The Plastic Surgeon Summit

We’re in a plastic surgery “renaissance period.”

Dr. Yannis Alexandrides: It is busier than ever. There’s a remarkable year-on-year demand increase that we see in surgical procedures, especially for the face, but also for the body. This is a trend that we have seen through the pandemic, but it has accelerated the last year.

Dr. Akshay Sanan: I think plastic surgery is in a renaissance period right now because of people publicly talking about it. Plastic surgery is now part of your wellness armamentarium. People used to flex what gym they went to, that they had a trainer, and now plastic surgery is part of that flex. People love to rock that they had their eyes done or their face and neck done or their body done. It’s just part of the cultural shift that we’re seeing.

Dr. Jason Champagne: This is where social media comes into play, camera phones and Zoom meetings. You see yourself from all these different angles nowadays that maybe you didn’t notice in the past.

Dr. Emily Hu: I find it very generational: Those who grew up in the social media era with a lot of sharing and openness are also very open about telling their friends [about the work they’ve had done].

Sanan: There’s a shift in consumer or patient habits. More people in their late 30s, early 40s, they’re choosing surgery earlier to age gracefully instead of waiting until things are advanced. They’re like, “I’m not going to wait until it drops down further. I just want to be hot in my 40s.”

Dr. John Diaz: It used to be that not everyone had access to a plastic surgeon. That was reserved within the realm of the elite. Well, not anymore. I have celebrities, executives, and business owners come in — but also teachers and waiters. There’s this democratization of attractiveness.

Dr. Paul Afrooz: Patients are very educated these days. They know what they’re looking for, they know what realistic results are, and they have the ability to do a lot of background research and understand who does things at an elite level. [...]

Let’s get into it: Why are we talking so much about facelifts this year?

Diaz: Facelifts have absolutely exploded for a few reasons. A lot of women see celebrities and influencers suddenly looking incredible, and they want to know how. Think about Kris Jenner — she had a huge impact when her pictures came out. And now it’s brought awareness to the fact that we have the technology to be able to take a young-looking woman and make her look better with surgery, without making her look fake. That was a real challenge 20 years ago.

Alexandrides: Kris Jenner was a very hot topic the last few months. Definitely a lot of the patients I see here take her as, let’s say, a model on how they want to look, because she looks fresh, but she doesn’t look pulled. She looks younger, and she looks happy, and you cannot see the scars, at least not in these pictures that we see.

Hu: I can’t tell you how many of my patients are like, “Yeah, my mom had a facelift. She was so scary. I’m never doing a facelift.” I mean, that was their response because they see their mom all bruised and scary looking.

Dr. Mark Murphy: Facelifts historically had a stereotypical “plastic surgery” look. Now people have realized, “I can look like myself 15 years ago and not have to look like a circus freak for it.” It’s become very digestible for patients. Social media is a huge driver behind it. Well, that, and the techniques are better.

So what’s actually new or changing about facelifts?

Dr. Mark Mani: We call it the golden age of facelift surgery. It’s primarily because of the success of the deep plane facelift.

Dr. David Shafer: There’s nothing new about [the deep plane facelift] as a procedure. It’s just very sophisticated marketing that’s being done now, and there are refinements to the procedures. But it’s not some plastic surgeon who’s marketing it now as some magic procedure that he came up with that nobody else does.

Mani: [A version of] the first deep plane lifts was performed in the late 1960s by a surgeon named Tord Skoog in Sweden [though the name came later]. I have his textbook and can show you results that would stand up to the best deep plane surgeons today. It’s not the procedure, it’s the surgeon, and facelift surgery, among all surgeries in plastic surgery, is an art form.

Afrooz: A surgeon named Sam Hamra — he just passed, but a wonderful human being, an extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary surgeon — first coined the phrase “deep plane facelift” in a 1990 paper and laid out some building blocks of the procedure. Just like everything else in plastic surgery, we stand on the giants before us.

Dr. Michael Stein: There are two main facelift techniques: deep plane and SMAS plication. The deep plane facelift is where you cut the layer under the skin called the SMAS, dissect underneath it, and tighten it in addition to the skin. In the SMAS facelift, instead of cutting and elevating the SMAS, you suture it to itself to tighten it from over top.

Dr. Amir Karam: The majority of surgeons, up until recently, have been doing the traditional SMAS technique, which is more or less horizontally pulling the face sideways, and that was leading to a very unnatural look.

Mani: I was the surgeon who wrote the most-read facelift academic article that convinced other surgeons to do deep plane facelifts. It was an article in Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2016, where I detailed the specific anatomic reasons that deep plane is better.

Stein: The people who only do deep plane facelifts say they have a more longitudinal result, and vice versa. But the truth is, a good result is a good result. It depends more on the surgeon versus technique. A good facelift is a good facelift.

Facelifts aren’t done evolving.

Karam: The consumer is driving surgeons to create better and better results. So there’s been a massive increase in interest for surgeons to level up their strategies surgically and learn new techniques that are not new but new to them.

Afrooz: Even my facelift today is better than my facelift was one year ago. When you hone in on one thing as your career, you’re just constantly looking for ways to improve. It’s the cumulative effect of small subtleties over time and practice that you notice nuanced improvements to your results. One might assume that a deep plane facelift in one surgeon’s hands is the same as it is in another’s, but I’m here to tell you that it’s very much not the same.

