The Desert Safety Net

Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.

Every autumn across North America, migration begins.

And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.

They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.

Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.

Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.

“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.

In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.

It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.

Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.

In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.

With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.

In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.

A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.

*****

For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.

Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.

According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.

But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.

But not everyone keeps moving.

Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.

Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.

Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.

“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.

Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.

Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]

Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.

He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.

“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.

“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”

For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.

“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”

by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Jackson

Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

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

Something Big Is Happening on Campus

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.

These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.

Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.

Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.

By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”

But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.

Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”

Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.

I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.

I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind. [...]

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”

The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:

by David Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic: Source: Laurie Michaels/Bridgeman Images
[ed. Contrast this with someone (below), who believes that colleges should be modeled after OnlyFans, and that hyper-specialization ("edge" degrees where AI will supposedly be less adept) are the future. I know which curriculum I'd choose.]

Intervention Time

via: X
[ed. Surreal. Republicans continue their silence and make excuses. The entire nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Nothing to see here. For more, including pictures and videos, see: If You Have to Tell People You’re the G.O.A.T., Then You Are Not (Larry Johnson). Then there's this - below:]

Kash Patel’s Personalized Calling Card

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.

But then came Kash Patel.

President Trump’s FBI director has a great deal of affection for swag. Merchandise for sale on a website he co-founded—still operating, nearly 15 months into his term—includes beanies ($35), T-shirts ($35), orange camo hoodies ($65), trucker caps ($25), “government gangsters” playing cards (on sale for $10), and a Fight With Kash Punisher scarf ($25).

One thing not for sale is liquor, because liquor is something Patel gives away for free.

Last month, I reported that FBI personnel were alarmed by what they said was erratic behavior and excessive drinking by Patel. (The FBI director has denied the allegations and filed a defamation suit against The Atlantic and me.)

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)

Patel has given out bottles of his personalized whiskey to FBI staff as well as civilians he encounters in his duties, according to eight people, including current and former FBI and Department of Justice employees and others who are familiar with Patel’s distribution of the bottles. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Patel has distributed his self-branded bottles while on official business, including during at least one FBI event. He and his team have transported the whiskey using a DOJ plane, including when he went to Milan during the Olympics in February. One of the bottles was left behind in a locker room, according to a person who was there. (I reviewed a photograph of the bottle.) On the same trip, Patel was filmed drinking beer with the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team—behavior that officials have said did not sit well with the teetotaling president. Patel defended himself at the time, saying he was just celebrating with his “friends” on the hockey team. Patel’s use of DOJ aircraft to transport cases of alcohol has been the subject of discussion among FBI staff.

The FBI did not dispute that Patel gives out bottles of whiskey inscribed with his name, but in response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson portrayed the gifts as routine within the FBI and the broader government. He added that “the bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”

The spokesperson declined to clarify which ethical rules Patel was following, when the bottles were engraved with Patel’s name, or whether any bottles had actually been reimbursed as personal gifts. The FBI also declined to provide images of bottles bearing the names of past directors. When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing. [...]

A spokesperson for Woodford Reserve said she did not have information about who had ordered the bottles or when. “Consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” Elizabeth Conway, the director of external communications for the distillery’s parent company, told me. “These engravings occur after the point of purchase.”

Patel’s affection for bourbon is long-standing; during the first Trump administration, he and his colleagues at the National Security Council kept a barrel of it on hand to celebrate successful hostage negotiations and rescues, The New Yorker reported last year. (Patel served as the council’s senior director for counterterrorism at the time.)

Patel’s enthusiasm for self-branded merchandise is also well documented. “He is known as being very merch forward,” one DOJ employee told me. Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher, one person who received such a box told me. As my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro reported in 2024, before Patel became FBI director, he previously sold “Justice for All” #J6PC tees in honor of those arrested for their actions on January 6, 2021. (That item is no longer available from the Kash Foundation, which was founded by Patel but is now, according to its website, “an independent nonprofit, not endorsed by, associated with, or influenced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, or any government agency.”)

In a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in September, former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Steven Jensen described an interaction in Patel’s conference room in which the director presented him with an abnormally large challenge coin—a memento often given out by leaders in law-enforcement and military organizations. The coin was inscribed Director at the top and Ka$h Patel at the bottom.

