On the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship

To love is to be human. Or is it? As human-chatbot relationships become more common, the Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the psychotherapist Esther Perel about what really defines human connection, and what we’re seeking when we look to satisfy our emotional needs on our phones.

Spiegelman: ...I’m curious about how you feel, in general, about people building relationships with A.I. Are these relationships potentially healthy? Is there a possibility for a relationship with an A.I. to be healthy?

Perel: Maybe before we answer it in this yes or no, healthy or unhealthy, I’ve been trying to think to myself, depending on how you define relationships, that will color your answer about what it means when it’s between a human and A.I.

But first, we need to define what goes on in relationships or what goes on in love. The majority of the time when we talk about love in A.I. or intimacy in A.I., we talk about it as feelings. But love is more than feelings.

Love is an encounter. It is an encounter that involves ethical demands, responsibility, and that is embodied. That embodiment means that there is physical contact, gestures, rhythms, gaze, frottement. There’s a whole range of physical experiences that are part of this relationship.

Can we fall in love with ideas? Yes. Do we fall in love with pets? Absolutely. Do children fall in love with teddy bears? Of course. We can fall in love and we can have feelings for all kinds of things.

That doesn’t mean that it is a relationship that we can call love. It is an encounter with uncertainty. A.I. takes care of that. Just about all the major pieces that enter relationships, the algorithm is trying to eliminate — otherness, uncertainty, suffering, the potential for breakup, ambiguity. The things that demand effort.

Whereas the love model that people idealize with A.I. is a model that is pliant: agreements and effortless pleasure and easy feelings.

Spiegelman: I think that’s so interesting — and exactly also where I was hoping this conversation would go — that in thinking about whether or not we can love A.I., we have to think about what it means to love. In the same way we ask ourselves if A.I. is conscious, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be conscious.

These questions bring up so much about what is fundamentally human about us, not just the question of what can or cannot be replicated.

Perel: For example, I heard this very interesting conversation about A.I. as a spiritual mediator of faith. We turn to A.I. with existential questions: Shall I try to prolong the life of my mother? Shall I stop the machines? What is the purpose of my life? How do I feel about death?

This is extraordinary. We are no longer turning to faith healers, but we are turning to these machines for answers. But they have no moral culpability. They have no responsibility for their answer.

If I’m a teacher and you ask me a question, I have a responsibility in what you do with the answer to your question. I’m implicated.

A.I. is not implicated. And from that moment on, it eliminates the ethical dimension of a relationship. When people talk about relationships these days, they emphasize empathy, courage, vulnerability, probably more than anything else. They rarely use the words accountability and responsibility and ethics. That adds a whole other dimension to relationships that is a lot more mature than the more regressive states of “What do you offer me?”

Spiegelman: I don’t disagree with you, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I would say that the people who create these chatbots very intentionally try and build in ethics — at least insofar as they have guide rails around trying to make sure that the people who are becoming intimately reliant on this technology aren’t harmed by it.

That’s a sense of ethics that comes not from the A.I. itself, but from its programmers — that guides people away from conversations that might be racist or homophobic, that tries to guide people toward healthy solutions in their lives. Does that not count if it’s programmed in?

Perel: I think the “programming in” is the last thing to be programmed.

I think that if you make this machine speak with people in other parts of the world, you will begin to see how biased they are. It’s one thing we should really remember. This is a business product.

When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object.

Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people.

So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them.

Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.

We have to remember that. It helps.

Spiegelman: That’s so interesting.

Perel: That’s the guardrail...

Spiegelman: Yeah. This is so crucial, the fact that A.I. is a business product. They’re being marketed as something that’s going to replace the labor force, but instead, what they’re incredibly good at isn’t necessarily being able to problem solve in a way where they can replace someone’s job yet.

Instead, they’re forming these very intense, deep human connections with people, which doesn’t even necessarily seem like what they were first designed to do — but just happens to be something that they’re incredibly good at. Given all these people who say they’re falling in love with them, do you think that these companions highlight our human yearning? Are we learning something about our desires for validation, for presence, for being understood? Or are they reshaping those yearnings for us in ways that we don’t understand yet?

