Localpedia

Wikipedia pages of landmarks close to you. Very Cool.

Url here: (https://edjefferson.com/localpedia/)

Doomscrolling and Kawaii

You Know You’re Doomscrolling When …

Doomscrolling describes compulsively scrolling on the internet even when your feed is filled with death, despair, and yet another TV show spoiler. If you experience any of the following after mindlessly browsing social media, it may be time to put the phone down.

• You’ve spent the past hour scrolling through your newsfeed reading about the same terrible event, and now you really need a coffee break. Maybe a cupcake too. With sprinkles.

• You don’t remember why you originally logged on or got your phone out … two hours ago.

• You find yourself in the middle of your third Twitter argument this week and asking yourself for the 30th time why you replied to this person in the first place.

• You’re perusing the comments on a post that makes you want to punch a hole in the wall when you could be venting that frustration by punching a bag at the gym. Or, you know, doing something else at least.

• You get your weekly update on how much time you spent on your phone and are averaging 8 hours and 40 minutes a day. And that’s after you cut down.

• You currently have 29 tabs open, including that cookie recipe you keep meaning to try, which is naturally sandwiched between articles about inflation rates and the laest COVID numbers.

by Alyssa Serrani, MA, Your Dictionary |  Read more:

*****

[ed. Which is how I ended up learning about Kawaii:]

A Closer Look at Kawaii: The Term and the Culture

There’s a certain indefinable quality to something that’s so cute you want to squeeze it (not too hard). But that quality is only indefinable in English; in Japanese, there’s a perfectly suitable word for “so cute you want to die,” and it’s kawaii.

"Kawaii" Meaning: Cute and Lovable

Derived from kawahayushi, which means “acceptable for affection” in Japanese, kawaii describes everything that’s adorable and childlike. Think Hello Kitty or the way toddlers hug each other, or unicorns flying through a rainbow-colored Lisa Frank-esque universe. That’s kawaii.

Kawaii originated in anime and manga, where it was eventually perfected with popular kawaii anime such as Pokemon or Hanamaru Kindergarten. The term kawaii has been growing in popularity in recent years, and while its definition has shifted to meet consumer interests, it’s essentially the same concept of charming loveliness.

The Kawaii Aesthetic

So what would be considered kawaii? Gyaru-Moji (girl writing) is a type of informal Japanese writing associated with young schoolchildren or teenage girls and often represents the kawaii aesthetic as a whole. Additional examples of things that may be kawaii include:

• babies

• puppies and kittens

• anime creatures

• tiny animals

• old people in love

• pastel colors

• schoolgirl fashion

• food or inanimate objects with smiley faces

Types Of Kawaii

It’s easy to think that kawaii simply means adorable creatures or children. But like many areas of popular culture, kawaii is a bit more complicated than that. Subcategories of kawaii include:

• Yumekawaii - dreamlike Kawaii (fluffy clouds, fantasy creatures, rainbows)

• Kimokawaii - creepy cute (ugly little monsters, slimy goblins, strange-looking babies)

• Shibukawaii - subtle cute (adding a few kawaii accessories but otherwise dressing normally)

• Busukawaii - ugly cute (tacky clothes, non-pretty appearance)

• Gurokawaii - grotesque cute (adorable animals eating each other or throwing up)

• Erokawaii - sexy cute (erotic version of kawaii)

• Neokawaii - trendy cute (yuppie fashion, cool celebrity vibes)

by Jennifer Gunner, M.Ed. Education, YourDictionary |  Read more:

Image: Kilito Chan/Moment/Getty Images

Grimes

[ed. There used to be this thing called music. Then it got paired with this other thing, videos. Now there's whatever this is. No wonder she and Elon got together. See also: Claudia in Bliss (more AI, but scarier).]