Dr. Daniel Gould: There are new layers that we’re adding into the surgery. We’re recognizing the importance of the mid-face and volume position there. I’m recognizing adding fat to the mouth and the areas around the mouth, the chin, because all these areas have been neglected. We are now nailing all the low-hanging fruit: We’re nailing the neck, we’re nailing the face, we’re nailing the temple and the brows. Now it’s time to move forward and continue to innovate and push the limits of what we can really do in facial rejuvenation.

Mani: What I’ve developed is called the scarless lift, and it’s basically a deep plane facelift without a scar in front of the ear, with an endoscope. The endoscopic procedure involves a hidden incision within the hair, a short one behind the ear, and sometimes one under the chin. I still do about 60% open [non-endoscopic], but a good percentage of my facelifts are scarless endoscopic. The results are more beautiful because you don’t have to worry about the scar, and the vectors of lifting are better.

Alexandrides: I don’t think this will be now, “OK, let’s forget about facelifts, let’s move to something else.” What will probably happen is that people will discover intricate little different techniques and say, “You have the facelift that is done like that.” I have patients who ask me very technical questions: How do you design your scar around your ear?

Stein: Facelift surgery has survived the test of time. Every year there are new machines designed to tighten skin, and for some patients with mild laxity, they may see nice results. The truth is though, if you have jowls or droopy skin of the face and neck, the only thing that’s really going to give you the best bang for your buck and directly address your laxity is a facelift.

by Bustle Editors, Bustle |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships

This chapter is concerned with the thinking processes of the intimate dyad. So, although we wlll focus from time to time on the thinking processes of the individual - as they influence and are influenced by the relationship with another person - our prime interest is in thinking as it occurs at the dyadic level. This may be dangerous territory for inquiry. After all, this topic resembles one that has, for many years now, represented something of a "black hole" in the social sciences - the study of the group mind. For good reasons, the early practice of drawing an analogy between the mind of the individual and the cognitive operations of the group has long been avoided, and references to the group mind in contemporary literature have dwindled to a smattering of wisecracks. 

Why, then, would we want to examine cognitive interdependence in close relationships? Quite simply, we believe that much could be learned about intimacy in this enterprise, and that a treatment of this topic, enlightened by the errors of past analyses, is now possible. The debate on the group mind has receded into history sufficiently that its major points can be appreciated, and at the same time, we find new realms of theoretical sophistication in psychology regarding the operation of the individual mind. With this background, we believe it is possible to frame a notion somewhat akin to the "group mind" and we to use it to conceptualize how people in close relationships may depend on each other for acquiring, remembering, and generating knowledge.

Interdependent Cognition 

Interdependence is the hallmark of intimacy. Although we are all interdependent to a certain degree, people in close relationships lead lives that are intertwined to the extreme. Certainly, the behaviors they enact, the emotions they feel, and the goals they pursue are woven in an intricate web. But on hearing even the simplest conversation between intimates, it becomes remarkably apparent that their thoughts, too, are interconnected. Together, they think about things in ways they would not alone. The idea that is central in our analysis of such cognitive interdependence is what we term transactive memory. As will become evident, we find this concept more clearly definable and, ultimately, more useful than kindred concepts that populate the history of social psychology. As a preamble to our ideas on transactive memory, we discuss the group mind notion and its pitfalls. We then turn to a concern with the basic properties and processes of transactive memory. [...]

The Nature of Transactive Memory 

Ordinarily, psychologists think of memory as an individual's store of knowledge, along with the processes whereby that knowledge is constructed organized, and accessed. So, it is fair to say that we are studying "memory'; when we are concerned with how knowledge gets into the person's mind, how it is arranged in the context of other knowledge when it gets there, and how it is retrieved for later use. At this broad level of definition, our conception of transactive memory is not much different from the notion of individual memory. With transactive memory, we are concerned with how knowledge enters the dyad, is organized within it, and is made available for subsequent use by it. This analogical leap is a reasonable one as long as we restrict ourselves to considering the functional equivalence of individual and transactive memory. Both kinds of memory can be characterized as systems that, according to general system theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), may show rough parallels in their modes of operation. Our interest is in processes that occur when the transactive memory system is called upon to perform some function for the group - a function that the individual memory system might reasonably be called upon to perform for the person. 

Transactive memory can be defined in terms of two components: (1) an organized store of knowledge that is contained entirely in the individual memory systems of the group members, and (2) a set of knowledge-relevant transactive processes that occur among group members. Stated more colloquially, we envision transactive memory to be a combination of individual minds and the communication among them. This definition recognizes explicitly that transactive memory must be understood as a name for the interplay of knowledge, and that this interplay, no matter how complex, is always capable of being analyzed in terms of communicative events that have individual sources and individual recipients. By this definition, then, the thought processes of transactive memory are completely observable. The various communications that pass between intimates are, in principle, observable by outside observers just as each intimate can observe the communications of the other. Using this line of intepretation, we recognize that the observable interaction between individuals entails not only the transfer of knowledge, but the construction of a knowledge-acquiring, knowledge-holding, and knowledge-using system that is greater than the sum of its individual member systems. 

