Devour the Flesh

In the sterile womb of Jersey City, if you sit and watch a while, you can bear witness to the beating heart of corporate America. Here, along the waterfront, where banks and commercial entities alike feign importance, you can watch this organ function in all its pulsating, bloody, slimy glory: senior managers in starchy button-downs, shouldering duffel bags, talking about frenetic nothings on the phone; junior analysts, hiding happy hour hangovers with oat lattes and Chill Mint nicotine gum; women wearing ballet flats and cropped fit Zara blazers; men disguising receding hairlines with gelled crew cuts, swaggering in and out of glass buildings with their artfully hidden secrets. Everyone has been reduced to the same amount of nothing—no more than cells delivering oxygen to the vascular organ, ciphers turning around and around in revolving doors. Everyone is equally insignificant in the face of A Business Plan. They coagulate into a viscous soup, being pulled through aortas that channel them from the train station to the office door. The line for Just Salad in the adjoining mall wraps around the floor during lunch. They have a system so you won’t ever have to wait more than fifteen minutes for your Crispy Chicken Poblano.

There is a strong idea of fraternity here, not because of a shared commonality between individuals, but rather the compulsion that you are nothings beating within the same fleshy walls, so there must be inherent community within it. It must be true. The men sitting atop this system, who hide their sexual hunger and bloodthirst and baldness, spread their pink legs wide across leather seats and rhapsodize about how everyone here is part of a family, a community, a team. They wax lyrical about it like they are preparing to make everyone jerk off over a cookie. Of course, they have no qualms about turning on these idealisms in the face of a dangling carrot. Money is the siren’s call; greed, a Hydra. True sustenance is slim. They want people who are hungry, they say. They want people who are insatiable.

I do not think fondly of the limited time I spent on the waterfront in Jersey City last year. I think about the months I felt disrespected, belittled, objectified. I think about the Mexican restaurant where blazered ciphers would gather for company tab margaritas and I felt a self-disgust so deep in my bones I thought I might be having some kind of deathly allergic reaction to cotija cheese. I think about the route I would take along the water in the moments I had alone, walking past the starchy shirts, the hungover interns, the brassy highlights and misshapen executives, staring at my hollowing reflection in the Hudson River, wondering if it would please get eaten by the water: Drown drown drown drown drown.

All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.

When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”

I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it. 

by Steffi Cao, It's Steffi |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always nice to discover a new young writer with talent, wit, and deadly aim. See also: The Whimsy War Manifesto:]

***

Here is my synthesis of 2025 so far: the status quo is a bad day, and the likelihood of a world-ending day is far likelier than a good one, so when a good day does come around, it feels like licking the Pearly Gates with your own parched tongue.

Most of this is because of politics. Politics, we say, tearing our hair out once more! Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy, intended to make news outlets and the public alike feel like we’re being whiplashed with news while explicitly and covertly executing fascist policy, has entered in full force in the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term. Every day feels like you’re being bashed in the face like a birthday piñata: No more Department of Education! The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America! Tariffs! No tariffs! We’re gutting USAID and the CFPB—you didn’t know what they did for you as an America? No one taught you that in school? You didn’t read about it in the news that was paywalled because Marc Benioff bought TIME and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post? That’s your own fault! Fuck you! Tariffs again! Mass deportations! AI is gutting white collar jobs! They’re bombing Iran for fun! World War III! And now, here’s Elon Musk being ugly.

It is difficult to be online, to read the news, to open up your phone without your brain activating your fight-or-flight response because all of your synapses lit up like a Christmas tree. The future seems to be at a crossroads, every decision unsure and halting about what is really coming next. On the bad days, we are all just grasping to the last life raft of a boat being blown up by a bunch of the un-funniest losers you’ve ever seen in your life. Rent is skyrocketing, people are asking ChatGPT to make them weekly grocery lists, the rich are only getting richer. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet we scroll onto the next post anyway.

Nihilism and doomerism run rampant as a result. Trust in the government, in media and in society is at an all-time low. Everyone asks, are we cooked? For the first time in a long time, it really seems that way.

Gen Z’s Dating Rules Are Making Them ‘Constantly Disappointed’

Lea Veloso, 26, has an ever-growing ick list.

If he spits on the ground, can’t cook, lies about his height, identifies as apolitical or doesn’t travel enough. If he’s weird about other men wearing makeup (“like, K-pop idols”), says he wants a “slightly autistic woman”, has no skincare routine or only likes songs that got famous on TikTok. It’s an ick if he doesn’t call his parents, sniffs every five seconds, is an unsuccessful DJ or is embarrassed to do karaoke. Recently, she uncovered a new one: if he’s saving himself for marriage. It’s now at the top of the checklist on her Notes app that she references whenever she starts seeing someone new.

“Three strikes, you’re out,” she said.

Between growing up on a steady diet of fan fiction and a never-ending parade of dating content on her feeds, where strangers share the just-because flowers they receive and beloved creator couples post their lengthy breakup announcements on YouTube, Veloso finds it harder to take in the nuance of a person when she’s dating them. The noise of who she should be dating is just too strong.

“For so long, I’ve been idealizing this one man who will drop everything for me, who will know my likes, and is someone who’s the perfect mold,” she said. “I think I’m constantly disappointed by real men.”

Gen Z have long faced accusations of being losers in the dating realm: young people are having less sex, meeting fewer new people, getting cringed out by even sending roses on Hinge. They are the most rejected generation and the loneliest generation. Most of these trends point to a big change in dating culture: social media has entrenched itself into our romantic reality, often informing our interpersonal relationships rather than the other way around. For young women like Veloso who have never dated without the internet’s input, that means the construction of a Dream Man informed by viral terms served to her by algorithms, social feeds and stories people share online more than her IRL dating life.

The phraseology is expansive and ever-evolving, and for many, wielded as a prescriptive rubric for tackling the thunderdome of heterosexual dating content. There is no shortage of ways to describe the kind of man who is a romantically superior kind of partner: a loser provider man with golden retriever energy who worships you because if he wanted to, he would. The health of a prospective match can be deemed on a red-to-green flag scale, from minimum effort and weaponized incompetence to getting the princess treatment from a real yearner, written by a woman. Your happily-ever-after can be ensnared with the red nail theory or the orange peel theory. The truest love, the ship, the OTP (one true pairing), is also increasingly championed on social media through tropes, whether it’s enemies-to-lovers or a slow-burn relationship arc.

