

“Dolly Parton?” one suggested.

“Santa?” said another.

“About six-one?” went one more.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Congeniality,” Greg said, coming in to knead his neck. “You’re looking at thirty-four years of Kenny Rogers.”

Every impersonator made for a convincing person. But as the gathering of celebrity doubles milled about the room, it was growing obvious just how broad the spectrum of fidelity within impersonation could get. Some were just blessed with a genuinely miraculous assembly of genetic glitches. Dangerfield, for instance, with big red eyes hot enough to boil water, and now miming his golf swing for Greg, was an amazing, near-perfect dupe, clearly put on this planet as proof of a lazy and hilarious God. (Ditto Boy George, with his stubble, his exemplary androgynous smolder — and same for Walter White of Breaking Bad, who kept pulling out a small bag of laundry beads from his shirt pocket as his prop ounce of crystal meth.)

But the lion’s share of them weren’t so finely biologically determined. The majority looked more like second or third cousins to their doubles. Staring at them yielded a whole other feeling, stranger than the vague awe you might harbor for folks obviously cashing in on their Darwinian dues. The faces of the not-quite-theres held a secret, focused serenity — kin to the quality inborn in the showman, dramatized by the spy, not far from the one on your casual adulterer. It was the flickering, only occasionally visible pact between at least two selves.

by Mina Tavakoli, N + 1 | Read more:
Image: Kate Bancroft, The Devil On My Shoulder. 2026
[ed. Feeling Gay Talese vibes from his famous essay Frank Sinatra Has a Cold; also, David Foster Wallace's Shipping Out (from "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again").]

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy

by Tom Gauld, My Jetpack |  Read more:

What the Pope Said About A.I.

Leo XIV’s new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.

Last year, only months into his papacy, Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, called on developers of artificial intelligence “to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work.” In response, the Silicon Valley billionaire and troll-in-chief Marc Andreessen began mocking the pontiff by tweeting an idiotic meme at him. The Pope raised the grave concern that artificial-intelligence companies were “totally ignoring the value of human beings and of humanity”; the venture capitalist Peter Thiel reportedly wondered whether the Pope might be in league with the Antichrist. The merchant princes of Silicon Valley appeared concerned that the new Pope would usurp their authority and diminish their power. And now, arguably, he has, in a long-awaited encyclical on artificial intelligence.

For years—for decades—tech leaders have described their investments and inventions, their corporations, and even themselves in religious terms, and specifically in messianic terms. They claimed to be driven by a mission to make the world a better place; they were faithful to the misbegotten gospel of disruptive innovation. A “mission” is, historically, the Christian work of spreading the word of the Gospel; disruptive innovation is a theory of change that participates in the rhetoric of salvation. For a time, Facebook’s stated mission was “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” which is what most clergy of any faith might say is their mission, too, alongside caring for the poor and comforting the suffering. Tech executives, dressed in the ritualized vestments of hoodies, jeans, designer sneakers, and black T-shirts, have acted as if their companies were churches, their TED talks so many homilies, and their products—apps, platforms, and video games—temples, mosques, and chapels. More recently, these same people—men, really—have heralded the arrival of artificial intelligence as ushering in what Mark Zuckerberg calls a “new era for humanity.” This week, the Pope offered his own understanding of that new era in his encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It could hardly be more different from the preachings of the priests of Silicon Valley. They like to say they are saving the world. The Pope fears they are destroying it. [...]

The new encyclical, at nearly forty thousand words, bears reading. It is addressed “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to all men and women of goodwill”—that is, to everyone. In advance of its release, and leery of the inevitable TL;DR reaction, one Texas bishop warned parishioners not to ask a chatbot to summarize it for them. (Earlier this year, the Pope urged priests against using ChatGPT to write their sermons and to instead “use your brains more.”) It is not a beautiful document. It’s often maddeningly, boringly wonky (“this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data”), and it gives every evidence of being written by a committee (“psychological and psychiatric literature has documented with growing insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships”). Some of it reads like a Silicon Valley press release (“Today, the convergence of automation, robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the very structure of work”). Nevertheless, “Magnifica Humanitas” presents a remarkable case for placing moral concerns, and not profit, or competitive advantage, or efficiency, at the center of any discussion of artificial intelligence.

If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.

Much of the encyclical involves defending the proposition that the Vatican ought to be—and has always been—engaged in making statements about new and very worldly things like artificial intelligence. “The Church is present in history and engages in dialogue with the world,” Leo argues. He agrees with the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world that humanity stands at a crossroads. But at this crossroads, he argues, three questions must be asked: “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?” Invoking a Biblical story about hubris, the building of the Tower of Babel, he warns of what he calls the “Babel syndrome”: “namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

Beginning with the fundamental dignity of the human, Leo traces the inalienable, universal equality of persons and their inviolable rights. He establishes, within the Church’s Social Doctrine (traceable to “Rerum Novarum”), principles that include the commitment to the common good, which he defines as “the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.” [...]

The problem is not the technology, the Pope maintains in “Magnifica Humanitas”; it’s the anthropology. Algorithms, forms of automation, and artificial intelligence sort the worthy from the unworthy; they manipulate information and undermine trust; they violate privacy; they enhance the power of the already powerful and reduce the capabilities of the already vulnerable; they make war more ruthless; they undermine democratic governance; they take away the dignity of work, possibly for the mass of humanity. He presses for forms of regulation and especially for democratic control of artificial intelligence, but above all he calls for “disarming” A.I. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” he writes. “It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” He worries that the culture around artificial intelligence undermines the search for truth that is necessary for both democratic life and any possibility for a genuine spiritual existence. [...]

That the concerns the Pope has raised in “Magnifica Humanitas” are not even remotely new does not make them any less urgent. Yet this history does suggest that calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and, as Arendt put it, to “think what we are doing” have not been heeded. Then again, before this week, they’ve never been sounded by the Pope, the spiritual leader of nearly a fifth of the world’s population.

“Magnifica Humanitas” is in many ways a religious analogue to Claude’s Constitution, released by Anthropic this past January (and on which at least two delegates to the Vatican were consulted). In a move freighted with symbolism, Anthropic’s co-founder Christopher Olah appeared on the dais alongside Leo at the release of the encyclical, which the Pope, in a first for the Church, presented in person, at the Vatican’s Synod Hall. “I am grateful to His Holiness and to the Church for taking up this work of discernment,” Olah said in his remarks. Executives of other A.I. companies are not likely to express that kind of gratitude. Nor are they likely to cede political power willingly, any more than they are likely to become philanthropists, or volunteer to pay more in taxes, or stop tweeting daft things or selling you tools that you don’t need and that you never asked for and that make you miserable, angrier, and stupider.

by Jill Lepore, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Yara Nardi/Reuters
[ed. Maybe tl;dr for most folks, but AIs will certainly read it. Sort of my intent with ARIA: The Great Pause. Every little bit helps.]