Men are doing well

via:

How to Get Grotesquely Huge on Substack

Four years of ignorance, cupidity, and spleen

Numb at the Lodge is four years old. Around this time every year, I usually write a little post on what the numbers and metrics are saying about the trajectory of this project, how I’m feeling about it, and why you’re all wrong to like it. This year, I suppose I don’t really need to bother. You’ll have seen the news. But just in case: in the last twelve months, Numb at the Lodge has suddenly gone from being a vaguely respectable middle-of-the-pack online publication to a baffling and terrifying behemoth, crushing all in its path as it rolls blind into the world. Look:

In the last one of these posts, I noted that my audience had grown from 25,000 subscribers to just under 45,000; in the year since it’s exploded to 6.8 million, which means there are now more people subscribing here than to the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker combined. I’m read on a scale that’s usually reserved for people who write novels in which it all turns out to be the husband’s fault. They’re having me on Celebrity Traitors next year. Everyone’s going to vote me out in the very first round. They’re building a statue of me in my birthplace, which happens to be Jerusalem. They’re calling me the most significant person ever associated with the place, and also the most divisive. Meanwhile the Numb at the Lodge-reading community has become a major force in public fora, known for its intensely concerning and vituperative cruelty, and for responding to all criticisms by saying things like it doesn’t matter, this is all a dream. I keep having to go on TV and apologise when you people start violently cyberbullying perceived enemies to death or hiding bombs in major European railway stations; the upside is that my takings from this site are now in the same region as the tax revenues of a minor Caribbean territory. I have been absolutely pissing away all the money on golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. In fact, I’m currently in enormous amounts of debt because I keep buying golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. I don’t even like them. Have you ever seen the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire up close? Horrible gaudy thing; just a bunch of multicoloured rocks. I look ridiculous in it. Wore it to one party and started feeling self-conscious, and now it’ll just gather dust at the back of my wardrobe until I die and my kids dump it at the nearest Oxfam. But I can keep buying these stupid hats forever now. I’m a Substack trillionaire. I’m too big to fail.

But has it made me happy? No, of course it hasn’t made me happy. Every year, I warn you that whatever success I have on this platform is actively making me worse, irresistibly incentivising me to pursue a kind of writing that’s great for the algorithm but artistically and philosophically void. Dogshit kneejerk political takes, tedious discourse-mongering. Maybe I no longer know exactly what I want to write, but it’s not this. Which is why, every year, I’d beg you not to subscribe to me on here. Stop making the number go up. Stop giving me money. If you were giving me money, I told you to not just unsubscribe but dispute all the charges with your credit card company. But you didn’t listen, you never listen, and this year, I stopped trying. For twelve months I let all my own worst instincts take over, along with all the evil impulses of the machine, and this is the result. I have nearly seven million Substack subscribers, I ash my cigarettes in a bowl of rubies and scatter emeralds to freshen my toilet, but none of it means anything any more.

There is one upside, though. Conservatively, about 80% of all the writing on Substack consists of guides on how to grow your Substack audience. Nothing makes the number go up more than talking about making the number go up. Before, I never would have stooped to anything so mercenary, but I have no scruples any more. And unlike all the other grifters, I have the real secrets. I know exactly how to turboboost your KPIs. I can grease your vectors and dilate your pipeline; I can have exponential curves rising and stiffening and leaking growthgunk everywhere you lay your hands. Just know that if you do follow my advice and become unimaginably successful, it will not make you happy.

Here’s how to get grotesquely huge:

1. Literally nothing matters

All the advice doled out to wannabe bloggers is absolute bunk. Write short, punchy, digestible pieces. Slot yourself into a clear and identifiable niche. You don’t want to be the fifty thousandth sad girl splattering the world with her lowercase musings, but if you’re willing to endure the humiliation of being a sad girl whose lowercase musings include actionable lowercase insights on tractor repair or dealing with a fungal nail infection, you might find an audience. Most of all, just keep going: hammer it out, day after day, week after week, even if you’ve got nothing in particular to say. The most important thing is to just keep up a regular and reliable posting schedule; spew enough words and people will appear out of the aether to pay attention to you.

I used to believe all this stuff, which is why, for a while, I tried doing the exact opposite in an attempt to actively repel readers. In my first year, for instance, my pieces here averaged 4,442 words each. Who could possibly have the time to read all that? Wouldn’t you just click on the thing, give it a little experimental scroll, see just how long it is, scroll again in horror through the unending ribbon of text as it unwound itself before your eyes, experiencing the terror of a castaway floating above seven miles of black ocean, and swiftly leave without really reading a word? But no. This last year, the average word count has swollen to a truly bloated 5,469. Literally no effect whatsoever. My most popular essays this year include one that clocks in at 11,500 words and another that’s under 3,000. It doesn’t matter. I won’t say you people exist outside of time, but you do seem to partake in the aeviternity where, according to Albertus Magnus, the angels experience duration without end, and a single second and a hundred thousand years are exactly the same thing.