This desire to develop theories that explain the painful steps of falling in love feels similar to older adages around dating, like the teachings of Cosmo magazine, Sex and the City, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. But relational psychoanalyst Cynthia LaForte said there is also a generational trend of diagnosing and clinicalizing everything, often propelled by misappropriated therapy speak on social media, that is unique to gen Z and the digital era of dating.

“We’ve pathologized away personality,” LaForte said. “I think there’s a big narrative around ‘these are the types of people you date’ and ‘these are the people you break up with’ and it leaves little room for compassion.” (...)

Whether you are young or not, human relationships are fraught with emotional tripwires, and Dream Man content offers a safer way forward. But that means we are all dating under a panopticon, where virtues and sins can be broadcasted and scrutinized and farmed for engagement. There is a huge appetite for other people’s horror stories especially. Millions-strong Facebook groups like Are We Dating The Same Guy? and apps like Tea were specifically designed to catch cheaters in the act. Really any fuckboy behavior can be posted and reposted until daters are ubiquitously known across the internet as West Elm Caleb or the Couch Guy or the man from Reesa Teesa’s notorious 50-part “Who TF Did I Marry?” TikTok series. And online, it doesn’t matter if the crime was pathologically lying or not looking overjoyed enough when your girlfriend walked through the door – the deliberation and condemnation processes are the same.

“Social media makes me scared shitless to date,” Nicole said. “Everyone is on the wave of holding people accountable, which I do very much support, and because of this, people are highlighting more of the abusive side of things to raise awareness to it. But it also drowns out the hopeless romantics.”

by Steffi Cao, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Laura Edelbacher
[ed. Posted mostly for the links (all new to me - don't do social media). See also: It's a loser boy summer (It's Steffi):]

***

Something is brewing in the murky waters of our crumbling society. Everyone is battling loneliness and existential dread. We’re all physically or spiritually chaste, but somehow still trying to be hedonistic brats in the club. Sex and the City is being studied on social media like a fossilized relic of a bygone dating era. Romantic morale is dissolving like saltine crackers under the wet, baking sun. Everywhere, every hour, someone is at a bar or up on Twitter, talking about yearning. (...)

Last year, I wrote about the medium ugly boyfriend and his meteoric ascent as romance’s hottest status piece. The appeal was clear—in the external trappings of your relationship, the medium ugly boyfriend ensured that you would always be perceived as the glamorous and altruistic heroine. He seems to know that you’re out of his league and will, to any passerby in a Uniqlo, always make you look good. But now, a new phenomenon has expounded upon the fertile soil of the boyfriend status symbol: the nonchalant cool man is out, and the loser boy is in. Medium ugly boyfriends of last year have opened the floodgates to a new dawn, and it is unequivocally the era of loser boys. Men who proclaim to “only date models” are as dead in the water as the Shein microtrends of 2020. In the relentless heat of August, we are too tired to deal with texts that say “I mean, you can come if you want,” and we are now searching for the person that will get down on both knees, put their hands together in prayer, and beg for a woman to look their way. (...)

To be clear, I mean “loser” in a very laudatory way. There are a million other names for him: he’s a yearner. He’s a worshipper. He’s a real eater. He’ll cherish you and love you even if you were a worm. “Loser” is simply the ironic digest of these personality traits that have historically been considered undesirable by traditional masculinity. (...)

Within the context of patriarchal oppression, loser boys are the very antithesis to the red-pilled manosphere that seems to grow bigger each year. Loser boys are really lover boys—the ones who are conscious enough to identify a hegemonic dog whistle and act accordingly.

It makes sense why this has happened. Over the years, the Joe Rogan–Andrew Huberman–Sneako enclave of digital masculinity has peddled the ideologies of homophobic, racist chauvinism to millions of men. Young women are skewing more progressive as young men skew more conservative, and a huge factor has to do with the content they are fed on their feeds. And of course, there are interpersonal impacts. I hear stories from women who more frequently encounter direct forms of such alpha male ideology on dating apps or during IRL dates—men swiping up just to tell them that they’re ugly, men directly telling women during first dates what they perceive to be wrong with their looks, men actively putting down women for their interests, professions, and beliefs. For having sex with them, for not having sex with them.

It’s disrespectful, yes, but also incredibly boring. It’s so boring to get disrespected again and again by the same genre of man who has shit to say about your looks while he’s nursing a hairline that’s got two years left before it takes permanent PTO. The loser boy phenomenon is indicative of women wanting more—they want someone who, at a very baseline level, understands that they deserve to be treated above a level of degradation and dehumanization.

[ed. PTO? Had to look it up (paid time off). Lol.]

Tilly Norwood

Tilly Norwood: how scared should we be of the viral AI ‘actor’? 

It takes a lot to be the most controversial figure in Hollywood, especially when Mel Gibson still exists. And yet somehow, in a career yet to even begin, Tilly Norwood has been inundated with scorn.

This is for the simple fact that Tilly Norwood does not exist. Despite looking like an uncanny fusion of Gal Gadot, Ana de Armas and High School Musical-era Vanessa Hudgens, Norwood is the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) talent studio called Xicoia. And if Xicoia is to be believed, then Norwood represents the dazzling future of the film industry.

Unveiled this weekend at the Zurich film festival, Norwood has been touted as the next Scarlett Johansson, with studios apparently clamouring to work with her and a talent agency lined up to represent her. Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Well, this sucks.]

The End of Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

Time Under Tension

… or, you know, maybe not!

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

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

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

by Derek Thompson |  Read more:

Image: Sanika V on Unsplash

Subscription Prices Gone Wild

Most platform subscription price are going up, not down—and many are skyrocketing.

Music streaming is one more example. Spotify’s Chief Business Officer recently offered the bland observation that price hikes are “part of our toolbox now”—and added “we’ll do it when it makes sense.”

What does that really mean?

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, Spotify subscribers should expect regular prices increases from Spotify in the future—with a boost coming every 12-24 months.