Let us consider a simple example to bring these ideas down to earth. Suppose we are spending an evening with Rudy and Lulu, a couple married for several years. Lulu is in another room for the moment, and we happen to ask Rudy where they got the wonderful stuffcd Canadian goose on the mantle. He says, "we were in British Columbia..." and then bellows, "Lulu! What was the name of that place where we got the goose?" Lulu returns to the room to say that it was near Kelowna or Penticton - somewhere along Lake Okanogan. Rudy says, "Yes, in that area with all the fruit stands." Lulu finally makes the identification: Peachland. In all of this, the various ideas that Rudy and Lulu exchange lead them through their individual memories. In a process of interactive cueing, they move sequentially toward the retrieval of a memory trace, the existence of which is known to both of them; And it is just possible that, without each other, neither Rudy nor Lulu could have produced the item. This is not the only process of transactive memory. Although we will speak of interactive cueing again, it is just one of a variety of communication processes that operate on knowledge in the dyad. Transactive processes can occur during the intake of information by the dyad, they can occur after information is stored and so modify the stored information, and they can occur during retrieval. 

The successful operation of these processes is dependent, however, on the formation of a transactive memory structure - an organizational scheme that connects the knowledge held by each individual to the knowledge held by the other. It is common in theorizing about the thoughts and memories of individuals to posit an organizational scheme that allows the person to connect thoughts with one another - retrieving one when the other is encountered, and so forth. In a dyad, this scheme is complicated somewhat by the fact that the individual memory stores are physically separated. Yet it is perfectly reasonable to say that one partner may know, at least to a degree, what is in the other's memory. Thus, one's memory is "connected" to the other's, and it is possible to consider how information is arranged in the dyadic system as a whole. A transactive memory structure thus can be said to reside in the memories of both individuals - when they are considered as a combined system. 

We should point out here that transactive processes and structures are not exclusively the province of intimate dyads. We can envision these: things occurring as well in pairs of people who have just met, or even in groups of people larger than the dyad. At the extreme, one might attribute these processes and organizational capacities to whole societies, and so make transactive memory into a synonym for culture. Our conceptualization stops short or these extensions for two reasons. First, we hesitate to extend these ideas to larger groups because the analysis quickly becomes unwieldy; our framework for understanding transactive memory would need to expand geometrically as additional individuals were added to the system. Second, we refrain from applying this analysis to nonintimate relations for the simple reason that, in such dyads, there is not as much to be remembered. Close dyads share a wealth of information unique to the dyad, and use it to operate as a unit. More distant dyads; in turn, engage in transactive processes only infrequently - and in the case of a first and only encounter, do so only once. Such pairs will thus not have a very rich organizational scheme for information they hold. We find the notion of transactive memory most apt, in sum, for the analysis of cognitive interdependence in intimate dyads. 

Our subsequent discussion of transactive memory in this chapter is fashioned to coincide with the process-structure distinction. We begin by considering the processes involved in the everyday operation of transactive memory. Here, we examine the phases of knowledge processing standardly recognized in cognitive psychology - encoding, storage, and retrieval - to determine how they occur in transactive memory. The second general section examines the nature of the organizational structure used for the storage of information in the dyad. The structure of stored information across the two individual memories will be examined, with a view toward determining how this organization impinges on the group's mental operations. The final section concentrates on the role of transactive memory, both process and structure, in the life of the dyad. We consider how such memory may contribute to compatibility or incompatibility in relationships, and how an individual's personal memory may be influenced by membership in a transactive system. 

Transactive Memory Processes 

Communication is the transfer of information. When communication takes place between people, we might say that information is transferred from one memory to another. However, when the dyadic group is conceptualiized as having one memory system, interpersonal communication in the dyad comes to mean the transfer of information within memory. We believe that multiple transfers can occur as the dyad encodes information, as it holds information in storage, and as it retrieves information - and that such transfers can make each of these processes somewhat different from its counterpart occurring at the individual level.

Transactive Encoding 

Obviously, dyads do not have their sense organs in common. The physical and social environment thus must be taken in by each person separately. Social theorists have repeatedly noted, though; that an individual's perceptions can be channeled in social ways. Many have observed, for example, that one partner might empathize with another and see the world from the other's "point of view." Alternatively, cognitive constructions of a "group perspective" may be developed by both partners that lend a certain commonality to their intake of information (see Wegner & Giuliano, 1982). These social influences on encoding, however, are best understood as effects on the individual. How does the dyad encode information? 

When partners encounter some event and encode it privately in their individual memories, they may discuss it along the way. And though we might commonly think of such a discussion as a "rehash," a mere echo of the original perceived event, there is reason to think that it could be much more. After all whereas expeiencing an event can be accomplished quite passively, discussing an event requires active processing of the information - and the generation of ideas relevant to the event. Several demonstrations of an individual memory phenomenon called the "generation effect" indicate that people will often remember information they have generated better than information they have simply experienced. So, for instance, one might remember the number 37 better if one had been presented with "14 + 23 = ?" than if one had merely been presented with "37 ." Partners who talk over an event, generating information along the way, might thus come to an encoded verbal representation of the event that supplants their original, individual encoding. 