“Jensen then noticed a collection of whiskey bottles and cigars on Patel’s desk,” the complaint states. According to the complaint, “Patel explained that he used to produce his own brand of cigars, but they are not in production anymore.” Jensen, who oversaw parts of the investigation into the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, was fired in August. (The U.S. government has moved to dismiss the case, and the lawsuit is pending.) Jensen’s lawyer, Margaret Donovan, told me in a statement that “there are line agents out there spending their nights and weekends trying to finish warrants, write reports, plan arrests. Yet the FBI Director apparently has the time to design logos, go to hockey games, sit for multi-hour podcast interviews. This is one of the most serious jobs in the country, not a vehicle for self-promotion and branding.”

by Sarah Fitzpatrick, The Atlantic | Read more:
Images: The Atlantic; Ebay; CSPAN; William Turton/X; Health Ranger Report
[ed. What a sad little man, but then no different than his boss. See also: Kash as the Poster Boy for Kakistocracy (Richard Hanania).]

Why Consciousness Researchers Have Failed (So Far)

Oh god, I barely made it through.

Experienced sensations while reading: frustration, dread, restless legs, and overwhelming waves of weariness. At one point I felt physically nauseous.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, since (a) Michael Pollan is a great writer who has proven his chops over countless other topics, and (b) this is objectively quite a good book about the science of consciousness. Indeed, I should be happy! Consciousness is clearly having “a moment” right now—a science book about consciousness has been on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, and meanwhile, the online world is abuzz with debates about AI consciousness.

And yet… I hated Pollan’s book.

I felt that every next chapter or section could have been predicted by some statistical machine for producing books about consciousness (“Okay, here’s the part about David Chalmers coming up”). And yes, I have the advantage of being a researcher in the same subject and have even worked with some of the figures Pollan writes about, which is why in my own The World Behind the World (we all seem to gravitate to the same titles, huh) I broadly told much the same story. But you can even go back to science journalist John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind, published in 1999, to get similar progress beats and quite familiar names. It’s been 27 years, during which the discussion has (as many fields of science do) centered around major figures like neuroscientists Christof Koch or Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio or philosophers like David Chalmers. There’s always the part where Alison Gopnik makes an appearance. Karl Friston pops his head in. And all these people are intellectual titans. Truly. But honestly, this stage of consciousness research feels played out.

Like you have Christof Koch, one of the highest-profile figures, who broke open the field in the 1990s with Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA’s structure) and gave one of the first proposals for a neural correlate of consciousness: gamma oscillations in the ~40Hz range in the cortex.

Koch, who is soon to turn seventy, was for a while after the death of Francis Crick a staunch supporter of Integrated Information Theory (I was part of the team that worked on developing that theory after Giulio Tononi proposed it, and even once did a conference submission with Koch himself). But now Koch has apparently moved on to other approaches to consciousness, mentioning his attendance of an ayahuasca ceremony and his accessing of a “universal mind.”

Here’s Pollan talking to Koch at the end of the book:

When I confessed to Koch my fear—that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started—he simply smiled.

“But that’s good,” he said. “That’s progress.”

No, it isn’t!

Consciousness is not here for our personal therapy. It’s not tied to our life journeys. And I’m guilty of all that artsy and personal stuff too! But it’s no longer about how the grand mystery makes us feel, or the friends we made along the way.

It’s all changed.

HOW WE FAILED

Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love. On the other hand, if somehow AIs are conscious, either right now (to some degree), or near-future ones will become so, then they deserve rights and protections, and the entire legal and social apparatus of our civilization must expand rapidly to include radically different types of minds (or we must choose to restrict what kinds of minds we create). There are immediate practical matters here. Long term, we also need to protect against extremely bad futures where only non-conscious intelligences remain—the worst of all possible worlds is that our civilization acts like a reverse metamorphosis, where something weaker but more beautiful, organic consciousness, gets shed in the birth of some horrible star-devouring insect made of matrix multiplication. And then it turns out there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying.

While it’s my opinion that modern LLMs operate more like tools right now, or at best like a lesser statistical approximation of what a good human output would be (with their main advantage being search, not insight), this is all just the beginning of the technology. The door is open and will never be closed again.