Spotify even bragged to the investment community that it’s always planning a price boost somewhere. Here again is the Chief Business Officer laying it out for us:

I want to also remind you that we take a portfolio approach. So in a sense, you could say that we raise all the time. For instance, in the last quarter we raised in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And I can report to you that on churn, we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary for Spotify.

Years ago, I claimed that streaming economics were broken, and price increases were inevitable. But I never anticipated the rapacious response of the suits in the C-suite.

The short explanation is that they do it because they can. Sure, some people cancel their subscriptions, but not enough to make a difference. Most subscribers simply put up with it.

That’s why the streamers keep boosting prices again and again. They will continue doing it until they encounter serious resistance—and they haven’t hit it yet. So I expect more of the same.

But there’s a danger to this business strategy. Look at Las Vegas, where tourism is collapsing because the casinos went too far. For a long time, the public didn’t flinch in the face of price hikes, but then it got ridiculous:

• $95 ATM fees

• $14 coffee

• $50 early check-in fees

• $30 cocktails

The casinos have now earned a reputation as exploitative price-gougers. Tourism is now down sharply—hotel occupancy has dropped 15%. The city feels “eerily empty.”

This isn’t easy to fix. Once you destroy your reputation and lose the customer’s trust, it’s almost impossible to get it back. That happened in an earlier day to Sears and K-Mart, and they never recovered.

Something similar may already be happening at Disney’s theme parks. Some visitors report that Disney World is empty—looking like a ghost town even during Labor Day weekend.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Parris, Stat Significant

[ed. May have to go back to cable (horrors). Just canceled my Amazon Prime account. See also: Is TV's Golden Age (Officially) Over? A Statistical Analysis.]

Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?

A few days ago, The Atlantic published an article on esteemed author John Cheever (1912-1982). But the magazine is almost apologetic, and feels compelled to admit the “final indignity” suffered by this troubled author—”less than 30 years after his death, even his best books were no longer selling.”

What a comedown for a writer who, during his lifetime, was a superstar contributor to The New Yorker, and got all the awards. Those included the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the National Medal for Literature.

But that’s not enough to keep any of his books in the top 25,000 sellers at Amazon. Try suggesting any of Cheever’s prize-winning works to your local reading group, and count the blank stares around the room.

And it’s not just Cheever. Not long ago, any short list of great American novelists would include obvious names such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. But nowadays I don’t hear anybody say they are reading their books.

And they are brilliant books. But reading Updike today would be an act of rebellion. Or perhaps indulging in nostalgia for a lost era.

The list goes on—Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Agee, etc. Do they exist for readers under the age of forty?

Their era—mid-20th-century America—really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.

And what about music?

The New York Times recently noticed that mid-century American operas never get performed by the Met. It’s almost as if the 1940s and 1950s don’t exist at Lincoln Center. (...)

But I see the exact same thing in jazz. Most jazz fans want to listen to music recorded after the the emergence of high fidelity sound in the late 1950s. So they are very familiar with Kind of Blue (1959) and what happened after, but know next to nothing about jazz of earlier periods.

If I were making a list of the greatest American contributions to music, my top ten would include Duke Ellington’s music from the early 1940s and Charlie Parker’s recordings from the mid-1940s. But even jazz radio stations refuse to play those works nowadays. So what hope is there that these musical milestones will retain a place in the public’s cultural memory?

Jazz musicians who died in the mid-1950s, such as Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, and Clifford Brown should rank among the great musicians of the century, but somehow fall through the cracks. Maybe if they had lived a few more years, they would get their deserved acclaim. But the same fans who love Monk, Miles, Ornette, and Trane often have zero knowledge of these earlier figures.

Now let’s consider cinema from the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t exist on Netflix.

You might say that Netflix has eliminated the entire history of cinema from its platform. But it especially hates Hollywood black-and-white films from those postwar glory years.

Citizen Kane is the greatest American film of all time, according to the American Film Institute. But when I try to find it on Netflix, the algorithm tells me to watch a movie about McDonald’s hamburgers instead.

The second best American film of all time is Casablanca, according to the AFI. When I tried to find it on Netflix, the algorithm offered me an animated film from 2020 as a substitute.

The sad reality is that the entire work of great filmmakers and movie stars has disappeared from the dominant platform. It wouldn’t cost Netflix much to offer a representative sample of historic films from the past, but they can’t be bothered. (...)

Not all of these works deserve lasting acclaim. Some of the tropes and attitudes are outdated. Avant-garde obsessions of the era often feel arbitrary or constraining when viewed from a later perspective. Censorship prevented artists from pursuing a more stringent realism in their works.

But those reasons don’t really justify the wholesale erasure of an extraordinary era of American creativity.

What’s happening? Why aren’t these works surviving?

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!

• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!

• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums. A visit to an Ivy League campus conveys the same intense feeling, if only via the architecture.

You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations—and with a responsibility to future ones.

The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

But it can act as if they never happened.

This is especially damaging to works from the 1940s an 1950s. These are still remembered—but only by a few people, who will soon die.

This is the moment when works from 80 years ago should pass from contemporary memory and get enshrined in history. But that won’t happen in an age that hates history and wants to live in the eternal present. (...)

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now. The same brand franchises get reheated over and over. The same song styles get repeated ad nauseam. The same clichés get served up, again and again.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image:Bettmann/Getty/reddit

TikTok Clock

Here comes TrumpTok.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there was a “framework for a deal” for a TikTok sale, though he has said the words “framework for a deal” eleventy-hundred times. Through the months of Trump’s insane pingponging deals with China we have learned that “framework” and “deal” are two very different things. Though at least this is better than the “handshake for a framework” Howard Lutnick said they had back in June. So on Friday are Trump and Scott Bessent really, finally going to get that deal from China on those rare earth minerals, the ones US tech companies need to make all of their AI chips, planes, and high-tech gadgets that Trump screwed them out of by self-embargoing the US? It’s concepts of a framework for maybe!

TikTok being forced under his thumb has apparently long been a wish of Trump’s, at least since app users first ground his gears back in 2020 by registering to attend his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with no intention of showing up, causing his delicate ego embarrassment when the yuge surging crowd he was expecting turned out to be a mere trickle. He raged for TikTok to be BANNED, because something something Chinese spies, and Congress passed an act that banned the app unless its algorithm was put under the control of a US company. And Joe Biden signed it!