The influence of the generation effect could, of course, take many forms. Ordinarily, it should lead partners to remember their own contributions to dyadic discussions better than the contributions of their partners. This phenomenon has been observed in several studies (e.g., Ross & Sicoly, 1979). But the generation effect could also contribute to one's memory for group generated information. When a couple observes some event - say, a wedding they may develop somewhat disparate initial encodings. Each will understand that it was indeed a wedding; but only one may encode the fact that the father of the bride left the reception in a huff; the other might notice instead the odd, cardboard-like flavor of the wedding cake. Their whispered chat during all this could lead them to infer that the bride's father was upset by the strange cake. Because this interpretation was generated by the group, both partners will have thus encoded the group's understanding of the events. Their chat could thus revise history for the group, leaving both with stored memories of the father angry over a sorry cake. 

Evidence from another domain of cognitive research leads to a similar point. One of the most powerful determinants of encoding in individual memory is the degree to which the incoming information is semantically elaborated (e.g., Anderson & Reder, 1979). To elaborate incoming information is simply to draw inferences from it and consider its meaning in relation to other information. This is precisely what happens in dyadic communications about events. Partners often talk about things they have experienced as individuals or as a group. They may speak about each other's behavior, about the behavior of others they both know, about the day's events, and so on. In such discussions, it is probable that those particular events or behaviors relevant to the dyad will be discussed at length. They will be tied to other items of knowledge and, in the process, will become more elaborately encoded - and thus more likely to be available for later retrieval. 

To the extent that generative or elaborative processes are effortful, or require careful thinking, their effects could be strengthened yet further. Encoding processes that are effortful for the individual typically lead to enhanced memory. When a couple engages in an argument, cognitive effort may be required for each person to understand what the other is saying and for each to convey a personal point of view. Such effort on the part of both could also be necessary when one partner is merely trying to teach the other something. It is the shared experience of argument, decision-making, or careful analysis that will be remembered more readily when the communication is effortful. After all, couples more frequently remember their "talks" than their routine dinner conversations. 

These transactive encoding processes could conceivably lead a dyad to understand events in highly idiosyncratic and private ways. Their discussions could go far afield, linking events to knowledge that, while strongly relevant to the dyad, is embedded primarily in the dyad's known history or anticipated future. The partners' memories of the encoded events themselves could be changed dramatically by the tenor of their discussions, sometimes to the point of losing touch with the initial realities the partners perceived. To some degree, such departures from originally encoded experience might be corrected by the partners' discussions' of events with individuals outside the relationship; such outsiders would serve to introduce a perspective on events that is uninformed of the dyad's concerns, and that therefore might help to modify memory of the events. But many experiences are discussed only within the relationship, and these are thus destined to be encoded in ways that may make them more relevant to the dyad's concerns than to the realities from which they derived.

by Daniel M Wegner, Toni Giuliano, and Paula T. Hertel, Harvard |  Read more (pdf):

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[ed. Probably of little interest to most but I find this, and the process of memory retrieval in general, to be fascinating. When I think back on the various experiences and conversations I've had over my lifetime it's not uncommon to settle on the same scenes, arguments, feelings, etc. over and over again to represent what I remember as being reality, or at least an accurate reflection of my personal 'history', when actually they're just a small slice of a larger picture, taken out of context. Want an example? Try talking to an old friend at a class reunion and see what they recall about your experiences together. We can never remember all the details of the thousands of small conversations and experiences we've had - individually, with partners, with others - that in the aggregate have more relevance to reality than we can imagine... or remember.]

Shoddy People

America has been successfully invaded by an army of shoddiness. Our bones are gnawed upon by lazy rats. Even our pervasive sense of menace is shoddy in its approach.

The government has organized itself to please the King of Shoddiness, a man wholly concerned with spectacle to the exclusion of substance. The announcement of a program or action is all-important; what happens after that, no one cares. We watch federalism reshaped into the edifice of a casino, a swooping artifice of neon hung on a flimsy frame, fronting a blocky and neglected interior whose employees are rapidly losing interest in the customers.

The Secretary of Defense is a drunk newsman whose ideas for history’s most powerful military extend only to “increase your max bench,” and tail off from there. Likewise the FBI director, whose bug-eyed macho posturing evinces the desperation of a man trying not to think about the contempt in which his underlings hold him. The Attorney General’s primary qualification is the willingness to make loud declarative statements that are provably false while maintaining the serious visage of a television anchor. The Secretary of Homeland Security spends her time donning tactical gear and tossing around her inhuman ringlets while making videos for those with a Nazi propaganda kink. The Director of National Intelligence, a self-promoting political chameleon, has achieved the neat trick of being both incompetent and frozen out of power by other incompetents at the same time.

The Transportation Secretary, a former reality star whose official White House biography boasts that “Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” is not even close to being the cabinet’s least qualified member. The Education Secretary and head of the Small Business Administration are just rich women seemingly assigned their positions at random. Others have, if such a thing is possible, negative qualifications. The Secretary of State landed his job by proving himself willing to adopt a posture of submission towards the man that he had tried and failed to cast as less manly than himself during the 2016 primaries. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a certified loon, a classic dissolute child of privilege swirling into ever deeper cesspools of fringery, a former environmentalist transformed into a pesticide-boosting anti-vaxer, a man with no emotional or mental grounding in anything other than his determination to fulfill his destiny of poisoning the family name forever.