Of course, consciousness matters far beyond just AI. Table stakes for actual scientific progress on consciousness include shifting neuroscience and psychiatry from pre-paradigmatic to post-paradigmatic sciences (and all the pile-on effects from that). This was always true. But my point here is that LLMs act like a forcing function. Before everything changed, consciousness research was an unhurried subfield of neuroscience that was always a little weird and niche; therefore academics are guilty of treating consciousness like an academic exercise. [...]

Due to the rise of behaviorism and logical positivism, “consciousness” became a dirty word in science for half a century or more—precisely when the rest of the sciences rocketed ahead! The consciousness winter only really ended in the 1990s because of the collective weight of several Nobel Prize winners (like Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman) determined to make it acceptable again.

The two major scientific conferences (which are how scientists organize) devoted to consciousness also only started in the mid-90s. That’s just 30 years ago! Modern science is incredibly powerful, maybe the most powerful force in existence, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not long at all. That’s just one generation of scientists and thinkers. Kudos to them. Pretty much all of the big names (including definitely Koch) deserve their laurels, and contra Pollan, I do think consciousness actually has made progress over the last 30 years, in that our conceptions are a lot cleaner, the definitional problem is pretty much solved, a lot of the space of initial possible theories is mapped, the problems and difficulties are much better known and clearly outlined, and there is organizational and behind-the-scenes structure that exists in the form of established conferences and labs and minor amounts of funding, etc.

And that’s another thing: no one has tried throwing money at the consciousness problem, at all—and for many problems, from AI to cancer cures, a necessary component often ends up being finance and scale and concentrating talent.

Humanity spends something like a billion dollars a year on CERN. To compare, let’s look at the biggest scientific funder in the United States, the NIH. Out of 103,280 grants awarded to scientists during the 2007-2017 decade, want to guess how many were about directly studying the contents of consciousness?

Five.

That’s probably, at most, a couple million dollars in funding over a decade. Total. So if you’re a consciousness researcher, what can you do, cheaply? What can you do, for free? You can pontificate. You can propose your own theory of consciousness! That requires no funding whatsoever. And so for 30 years the meta in consciousness research has been to create your own theory of consciousness. We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom. The problem is that, if any flower is at all true or promising, you can’t identify it, as its sweet subjectivity-solving scent is completely masked by the bunches of corpse flowers around it. We have too many flowers, and one more just isn’t meaningful anymore. As is sometimes said at the end of fairy tales: “Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.”

What we need are efforts at field-clearing, and methods that can actually make progress on consciousness in ways not tied to just promoting or trying to find evidence for some pre-chosen pet theory—which means finding ways to select over theories, to test theories en masse, so you don’t reinvent the wheel each time, and, perhaps most importantly, you have to do all this while scaling institutions with funding to specifically get a bunch of smart people in a room working together on this.

ME GETTING OFF MY ASS

If the 2020s were all about intelligence, then necessarily the 2030s will be all about consciousness. Intelligence is about function, while consciousness is about being, and forays and progress into understanding (and shaping) function will in turn force our attention toward a better understanding of being. And if the answer to “Why has consciousness not been solved?” is secretly “Material and historical conditions made it hard for anyone to actually try!” then the answer is to actually try.

I refuse to live in a civilization where we consciousness researchers have so obviously failed. I refuse to live in a civilization where we cannot tell consciousness from non-consciousness. Where we can offer no guidance for the future. Where we cannot explain the difference between actually experiencing things vs just processing them. In the short term, this is destabilizing and harmful. In the long term, it may be literally existentially dangerous.

by Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Michael Pollan/Penguin Random House

[ed. I thought consciousness research was going great guns since it's central to determining AGI (artificial general intelligence). Huh. See also: His ‘Machine’ Could Uncover the Origin of Human Consciousness—And if It Truly Connects to the Whole Universe (Popular Mechanics)]

