Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—once famous for building aircraft carriers, now better known for creative studios—a company called Crye Precision is one of the biggest tenants. Its footprint in the building is 100,000 square feet. Inside its gigantic warehouse space, rows of whirring sewing machines are stitching together garments made out of the most popular, renowned, and confusing textile of our time: MultiCam.

MultiCam is so ubiquitous that you can buy a camping chair or baby carrier in the camouflage pattern. Arc’teryx and Outdoor Research make jackets in MultiCam. Perhaps most importantly, you may see this iteration of camo on police officers, SWAT teams, ICE agents, or your average January 6 rioter.

For its influence, the pattern has earned a place in MoMA’s permanent collection, a thrill to the Cooper Union art students who created it. “They gave us a lifetime membership, which is cool,” says Gregg Thompson, who was still in graduate school in 1999 when a Cooper Union alumnus, Caleb Crye, reached out to him about a collaboration. “We always had an interest in all things military,” says Thompson. “It’s boy stuff—monster trucks and that kind of thing.”

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in. “When guys deploy, they’re wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor,” Thompson explains. What if, they thought, there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere? It could be a “75 percent solution to environments in general,” Thompson says.

There are a few ways to make a camouflage pattern work in multiple environments. One is to make sure it has the right number of colors. “Three would not be enough; 12 would be too many, because they would just get lost,” Thompson says. He thinks seven is the sweet spot. These colors—greens and browns and beiges—all need to have warm overtones. “Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them,” he says. “Even a building—it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Very few things remain cold.” Also very important for a camo pattern is that it should have a lot of highlights, lowlights, gradients, and fades; no two outfits should be identical. As Thompson notes: “If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out the rest, right?”

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says.

And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who could essentially opt out of wearing UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get a little more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what’s called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will outline the “third-party items you’re allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually pretty lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he has heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.

As such, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camo started being worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the United States military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff.” Crye started to produce runs of their camo, selling their own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.

Around this time, the culture of the Special Forces started to change. Before the War on Terror, elite teams were small and secretive; very few members of the military knew what they were doing. “Look at photos of the first Special Forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001,” says McFarlane. “They look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.” As the number of special operators grew, the whole Army could see them fast-roping down from helicopters, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists—often in MultiCam. Same with the popular video game Call of Duty and movies like Zero Dark 30, American Sniper, and Act of Valor (which featured active-duty Navy SEALs). In a confusing and unpopular war, stories of Special Operators offered rare victories the United States military could claim.

Special Forces started to develop a new image in the popular imagination, says McFarlane: “Dudes with huge beards and long hair and just totally ripped and just wearing lots of technical gear.” Because Special Forces were so admired and idolized, regular infantry soldiers would buy MultiCam backpacks or accessories to emulate them. Everyone wanted to wear MultiCam—not only to cosplay but also to get away from the ugly digital UCP pattern. Including, eventually, the US Army itself.

Although UCP was deployed to American troops all over the world, it became increasingly associated with Iraq: a hated, unsuccessful pattern for a hated, unsuccessful war. In 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to distance itself from Iraq, the military was instructed to get rid of the UCP pattern. And so, to quickly supply a troop surge in Afghanistan, it turned to the most readily available replacement camo: MultiCam.

Even though the US military called its pattern OEFCP (Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern), it was MultiCam from Crye Precision, bought in bulk when roughly 100,000 members of the conventional forces were deployed to Afghanistan. Then, in 2014, the Army announced that its in-house camo team had finally developed a new pattern: Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP. As McFarlane believes: OCP is “basically MultiCam without the branding.” If you view two swaths side by side, you can see that OCP is ever so slightly more brown. There’s a reason they look so similar: Both are inspired by Scorpion, the original pattern that Crye presented to the US government.