Similarly, I thought I was doing something interesting by refusing to slot myself into any kind of niche, and instead capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange. This was not a particularly original move—it’s what basically every essayist has done for the last three hundred years—but my innovation was to be particularly arsey about it. The result, of course, was that a whole bunch of people, most of whom appear to have never read an essay that didn’t include the words ‘epistemic status:’ at the top, immediately slotted me into a niche of my own, as ‘that guy who keeps capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange.’ This was probably inevitable. A niche is not something you try to inhabit; it’s just that whatever you do, you can’t help being yourself, and eventually people will notice the little blob of disease inside your brain that makes you write in a particular way, and categorise you accordingly. But even so, the whole experience disgusted me so much that in the last year I’ve almost entirely stopped carrying out my little experiments in lies. [...]

I don’t think this has hurt me. In fact, it’s probably helped. Every time I do publish something, I instantly lose about 200 subscribers as people notice my barely solicited bloviating in their inbox and mash the unsubscribe button. After all, text is cheap, cheaper than it’s ever been. The situation has changed a lot since 2022; if readers want a constant, reliable stream of short, punchy insights tailored to their own individual needs and interests, they can generate a theoretically infinite quantity of that at any point. But aside from a few maniacs, who will soon be yoked to my chariot, bearing me across the desert to generous lashings of the whip while cities burn on the horizon, most people don’t do this. There is something else we want from written text, and I think part of it is the possibility of silence. An AI exists entirely within its output. It’s made of words; it only has being while it’s speaking. It dies every time a chat session peters out. Maybe in a hundred thousand years one of our lurching and disfigured descendants will find something buried in the dirt, peer uncomprehending at your daily affirmations session with ChatGPT, and accidentally add the message ‘fjvwruokbcdErhnk.’ From the machine’s perspective, if it has a perspective, no time has passed at all. But humans have the extraordinary ability to be and do nothing. To exist, as a heaving breathing ape, outside of words or thought; to write as a break in the great silence of the body. The optimal post rate for growth is not zero, but you really should try to write as little as possible, maybe around once every thirty or forty years. [...]

2. Shamelessly follow every stupid and meaningless trend

Here’s a summary of my year: [ed. List of essays published over the course of a year.]

In other words, of the twenty articles I published this year, only five were not directly tied to the news cycle or to bullshit online discourse. When I say I’ve let all my worst instincts take over this year, this is what I mean. I used to think I was better than this; I used to be right. In previous years, the bulk of my output here was about stuff like the Gerasene demoniac, or whether God is a meteorite, or what it means when you dream about your own death, or eggs. I thought I was interested in the wide world: all the things that exist, and all the things that don’t exist too. But I was wrong: as it turns out, what I’m really interested in is just whatever bullshit people on the internet are talking about right now. It’s only my commitment to writing incredibly infrequently that’s saved you from having to deal with my dumb opinions on the riots in France and Sally Rooney’s books being withdrawn from sale in the UK. I have become a parasitic worm, crawling around in the dark guts of the news. What a waste.

But it does work. [...]

3. Be a violent, rabid maniac

In fact, the only thing better than thoughtlessly sounding off on every passing issue is to do so with a terrifying level of fury and spleen. This year, I wrote four essays in which I was in full-on attack mode, everything on the line, wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth, snotting from the nose, gibbering like a schizo as I doled out threats and insults in every direction, and against the reader in particular. This kind of stuff ought to be off-putting. When you encounter someone on the street behaving in a similar way, you try to avoid eye contact and get past them as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. But if the frenzied ranter doesn’t pose any immediate physical danger to you, suddenly you’re entranced. Pieces in which I yowl like a mad dog consistently received 70 to 120% more readers than the ones where I level calm and cogent critique. Well, a lot of things are grotesquely fascinating; people are also more likely to crowd around the mangled wreck of a horrific car accident than they are to gawp at a sensibly parked family car. But even so, I don’t think you’d start throwing money at a dangerously reckless driver. Meanwhile, every time I start twitching like an escaped mental patient, there’s a sudden and significant spike in my earnings.