The Life and Times of an American Tween

Every Wednesday, at exactly 2:15 P.M., the electronic bell at San Francisco’s A. P. Giannini Middle School sounds with a dull, droning buzz, and hundreds of students stream from the building. They wear big pants and bucket hats, cropped tanks and cargo jeans, Athleta sets and Air Force 1s. They carry ergonomically unsound backpacks dripping with bag charms and key chains: athletic affiliations, memorabilia, miniature stuffies. They pull thick socks up over their leggings; fix hydrocolloid stickers, star-shaped and cutesy, atop angry, interloping zits. Their lip tint is red and thickly applied. Their water bottles are status symbols. Their press-ons are shellacked and combat-ready. There are boys, too, small and gangly. They move in packs, magnifying their bulk like synchronized minnows. They look dressed by their mothers. On early-dismissal days, the afternoon yawns with possibility. The students dash to the bus or wander the nearby commercial drag, which has little going for it save the hardware store, where there is candy. They exchange their allowance for matcha ice cream at Polly Ann; gobble Domino’s to no intestinal detriment. They buy boba and punt each other with tapioca bullets. They flock to Starbucks for magenta Cannon Ball Drinks, creamy Pink Drinks, sludgy Dubai Chocolate Mochas. They chug the unchuggable. Twelve blocks to the west, the Pacific Ocean glitters and threatens, waves dragging out in the wind.

On a Wednesday afternoon, I was joined outside A.P.G. by Mira, a sixth grader with an open, angelic face and an ebullient presence. It is often chilly and overcast in the Outer Sunset, but this was a warm and clear day, and Mira, who is interested in matters of fashion, wore low-slung cargo sweatpants and a white tube top. Her hair, which is long, dark, and curly, had recently been treated to a bathroom Manic Panic job, and the front strands were dyed a light peach. She smoothed a strand as one might the tail of a cat. Mira is good company: frank, funny, and self-deprecating in a way that suggests confidence rather than its lack. At four feet eight, she is small for her age, but manages to occupy space laterally. She moves with a noodle elasticity, and is prone to breaking into dance moves while going about her business: a full-body wave from wrist to wrist, an entire sequence from a Katseye music video. The first time we met, we were mid-conversation when she inexplicably dropped into a side split, grabbed her ankles, and rolled backward, placing her toes on the floor behind her head. “At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t do an aerial”—a hands-free cartwheel—“and I can kind of do one now,” she told me, harrowingly assuming the starting position.

Mira is twelve years old and lives in the Avenues, San Francisco’s foggy western neighborhoods, with her mother, Michalle, who is a nurse practitioner, her father, Patrick, who is a full-time parent, and her sibling, Dylan, who is nine. (Last year, Dylan requested to use they/them pronouns, which the family mostly remembers to honor.) Like most kids her age, Mira exists in the murky, thrilling bardo between childhood and maturity. She is a gracious host—quick to offer guests a Spindrift—who totes a lunchbox adorned with a sticker of a unicorn. She is learning to cook, mostly quesadillas, but if she could she would live on Cheetos, boba, Trü Früs, and Coke. She razzes her parents in a way that makes them laugh, but no longer tells them everything. Mira’s first middle-school dance was coming up, and there was discussion among her friends about dresses and hair styles. I was excited to see which of her dance moves would make an appearance.

For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.

That Wednesday, Mira went to Polly Ann with her friends Kaitlyn and Sloane. At the counter, the girls realized no one had brought money. They began plumbing their wallets—pink, pleather, flat—for stray coins. Sloane called her mother on her Apple Watch and, in a mix of English and Mandarin, requested a transfusion of Apple Cash. She hung up just as Mira and Kaitlyn discovered, miraculously, that if they pooled their assets they could afford to split something. “Never mind we found money exclamation point,” Sloane said into her watch.

“Sloane, no!” Mira said. “We were going to get money!” Giggling, the girls ordered a pint of watermelon ice cream, requested three spoons, and dropped their last dime into the tip jar. They headed to a playground, a regular hangout spot for their peers, and settled onto a boulder. Smaller children from a nearby elementary school were availing themselves of climbers, slides, and beams. But by the boulder the real action was social and discursive. Two sixth-grade boys appeared, one tall and floppy-haired, the other wiry and blond. “Mira, I have a question for you,” the floppy-haired boy said. “Are you straight?” Mira looked at him, her face grave and blank. “No, no, not for me, for one of my friends,” he said, putting his hands out in front of his body, as if to distance himself from any association with crushing. Mira wanted to know who had dispatched him, but the boy wandered off to a playground structure, singing Jimmy Eat World to himself. [...]