In a few niche corners of the internet, debate still simmers over whether Crye had the right to trademark MultiCam or whether the Army had the right to make its own version. Truly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, because of this whole saga, some version of MultiCam or OCP or Scorpion is everywhere. The militaries of Australia, Georgia, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and France all wear variants of MultiCam uniforms—some specifically customized by Crye Precision. Soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine do, too; they don colored armbands to tell who is on what side. Even the Taliban wear MultiCam. In January 2026, the Minnesota National Guard wore bright yellow vests over their camouflage in part “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”

MultiCam has trickled down from Special Forces to all kinds of law enforcement: American SWAT teams, municipal police, teams within the FBI, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement, and Border Patrol all dress like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. ICE also wears a mixture of civilian clothes and MultiCam, and in January, Crye Precision was awarded a nearly $40,000 contract to provide cold-weather gear for Border Patrol in Maine. Although there have been a number of camo companies attempting to rival MultiCam’s ubiquity (notably the impressionist looking A-Tacs and the animalistic Kryptek), none of them seem to hold a candle. “ I think the fact of the matter is, there’s been no other pattern that’s proven,” Thompson says proudly. [...]

It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don't even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.

by Avery Trufelman, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Berger

[ed. Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern. Seriously. Lol.]

Fix Everything Switch

Ask Claude: 'There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the US? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented.'

Claude is asked for the top 10 Fix Everything Now buttons. Its answers:

1. Legalize housing.
2. Land value tax.
3. Permitting and NEPA reform.
4. Carbon taxes.
5. Repeal the Jones Act.
6. Compensate kidney donors.
7. Expand high-skilled immigration.
8. Reciprocal drug and device approval with peer regulators (e.g. EU/UK/JP/AU).
9. Occupational licensing reform.
10. Approval or ranked choice voting.
11. Honorable mentions: Child allowance, congestion pricing, replacing corporate income tax with a VAT or DBCFT, ending the home mortgage interest deduction, federal preemption of telehealth and medical licensing, and letting Pell Grants pay for vocational programs.

10/10, no notes, no seriously that’s 10/10 and no notes. 16/16 if you count the others.

There is also a UK version, which also seems like a very good list at first glance.

via: Zvi

***

[ed. 'Legalize housing' might be confusing to some. It's mostly about allowing more housing in every neighborhood, especially historically affluent and exclusionary neighborhoods, removing barriers to both subsidized affordable and market rate housing. 

Reciprocal approval is FDA approval for drugs and devices already approved in other trusted countries like the UK, European Union member countries, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Japan, etc. 

VAT/DBCFT - revenue from sales to nonresidents would not be taxable, and the cost of goods purchased from nonresidents would not be deductible. So if a business purchases $100 million in goods from a supplier overseas, the cost of those goods would not be deductible against the corporate income tax. Likewise, if a business sells a good to a foreign person, the revenues attributed to that sale would not be added to taxable income. Another way to think about the border adjustment is that the corporate tax would ignore revenues and costs associated with cross-border transactions. The tax would be solely focused on raising revenue from business transactions from sales of goods in the United States. (via)]

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler

Critical Mass

Rick Beato Versus the NY Times

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article—so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy—but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally—the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in”—whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list.” But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter.” The survey was just a “starting point.” The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment—when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.”

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader—simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny. [...]

During the subsequent 72 hours, the backlash intensified. A fiery response from esteemed jazz pianist Brad Mehldau was ostensibly a defense of Billy Joel, but focused mostly on the problems with music criticism of this sort. He describes a music critic character type very similar to the one I warned against in my article:

He is a snob who wants to be hip, so he becomes a critic. He listens to music not because he loves music, but because of how it defines his understanding of himself, narcissistically.

But even this response was mild compared to Rick Beato’s take, which went live yesterday. Rick is a very smart guy with big ears and a deep understanding of music—much deeper than those Times insiders. And his words carry weight. By my measure, Beato has more influence than any music critic in the world right now, and when he says something, it gets attention.

Rick had already released a video about the Times songwriter list, and he rarely deals with the same issue a second time. “I don’t usually make videos back-to-back on the same topic,” he explains. But he was also irritated by the tone of the Times video and felt compelled to respond to it.

His rebuttal is going viral with a vengeance. It’s been up for less than a day, and already has ten times as many views as the original Times video.

For the most part, he just shares clips from the Times podcast—which are damaging enough—before asking in frustration: “You hear these guys competing for the worst take?” In his words, they come across as “the most pretentious, cork-sniffing smug people”—whose condescension is all the worse because they have “no background in music.”