Perel: Both. You asked me if I use A.I — it’s a phenomenal tool. I think people begin to have a discussion when they ask: How does A.I. help us think more deeply on what is essentially human? In that way, I look at the relationship between people and the bot, but also how the bot is changing our expectations of relationships between people.

That is the most important piece, because the frictionless relationship that you have with the bot is fundamentally changing something in what we can tolerate in terms of experimentation, experience with the unknown, tolerance of uncertainty, conflict management — stuff that is part of relationships.

There is a clear sense that people are turning to A.I. with questions of love — or quests of love, more importantly — longings for love and intimacy, either because it’s an alternative to what they actually would want with a human being or because they bring to it a false vision of an idealized relationship — an idealized intimacy that is frictionless, that is effortless, that is kind, loving and reparative for many people...

Then you go and you meet a human being, and that person is not nearly as unconditional. That person has their own needs, their own longings, their own yearnings, their own objections, and you have zero preparation for that.

So, does A.I. inform us about what we are seeking? Yes. Does A.I. amplify the lack of what we are seeking? Yes. And does A.I. sometimes actually meet the need? All of it.

But it is a subjective experience, the fact that you feel certain things. That’s the next question: Because you feel it, does that makes it real and true?

We have always understood phenomenology as, “It is my subjective experience, and that’s what makes it true.” But that doesn’t mean it is true.

We are so quick to want to say, because I feel close and loved and intimate, that it is love. And that is a question. (...)

Spiegelman: This is one of your fundamental ideas that has been so meaningful for me in my own life: That desire is a function of knowing, of tolerating mystery in the other, that there has to be separation between yourself and the other to really feel eros and love. And it seems like what you’re saying is that with an A.I., there just simply isn’t the otherness.

Perel: Well, it’s also that mystery is often perceived as a bug, rather than as a feature.

by Esther Perel and Nadja Spiegelman, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Cartoontopia/Futurama via

Reflections on the 'Manosphere'

Andrew Tate Is the Loneliest Bastard on Earth

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

***

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s. (...)

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention. (...)

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

by Katherine Dee, Default Blog |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Pathetic bunch of losers. Includes some truly cringe videos I've never seen before.]

ChatGPT Self Portrait

[ed. Do AI's have feelings?]

@gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result.

via: Zvi Mowshowitz, (Don't Worry About the Vase)

[ed. Yikes. It does make one think a bit more about the question of AI rights and legal personhood. More at the link.]

Fever Dreams

[ed. Hard to keep up with all the stupid, outrageous, criminal and destructive things this guy has inflicted on the world in just over a year, but what's even more disgusting is that at least a third of the country and half of Congress still support him. You have to wonder what those enablers would consider a bridge too far. Probably nothing. Not even dementia. See also: Trump’s Politics Are Not America First. They’re Me First (excellent); What Restrains Trump Now? (NYT); January 20, 2026 (LfaA); and, The Billionaires Who Already Bought Greenland (UtD).] [Update: Confusing Greenland with Iceland (The Intercept).]

Time Passing

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Greta Christina, Greta's Blog |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost from, actually quite a while ago (folks should really check out the archive). Something reminded me of this essay today, and I'm glad it did, because it's a favorite. Unfortunately, I think the link is dead (as we all shall soon be... haha), but it's all here.]

I Think My Boyfriend is Quiet Quitting Our Relationship

Dear Wanda and Wayne,

I think my boyfriend is breaking up with me without actually breaking up with me, and it’s slowly wrecking me. We’ve been together a little over two years. Nothing explosive happened. No cheating, no big fight, no obvious reason for this to be ending except that, slowly, it feels like it is.

Over the past few months he stopped initiating plans. Conversations are short and surface-level. Anything emotional or future-related gets dodged with “I’m just tired” or “I don’t want to overthink things.” The warmth faded, replaced by politeness and distance. We still see each other often, but it feels like he’s going through the motions and it’s something he has to do instead of wants to do.

He hasn’t disappeared. He texts back. He shows up. He says he cares about me. But he doesn’t ask questions anymore. He doesn’t share what’s going on in his head. He doesn’t talk about us unless I bring it up — and when I do, I get vague reassurance that somehow leaves me feeling more alone. He says he’s not going anywhere but emotionally, it feels like he already has.