The literature on adolescence marks middle school as a turning point, a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet: now there are clean girls, tomato girls, vanilla girls, office sirens, femboys, e-boys, looksmaxxers; one can be avant basic, old money, new money, quiet luxury, cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore. Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.

by Anna Wiener, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ok Causland

Doomers in Love

Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.

This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.

But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.

Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”

In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain: How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?

These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are liberal numbers.”

A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.

I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.

One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”

I later tell Jake,* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.

The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”

“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”

I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.

by Mana Afsari, The Point | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Maybe it's because these guys don't have fully formed personalities and rely too heavily on being told what to think, be, expect by dumb macho podcasters.]

Banter

I run into a lot of people who don’t seem to understand what banter is. In my experience, it has exactly two ingredients:

• You call someone out for a transgression that is, in fact, a transgression—something where they are in fact cringe, have in fact lost some points.

• You do so in a context and in a manner where it’s clear that this doesn’t matter, overall—that they are safe, and still “in.” That the loss is small and absorbable and forgettable.

That’s it.

If you (metaphorically or literally) fart while everyone is eating, and nobody mentions it, this can be a certain kind of anxiety-inducing. It’s not clear whether the faux pas was noticed, and by whom; it’s not clear whether it’s being left unmentioned because it’s a really big deal, actually; it’s not clear whether maybe people are going to talk about it later, behind your back, or whether the loss of status is so great that actually this is the last time you’ll be invited, or whether they think that you are so fragile and thin-skinned that they don’t dare to just … acknowledge plain reality.

But if you fart, and everybody groans and calls you the Field-Marshal of Flatulence, and there’s good-natured laughter, and then the conversation moves on to the next target…

What’s happened is that a cap has been put, on how bad it could possibly be. That the group feels safe acknowledging plain reality. They feel like it’s fine. They’re showing, viscerally, that it’s fine. They’re defusing the potential of social land mines by loudly stomping around, laughing and unafraid. They’re not so concerned over the loss of a few points that they’re making A Big Deal Out Of It.

This can go south, in a number of ways. It’s not always easy to distinguish loving banter from contempt; they sort of necessarily use the same words and the same channels.

And if you yourself are not secure in your position within the group—if you’re either genuinely afraid that you don’t have very many points, or if you just kind of happen to be eternally socially anxious, such that you feel threatened by the pointing-out—this can cause you to react loudly to the attempted gentle slug-on-the-shoulder, in a way that demonstrates back to the group that it’s not safe to josh you, actually, and that whole thing can start a spiral away from a starting point that was actually safe (if only you’d known).

But overall, friendships that have had a few fights and then recovered feel more secure than friendships that have only ever been Good Vibes Only. People who’ve made a couple of mistakes and come out of it fine are less terrified of misstepping than people who’ve never gotten anything wrong, in a given context, and don’t know what will happen if they do. One feels less scared of small downturns in the market if one has been investing for a while, and seen the squiggles go up and down, and trusts that they mostly go up in the end.

Banter is your friends’ expression of the sentiment “We see you. We actually see you. We see your flaws, your foibles. We accept you, warts and all. We’re not going to only conspicuously be accepting of your carefully curated best face.” [...]

Banter is your friends telling you “look, yeah, you lost some points, but whatever, you had 9567 and now you have 9548, big deal, nobody cares.”

And that’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than “Whoa, whoa, whoa—you just lost 19 points!? Jesus, you’d better get your shit together, you can’t afford to do that very many times.”...

And it’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than [embarrassing moment] → [radio silence]. Radio silence could mean anything.

by Duncan Sabien, Homo Sabiens |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Shooting and Crying

The focus of a recent conversation on the New York Times’s “The Opinions” podcast with Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, hosted by Nadja Spiegelman, was whether stealing from large corporations is justified and/or constitutes a meaningful form of protest or political action. Most of the controversy that ensued had to do with the fact that while Tolentino denied the latter (“Any successful direct action in history has to be ostentatious, has to make itself known, it’s ideally collective”), she affirmed the former, and not so sheepishly admitted to stealing from Whole Foods herself. Commentators expressed outrage at her glib affirmation of petty crime. What caught my attention however was something different altogether. It wasn’t a matter of questionable conduct, or a specious form of moral reasoning, per se. What struck me was a peculiar understanding of what it means to be moral at all.