Rick, I should add, is not just a pundit, but is also a very skilled guitarist, record producer, music educator, etc. He possesses real credentials—the same ones the Times critics lack—and not just opinions.

But did he go too far?

The people watching his video clearly don’t think so. It already has 10,000+ comments—that’s more responses than the original Times article received. And they are brutal.

That first comment has almost 8,000 likes. As I said above, Hades is getting hotter—especially that level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for music critics.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:
Images: NYT/YouTube

[ed. No Paul McCartney, Jimmy Webb, James Taylor... but Missy Elliot, Taylor Swift, Young Thug (?!), Babyface, Stephen Merrit, Romeo Santos, Outkast (?!), Lana Del Ray (?!), The Dream (who?), Bad Bunny, other greats...]

Italian Brainrot

Italian brainrot (Wikipedia)

Italian brainrot is characterized by absurd images or videos created using generative artificial intelligence. It typically features hybrid figures combining animals with everyday objects, foods, and weapons. They are given Italianized names or incorporate stereotypical Italian cultural markers and are accompanied by AI-generated audio narration in Italian, which is often nonsensical. The names of these characters often have Italian suffixes, such as -ini or -ello.

The term brain rot was named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and refers to the deteriorating effect on one's mental state when overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. The term can also refer to the content itself. Online users often use this label to acknowledge the ridiculousness of Italian brainrot, while recognising the growing amount of AI slop present online.

Images: DevonRex368; alexey_pigeon

[ed. Presented here for no other reason than to highlight another example of the decline of western civilization. I'm beginning to think that if AI is inclined to wipe us all out it'll be a mercy killing. See also: Reading is magic (Sam Kriss):]

***

"The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside. [...]

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."

Cover by Anna Weyant
via:

Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets

John Pederson, 33, couldn’t work. The former Outback Steakhouse line cook was recovering from a car crash and running out of money. Kalshi, the prediction market, promised a quick way to fix that. He took out a variable-interest loan and started betting.

At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit, where he lives. He parlayed that into $41,000 by trading on sports, using a strategy he developed with the help of AI, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his account records.

Then he placed his most audacious bet yet: All $41,000 that a celebrity would say a particular word on TV. He lost it all.

Pederson isn’t alone in walking away empty-handed from the bet-on-anything markets, which cover sports, celebrities, news and more.

Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket advertise themselves as life-changing tools for regular people—implying everyone has a fair chance to score. “I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions,” gushed one woman in a Kalshi ad on TikTok.

 
But for most users the reality is nothing like that.

Instead, casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.

 
On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts. That means less than 2,000 accounts netted a total of nearly half a billion dollars. The Journal analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts that have traded since November 2022. There are at least 2.3 million total accounts on the site. [...]

Casual traders “have no chance. Systematically,” said Michael Boss, a former professional poker player and a statistician by training. On Kalshi, Boss places 60 trades a minute and modifies his bids and asks 30 times a second.

by By Neil Mehta, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ?iStock

[ed. No chance unless they're insiders with special access to some form of classified information. Like... maybe, half of Washington, DC.]

Ted Turner, Cable TV Visionary Dies at 87

Ted Turner, a mercurial tycoon and gadfly visionary whose “superstation” TBS was a cornerstone of cable TV’s early success, whose 24-hour news channel CNN revolutionized TV journalism, and whose sprawling legacy encompassed conservation, philanthropy and professional sports, died Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by Phillip Evans, a spokesman for Turner Enterprises. Mr. Turner revealed in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

A serial entrepreneur known as “the Mouth of the South” for his bellicosity and bravado, Mr. Turner took over his family’s Georgia-based billboard company at 24, after his father’s suicide, and transformed the business into a media juggernaut that would forever alter broadcasting.

“CNN really heralds the world of Twitter and social networks and interactivity,” said Ken Auletta, a Turner biographer and media writer for the New Yorker. “During the Persian Gulf War, you had a live war for the first time, without commercial breaks. You’d see bombs dropping and people screaming and fire engines roaring. Everything is immediate. It’s the world we live in today. He’s the father of that world.”