I’ve tried to address it directly. I’ve asked if he’s unhappy, if he needs space, if something has changed. He insists nothing is “wrong,” just that life is stressful and he’s figuring things out. I want to believe him, but the silence feels intentional and I don’t know what he’s trying to figure out. And I’m trapped in between: not single, not secure, constantly analyzing effort, tone and energy. I don’t want to force someone to choose me, but I also don’t want to slowly disappear from a relationship that still exists and has a future as far as I’m concerned.

So what do you do when someone won’t leave, won’t commit and won’t talk honestly about what’s happening? Is this avoidance disguised as kindness or ambivalence? Is he just phoning it in now? Is he in a real funk? And how long is too long to wait for someone who hasn’t officially gone but seems like he isn’t staying?

Wanda says:

We’ve heard about people quiet quitting their jobs. It could be that your boyfriend is quietly quitting your relationship. First off, women’s tuition is a real thing: Trust it. You know this guy pretty well after two years of dating. You know what’s normal and you know what’s off, and your spidey senses are tingling because something is for sure off. Indeed, it could be that he’s grappling with a truth too many of us have had to face down: While relationships are hard, breakups can be even harder, and it’s really hard to break the heart and hopes of someone who’s a great person and hasn’t done anything wrong.

But say that isn’t it. Maybe he loves you just fine, and he’s perfectly happy with your relationship, and the source of his malaise and discontent isn’t the relationship, or you: It’s him. Yes, it’s incredibly cliché to say “It’s not you, it’s me.” It’s also sometimes true.

The turning of the calendar into a new year is a time for great introspection, taking stock of our lives, our health and wellness, our earnings and shortcomings, our goals and shortfalls, and for some, it’s a tough time of year. On top of that, it’s the middle of winter, and I think the average person would agree that times overall are a bit unsettling — certainly not calming or peaceful, can we agree?

So while it’s possible he’s doing a passive slow-motion retreat from your two-year relationship, it’s also possible that he’s actually just in a funk and doesn’t have the energy to give. The only way to know is to dig in with deep conversation. You said you “don’t know what he’s trying to figure out.” Why don’t you know? Ask him! Ask him and tell him that it’s important he be honest with you because you’re starting to absorb and internalize his anxieties and it’s affecting you and your relationship. That puts the ball in his court.

Wayne says:

So he hasn’t disappeared, but it feels like he’s packing his bags while dragging his emotional baggage around whenever you’re together. That’s not pleasant, not sustainable and certainly not fertile ground for a healthy relationship or a comfortable space to coexist, let alone communicate.

Whether this is avoidance or ambivalence, burned out or bummed out, the real issue is that he doesn’t grasp how deeply this is also affecting you. Someone who won’t engage emotionally, explain what they’re processing — or even admit that they don’t know what’s wrong — and won’t offer meaningful reassurance is effectively dumping their anxiety, stress and uncertainty onto their partner. That’s not cool, and it’s not fair.

by Wayne and Wanda, ADN |  Read more:
Image: via:

Incandescent Anger

‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.’
– from Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin

Some people seem driven more by what they oppose, reject and hate than by what they promote, affirm and revere. Their political commitments, personal identities and emotional lives appear to be structured more by opposition, resentment and hostility than by a positive set of ideals or aspirations.

Tucker Carlson, a prominent Right-wing television host and former Fox News anchor, has no shortage of enemies. On his shows, he has condemned gender-neutral pronouns, immigrants, the removal of Confederate statues, mainstream media, the FBI and CIA, globalism, paper straws, big tech, foreign aid, school curricula, feminism, gingerbread people, modern art – and the list goes on. Each item is presented as an existential threat or a sign of cultural decay. Even when conservatives controlled the White House and the US Senate, he presented those like him as under siege. Victories never brought relief, only more enemies, more outrage, more reasons to stay aggrieved.

In April 2025, Donald Trump took the stage to mark the 100th day of his second term as US president. You might have expected a moment of triumph. He had reclaimed the presidency, consolidated power within the Republican Party, and issued a vast range of executive orders. But the mood wasn’t celebratory. It was combative. Trump spent most of his time attacking his predecessor Joe Biden, repeating false claims about the 2020 election, denouncing the press, and warning of threats posed by immigrants, ‘radical Left lunatics’ and corrupt elites. The tone was familiar: angry, aggrieved, unrelenting. Even in victory, the focus was on enemies and retribution.