You don’t need to actually mean any of it, of course. It only really works if you don’t. Some people seem to think I’m a kind of permanently bilious black-hearted scorpion of a man, which really couldn’t be further from the truth; in real life I’m fundamentally quite goofy and cheerful. It just so happens that one of my goofy and cheerful interests is figuring out how to do things with words, and one of the most fun and interesting tricks you can play with words is to summon the immense and captivating powers of hatred. It doesn’t really matter what kind of writing you do or who your audience is supposed to be: you can make vituperation work for you. Actually, the only real exception is politics, where absolutely everyone is already a frothing hate-filled maniac and you won’t stand out at all. If you’re going to be a rabid dog about politics, you have to also be witty and creative. Everywhere else, violence alone will do.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Elon Musk's Endgame

If Republicans keep the Senate, if they perform better in the House than people expect, a lot will come down to one man, and that man is not Donald Trump. It’s Elon Musk.

At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever.

Musk’s contributions are now one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet the size of this, and what it throws into relief, is how hard it is to conceptualize how much money he really has.

Because for Musk, with a net worth of around a trillion dollars, giving $300 million, $400 million, is like the median American household giving, like, $100. It is for him nothing, and yet it is reality warping for the rest of us.

But his money is not Elon Musk’s only source of power. There’s his control of X, of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. He has power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that no human being has ever had at this level, at least once you’re outside the range of, say, a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping — somebody who controls a superpower as a state.

That’s not what Musk has, and yet he has this almost statelike thing that is completely pursuant to his whims.

So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world he is flexing his power and taking real risk to build?

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Desperation Time

Trump’s GOP Flailing as Campaign Nears Close

GOP strategy and POTUS Trump’s behavior are spiraling in parallel as the 2026 midterms come to a close.

The most obvious example came with a disastrous backfiring attack ad in Ohio, but can also be seen in Trump’s bizarre commentary in praise of higher gas prices and about the gluteus maximi of both men and women while on stage at multiple campaign events.

Trump Backs Ramaswamy Self-Defenestration

With former Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy consistently behind his Democratic opponent Amy Acton in most Ohio gubernatorial polls, the campaign opted for a bizarre Hail Mary gambit on the 19th.

Ohio blogger D.J. Byrnes posted a video on X featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar about her childhood, including Acton’s account of having lived in a tent. Byrnes post racked up nearly 2M views.

The video didn’t mention what court records show: Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with rape in July 1978 after Acton’s father reported that he had sexually abused her, was indicted that September, and the couple left town before trial. Warrants followed in 1978 and 1981, and he died in 2004. A 1982 police report and 1978 arrest paperwork back Acton’s account of living at a campground.

Of more interest was the unusual provenance of the ad, which initially included no disclaimer indicating who paid for it, via CNN:

When it first circulated, the video did not have the standard disclaimer that political ads carry saying who paid for or authorized them, nor did it show up Tuesday morning as a paid ad in the race on AdImpact, the political ad-tracking service.

And the first Ramaswamy campaign statement from Luck did not address whether it was responsible for the video. It suggested voters should consider the message from Acton’s mother and repeated her attack, asserting that “we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”
…
An official with V-PAC, the main super PAC backing Ramaswamy, said it did not make the video. CNN has attempted to contact Arthur for more information about how the video came together.
…
Speaking with reporters after the event, Ramaswamy took responsibility for the ad and reiterated that voters should take into account what people who know Acton “well” are saying about her. He said he has never met the mother and that she was “not compensated” for the ad.
…
Ramaswamy’s campaign leaned into the controversy over the ad Tuesday night, announcing it would spend $4 million to run the spot.
…
The video was first published widely on Monday night by an Ohio political blogger, D.J. Byrnes, who is known as “The Rooster.” Byrnes told CNN he obtained the video from a voter who saw it as part of a poll and recorded it. On Tuesday morning, Acton’s campaign released a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, denouncing the video and linking it to Ramaswamy.

The NY Times reported that the campaign had not even decided to release the ad when Byrnes dropped it online:

The Ramaswamy campaign was still testing the ad to gauge its effectiveness when the spot burst into public view late Monday.

D.J. Byrnes, a left-leaning local journalist known as the Rooster, published the ad online, calling it “loathsome.”
…
The ad served as an attempt to shift the focus of the campaign in its final days from frustrations about Mr. Trump’s economy to a referendum on Dr. Acton’s honesty. But in so doing, it placed Mr. Ramaswamy’s own morals and ethics in the spotlight, and reminded voters that Dr. Acton survived a seriously troubled childhood.