The Labor Secretary and her husband are both under investigation for different sex-related violations, simultaneously. The Vice President combs expensive lotions into his beard and practices taking the oath of office in his mirror at night, tears running down his lonesome face, dreaming of being able to hurt enough people to prove to his mother that he is worth something.

If these people were concerned with carrying out a coherent ideological mission they would be in trouble. They are not. Their small personal ambitions to have official titles and taxpayer-funded private planes occupy their small store of energy. For these baubles and modest perks they are happy to perform a gruesome pantomime of deference to a tacky know-nothing whose plastic skin droops further towards the gutter with each passing day. Embarrassing, one might think; but the smallness of all involved serves them well. They are too shallow to be filled with shame, overflowing as they already are with the yokel dazzle of a Price Is Right contestant who has just heard their name called, at last.

Propping up this leaky and flatulent balloon of misplaced careerism is an even more debased substructure of boosters who find satisfaction in the firm placement of a brown loafer on their collective carotid artery. A parallel world of media, which cultivates the appearance of news with none of its reality, exists to help prompt these political actors when they forget their lines. Awkward young white men in tight blue suits, their minds marinated for years in the virtual fascism of internet marginalia, find rewarding jobs as twitchy boosters of real world fascism for imaginary audiences of pale and insecure peers who never had anyone to urge them to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. [...]

Saddest of all is “the base.” Base in class, base in emotion, regarded by those it supports in the same way they would regard any pedestal: A thing to stand upon in order to boost themselves, and then to promptly forget. The paltriness of this entire movement’s gestures at any version of substantial truth mean that it is impossible to be a genuine supporter without having an overwhelming amount of ignorance, delusion, or both. Bolstering the ranks of the purely deluded are the movement’s cynical supporters, aware of its bullshit but willing to overlook it due to a traumatic belief that nothing really matters. This layer of unhappy and unsuccessful con men lurk about in grudging respect for the more successful con men they see in charge. These are the angry small business owners with violent daydreams, the wheedling would-be hustlers trying to take advantage of modest and clumsy bribes, the Mar-a-Lago ghosts who haunt suburban Fort Lauderdale McMansions, clutching cheaply framed photos of themselves posing with the president in a holiday party receiving line. This coalition of the doomed lines the road to perdition, grasping for any crumbs that might fall to them, forsaking all earthly pleasures other than hypnotism.

What defines our seedy era is not its dishonesty, which has always been the government’s baseline orientation, but rather the pointed lack of concern for covering that dishonesty up. The well-crafted lies have given way to careless ones. The conspiracies all fester in plain sight. The payoffs and the quid pro quos are conducted casually. The motivation to appear more just than they really are has left the ruling class. In its place is an odd sort of affinity for tawdriness, a newfound respect for disgrace. If everyone abandons all pretense at telling the truth all at once, well, the pressure’s off, isn’t it?

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Yep. When your principle political philosophy is just 'owning the libs', and blindly following your leader's every zig and zag you're just a clown hiding under a flag. How's that working out? See also: Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer (HTW):]

***

Do you have a Ring (TM) or similar video camera by your front door? With the curved end of a claw hammer, deliver a sharp downward stroke to the device’s top edge. Think of the blow as a slicing or chopping motion. When the unit is severed from your doorway, place it in the trash.

For stubbornly attached units, you can also use the flat side of the hammer in a straight-on strike, repeated until the item is rendered into a pile of splinters that can be swept up using an everyday broom and dustpan.

Some say this approach to your Ring camera is wasteful. This is true. It would have been more efficient never to install this device at all. But perhaps you moved into a home that already has one. Or perhaps you were momentarily afflicted with an episode of irrational terror, which has now passed. Either way you need to get the thing off. Whatever waste is produced is, at this point, unavoidable.

Others say that this action is destructive. This is an error. What is destructive is the insidious belief that the world outside your front door is to be treated with suspicion; that every passerby is a potential threat; that every neighbor is a potential enemy; that every human interaction must be stored and cataloged as evidence of possible crime. This attitude is destructive of good will, of brotherhood, of peace, of love. This is the attitude of the Gestapo. This is the attitude of the paranoid lunatic. This is totalitarianism creeping into your home disguised as safety.

One swift stroke of that claw hammer will fix all that.

...what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At one point in the novel, Pirsig writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Heritage Preservation Department - MNHS; uncredited book cover

Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast

When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.

Obama was scheduled to meet with President Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The formula has proved improbably successful.

People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.

Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”

The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.

Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.

At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.

“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.

“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”

As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”

“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.

“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.

“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”

Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”

“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.

Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”

But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]

As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]

In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”

“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.

Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.] 

Political Amnesia

The Trump voters telling pollsters they never voted for him.

There is a curious polling phenomenon where a nontrivial share of respondents falsely claim to have voted for the winner of the last election. Whether they’re lying, misremembering, or rewriting history, “winner’s recall” is common enough that many reputable pollsters have observed it in past elections.

In our national polling of registered voters, though, we’re finding something different: a nontrivial chunk of people who are mad at Trump seem to suddenly have amnesia and no longer admit to having voted for him in 2024.