Remember that extra-stupid hearing with TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew, with Tom Cotton refusing to accept that he is from Singapore, which is a whole different country than China, and how embarrassingly pig-ignorant the senators were about the basics of how the Internet even works?

 

But, the Chinese government doesn’t and has never owned TikTok. A Chinese man founded it and is still 20 percent of the board, but the company was never incorporated in China. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government ever had access to user data, much less that they were using it to spy on dissidents or Americans making cucumber salads.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., which is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, and TikTok Inc. is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore. And its servers — ORACLE servers, in fact — dish out its secret-sauce algorithm from Virginia. Sixty percent of ByteDance is currently owned by non-Chinese global institutional investors including Susquehanna International Group (majority shareholder Jeff Yass), the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, KKR, BlackRock, and Tiger Global Management; 20 percent of the firm is owned by Beijing-based founder Zhang Yiming, and 20 percent is owned by employees.

But Congress and Biden decided to ban the app anyway, after Trump had said it was a CHINESE SPY EMERGENCY. And then some curious things happened!

Jeff Yass, the managing director of Susquehanna International Group, the company that is also the largest shareholder of TikTok’s parent company, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group, making its share price surge 140 percent, defibrillating Trump’s flatlining company.

And then right before the ‘24 election, the TikTok algorithm underwent a noticeable shift, and Trumpy content began appearing in people’s feeds when it hadn’t before. And TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in January.

And after his win, Trump credited TikTok with helping him win more young voters, so he loved it again and decided to save it, even going to the Supreme Court to try to stop them from enacting the ban he himself had asked Congress to pass. The deadline for a sale has since been extended four times already, and has now been pushed off until December 16.

The Wall Street Journal has more details of the prospective deal: The company’s board would stay the same, except that Zhang Yiming’s stake would be reduced to less than 20 percent, and a consortium of US companies, including Susquehanna International, KKR, General Atlantic Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz would control 80 percent of the company. A new US entity would be created, with a board with one member designated by the US government, which is unheard of. And the US company would license the magic algorithm, putting it into a new US version of the app, so that the Trumpy board would be able to customize it and make it massage everybody’s feed this way and that, promoting the reach of some accounts and limiting access to others.

by Marcie Jones, Wonkette |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Guardian

[ed. I try to pay attention but this whole TikTok deal is too convoluted and politicized to make any sense. Is this some kind of sweatheart business deal, budding propaganda platform, rare-earth minerals squeeze...or what? Who knows.]

The Uggo Police

The life of Marilyn Monroe yields a few lessons for those who would follow in her footsteps. One, don’t marry a playwright. Two, get paid. No current-day actress has taken this second lesson to heart like Sydney Sweeney, whose tousled good looks are practically designed to make people underestimate her. Sweeney understands that being an object of sexual fantasy involves a hefty dose of contempt—and says, If that’s the game, I’m going to make some money off of me, too. She’s under no illusions that if her career is left to others, she’ll be cast in parts she finds interesting. So if she sees a script she likes, she funds it herself. To get money, she sells stuff: bath soap that supposedly contains her bathwater, jeans, ice cream.

And if these products are advertised in ways that are a little tasteless, or a little offensive, that means that people will talk about the ads, and that talk means sales, and those sales mean, in the end, more checks for Sweeney. Asking whether or not Sweeney knew that a jeans ad campaign with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” would activate the very weird and very horny portion of the Internet that has made her into a symbol of anti-wokeness misses the point. She would have done it either way. That is, I imagine that Sweeney regards her crew of weird, horny right-wing fans the same way she probably regards any group of fans: as wallets.

As for me, personally? I like Sydney Sweeney, in a vague way that doesn’t mean I have any interest in her movies. I just have a lot of respect for actors who don’t ever say no to a check (see, Orson Welles). The other side of libidinal contempt is feel-good pity, but there’s nothing pitiable about Sweeney either. Some girls are born connected, some girls are born pretty, and some girls are born smart. Two out of three isn’t so bad. But her cultists are another story. Aside from the obvious—adopting Sydney Sweeney as a cause allows them to post pictures of her in underwear with plausible deniability—what’s going on there?

The “Ballad of Sydney Sweeney” goes like this: “They” wanted to exterminate beautiful busty blondes. “They” put ugly people in ads (sometimes). Now, however, here comes Sydney Sweeney, ending wokeness once and for all. The implication is that at some point in the past ten years, it’s been disadvantageous to be a curvaceous babe. The only sense in which that is true has not changed: Sweeney keeps showing up in ads in bras that don’t fit. But never mind that; thanks to Sweeney, it is now legal to be hot. The hot people have come out from the places where they’d been driven into hiding by the uggo police. Now they frolic freely in the sun. Very touching.

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Does something about this scenario feel a little off to you? Not to sound like I’ve woken up from a coma, in which I have languished since 1992 after hearing Dan Quayle rail against Murphy Brown, but when exactly did making cleavage great again become a conservative cause? Somebody with the combined memory powers of (let’s say) three goldfish can easily imagine an alternate present in which Sweeney and her cleavage were an object of outraged conservative disdain. In this other world, Sweeney is attracting rage-filled press over her horror movie in which (I’m told) she plays a nun who bashes a baby to death. But in this world, these people don’t even get to do that. All rage provides is free marketing.

The people who are slavering over Sweeney will cheerfully confess to motivations that are gross enough. They like her because she’s white, busty, blonde, thin, and blue-eyed, but it seems like the white part might be the most important trait [ed. don't think so.]. To them, Sweeney represents things being right with the world; she’s the hot cheerleader to their collective star quarterback. (Among her many crimes, Taylor Swift’s engagement to a woke-for-football fellow, whose name I can’t recall, surely ranks pretty high on the list.) She’s the human embodiment of A.I.-generated pictures of beautiful white families, on a farm, reading the Bible, captioned, This is what they took from you!