Mr. Turner’s achievements transcended journalism and business, and his much-publicized personality — charming, vulgar, daring, impulsive, idealistic, titanically self-regarding — made him one of the most captivating public figures of his generation.

He presented himself as a Southern gentleman. But he also boasted of being a Ferrari in the bedroom, and with his incessant philandering, he burned through three marriages, including his last, to actress Jane Fonda.

The billionaire Mr. Turner championed a world free of conflict but was on friendly terms with dictators and despots, including Saddam Hussein and Vladi­mir Putin. A Goldwater Republican turned unabashed liberal, he had friends running the political gamut — from former President Jimmy Carter to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), from televangelist Jerry Falwell to communist Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who became a duck-hunting companion.

On his cable channels TBS and TNT, Mr. Turner delivered wholesome family fare, including sports and black-and-white reruns. But in his prime, he was a self-confessed absentee husband and father, with family below business and sailing on his list of priorities.

As skipper of the yacht Courageous in 1977, Mr. Turner won the America’s Cup, sailing’s most prestigious trophy. He also brought his competitive drive to ownership of the Atlanta Braves, the long-hapless baseball team he bought in 1976. The team rewarded his vigorous support and patience with a World Series victory in 1995 over the Cleveland Indians.

His interests and ambitions seemingly boundless, Mr. Turner became one of the largest private landowners in the Western Hemisphere, and he used his more than 2 million acres, from Montana to Argentina, to preserve endangered flora and fauna. He underwrote foundations that campaigned against nuclear arms proliferation and for such causes as population control, solar energy and debt forgiveness for developing countries.

In 1986, he created the Goodwill Games to foster brotherhood among athletes after the two world superpowers — the United States and Soviet Union — traded boycotts of the Summer Olympics in Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) during a surge in Cold War tensions. He lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on the venture before it was shuttered in 2001 because of low television ratings.

Years before Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates rose to the top of world philanthropy, Mr. Turner donated $1 billion to start a foundation to support United Nations projects in developing countries.

In business, as in all his undertakings, Mr. Turner cultivated a renegade persona. The bad boy yachtsman, who galled the elite gatekeepers of sailing in New York and Newport, Rhode Island, was also the Atlanta David battling the media Goliaths of New York. “I was cable,” he once quipped, “when cable wasn’t cool.”

Mr. Turner thrived on the role of buccaneer, and he looked the part with his rugged 6-foot-3 frame, square jaw, cleft chin and tidy mustache. A cigar, a beer can and a quip were ever at the ready. “If I only had a little humility,” he once joked in his booming Southern drawl, “I’d be perfect.” [...]

“Ted is a complicated guy, but he is part genius,” Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, told The New York Times in 2001. “Ted doesn’t mean the harm he causes; he just cannot shut up.”

by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images:Michael Williamson/Craig Herndon/Washington Post

[ed. What a life. And he married Jane Fonda, too.]

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Amy Warren's “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles...

The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.

Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.

YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what’s best for their children. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google’s tools and content filters haven’t met their needs for a variety of reasons.

In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.

Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”

In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”

When Google brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google’s suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.

To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hours-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends, according to a 2016 document entitled “YouTube edu opportunities”: “Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”

A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by “inappropriately-aged children,” children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos “decreased attention spans.”

By 2019, the company was aware “the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken” due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and “trivially easy for students to bypass,” internal exchanges said.

An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children’s privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in “absolute regulatory failure,” said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.

The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices. 

by Shalini Ramachandran, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Colin E. Braley for WSJ

[ed. See also: Classroom Cope (The Point) - AI as another teaching tool:]

***

"As for outcomes: it is one thing to say that in-class practice is the best we can do in the age of AI; it is quite another to credit AI with “reviving” writing. There is nothing, nothing, to celebrate about teachers and students being forced to resort to degraded forms of learning, practice and assessment. We might as well credit a basketball hoop in the prison yard with reviving organized sports. It’s a good thing that the inmates are given a chance to exercise. It is better than nothing."

Want to Be Friends With a Bravolebrity?

 That’ll be $5,000.