Spiegelman ended the conversation by asking, “What’s one thing that you think should be OK but currently isn’t OK?” Piker answered briefly, “I.P. theft. Stealing movies, things like that.” But Tolentino struggled to answer the question directly:

One thing that should be legal that isn’t—it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that. (Emphasis mine.)

Spiegelman found this particularly relatable. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society,” she agreed. “I’m constantly acting in ways that don’t align with my belief system. And constantly having to justify that, like ordering in food when it’s raining out … my comfort is more important than someone bringing me food through the rain. And it doesn’t feel good. But it is part of living—I mean, no one’s making me do that, but it is part of the way in which we live in our society.”

On the standard view of what it means to act in the light of moral knowledge—to act while possessing a capacity to tell right from wrong—when one confronts a moral injunction, say, “don’t do X,” one faces a choice between two courses of action: refrain from Xing or figure out why “don’t do X” is only apparently a moral injunction. Show, to yourself if not also to others, why it is, in general, or under these circumstances, okay to do X.

Both paths can be difficult. Not Xing may come at great personal cost, or one might really love Xing. And figuring out why it is actually okay to do X could be tricky because it might just not be okay to do X, at all; or the argument to the effect that Xing is fine, actually, might be elusive, requiring a lot of serious thinking; or these arguments may be such as to put one in conflict with oneself—with other beliefs one espouses and ways one conducts oneself—or with others, on whose companionship, or approval, or readership, one depends. In other words, the incentives to find ways to both do X and distance oneself from doing X, at one and the same time, are plentiful and powerful.

Jia Tolentino has always been particularly interested in such dilemmas. In her best-selling 2019 essay collection Trick Mirror, she wrote probingly about the difficulty of abstaining from Amazon, Ballet Barre, Sephora, expensive haircuts and salad chains. In 2026, she adds to these moral torments iced coffee in plastic cups and flying for pleasure. By her own admission, all of these temptations might be just the tip of the iceberg.

Tolentino’s curious confessions—“I do so many immoral things every day!” she jauntily reassured Spiegelman—put me in mind of an expression in Hebrew that is meant to capture a way of responding to the powerful incentives to do X and distance oneself from doing X at one and the same time: yorim ve bochim, “shooting and crying.”

Shooting and crying is a term of derision directed at the attitude that IDF soldiers and Israelis more generally have been known to take toward the violence they routinely employ. While it was first and mostly subsequently used to mock a certain kind of post-factum lament—soldiers complaining after the Six Day war, or the first Lebanon war, or the second Lebanon war, or the Gaza war, about the military’s conduct, the implicit idea is that the crying and the shooting might as well be contemporaneous. This is because, while in individual cases those accused of shooting and crying might have been expressing genuine moral contrition—indeed some of those blithely accused of shooting and crying have gone on to dedicate their lives to justice and reform—collectively, a certain kind of crying enables rather than curbs moral disaster. This is the kind of crying that is calibrated to express regret not for what one has done and should not have done so much as for what one, regrettably, had to do. In this way, the avowed hatred of violence absolves the personal and national conscience (cf. “I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action”) and thereby clears a path for its infinite repetition (cf. “I do so many immoral things every day”). At the same time, the professed “moral injury” to self turns the perpetrator into a victim (cf. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society”). The problem with shooting and crying is that all too often you are not really crying for anyone but yourself.

Far be it from me to propose that a slippery slope leads from Ballet Barre to what Tolentino would be very happy to call a genocide. At the same time, Tolentino’s own moral trajectory does suggest, minimally, that one is liable to gain a certain facility with the move. Do it enough and shooting and crying starts to come easy.

by Anastasia Berg, The Point |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I love this term - shooting and crying. It applies to so many bad decisions and behaviors (especially former and present wars). After the fact contrition where before the fact certainty once ruled. If only we had known then what we know now. No. You were told then and refused to listen.] 

What Makes Art Great?

Shakespeare is excellent, whereas AI writing is — at least, for now — dull. AIs can now write much of our code, review legal contracts, and perform various impressive feats; they have achieved gold-medal-level scores at the IMO. But, as of this writing, I am not aware of a truly interesting AI-written poem or even essay. Why?

This breaks down into two questions:

1. What makes texts good?

2. Why is it difficult for AI to do that?

This essay will focus on question 1, and is thus mostly about aesthetics.