Intriguingly little of this fandom has anything to do with Sydney Sweeney, the actual person, her professional life, or her public statements. When Doreen St. Félix, a writer for the New Yorker, had the temerity to call the American Eagle ad (and Sweeney, by implication) “banal,” the immediate reaction was to try to get her fired by digging up tweets she had written more than ten years ago and accusing her of racism against white people. One wonders whether what really set them off was St. Félix’s pointing out that Sweeney dyes her hair blonde: “Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed.” As both St. Félix’s piece and the subsequent backlash illustrated, the idea that Sydney Sweeney might be marketing herself undoes the illusion of the naturally beautiful girl who attracts attention and fame for doing nothing. Her fans miss all the things Sweeney herself clearly is—a smart businesswoman and an ambitious artist—because in her advertisements they see only a sleepy-looking fantasy object. Do any of these people even know that Sweeney makes movies? It’s an open question. (...)

So these people are deprived not only of the chance to ogle but of control. Neither their approval nor their disapproval can move the needle. The only thing that can is conjuring up the idea of a phantom lib, outraged and disapproving, and hoping some real people will come along to play the part. This type of resentment politics is the only card they really have: Look at how they despise you; make them mad, drink their tears! There’s always a professor somewhere who has said something inflammatory and stupid to back up this assertion.

But who cares? Really. Who cares? At last, to own the libs, we can admit McDonald’s tastes good, have fun at the movies, and post pictures of beautiful women in advertisements. But we already could do all of those things. It’s just that McDonald’s is junk, the movies are junk, and those advertisements exist to sell us junk. (...)

It might sound paradoxical to say that Sweeney’s worst fans adore her because they hate women, but it’s true. (Also, they don’t adore her.) There is always a young blonde to attach yourself to, and an older blonde to throw away. As long as Sweeney does nothing to alienate them, they will continue to hype her up; if one day she endorses a politician they don’t like, then it will be time to start talking about how she’s washed (or whatever slang has replaced “washed” by then). What they really want, besides the Fourth Reich, is a world in which women are either objects or invisible, disposable or essentially private.

by B.D. McClay, The Lamp |  Read more:

Image: American Eagle

[ed. Still high on winning the 'War on Christmas'. Also, have nothing against breasts.]

[ed. Jesus. Who in their right mind would have approved these interview questions? Miles Davis and Harry Reasoner (60 Minutes).]

The Gaslighting Spectacular

There's something breathtakingly audacious about Donald Trump—yet unsurprising—going on Fox & Friends to justify right-wing extremism while blaming "radicals on the left" for political violence.

“The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime,” Trump explained, as if systematic constitutional destruction and threats to militarize American cities represent merely vigorous opposition to petty theft. “They don't want you burning our shopping centers; they don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.” One can only admire the exquisite inversion: the man who posts AI-generated memes threatening military assault on Chicago now positions himself as the voice of peaceful law and order.

Meanwhile, Utah Governor Spencer Cox—clearly suffering from the unfortunate delusion that adults should act like adults during national crises—made an emotional appeal for Americans to “lower the political temperature” and declared social media “a cancer in our society.” The irony of delivering this message while flanked by Kash Patel, whose own social media obsession has turned federal law enforcement into click-bait content creation, apparently escaped no one except Patel himself.

The cognitive dissonance required to maintain Trump's position would be impressive if it weren't so dangerous. The same movement that spent months minimizing January 6th as a minor disturbance, dismissing Charlottesville as isolated extremism, and spreading conspiracy theories about the assassination of Democratic legislators in Minnesota now presents itself as the victim of dangerous left-wing rhetoric following Charlie Kirk's murder.

But here's what makes the gaslighting particularly spectacular: Kirk himself spent years engaging in exactly the kind of rhetoric that Trump now claims is exclusively a left-wing problem. Kirk mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi, promoted conspiracy theories about the Minnesota legislative assassinations being false flag operations, and built his entire brand around the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that treats political opponents as existential enemies requiring destruction rather than fellow citizens requiring persuasion.

The man who made light of an elderly man being attacked with a hammer in his own home is now being martyred as a victim of the very political toxicity he helped create and amplify. The irony would be delicious if it weren't soaked in blood.

Trump's justification of right-wing extremism—"they're radical because they don't want to see crime"—represents the classic authoritarian move of treating systematic constitutional destruction as law enforcement, military deployment against cities as crime prevention, and elimination of democratic constraints as necessary security measures. When your definition of "crime" includes democratic opposition to authoritarian rule, then opposing crime becomes indistinguishable from supporting authoritarianism.

This is how authoritarians eliminate moral categories: by redefining violence as peace, oppression as liberation, and systematic criminality as law enforcement. When Trump claims unlimited authority to execute suspected drug traffickers without trial, that's not crime prevention. It's state-sponsored murder. When he deploys military forces against American cities, he's not fighting crime—he's committing constitutional violations that would make the Founders reach for their muskets.

But the most insidious aspect of the gaslighting is how it weaponizes Kirk's assassination to silence criticism of the very authoritarianism that creates conditions where political violence becomes inevitable. They want his death to function as proof that accurately describing Trump's systematic constitutional destruction somehow causes violence against conservatives.

This is precisely backwards: political violence becomes more likely when democratic alternatives get systematically eliminated, when constitutional constraints disappear, when peaceful opposition gets criminalized through immunity doctrines and weaponized federal agencies. Trump's destruction of democratic institutions doesn't prevent political violence—it makes political violence the only remaining form of political expression for people desperate enough to use it.

The same authoritarian consolidation that threatens democratic governance also creates the instability that makes assassination attempts against political figures from all directions more likely. When you eliminate legal accountability, democratic oversight, and constitutional constraints, you create exactly the kind of chaos where desperate actors turn to violence because systematic alternatives have been destroyed.

Trump's response to Kirk's assassination—justifying right-wing extremism while blaming left-wing rhetoric—reveals the complete moral bankruptcy of the MAGA movement. They want to use Kirk's death to silence their critics while ramping up the very authoritarian behavior that makes more political violence inevitable.

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

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: The 35% Answer:What to do when a Third of Your Country Lives in a Weird Fantasy (TER):]

***

Democracy only works if we can agree on what happened. Not what it means, just what actually happened. We can debate whether a war was justified. We can't debate whether it occurred.

That basic requirement is now broken. (...)