Voters abandoning the winning candidate is a pretty big reversal of a well-established phenomenon. But we now have enough data to suggest that it’s both real and the direct result of Trump’s unpopularity.

Let’s back up for a second. How do we even know who people voted for in the first place?

The day after the 2024 election, our polling partner Verasight collected data from every respondent in its panel about whom they voted for. For each new recruit who joined its pool post-2024, it asked for 2024 vote choice as part of the signup process.

In other words, a respondent’s 2024 vote is recorded as part of their profile at a time when it was fresh in their memory. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times explained, this kind of logging of past vote is more reliable (and significantly less noisy) than asking someone who they voted for months (or even years) down the line.

But every survey, we also separately ask respondents whom they voted for so that we can see how people’s responses and memories drift and diverge from reality over time.

Here’s what we’re finding: six percent of Trump voters — as determined by the recorded vote data we have, which we’ll treat as the ground truth — don’t even admit to voting for him in the last election.

The evidence suggests that unhappiness with Trump’s performance in office is the reason these voters don’t admit to having voted for him any longer.

Approximately 15% of Trump’s 2024 voters disapproved of his job performance. Among this group, almost one in four didn’t admit to having voted for the president. Thirteen percent even falsely claimed to have voted for Kamala Harris, while 12% claimed they actually didn’t vote at all.

But among the 84% who voted for Trump and still approve of him, 98% correctly recalled having voted for him.

So we know that if a Trump voter disapproves of Trump, they’re more likely to (incorrectly) say they never voted for him in the first place.

I suspect this is down to respondents attempting to reconcile their memory of their previous vote with the way they feel right now. I call this “preference reconciliation,” and there’s a good amount of research to reinforce this theory. [...]

Here’s more proof the effect is real: it also holds for Harris voters, as well as for nonvoters and third-party voters. For example, of the Harris voters who approve of Trump, 18% falsely recalled voting for him, while among Harris voters who disapprove of Trump, this number was just 0.4%.

And looking at respondents who didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump in 2024, those who approved of him wrongly claimed they voted for him over Harris by a margin of 43 percentage points to five, whereas those who disapproved of him reported voting for Harris over Trump by a margin of 19 points to five.

In other words, the evidence in favor of “preference reconciliation” is clear, consistent, and highly observable across every stripe of partisanship: Trump voters who dislike Trump are less likely to admit to voting for him, and non-Trump voters who like him are more likely to incorrectly claim they supported him.

You can imagine that at the start of his second term, when his political strength was arguably at its peak, this effect would have inflated Trump’s recalled vote share quite a bit. Now, the effect is the opposite; with the president’s approval rating sitting at a whopping -15 points in our most recent poll, there is no appetite among the electorate to align with Trump.

by Lakshya Jain, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
[ed. I've noticed this too but never seen it quantified.]

'Banality of Evil Personified'

A fake ICE tip line reveals neighbors reporting neighbors.

Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.

Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.

Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.

“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”

What began as a comedy routine has become one of the most viral pieces of social satire during President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The kindergarten video has been watched more than 20 million times on TikTok and exploded across Facebook, Reddit and YouTube, where one commenter called it “one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance” they’d ever seen. [...]

Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement.

“He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.” (ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.)

But neither Palmer nor the website say they represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)

His supporters have argued the strategy is worth it because it has helped reveal the horrors of America’s immigration crackdown, exposing the moral contradictions and hidden inhumanities of deportation politics — and reaching viewers, through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, who might otherwise be politically disengaged. One commenter said the teacher video showed the “banality of evil personified.”

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor who studies political comedy and saw the video on social media, said Palmer’s satire has been effective because he plays the conversations as straight as possible, letting the caller deliver an unimpeded justification that slowly crumbles under its own weight.

“It creates this uncomfortable irony, where he's letting the person deliver the argument and it just beats itself, because it's so morally problematic or hypocritical or wrong,” he said. “You can kind of sense that they think they're doing the right thing, and then he just repeats what they said, and they kind of realize they're doing something terrible.”

Palmer's project, Sienkiewicz said, feels especially distinctive in the short-video era because he does not copy the style of many social media ideologues by “rage-baiting” viewers into an immediate emotional response.

“So much of contemporary internet culture is showing something offensive and telling people how to feel about it,” he said. “It’s his refusal to act enraged that allows the audience to then choose their own level of anger.” [...]

After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another homeowner reported his neighbor after he used his trash can.

One tipster called after she went to Publix and the worker who helped her find the water didn’t speak English. “And then she did help you find the water?” Palmer asked on the call, to which the woman responded, “Right, she walked me right to it.”

Many of the tipsters spoke as if the government was “their own personal army,” Palmer said. “If these are the calls I’m getting, as a fake, not legitimate person, imagine what’s happening at the actual ICE.”

In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in the school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York, and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.”

When Palmer read back her report in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude.

“I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said. [...]

Dannagal Young, a political communication professor at the University of Delaware, said Palmer’s videos could help reach Americans turned off by politics and uninformed about how deportations work. She noted that immigration, once one of Trump’s most popular policy issues, has become the one area where he’s lost the most support.

“There’s something really powerful about witnessing someone have to reckon with their own moral judgment in the moment, especially because they think they’re calling a welcome receiver, and they think they’re going to be applauded,” Young said.