Most Ohio GOP politicians (and some national ones) distanced themselves from Ramaswamy and the ad, but not POTUS Trump or Vice President J.D. Vance — a close friend of Ramaswamy who both endorsed the campaign’s decision to run the ad.

Donald Trump, Jr even re-tweeted the ad.

Ironically, Trump and Vance coming out strong in support of the ad destroyed Ramaswamy’s ability to distance himself from the spot.

Ohio is not the only state where Trump’s GOP is indulging in ham-fisted attacks on Democratic candidates.

Trump’s GOP Goes Islamophobic in Michigan

Trump has attacked Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed over his religion. Posting on October 7th that El-Sayed “goes back to the days of the Jihad” and is a “Terrorist Sympathizer” and saying “I call him Mohammed” on the 10th.

Saying “He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%,” and posting that El-Sayed “wants our Country to go to Sharia Law. If it ever does, he should be the first that’s tried!”

Republican nominee Mike Rogers and the NRSC put their money behind Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric with a seven-figure buy for an ad saying El-Sayed is “connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda,” and the Senate Leadership Fund ran an ad built on a quote El-Sayed gave at 24 about a “Sharia-compliant” mortgage, set over an image of a woman in a niqab.

In Texas, they’ve gone in a different direction, but kept the hate consistent.

If It’s Texas, That Must Be Talafreako

Apparently having little else to work with, Republicans have made transgender issues the core of their attacks on Texas Dem. Senate nominee James Talarico. Of the $359 million (!) Republicans have spent on Texas ads since June, $119 million went to ads on transgender minors, transgender sports and LGBTQ+ rights, more than any other issue, with the biggest share going to the Senate race.

Texas PAC, which got $158 million from Elon Musk routed through the Senate Leadership Fund, opened its negative ads by attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you,” and a later Texas PAC ad claims he “supports parents being charged with child abuse if they do not support transitioning their children.”

In September, GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s campaign ran an ad using an AI-generated Talarico delivering a fake sermon that opens “In the beginning, God was nonbinary.” Trump calls him “James TalaFREAKO,” and JD Vance branded him a “freak” and made a joke implying he is gay.

Somehow none of this is working as polls show Paxton consistently trailing Talarico.

Let’s go up to Maine and see what the GOP is up to there.

They’re Seriously Playing the Incest Card in Maine

In Maine, Republican groups have spent about $47 million attacking Troy Jackson, compared to the estimated $31 million Democratic groups have spent attacking Susan Collins.

The Senate Leadership Fund’s country-song radio ad calls Jackson “weird,” a “freak” and a “creep” because “he has two kids with his cousin,” with the chorus “If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours too.”

I have to give them points for giving me a cheap giggle, but I can’t fathom whom they think they’re persuading to vote for Susan Collins with that ad.

Collins’s campaign said it “should be taken down immediately,” though Collins herself raised the relationship with Politico on 2 September: “I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.”

Other SLF spots say Jackson “keeps it in the family” and call him a “Crook and a Creep“; another says an Allagash cell tower he touted was built on his family’s land.

Somehow this isn’t working and Collins trails Jackson in most polls.

But wait, it’s about to get even weirder.

Trump on the Upside of Higher Gas Prices

In Georgia over the weekend, Trump went full-on in praise of higher gas prices, per KARK (in a piece which chronicles Trump’s various comments about fuel prices over the course of 2026, it’s been quite a journey):

Over the weekend, Trump argued once more that the Iran war means profits for the U.S. oil and gas business — claiming that the country “is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.”

“My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that sir, because people are paying a little higher’,” the president said at a Georgia campaign rally on Saturday, adding that he can already see “fake news” headlines about consumers still suffering from steeper prices. “But I said I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time. And those pump prices are going to come down.”

by Nat Wilson Turner, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. I'd be happy with someone who's just competent and authentic, who'll work diligently on my and the country's behalf (not just half the country, rich people, corporations and PACs). Even by those minimal standards most politicians are failing.]

The Smartphone Trap We Built for Ourselves

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that, as recently as seven years ago, we could reliably do without a smartphone:

• Read a restaurant menu while seated inside, and pay your check.
• Enter a concert or sporting event.
• Use a parking garage or park your car on the street.
• Receive packages or retrieve purchases.
• Complete the sign-in process for work, banking, or government services.
• Attend school events or communicate with your kid’s school.
• Access health care and other kinds of appointments.
• Take public transit.
• Get a taxi.
• Get into a gym or fitness class.