When someone claims Trump reduced the deficit, they're not just wrong about economic policy. They're wrong about reality. He added $7.8 trillion to it. When they claim crime is at record highs, they're denying FBI statistics showing violent crime near its lowest levels since the early 1970s. When they believe a billionaire who gold-plates his toilets actually cares about working families, they're living in a fantasy where a man who stiffed his own contractors for decades is somehow their champion.

This isn't a difference of perspective. It's a rejection of reality itself.

For democracy to function, people need to share basic facts even when they disagree about everything else. We need to agree that unemployment is either 4% or it isn't. That a hurricane either hit Florida or it didn't. That elections are valid when people you don't like win, not just when your team wins.

That agreement no longer exists.

Through a combination of social media algorithms, deliberate propaganda, and partisan news ecosystems, roughly a third of the country has moved to a different dimension. In their dimension, some argue that dragons are real but dinosaurs are fake. Climate change is a hoax but weather control machines exist. The moon landing was staged but JFK Jr. is coming back. And at the center of it all, a man who cheated on all three wives and called American war heroes "losers" is actually a noble patriot who loves his country and is just misunderstood by everyone who's mean to him.

They believe a man who wouldn't rent to Black families genuinely cares about them. A man who mocked a disabled reporter is their champion. A casino owner who bankrupted casinos is their business genius. They donate their last dollars to defend a billionaire who wouldn't let them set foot in Mar-a-Lago. It's like believing in Santa Claus, except Santa Claus at least gives presents to children instead of taking their parents' Social Security.

The comfortable liberal assumption is that this is an information problem. If we just fact-check harder, teach media literacy, or find the right messenger, people will come around to reality.

This is delusional.

These Americans aren't confused. They've chosen a story that feels true over facts that don't. Everyone has access to the same internet. The FBI crime statistics, deficit numbers, vote counts, death rates, Trump's actual business history, his documented lies, it's all right there. But millions have decided that all of this is fake while anonymous posts about microchips in your flu shot and Trump's secret genius reveal hidden truths.

You can't educate people out of beliefs they didn't reason themselves into.

A.I. Is Coming for Culture

In the 1950 book “The Human Use of Human Beings,” the computer scientist Norbert Wiener—the inventor of cybernetics, the study of how machines, bodies, and automated systems control themselves—argued that modern societies were run by means of messages. As these societies grew larger and more complex, he wrote, a greater amount of their affairs would depend upon “messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine.” Artificially intelligent machines can send and respond to messages much faster than we can, and in far greater volume—that’s one source of concern. But another is that, as they communicate in ways that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly. Partly for this reason, Wiener later wrote, “the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

The messages around us are changing, even writing themselves. From a certain angle, they seem to be silencing some of the algorithmically inflected human voices that have sought to influence and control us for the past couple of decades. In my kitchen, I enjoyed the quiet—and was unnerved by it. What will these new voices tell us? And how much space will be left in which we can speak? (...)

Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: a voice in your ear, three friends in a room. There have been a few experiments in fully automated podcasting—for a while, Perplexity published “Discover Daily,” which offered A.I.-generated “dives into tech, science, and culture”—but they’ve tended to be charmless and lacking in intellectual heft. “I take the most pride in finding and generating ideas,” Latif Nasser, a co-host of “Radiolab,” told me. A.I. is verboten in the “Radiolab” offices—using it would be “like crossing a picket line,” Nasser said—but he “will ask A.I., just out of curiosity, like, ‘O.K., pitch me five episodes.’ I’ll see what comes out, and the pitches are garbage.”

What if you furnish A.I. with your own good ideas, though? Perhaps they could be made real, through automated production. Last fall, I added a new podcast, “The Deep Dive,” to my rotation; I generated the episodes myself, using a Google system called NotebookLM. To create an episode, you upload documents into an online repository (a “notebook”) and click a button. Soon, a male-and-female podcasting duo is ready to discuss whatever you’ve uploaded, in convincing podcast voice. NotebookLM is meant to be a research tool, so, on my first try, I uploaded some scientific papers. The hosts’ artificial fascination wasn’t quite capable of eliciting my own. I had more success when I gave the A.I. a few chapters of a memoir I’m writing; it was fun to listen to the hosts’ “insights,” and initially gratifying to hear them respond positively. But I really hit the sweet spot when I tried creating podcasts based on articles I had written a long time ago, and to some extent forgotten. (...)

If A.I. continues to speed or automate creative work, the total volume of cultural “stuff”—podcasts, blog posts, videos, books, songs, articles, animations, films, shows, plays, polemics, online personae, and so on—will increase. But, because A.I. will have peculiar strengths and shortcomings, more won’t necessarily mean more of the same. New forms, or new uses for existing forms, will pull us in directions we don’t anticipate. At home, Nasser told me, he’d found that ChatGPT could quickly draft an engaging short story about his young son’s favorite element, boron, written in the style of Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.” The periodic table x “The BFG” isn’t a collab anyone’s been asking for, but, once we have it, we might find that we want it.

It’s not a real collaboration, of course. When two people collaborate, we hope for a spark as their individualities collide. A.I. has no individuality—and, because its fundamental skill is the detection of patterns, its “collaborations” tend to perpetuate the formulaic aspects of what’s combined. A further challenge is that A.I. lacks artistic agency; it must be told what’s interesting. All this suggests that A.I. culture could submerge human originality in a sea of unmotivated, formulaic art.

And yet automation might also allow for the expression of new visions. “I have a background in independent filmmaking,” Mind Wank, one of the pseudonymous creators of “AI OR DIE,” which bills itself as “the First 100% AI Sketch Comedy Show,” told me. “It was something I did for a long time. Then I stopped.” When A.I. video tools such as Runway appeared, it became possible for him to take unproduced or unproducible ideas and develop them. (...)

Traditional filmmaking, as he sees it, is linear: “You have an idea, then you turn it into a treatment, then you write a script, then you get people and money on board. Then you can finally move from preproduction into production—that’s a whole pain in the ass—and then, nine months later, you try to resurrect whatever scraps of your vision are there in the editing bay.” By contrast, A.I. allows for infinite revision at any point. For a couple of hundred dollars in monthly fees, he said, A.I. tools had unlocked “the sort of creative life I only dreamed of when I was younger. You’re so constrained in the real world, and now you can just create whole new worlds.” The technology put him in mind of “the auteur culture of the sixties and seventies.” (...)