“He is describing to them the reality of what they’re requesting as though it is completely fine and desirable, and through that calm matter-of-fact representation, it reveals itself to be absolutely inhumane,” she added. “The greatest nightmare for this administration is [normal people] paying attention.”

by Drew Harwell, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Natalie Vineberg/The Washington Post; Screenshots from Ben Palmer's YouTube and reportaliens.us; iStock

[ed. 'Banality of Evil' ~ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem]

Child’s Play

Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

The first sign that something in San Francisco had gone very badly wrong was the signs. In New York, all the advertising on the streets and on the subway assumes that you, the person reading, are an ambiently depressed twenty-eight-year-old office worker whose main interests are listening to podcasts, ordering delivery, and voting for the Democrats. I thought I found that annoying, but in San Francisco they don’t bother advertising normal things at all. The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: TODAY, SOC 2 IS DONE BEFORE YOUR GIRLFRIEND BREAKS UP WITH YOU. IT'S DONE IN DELVE. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did. A few blocks away, I saw a billboard that read: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT. MAKE THEM. UNIFY: TRANSFORM GROWTH INTO A SCIENCE. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife. Passersby in sight of the billboard that read WEARABLE TECH SHAREABLE INSIGHTS did not seem piqued by the prospect of having their metrics constantly analyzed. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to PROMPT IT. THEN PUSH IT. After spending slightly too long in the city, I found that the various forms of nonsense all started to bleed into one another. The motionless people drooling on the sidewalk, the Waymos whooshing around with no one inside. A kind of pervasive mindlessness. Had I seen a billboard or a madman preaching about “a CRM so smart, it updates itself”? Was it a person in rags muttering about how all his movements were being controlled by shadowy powers working out of a data center somewhere, or was it a car?

Somehow people manage to live here. But of all the strange and maddening messages posted around this city, there was one particular type of billboard that the people of San Francisco couldn’t bear. People shuddered at the sight of it, or groaned, or covered their eyes. The advertiser was the most utterly despised startup in the entire tech landscape. Weirdly, its ads were the only ones I saw that appeared to be written in anything like English:

HI MY NAME IS ROY
I GOT KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL FOR CHEATING 

BUY MY CHEATING TOOL

CLUELY.COM

Cluely and its co-founder Chungin “Roy” Lee were intensely, and intentionally, controversial. They’re no longer in San Francisco, having been essentially chased out of the city by the Planning Commission. The company is loathed seemingly out of proportion to what its product actually is, which is a janky, glitching interface for ChatGPT and other AI models. It’s not in a particularly glamorous market: Cluely is pitched at ordinary office drones in their thirties, working ordinary bullshit email jobs. It’s there to assist you in Zoom meetings and sales calls. It involves using AI to do your job for you, but this is what pretty much everyone is doing already. The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window. A lot of the other complaints about Cluely seem similarly hypocritical. The company is fueled by cheap viral hype, rather than an actual workable product—but this is a strange thing to get upset about when you consider that, back in the era of zero interest rates, Silicon Valley investors sank $120 million into something called the Juicero, a Wi-Fi-enabled smart juicer that made fresh juice from fruit sachets that you could, it turned out, just as easily squeeze between your hands.

What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.

by Sam Kriss, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Max Guther

[ed. Seems like we're already creating artificial humans. That said, I have only the highest regard for Scott Alexander, one of the people profiled here. The article makes him sound like some kind of cult leader or something (he's a psychologist), but he's really just a smart guy with a wide range of interests that intelligent people gravitate to (also a great writer). Here's his response  on his website ACX:]

***

I agreed to be included, it’s basically fine, I’m not objecting to it, but a few small issues, mostly quibbles with emphasis rather than fact:

1. The piece says rationalists believe “that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch”. The Harper’s fact-checker asked me if this was true and I emphatically said it wasn’t, so I’m not sure what’s going on here.

2. The article describes me having dinner with my “acolytes”. I would have used the word “friends”, or, in one case, “wife”.

3. The article says that “When there weren’t enough crackers to go with the cheese spread, [Scott] fetched some, murmuring to himself, “I will open the crackers so you will have crackers and be happy.”” As written, this makes me sound like a crazy person; I don’t remember this incident but, given the description, I’m almost sure I was saying it to my two year old child, which would have been helpful context in reassuring readers about my mental state. (UPDATE: Sam says this isn’t his memory of the incident, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

4. The article assessed that AI was hitting a wall at the time of writing (September 2025). I explained some of the difficulties with AI agents, but I’m worried that as written it might suggest to readers think that I agreed with its assessment. I did not.

5. In the article, I say that I “never once actually made a decision [in my life]”. I don’t remember this conversation perfectly and he’s the one with the tape recorder, but I would have preferred to frame this as life mostly not presenting as a series of explicit decisions, although they do occasionally come up.

6. Everything else is in principle a fair representation of what I said, but it’s impossible to communicate clearly through a few sentences that get quoted in disjointed fragments, so a lot of things came off as unsubtle or not exactly how I meant them. If you have any questions, I can explain further in the comments.

Family Farms, Not Data Farms

US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’. Families are navigating the tough choice between unimaginable riches and the identity that comes with land.

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.

According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.

The unknown company was building a datacenter.

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.

Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land’s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he’d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago. [...]

Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap power and abundant water.

Developers keep knocking because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615m for less than 100 acres – property the seller had bought for just $57m four years prior. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m for it 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.

‘Name your price’

About 20 Mason county residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the datacenter project estimated to cover 2,000 acres.

After Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8m offer for his 250-acre farm – 3,500% more than he’d paid nearly four decades earlier – the developers came back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”

His answer: “There is none.” [...]

‘Keeping our people here’

Local officials in Mason county insist the datacenter would sustain future generations by bringing much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument being made in town halls across the country.

Mason’s population has shrunk by around 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project would bring 1,000 construction jobs, although it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.

In places like Loudoun county, Virginia – home to “Data Center Alley”, where about a fifth of the world’s internet traffic goes through – datacenter tax revenue nearly equals the county’s entire operating budget.any 

“We can continue to shrink – losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – or we can chart a new course,” Tyler McHugh, Mason county’s industrial development director, said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”

by Niamha Rowe, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Jim West/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
[ed. No disrespect to folks determined to keep their land (generational diffusion and family disageements usually take care of that), but something seems off here. Globally, 40000 acres of land are projected to be needed for data centers? That's almost nothing. So what are companies really paying for?]

How Scarcity Politics Eats Liberalism

American politics is increasingly organized around a simple conviction: There’s only so much to go around. Only so many good jobs, decent homes, and slots in the social hierarchy. If someone else starts doing better, that’s a threat—it means someone else (maybe you) is getting screwed.

The throughline of MAGA politics is this zero-sum worldview.

Whether it is immigrants taking all the good jobs or other nations developing domestic manufacturing at the expense of American industry or even women’s advancement in the workplace coming at the expense of men, the story is the same: When someone else wins, you lose. You are in a fight over scarce resources, and you have to protect your own.

Now, of course, many interactions are zero-sum: If someone passes you before the finish line of a race, their gain comes directly at your expense. But many other interactions and games are or can be positive-sum. For instance, if more kids know how to read, that’s better for everyone; it doesn’t necessarily come at another person’s expense.

But are the most important economic, political, and cultural questions more like the 50-meter dash or childhood literacy?

Zero-sum thinking is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think every extension of opportunity to one group necessarily hurts another, you’ll oppose immigration, trade, new housing, and eventually basic rights for anyone who isn’t already inside the circle. Eventually you get a politics of permanent siege, where every reform is framed as an attack on “heritage” Americans. That doesn’t just leave the country poorer; it makes it almost impossible to sustain a liberal society where people believe rights and prosperity can expand rather than being rationed.

But this isn’t a story about right vs. left. Zero-sum thinking cleaves both parties, and in fact Democrats are more likely than Republicans to hold such views. In a new paper, economists Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva ran a massive survey of 20,400 U.S. residents to investigate the roots of zero-sum thinking.

Their analysis reveals that people who exhibit zero-sum thinking are more likely to support more restrictive immigration policies, yes, but also redistribution and affirmative action. The logic of this is that people who believe that some groups are behind because of other groups are more likely to support policies that rebalance that.

Quick caveat here that you can support redistribution, affirmative action, and restrictive immigration policies without holding zero-sum views. For instance, I support redistribution because I think poverty is bad and society is better off when people have a basic standard of living. I don’t think my gains have come at the expense of a homeless person in California, but I do think I should be taxed to help house them.

The crucial difference is that I see these transfers as part of a bigger positive-sum project making the country richer, safer, and more stable — not as payback in a never-ending war between groups. Zero-sum thinkers see only the war, and they vote and govern accordingly.

Liberalism’s scarcity problem

Liberalism is a bet that rights and prosperity can expand together. Zero-sum politics tells people that bet is insane, that any gain for immigrants, minorities, or newcomers must be stolen from “heritage” Americans. If one group’s gain comes at another group’s loss, then it would be masochistic or, at best, extremely altruistic to fight for the political or economic rights of another group.

Not all scarcities are like rainfall, some are choices. Land-use regulations that choke off housing supply are policy-created scarcities that make it rational to fear “competition,” and they keep zero-sum intuitions alive even in a rich country. Research shows that these regulations have limited regional and economic mobility, slowed economic growth, and reduced worker wages. All ingredients for creating a zero-sum society.

by Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. From the comments (Chris Wasden):]

***

Zero-sum thinking flows from victim identity—the belief that my gain requires your loss, producing Maladaptive responses: immigration restrictions, housing freezes, endless redistribution battles. But as Foster showed, this isn't irrational when growth has genuinely stalled.

The deeper question: Why do wealthy societies manufacture scarcity through zoning, occupational licensing, and educational monopolies? Because victim identity demands control over fixed resources rather than expansion of opportunity.

Classical liberalism bet everything on abundance through creative tension—not just material prosperity, but expanding rights, mobility, and human potential...

The alternative isn't abandoning those in need—it's recognizing that genuine help means expanding opportunity, not managing dependency. Equal access to excellent education. Economic mobility through deregulation. Housing abundance through builder-friendly policies.

...We have chosen scarcity. Liberalism survives when it delivers what those peasant societies never experienced: visible, tangible proof that the pie grows. That's not just policy—it's identity transformation from competitor to architect.