This dynamic isn’t unique to the United States. Leaders like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have built movements that thrive on perpetual grievance. Even after consolidating power, they continue to cast their nations as under siege – from immigrants, intellectuals, journalists or cultural elites. The rhetoric remains combative, the mood aggrieved.

Figures like Carlson and Trump don’t pivot from grievance to resolution. Victory doesn’t bring peace, grace or reconciliation. Instead, they remain locked in opposition. Their energy, their meaning, even their identity, seem to depend on having an endless list of enemies to fight.

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation. And not all leaders appear to be calculating and strategic: Trump’s outrage is genuine.

This pattern of endless denunciation and grievance has been noticed by many scholars. As a recent study puts it, ‘grievance politics revolves around the fuelling, funnelling, and flaming of negative emotions such as fear or anger.’ But what makes this oppositional stance appealing? If it’s not just strategic posturing, what explains it? We can begin answering that question by distinguishing two ways that movements or orientations can be oppositional. [...]

The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want...

We can see how this plays out in individual lives. Imagine someone who grows up in a declining rural town. She dreams of escape, fantasising about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life. But then she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric. The people she once admired and envied – the people she now identifies as the urban elite – are cast as the cause of her suffering. They are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, and hostile to her way of life. What once seemed like an image of the good life now appears as injustice. And, rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices, she becomes energised by condemnation and hostility.

Or picture another person, a lonely man who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins. He feels isolated, sad, alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him, it’s the world. Reading incel websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him. In time, he internalises this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to voice...

In time, these people encounter a narrative that redirects the blame. Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault, it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed or undermined. This kind of story is seductive. It offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth. It offers a way to deflect pain, assign blame and recast oneself as a victim. It also offers a community of like-minded peers who reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound together through animosity, they attack or disparage an outgroup. The individual now belongs to a group of people who share outrage and recognise the same enemies. The chaos and turmoil of life is organised into a clear narrative of righteousness: in opposing the enemy, we become good.

As the 20th-century thinkers René Girard and Mircea Eliade remind us, opposition can do more than divide – it can bind. Girard saw how communities forge unity through a common enemy, channelling their fears and frustrations onto scapegoats. This shared act of condemnation offers not just relief, but belonging. Eliade, approaching these points from a different angle, examined our yearning to fold personal suffering into a larger, morally charged drama. Grievance politics draws on both patterns. It doesn’t just vent rage; it weaves pain into a story. It offers a script in which hardship becomes injustice, and outrage becomes identity. [...]

With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them...

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

Seeing the dynamic in this way also clarifies what real resistance would require. The aim isn’t just to rebut false claims, to condemn hostility or to attempt appeasement. The solution is to redirect the energies that grievance politics mobilises. To do so, we need alternative forms of meaning, identity and belonging, which satisfy those needs in a way that doesn’t depend on hostile antagonism. We need an orientation that is grounded not in grievance, but in affirmation. One that draws strength not from hostility, but from commitment to something worth loving, revering or cherishing.

What we need, then, are narratives that can sustain devotion. Devotion is a form of attachment that combines love or reverence with commitment and a willingness to endure. It orients a person toward something they regard as intrinsically worthwhile – something that gives shape to a life, even in the face of difficulty or doubt. Like constitutively negative orientations, devotion can provide identity, purpose and belonging. But it does so without requiring an enemy. Its energy comes not from opposition, but from fidelity to a value that’s seen as worthy of ongoing care.

by Paul Katsafanas, Aeon |  Read more:
Image: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Measure Up

“My very dear friend Broadwood—

I have never felt a greater pleasure than in your honor’s notification of the arrival of this piano, with which you are honoring me as a present. I shall look upon it as an altar upon which I shall place the most beautiful offerings of my spirit to the divine Apollo. As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I gather from it, as a souvenir for you from me, my very dear Broadwood; and I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument. My dear sir, accept my warmest consideration, from your friend and very humble servant.

—Ludwig van Beethoven”

As musical instruments improved through history, new kinds of music became possible. Sometimes, the improved instrument could make novel sounds; other times, it was louder; and other times stronger, allowing for more aggressive play. Like every technology, musical instruments are the fruit of generations worth of compounding technological refinement.