It’s a scorching Sunday in Los Angeles, and Devyn Parrott, a 36-year-old mother of twins from Phoenix, has already made the pilgrimage to a few sites of celebrity worship: the Beverly Hills Erewhon for a Hailey Bieber smoothie, the Four Seasons for a massage, and SUR, the main setting of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, for a glass of wine. Then comes the highlight: a dinner with Reza Farahan and Mercedes “MJ” Javid of the reality series Shahs of Sunset, The Valley: Persian Style, and The Traitors. It’s her second time meeting Farahan. The first took place in November, when she and her mother had drinks with him at BravoCon. “It was like catching up with an old friend,” she says. “He’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.”

Parrott is a client of Fan Social, a start-up launched as a sort of Cameo on steroids: Whereas Cameo allows users to pay around a couple hundred bucks for a personalized video from a celebrity, Fan Social has its clients pay two, three, or ten times that amount to actually hang out with them in person. Parrott’s experience in L.A. would cost you $7,888 ($2,888 for Javid, $5,000 for Farahan); her drinks date at BravoCon was $2,500. On Fan Social’s menu, you can have lunch with Luann de Lesseps for $5,000, grab coffee with Jamie Kennedy for $750, dine with To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen for $3,500, or golf with former L.A. Laker Byron Scott for $20,000. For $10,000, The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Margaret Josephs will officiate your wedding. For a tenth of that, comedian Tom Arnold will virtually preside over your divorce counseling.

The wealthy have always been able to buy access to celebrities (consider the many pop stars who appeared on My Super Sweet 16), but Fan Social seeks to standardize what were formerly backdoor negotiations with an individual’s management. The idea was born in 2024 when a fan called in to “Jeff Lewis Live,” a two-hour SiriusXM show hosted by the former star of Bravo’s Flipping Out, asking if she could take Lewis to dinner, to which he joked that she could — for $10,000. The dinner never happened, but other fans took him seriously: Soon Lewis was receiving multiple $10,000 dinner invitations over DM, which he accepted. Months later, Lewis started Fan Social along with Southern Hospitality showrunner Michael Beck and Charleston-based software and product designer Shannon Barnes. Fan Social launched with ten celebrities, mostly Lewis’s friends from the Bravoverse. Within a year, the site had hundreds of bookings; the roster now sits at around 50 and includes comedians, actors, and influencers. The founders are currently expanding Fan Social’s talent pool of athletes, who are often based in smaller cities and have local appeal; they’re also hoping to land Andy Cohen, who Lewis expects could charge up to $20,000 per dinner. Barnes describes the pitch as “Uber for celebrities,” a side hustle they can squeeze into their schedules whenever they want. “It’s such an easy way for somebody to make money for one hour of conversation — usually about themselves, which they’re happy to do,” says Beck. 

Like most Fan Social clients, Parrott had heard about the company on “Jeff Lewis Live,” which she listens to “religiously.” (Until now, the platform has done no traditional marketing or press, relying on celebrities to promote their own pages.) Along with her family, she owns three subcontracting companies and was using the trip to L.A. to “capitalize on alone time.” “Here’s the thing,” she tells me, a stack of gold designer bracelets dangling on her wrist, as we wait at the bar for Farahan and Javid to arrive. “You can spend $500 on a Cameo that you watch one time and post. This is more expensive, sure, but it’s the memory of it. That for me is what’s so cool: the memory.”  [...]

The day after Parrott’s meetup, Amy Powers, a 54-year-old from Tennessee, arrives at the SiriusXM offices in Hollywood for her “Jeff Lewis Live” studio visit — a Fan Social experience where, for $5,000, a client can listen in on the prep meeting and taping of Lewis’s show. Powers is a Fan Social power user, a tiny blonde OG Housewives fan with a southern drawl who owns a construction company with the husband she’s in the process of divorcing. ChumpCon, the convention for fans of “Jeff Lewis Live” held last year in Las Vegas, was “the best weekend ever,” she says. Last night, she had a Fan Social dinner at the West Hollywood restaurant Craig’s with Doug Budin ($2,000) and Jamison Scala ($1,500), who both work on “Jeff Lewis Live.” “Any time I’m in town, the first thing I do is call Shannon, like, ‘Where are my boys? Can they do something? Can they have lunch? Can we have dinner?’ ” she says. [...]