1. Surprise

One of the things that so offends us about AI ‘slop’ images is a sense that the details don’t matter. The cup is green, but it may as well have been blue. In good human works, every detail feels carefully chosen. Arbitrarily changing a color in a Hopper painting would make it worse.

You can put this in terms of compression. A cliche illustration of, say, a vase of flowers can just be described as “imagine a New Yorker cartoon of a vase of flowers“. But a really good painting of a vase of flowers can only be captured by seeing the painting itself: nothing else will substitute. Great artworks are hard to compress (i.e. have high information content); slop is easy to compress. When you type a few short sentences into an AI image generator and it makes you an image for your blog post, you are likely generating slop because you are injecting relatively little information yourself. 

Another word for ‘high information’ is ‘surprising’. Thus:

1. Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.

One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise — where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know — our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty. [...]

Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten ‘hothouse’ or ‘uniquely’:

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose…

The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting:

Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:

Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?
— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133

The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor...“ and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word ‘whipping’. This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.

These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception. [...]

My main argument in this section has been that surprisingness, or strangeness, operates at many different levels in the art we value: word choice (or color choice), grammar, sentence, plot, form, and so on. This strangeness is essential for the effect of great art, because we like to make sense of things, and if we make sense of things too easily they are not interesting to us; great works of art are therefore necessarily somewhat difficult to grasp the meaning of, their meanings are multiple and constantly shifting, and they require a pleasant kind of effort to make sense of.

To go back to AI, all of this gives us some sense of why LLMs aren’t great writers by default. At the word level, they tend to pick relatively ‘obvious’ choices. Thus, I ask the model currently considered the best AI writer: “write a descriptive paragraph about a day in the park“ and it starts with: “A warm afternoon unfolds in the park, where sunlight filters through the canopy of old oak trees and dapples the ground in shifting patterns of gold and green“. Note that this is the most cliche possible detail to have picked, and the word ‘dapples’ is the most common word to use in this context; in short, the whole thing is unsurprising.

And yet: you cannot fix this problem simply by asking the AI to be more surprising. Why?

2. Echoes

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms…
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

The most surprising sequence of numbers is a random one, but a random sequence of numbers is not great art. You need more than just surprise. The details of great artworks relate to each other somehow. They are chosen in such a way that they cohere with each other at multiple levels.

Great works are full of patterns. They are as intricately patterned as Persian rugs or Norwegian stave churches. [...]

2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.

This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.

Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’. Rhyme and assonance are verbal echoes.

In music, the most famous example perhaps is Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous “ba-ba-ba-BUM“ theme; the short-short-short-long statement in the beginning then echoes through that movement in thousands of ways, sometimes stretched, sometimes slowed down, so that the whole movement feels like an organic thing that has grown from that single seed.

Good art layers these, one on top of another, to build up artifacts of stunning complexity. These are the text equivalents of Gothic cathedrals. Each layer alludes to other layers, too, adding more and more constraints, until you get an artifact where changing any one word does violence to the whole.

To see this density in action, let’s look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15. Click through the layers to see how a single fourteen-line poem simultaneously participates in half a dozen independent systems of meaning — sonic, structural, thematic, and more.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 15 

When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory:
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night:
And, all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.

(The interactive version of this essay lets you click through a few layers of the poem and see the below analysis.) [...]

Echoes are sewn through sophisticated literary works in more subtle ways, too.

Thus Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, points out that Anna Karenina is filled with trains and railway images even apart from the fact that the main plot points occur at railway stations; Kafka’s Metamorphosis is filled with occurrences of the number three. Lots of movies and books use Christian symbolism this way — crosses, doves, and so on. Macbeth is full of birds (ravens, crows, bats, owls, the Thane of *Caw*dor...).

Sometimes these symbols are significant, as in the Christian symbolism; and sometimes they are insignificant, as in the number three; but either way, the density of these symbols strewn throughout a work give it an additional coherence that would be lacking if you wrote down things at random. It gives it the same type of coherence that you see when you look at a beautiful tree, or a grassy field: things feel right. This feeling of rightness is achieved through these echoes.

by Nabeel S. Qureshi, Substack | Read more:
Image: Fra Angelico