Today’s A.I. video tools reveal themselves in tiny details, producing a recognizable aesthetic. They also work best when creating short clips. But they’re rapidly improving. “I’m waiting for the tools to achieve enough consistency to let us create an entire feature-length film using stable characters,” Wank said. At that point, one could use them to make a completely ordinary drama or rom-com. “We all love filmmaking, love cinema,” he said. “We have movies we want to make, TV shows, advertisements.” (...)

What does this fluidity imply for culture in the age of A.I.? Works of art have particular shapes (three-minute pop songs, three-act plays) and particular moods and tones (comic, tragic, romantic, elegiac). But, when boundaries between forms, moods, and modalities are so readily transgressed, will they prove durable? “Right now, we talk about, Is A.I. good or bad for content creators?,” the Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier told me. (Lanier helped invent virtual reality and now works at Microsoft.) “But it’s possible that the very notion of ‘content’ will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that’s designed to have an effect on the recipient.” Today, there are A.I.-generated songs on Spotify, but at least the songs are credited to (fake) bands. “There could come a point where it’ll just be ‘music,’ ” Lanier said. In this future scenario, when you sign in to an A.I. version of Spotify, “the first thing you hear will be ‘Hey, babe, I’m your Spotify girlfriend. I made a playlist for you. It’s kind of sexy, so don’t listen to it around other people.’ ” This “playlist” would consist of songs that have never been heard before, and might never be heard again. They will have been created, in the moment, just for you, perhaps based on facts about you that the A.I. has observed.

In the longer term, Lanier thought, all sorts of cultural experiences—music, video, reading, gaming, conversation—might flow from a single “A.I. hub.” There would be no artists to pay, and the owners of the hubs would be able to exercise extraordinary influence over their audiences; for these reasons, even people who don’t want to experience culture this way could find the apps they use moving in an A.I.-enabled direction.

Culture is communal. We like being part of a community of appreciators. But “there’s an option here, if computation is cheap enough, for the creation of an illusion of society,” Lanier said. “You would be getting a tailored experience, but your perception would be that it’s shared with a bunch of other people—some of whom might be real biological people, some of whom might be fake.” (I imagined this would be like Joi introducing Gosling’s character to her friends.) To inhabit this “dissociated society cut off from real life,” he went on, “people would have to change. But people do change. We’ve already gotten people used to fake friendships and fake lovers. It’s simple: it’s based on things we want.” If people yearn for something strongly enough, some of them will be willing to accept an inferior substitute. “I don’t want this to occur, and I’m not predicting that it will occur,” Lanier said, grimly. “I think naming all this is a way of increasing the chances that it doesn’t happen.”

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight

Reichstag Moment

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

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

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

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a Story For the Kids

The other day, on Twitter, people (“people,” you know who I mean, the disorganized blob of posting addicts, ahistorical teenagers, and semi-employed journalists and academics who on the right day constitute a plurality of social media discourse) were submitting bids for the worst song of all-time. And it wasn’t long before someone posted a clip of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes performing their 2010 hit “Home” on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

(Twitter embeds don’t work anymore, but it’s around the 5:00 mark below.)

The clip went viral in a way that other suggestions for WOAT did not, even though “Home” isn’t that bad. Really, it’s not. Sentimental and cloying, yes, and the whistle is grating; I did not like the song when it came out, and no false nostalgia descends upon me now. But if I put on my “neutral cultural critic” monocle, strip away all associated memories, and attempt to hear it for what it is, “Home” is basically cut-rate folk-rock. Maudlin, but not ontologically objectionable. Tinker with the production and you can imagine the Carter Family singing it. There are worse songs in this genre, for sure, and way worse songs beyond that. (...)

And that’s not getting into the hundreds of god-awful filler tracks, novelty cash-ins, and self-recorded demos that litter the deepest recesses of Spotify’s library and Instagram Reels, though I grant that when people say “worst song of all-time” they usually refer to “worst song of all-time that listeners have heard of.”

But what made people (again, “people”) respond so strongly to “Home” was the video, in which singers Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos duet face-to-face in that stripped-down and “real” Tiny Desk way. They make affectionate eye contact, and in particular Castrinos is making a face that says “I am sort of kooky but I really love you,” while Ebert’s face says “I am communicating a secret that only we know, which is that I really love you” A love song sung by two people who are in love—this is a formula that listeners usually fall for, and “Home” was sort of popular when it came out. It’s easily the band’s most popular song.

Still, much of what I just described is considered ontologically objectionable in 2025. Partly it’s because of the way they look: Ebert is long-haired, bearded, and shirtless underneath a white suit jacket (Father John Misty as a cult leader), while Castrinos hides very short hair beneath a knitted beanie, and lolls her head around as she sings. I cannot speak to the spiritually liberating experience of performing this song, but a ruder interpretation is that she looks like she’s clearly on drugs, thereby making her behavior insincere. Partly it’s the received understanding that this song is emblematic of the widely mocked “stomp clamp” genre that symbolizes millennial culture of the early ‘10s—music regarded as unilaterally embarrassing because the young have come for the old even though lots of us also hated it at the time!!!!!!! We didn’t all work for BuzzFeed!!!!!!!

Anyway. That “Home” seems “cringe” is possibly its worst sin—get a load of these two 20-something white people drawling at each other about moats and boats and waterfalls when they should be taking a dang shower. Actually, Ebert and Castrinos resemble the type of people who Father John Misty is so good at skewering, the self-serious flower child artiste types who are horrible to talk to at parties.

(A pet peeve: Everything is “cringe” from the right perspective. Even the haughtiest people I know have made—or enjoyed—art filled with emotions and ideas that are, to me, flatly wack. One of the most judgmental snobs I ever knew is now a fitness influencer. Another paints the worst paintings I’ve ever seen in my life. Another writes fiction. Calling something “cringe” is usually a confession of vulnerability, a sign of weakness. Projecting your own aesthetic and emotional insecurities onto other people? That’s cringe, bro.)