Not all “Jeff Lewis Live” listeners support Fan Social; posts on Lewis’s sub-Reddit have criticized him as being “desperate” and “grifting off his fans” for his $4,000 drinks and $7,500 dinner offerings. Lewis waves this off. “My guess is most of those people, if they had the opportunity to do what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure they’d be doing it. Why wouldn’t you?” he says. “You wanna go to a thousand-dollar dinner and have an amazing evening and then sometimes get a gift on top of it and be paid for it? It’s crazy.” Last year, Lewis did 33 Fan Socials and made well into the six figures on the platform (Fan Social takes a commission of around 20 to 25 percent). “I get to go to all my favorite restaurants for free,” he says; he’ll usually suggest Craig’s, the Polo Lounge, Boa, Cecconi’s, or Steak 48.

by Rebecca Jennings, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Michelle Groskopf
[ed. Sad. They'd have to pay me.]

Six Things Apple Achieved Under Tim Cook’s Management

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced this week that he’s stepping down from his position in September and handing the reins to John Ternus, currently the company’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering and a 25-year employee. [...]

I’ve been covering Apple for various outlets throughout Cook’s tenure as CEO, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Apple has changed in the 15 years since he formally took over from an ailing Steve Jobs in the summer of 2011. Under Cook, the company has become less surprising but massively financially successful; some of Apple’s newer products have flopped or underperformed, but far more have become and stayed excellent thanks to years of competent iteration.

This isn’t a comprehensive list of everything Cook has done as CEO, but it’s my attempt at a big-picture, high-level summary and a snapshot of where Apple is now, to serve as a comparison point once Ternus kicks off his tenure.

Quiet hardware successes: Apple Watch, headphones, and more

The Tim Cook era can’t lay claim to any single hardware announcement as important or far-reaching as the iPhone, the iPod, or even the iPad. Apple has definitely introduced good—even great—hardware in the last 15 years, though.

The main difference is that Apple products introduced during the Jobs era tended to belong at or near the center of your digital life. The Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface. The iPod was a constant musical companion on commutes, during workouts or study sessions, or when plugged into someone’s speaker at a party. The iPhone, obviously, became the most important personal computing device since the personal computer. And the iPad, as conceived by Jobs, was clearly intended to be a new kind of primary computing device (it was only under Cook that the iPad settled into its current in-betweener rut, computer-like but not computer-like enough to supplant the Mac’s mouse-and-pointer usage model).

Hardware introduced during Cook’s tenure, on the other hand, tended to be at its best when it extended or sat atop those Jobs-era products in some way. The AirPods and the wider universe of Beats headphones are the archetypal example—wireless headphones with just enough proprietary Apple technology in them that they’re much easier and more pleasant to use with other Apple products than typical Bluetooth headphones.

Similarly, the Apple Watch is a convenient way to tap into a tiny subset of your iPhone’s communication capabilities (plus fitness tracking). The HomePod is a speaker version of AirPods. I don’t know a kid with an iPad who doesn’t also have an Apple Pencil for doodling and sketching. Apple never released a TV set, but the Apple TV is the streaming box that makes the TV I already have feel the most like a TV and the least like a billboard. Apple never released a car, but it did introduce CarPlay, a useful add-on that is a prerequisite for me when I’m in the market for a car.

None of these products changed the face of their industries the way the iPod, iPhone, or iPad did, but they’ve all become ubiquitous, succeeding on the strength of Apple’s other products and services. That’s the kind of thing Cook’s Apple was good at inventing—reasons to stick around in Apple’s ecosystem once you’d already been drawn in.

Apple, the cloud services company

Apple still makes the majority of its money from hardware, but especially in recent years, the steadiest growth has come from Apple’s services—things like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV (the service, not the box), and software subscriptions like the new Creator Studio bundle.

The iCloud branding was introduced at the tail end of Jobs’ tenure, but its growth (and the growth of most Apple services and subscriptions) all happened on Cook’s watch. In 2011, Cook’s first year as CEO, Apple brought in a then-record $102.5 billion in annual revenue; in 2025, the Services division alone pulled down more than $109 billion in revenue. Not bad for a collection of features that rose from the ashes of the failed MobileMe service (and .Mac and iTools before it).