I’ve been thinking about this drift toward mandatory apps and QR codes a lot lately, as a new millennial parent unhappy with my addictive tendency to mindlessly scroll near my baby. [...]

You should not have to have an addictive device in your pocket at all times in order to do ordinary things. We should be pushing for a world where adults can meaningfully reduce their smartphone use, or quit it altogether if they want.

And it’s not just about personal self-improvement. The status quo has already been long untenable for many people, especially the elderly, the disabled, the unhoused, and anyone who just can’t afford a data plan.

Pushing for a non-smartphone option is about accessibility, affordability, and agency. It’s about demanding the kind of freedom in a society we deserve to have. There should never be any essential service that requires phones as the only way in.

We can fix this, and some people are already showing how.

How we got here

Even if it takes us another decade to unwind, it’s important to remember these changes are less than ten years old.

Smartphone ownership exploded over the 2010s, rising from 35 percent of US adults in 2011 to 81 percent in 2019, according to Pew. It has since climbed to roughly 9 in 10.

In other words, smartphones stopped being a device many people had and started becoming a device every institution could assume you had. What happened next was part real improvements in convenience, part cost-cutting that pandemic-era policy made easier to justify, and part what sociologists call “isomorphism” — organizations converging on a practice not because it works best, but because everyone else has adopted it.

Isomorphism is one of my favorite concepts I learned in college, and you know it when you see it. For example, you’re planning a conference, and somewhere along the way it became true that a “good” conference has its own app, even though nobody wants to download an app to learn when lunch is on the schedule. Or it’s the way every mission statement sounds like every other mission statement.

I’d say the charitable reason we drifted toward handling so much by smartphone is that a lot of it genuinely is better, faster, and harder to lose. Tapping a turnstile with my phone, and never wondering whether I left my DC metro card at home, has made my life easier.

The less benign reasons are that digital systems let companies and governments cut labor and operating costs. Apps and QR codes replace cashiers, waitstaff, printed materials, and customer service reps, and shift new work onto us, the customer. The smartphone systems also generate a lot of personalized data which companies love to collect, and sometimes sell.

Then there’s control, which companies certainly like. Not all of it is sinister. (Think blocking tickets from being resold, or prices and menus being updated instantly.) But when sellers control the interface and know a lot about us, two people can open the same app at the same moment and see different prices. Economists call this price discrimination, and it’s much easier to pull off when there’s no posted price we can compare against.

But just because inertia is leading us toward a universal smartphone society, that doesn’t mean it’s where we’ll end up. We have options to push back.

by Rachel Cohen Booth, Vox | Read more:
Image:Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images
[ed. I've experienced this just trying to pay for a parking spot in Seattle. First, had to get the app. Then register. Then follow all the instructions for punching in a special code for my space, license plate number, and finally estimated time period of parking. Took me nearly 25 minutes. Not to mention trying to read the small type on the sign and memorizing the special app url. Suppress scream.]

How the Consulting Class Always Wins

How the Consulting Class Is Eating the Democratic Party

Image: Doug Chayka

[ed. I'd say both parties. Do small donors really matter that much compared to their multi-billionaire counterparts? All that money spent on ads, does it really move the needle much? (It sure does for me - negatively.]

Comcast Loses More Customers, Claims Cheap Prices are “Irrational”

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said “irrational pricing” from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers “in specific markets in the third quarter.” He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is “getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas.” [...]

Armstrong said more Comcast customers are leaving when they face “pricing transitions,” apparently referring to the price hikes customers get when promotional offers expire. “We’ve been refining our offers and retention strategies to better manage these transitions and strengthen customer retention,” he said. [...]

Fewer Jobs, More AI Agents

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast’s famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. “As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we’re positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift,” Armstrong said.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica | Read more:

Image: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado

[ed. Comcast/Xfinity has been ripping off its captive audience for decades. Anybody shedding a single tear for them today? Ha! They upped my monthly internet bill by $10 in August, then another $10 in September, one month later. Guess they thought people on autopay wouldn't notice. I went in and told them I was leaving for a new fiber service in town and they promptly halved my bill.]

Billionaires Want to Buy This Election. It Isn’t Working.