Watching all this discourse unfold about a song I never liked inspired a familiar feeling: the need to correct someone on the internet who is wrong. I particularly feel this feeling when the discussion involves a period of time I lived through, and still remember pretty well. It’s obnoxious to be confronted with the crude stereotypes of how people allegedly behaved and thought back then. I understand that history is always being re-remembered by the pedantic, but sometimes you go, “whoa, that’s my history.” (...)

It’s funny that the song is seen as “cringe” now, though, because my first thought watching the clip is that these two people—both thin, and attractive in the face—are obviously having sex with each other. Perhaps today they look like back-to-the-land types, or MAHA believers, or simply homeless—but back then, this look said “we are going to take drugs and fuck,” which is categorically not cringe. (Unless you’re talking too much about your polycule, but I don’t want to open that can of worms.) Sex can be gross and shameful, but two hot people giving in to unbridled desire is one of the most powerful forces alive. It’s why people watch movies, or pornography, and it’s why many were—and are—skeptical of the hipster, this fear that attractive people were fucking. And when you remember, as I said above, that “hipster” was at some point applied to literally everyone under the age of 25 who voted for Barack Obama, it all reduces to a fear that young people are having fun.

Ebert is a particularly funny vector for this accusation of “cringe” because he was formerly the lead singer of Ima Robot (nobody remembers this), a sexed-up dance-punk band from the early ‘00s that the art kids of my high school were obsessed with. The line “No, I want to wait for someone like you” from Ima Robot’s single “Dynomite” is as earnest as anything in “Home,” and it’s sung by the same person: a handsome white man who was probably having a lot of sex with other good-looking people. That the same guy with a different haircut could go from making cocaine music to marijuana music (to paraphrase an old Chuck Klosterman observation) is the stronger criticism about the meaninglessness of this stuff: It was all lifestyle content sold by intellectually bankrupt sex addicts. (...)

Yet it’s easy to imagine Ebert coming by all of this authentically, in that girls and boys alike just want to have fun. This is uncomfortable to think about, the possibility that strangers may just be enjoying their lives. I watch a lot of TikTok videos, which I’m still unpacking, and a frequently encountered affect in the comments is a sort of smug tut-tutting. Like if you’re watching a video where a cat eats a slice of turkey, you’d better believe you’ll read a comment where someone tells a whole sob story about how you’d better make sure the turkey isn’t cooked in any herbs because my sister’s cat ate a piece of rosemary and died. If there’s any opportunity to judge from a removed vantage point, a commenter will take it. More and more I wonder if culture isn’t just cresting toward the inevitable endpoint of art not mattering so much as whether it is produced by someone worth rooting for—someone who doesn’t make other people regret their own personal choices. We’re already there, maybe.

I regret very few things in my life, and I am lucky to feel this way. But I’m certainly aware of the choices I didn’t make. And the truth is, in 2010 I was definitely envious of people like Ebert and Castrinos, so confident and happy in their crunchy earthy hedonistic bubble. I lacked the confidence to be so romantically available, in a way that might allow me to have my own full eye contact love affair with a sprightly and interested person. I was the type to pine, and ruminate, and this is not pining or ruminating music—this is stuff for dropping acid and frolicking in a field. My father had died a few years before, and I’d moved past the immediate shock toward a deeper understanding that I was now different, and sadder, in a way that often prevented me from letting loose. But really, my father’s death only sharpened and clarified feelings that were going to come out at some point. People my age who enjoyed this song—I don’t even think I felt like we were part of the same species.

This is why the clip of “Home” offends, I think, because it’s visual evidence that two young people were maybe in love. Without the video, it sort of sounds like Paul Simon. With the video, it’s everything you’re not, and everything you never were, and everything you will never be, which is a scary thought.

by Jeremy Gordon, Air Gordon |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Shell Game

Team Trump Tries to Rebrand His Law Slashing Medicaid as a ‘Working Families Tax Plan’. 

Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — his law slashing taxes for the wealthy and health care for the poor — is getting a rebrand. After meeting with the president’s 2024 campaign team, Republican lawmakers are now calling their law a “working families tax plan.”

This latest name, of course, is a misnomer: The law’s tax cuts are designed to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and will do little to nothing for poorer Americans. And its provisions slashing Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans, are expected to force millions of people off their coverage.

Polls show the law, which GOP lawmakers named the “Big Beautiful Bill” at Trump’s insistence, isn’t popular with voters. Republicans seem to be ceding that point now, with the new message coming from the White House.

Trump’s top campaign advisers held a workshop Wednesday with House Republican lawmakers and their staffers. According to an invite published by Punchbowl News, Team Trump said it would track attendance at the event, conveying that “at least one staffer per office” was expected to attend.

“I’m told House Republicans are being told by the WH to start calling TRUMP’s Big Beautiful Bill the ‘Working Families Tax Cuts’ Plan in order to message it to voters better ahead of midterms,” a Fox News reporter posted on X during the meeting.

As the event ended, a New York Times reporter noted that Republican lawmakers were now describing Trump’s signature legislation as a “working families tax plan.”

“So we are discussing the Working Families Tax-cuts Plan!” Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) posted on Wednesday. “Some call it the ‘one big beautiful bill’ and the reason is that it is the absolute best tool to give WORKING FAMILIES Tax Cuts!… thank you, President Trump!”

Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) wrote, “The working families tax plan passed this year is a huge win for everyday families across rural Arizona. Radical democrats resent it because they wanted to keep giving Medicaid to illegals.”

Vice President J.D. Vance previewed the big, beautiful rebrand in a recent Fox News appearance, touting the administration’s “incredible working families tax cuts.” In an interview with USA Today, Vance called the bill “the biggest working families tax cut in a generation.”

In truth, Trump’s second tax law is designed to give a big hand up to America’s wealthiest, not working families — which might explain the messaging issue.

by Andrew Perez, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. They must think voters are stupid or something. But... not so fast:]

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). (...)

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications.

by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani
[ed. Zuckerberg should have his own chapter in the Book of Liars (a notable achievement, given the competition). See also: These People Are Weird (WWL). But there's also some good news: First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion (ArsT):]

"Today, Anthropic likely breathes a sigh of relief to avoid the costs of extended litigation and potentially paying more for pirating books. However, the rest of the AI industry is likely horrified by the settlement, which advocates had suggested could set an alarming precedent that could financially ruin emerging AI companies like Anthropic."