I don’t think the rise and increasing importance of the Services division has been entirely good for Apple or its users. The need to convert customers into subscribers and to upsell current subscribers to higher service tiers means that Apple’s users are now subject to some of the same kinds of notifications and reminders that so richly annoy PC users in Windows 11. [...]

A penchant for iteration

While it lacked somewhat in world-changing, all-new products, Cook’s Apple was also very good at relentlessly iterating on and improving Apple’s core products.

by Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Images: Apple

The Algorithm Doesn't Have to Destroy Us

via: The Algorithm Doesn't Have to Destroy Us (Elysian)

Image: uncredited

A Humble ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Ends His Run

For the past month, “Jeopardy!” episodes have followed a pattern.

The theme music plays. The three contestants stand at their lecterns. Then two of them are clobbered by a mild-mannered bureaucrat from New Jersey named Jamie Ding.

But on Monday’s episode, the unthinkable happened: After 31 victories, Ding lost.

His streak is the fifth-longest in “Jeopardy!” history. He fell just one win short of matching James Holzhauer’s 2019 run, and he left the Alex Trebek Stage with more than $880,000 in winnings.

Early in the game broadcast Monday, Ding found himself lagging behind Greg Shahade, an International Master in chess who was lightning-fast on the buzzer. During Final Jeopardy, Ding jotted down the correct response to a clue about South African languages — but it wasn’t enough to make up the deficit.

“It was over, just like that,” Ding, 33, said in an interview.

Contestants who went up against him included a statistician, a librarian and a professor. Ding produced so many correct answers (always in the form of a question) that it seemed he might never run out.

“Who was Trotsky?”

“What are non-Newtonian fluids?”

“What are waffle fries?”

Throughout his reign, he was matter-of-fact as he came up with arcana in a split second (“What is cuneiform?”). He endeared himself to viewers through his comically humdrum banter with the show’s host, Ken Jennings, about such topics as his favorite color (orange), his favorite letter (F) and his favorite number (6).

As the streak continued, the drama-free anecdotes and humble bits of personal information shared by Ding seemed to amuse Jennings, a former “Jeopardy!” champ who holds the record for consecutive wins, with 74.

The depth of Ding’s knowledge went along with a lack of bluster. He proudly identified himself as a “faceless bureaucrat.” When he won a game, he looked pleasantly surprised, as if he had been given an unusually good free sample at Trader Joe’s.

“Put Jamie Ding on the $20 bill,” one fan demanded in a tribute on the newsletter platform Substack.

After his “Jeopardy!” loss had been taped but before it was broadcast, Ding gave a video interview from his two-bedroom apartment in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

There he was, in front of an orange couch and a stuffed orange clown fish. He said he had remained calm throughout his final game, even as he realized that he was on his way to a loss. He went backstage and stared at the mostly orange clothes he had brought along in the hope that his streak would continue.
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“During it, I was trying to stay grounded,” he said. “Planning to win a whole bunch of games of ‘Jeopardy!’ just feels like asking to lose.”

Ding filmed the show in five-episode chunks in Los Angeles during vacation days from his job as a program administrator for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency. His work involves administering tax credits to build affordable housing in the state.

In an early appearance, he praised New Jersey’s efforts on the issue compared with those of New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. “If you’re from one of those states, then shame on you,” he said. “Build more housing.”

He spends his time away from his job studying law at Seton Hall University. He said he did not expect his “Jeopardy!” windfall to change his life all that much. He planned to donate some money and put the rest in a high-yield savings account.

In a way, Ding said, he had been preparing for the show since childhood. The son of a neuroscience professor and a high school math teacher, he grew up in Grosse Pointe Shores, a suburb of Detroit. He competed in geography bees and on his high school quiz bowl team. He recalled losing a sixth-grade spelling bee when he misspelled the word “bolero.”

“B-a-l-l-e-r-o,” he said. “Terrible.” [...]

Ding was a relatively conservative player, avoiding the all-in wagers on Daily Doubles that were a go-to stratagem for Holzhauer. But he was unusually fast on the buzzer and seemed to have few weak categories.