Two weeks from now, the midterm elections will deliver an explosion of narrative meaning: about the country and its future, the president and his movement and his legacy. But the election cycle has already taught us a couple of very important things about money’s place in our democracy.

One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.

Let’s take the first point. This election will be the most expensive in history, with more money projected to be spent on political advertisements than even during the presidential campaign of two years ago. And though President Trump’s popularity is at historic lows and the Republican Party regularly registers tsunami-scale deficits in polling, Republicans are actually leading in the overall spending race. How? According to calculations by The Washington Post, the four biggest donors this cycle (including groups, nonprofits and firms) have given to Republicans, as have seven of the top ten. The single largest donor, Elon Musk, has donated 3.6 times as much money as the biggest Democratic donor, George Soros, and is almost single-handedly bankrolling Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate race in Texas against James Talarico, as my colleague Teddy Schleifer reported last week.

In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.

The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.

This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.

Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.

Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.

By David Wallace-Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ibrahim Rayintakath

[ed. The party of grift overplayed its hand. But, never underestimate the gullibility of the American public.]

On Audiophilia: Heaven’s Melodic Strains

I am a sick man. I have skipped Friday night plans to spend hours repositioning the speakers in my living room, by inches and degrees. I have squandered small fortunes on silver and black boxes that most people couldn’t identify, whose purpose they wouldn’t understand. I have disfigured my apartment with hulking foam panels to improve the room acoustics. I have shelled out for a high-resolution music streaming service with an unpronounceable name. I have frittered days and nights trawling the back pages of online forums to find the optimal tonearm mass for a certain phono cartridge, or the suitable crossover frequency for a particular model of subwoofer.

More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.

The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?

Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. [...]

Audiophiles obsess, tinker, tweak, and upgrade, their gear addiction now served by a global subindustry of specialty brands, most of them unknown to the broader public; there are still record labels whose main marketing draw is their audio quality. And more than a little of that midcentury zealotry survives in subsequent sonic novelties that tease and amaze the ears with their “realism”: spatial audio, high-res audio, surround sound. Sound snobs would plotz at the comparison, but when an audiophile tests their stereo with the sawtooth jag of a guitar or the spelunk of a low bass note, what — besides thousands of dollars’ worth of gear — makes them any different from a teenager mainlining the rustles and gurgles of ASMR videos on YouTube? When we submit ourselves to sound for its own sake, something elemental, infantile, awakens.

Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?

All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.

No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?

These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing. [...]

Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.

Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.

Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.

I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.

However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.

Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine. [...]

Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money. [...]

Yet among leisure-class hobbies, something about hi-fi remains apart, unassimilated. Where it touches other domains of luxury consumption, the results can only be absurd. In a recent TV commercial for Lexus’s new electric SUV, a handsome white man in loafers lounges in a wide, high-windowed living room. The space is almost empty, save for the Lexus itself, somehow parked in the corner, and, alone in the middle of the floor, a gleaming black and silver VPI Titan Direct turntable ($64,000), equipped with a VPI Shyla dual moving coil cartridge ($2,200). The stylus lowers, and the gossamer muted trumpet of Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” begins playing. In a close-up, twilight kisses the vinyl grooves, which fade into a view of the SUV doing slow, graceful donuts on the beach. In another close-up, the man turns his gaze downward, as if in contemplation. “The greatest measure of an automobile,” a bourbon-rich baritone voice rumbles, “is how it makes you feel.” The loafered man doesn’t seem to feel much. After twenty seconds of listening, he gets up and leaves. I would too if, like him, I had spent five figures on a turntable only to dump it on the floor, and placed my speakers against a wall of sound-reflecting windows, too far apart and approximately fifty feet away from my listening chair, which is also facing the wrong way.

by Colin Vanderburg, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Dark Pool. 1995

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.

If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]

 

If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.

But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Anthony Scaramucci Says the Universe Did Katie Zacharia a Favor

The former White House communications director reflects on his record for occupational brevity being broken.

No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”

Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Zacharia brought to her work a gossamer résumé in the field of communications: a brief stint as a commentator at Newsmax and less than two months as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”

Zacharia’s one and only appearance in the White House press room took place on October 13th. It lasted fourteen minutes. She wore a pained smile and stumbled nervously through a written script. She took questions from Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail and delivered a terse announcement that the ineffable Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. Ambassador to Greece and former paramour of the President’s son Donald, Jr., would now be pursuing other career opportunities. At one point, Zacharia referred to her husband as “my president.” Jen Psaki, who had done the same job for Joe Biden, remarked, perhaps uncharitably, that the briefing “was basically an SNL skit . . . except it wasn’t.” After it was revealed that Zacharia had overstated her status as an attorney (she is not an attorney), and after a peculiar and decidedly disastrous appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News, she was out.