“The key to Jamie’s run really has been his incredibly wide base of knowledge in just about any category you can think of,” Saunders said.

Ding used a tactic he called “knight moves” — traversing the board in an L-shaped pattern, like a knight in chess. Maybe it threw his opponents off-balance, or maybe it was just nice to have a simple rule to follow, he said. “It’s basically a guaranteed way to pick something of a different difficulty, and in a different category,” he added.

He watched his first “Jeopardy!” appearance at Pint, a bar in Jersey City, with friends from so many different groups that it felt like a wedding. He is still getting used to the attention that comes with being a TV star.

“Watching my episodes, I can be pretty self-critical — like, ‘Why did you do that?’ Or, ‘What’s wrong with your face?’” he said. The outpouring of support has been worth the discomfort. “I’m trying to keep a list of people who did nice things for me because it’s so many,” he said.

Now that his streak has ended, he can return to his hobbies, like constructing cryptic crosswords and running an Instagram account rating General Tso’s chicken with his sister. He is also part of a group of intervenors seeking to block the U.S. Department of Justice from obtaining New Jersey’s voter registration records.

It won’t be long, though, before he starts studying for the “Jeopardy!” Tournament of Champions. He might even need some more orange clothes.

“I have a reputation to uphold,” he said.

by Callie Holterman, NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Katy Kildee/The Detroit News/TNS

[ed. Feels refreshing to read about a normal, well-adjusted person who's main goal in life isn't self-promotion in some way.]

We Absolutely Do Know That Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers

In a recent article in Bloomberg, David Zipper argued that “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Big if true! In fact, I’d been under the impression that Waymos are not only safer than humans, the evidence to date suggests that they are staggeringly safer, with somewhere between an 80% to 90% lower risk of serious crashes.

“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.

It’s also completely wrong. The article drags its audience into the author’s preferred state of epistemic helplessness by dancing around the data rather than explaining it. And Zipper got many of the numbers wrong; in some cases, I suspect, as a consequence of a math error.

There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.

***

In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.

But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.

Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.

Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.

It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”

The safety gap between, for example, Cruise and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?

Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?

This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”

by Kelsey Piper, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
[ed. I'd take one any time (if reasonably priced), and expect to see them everywhere soon. See also: I Was Promised Flying Self Driving Cars (Zvi):]

***

A Tesla Model S drove itself from Los Angeles to New York with zero disengagements. Full reverse cannonball run.

Mike P: I don’t mean to say this in a way that discredits what they’ve done, but ngl, this stuff isn’t even surprising to me anymore like ya, makes total sense. I went from Philly to Raleigh NC to Tennessee and back to Philly and the only thing I had to do was re park the car at 2 charging stops when the car parked in the wrong place.

Tesla did the thing

There’s still a difference between full self-driving (FSD) that can take you across the country, and the point when you can sleep while it drives.

A Waymo moving 17mph hits the breaks instantly upon seeing a child step in front of it from a blind spot, hits the child at 6mph and dialed 911. If a human had been driving, the child would likely have been struck at 14mph and be dead.

What did some headlines call this, of course?

TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

Samuel Hammond: A more accurate headline would be “Waymo saves child’s life thanks to superhuman reaction time”

This was another good time to notice that almost all the AI Safety people are strongly in favor of Waymo and self-driving cars.

Rob Miles: Seems worthwhile for people to hear AI Safety people saying: No, self driving cars are not the problem, they have the potential to be much safer than human drivers, and in this instance it seems like a human driver would have done a much worse job than the robot

Iran War Updates: April 24, 2026

Iran War: Trump Says Time Is on His Side, Iranian Leadership Is Divided, Iran Begs to Differ (Naked Capitalism)

Image: USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) sails in the Indian Ocean, April 23. CENTCOM/X

[ed. Updates from a variety of sources. Draw your own conclusions. See also: Iran War: Team Trump as Narrative War Captives? (NC).]

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.

From Laundromats to Airplanes

What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.

For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. [...]

Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.

Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:

Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.

“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.

Four Ways to Lose (Or, What's a 'Rigged Pitch' in a War?)

There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.

by Derek Thompson, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

[ed. See also: Exclusive: Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets (CNN).]