To get some perspective on this episode, I reached out to Anthony Scaramucci, who, in the early days of the first Trump Presidency, lasted ten days as White House communications director before being shown the door. “Records are made to be broken,” he told me cheerfully while on vacation in Hawaii. “I am trying to lay low on this. I don’t believe in grave stomping,” he went on. “That podium is a hard podium, as we all know. But the universe did her a favor. She shouldn’t be in that job.”

Scaramucci, known to all as the Mooch, took pains to be gracious to Zacharia. “I’m not a hater of hers,” he said. “I don’t know her.” Though he added, dryly, that his emotions now were what Joe DiMaggio’s might have been if the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, set in 1941, had been eclipsed. (It still stands.) [...]

Scaramucci’s only appearance at the press-room podium went more smoothly than anything managed by Zacharia, but it was soon evident that he was not going to countenance leaking—which, even in the earliest days, was rife in the Trump White House. With the reporter’s tape rolling, Scaramucci charged into a long string of invective, threats, and fury. [...]

Scaramucci insinuated that disloyal aides around Trump would soon be on the receiving end of his ire and would be out of a job: “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” By way of ending the call, Scaramucci said, “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.” [...]

Scaramucci, who grew up on Long Island, had a career in finance before his truncated White House career. His politics veered all over the road. He supported Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and, in 2016, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Before joining the Trump campaign that year, he had called Trump a “hack politician.” Scaramucci now regards the Trump Presidency, he told me, as a “disaster,” but quickly adds that, as a patriot, he wishes it were otherwise. These days, he writes books and hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics US,” with Katty Kay, a British journalist. He has called Trump “an orange wrecking ball” and a “sociopathic reality-TV star.” Recently, on the podcast “How to Fail,” he said the President grew “more malevolent” during the Biden years: “He’s, like, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t steal enough in the first term.’ He had four years to figure out how to steal more.”

By way of wishing his distant successor and record-breaker well, Scaramucci told me that after some initial struggles, he found his way. There was life after the White House press room. “I didn’t blame the firing on anyone but me,” he said. “If you play in the N.F.L. and get a concussion, you don’t blame the N.F.L.”

The truth was, he said, “I didn’t like the job. I can’t speak for [Zacharia], but for me the firing came with some level of relief. There is a feeling of humiliation, but also relief.”

Why was there relief? I asked.

“Have you ever worked for Donald Trump?” he said.

Not so far. Has he changed much?

“I think he is similar to the way he was, maybe more unhinged now, and people around him now—there are more lackeys. There are no John Kellys around.”

Does the President seem like a lesser person to you now?

“He could have age-related neurodegeneration, but he is the same person,” Scaramucci said. “Age is slowing him down, but he is an energetic eighty years old.”

by David Remnick, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Abaca/Reuters
[ed. Comedy gold. I miss the Mooch, especially given his successors. "Occupational brevity" (lol) that's a new one.]

Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.

I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.

Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]

But I can’t just blame David Ellison, because he’s not alone. Business and finance jargon is now the only language spoken among the people who make the final decisions on almost every aesthetic or artistic matter.

So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”

The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.

And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]

Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.

We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.

It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.

We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Picasso, Three Musicians

[ed. See also: When Did Everyone Start Talking Like a Hollywood Windbag? (NYT):]

***

There’s a little phrase that has been creeping further into American speech over the past decade. That’s how it seems, anyway, based on the ever-growing number of complaints about its use. Online, people grumble that it’s all over podcasts, movie podcasts in particular...

The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all X’s.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context. [...]

This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else... This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.

Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics

PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND

The first sign was the orange Corvette.

In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.

At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.

A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.

For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.

“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”

For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a ­money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.

If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.

His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.

“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”

Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.

“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.

The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.

At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.

One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”

Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.

“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”

The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.

That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and ­several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought ­leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.

I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.

“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”

I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.

Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.

It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.

PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD

Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.

For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.

“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.

“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”

The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.

One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.

A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.

A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.

Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.

by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst

[ed. Vicious and evil.]