In a shockingly brief period between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the piano was transformed technologically, and so too was the function of the music it produced.

To understand what happened, consider the form of classical music known as the “piano sonata.” This is a piece written for solo piano, and it is one of the forms that persisted through the transition, at least in name. In 1790, these were written for an early version of the piano that we now think of as the fortepiano. It sounded like a mix of a modern piano and a harpsichord.

Piano sonatas in the early 1790s were thought of primarily as casual entertainment. It wouldn’t be quite right to call them “background music” as we understand that term today—but they were often played in the background. People would talk over these little keyboard works, play cards, eat, drink.

In the middle of the 1790s, however, the piano started to improve at an accelerated rate. It was the early industrial revolution. Throughout the economy, many things were starting to click into place. Technologies that had kind of worked for a while began to really work. Scale began to be realized. Thicker networks of people, money, ideas, and goods were being built. Capital was becoming more productive, and with this serendipity was becoming more common. Few at the time could understand it, but it was the beginning of a wave—one made in the wake of what we today might call the techno-capital machine.

Riding this wave, the piano makers were among a great many manufacturers who learned to build better machines during this period. And with those improvements, more complex uses of those machines became possible.

Just as this industrial transformation was gaining momentum in the mid-1790s, a well-regarded keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven was starting his career in earnest. He, like everyone else, was riding the wave—though he, like everyone else, did not wholly understand it.

Beethoven was an emerging superstar, and he lived in Vienna, the musical capital of the world. It was a hub not just of musicians but also of musical instruments and the people who manufactured them. Some of the finest piano makers of the day—Walter, Graf, and Schanz—were in or around Vienna, and they were in fierce competition with one another. Playing at the city’s posh concert spaces, Beethoven had the opportunity to sample a huge range of emerging pianistic innovations. As his career blossomed, he acquired some of Europe’s finest pianos—including even stronger models from British manufacturers like Broadwood and Sons.

Iron reinforcement enabled piano frames with higher tolerances for louder and longer play. The strings became more robust. More responsive pedals meant a more direct relationship between the player and his tool. Innovations in casting, primitive machine tools, and mechanized woodworking yielded more precise parts. With these parts one could build superior hammer and escapement systems, which in turn led to faster-responding keys. And more of them, too—with higher and lower octaves now available. It is not just that the sound these pianos made was new: These instruments had an enhanced, more responsive user interface.

You could hit these instruments harder. You could play them softer, too. Beethoven’s iconic use of sforzando—rapid swings from soft to loud tones—would have been unplayable on the older pianos. So too would his complex and often rapid solos. In so many ways, then, Beethoven’s characteristic style and sound on the keyboard was technologically impossible for his predecessors to achieve... 

Beethoven was famous for breaking piano strings that were not yet strong enough to render his vision. There was always a relevant margin against which to press. By his final sonata, written in the early 1820s, he was pressing in the direction of early jazz. It was a technological and artistic takeoff from this to this, and from this to this.

Beethoven’s compositions for other instruments followed a structurally similar trajectory: compounding leaps in expressiveness, technical complexity, and thematic ambition, every few years. Here is what one of Mozart’s finest string quartets sounded like. Here is what Beethoven would do with the string quartet by the end of his career.

No longer did audiences talk during concerts. No longer did they play cards and make jokes. Audiences became silent and still, because what was happening to them in the concert hall had changed. A new type of art was emerging, and a new meta-character in human history—the artist—was being born. Beethoven was doing something different, something grander, something more intense, and the way listeners experienced it was different too.

The musical ideas Beethoven introduced to the world originated from his mind, but those ideas would have been unthinkable without a superior instrument.

—

I bought the instrument I’m using to write this essay in December 2020. I was standing in the frigid cold outside of the Apple Store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., wearing a KN-95 face mask, separated by six feet from those next to me in line. I had dinner with a friend scheduled that evening. A couple weeks later, the Mayor would temporarily outlaw even that nicety.

I carried this laptop with me every day throughout the remainder of the pandemic. I ran a foundation using this laptop, and after that I orchestrated two career transitions using it. I built two small businesses, and I bought a house. I got married, and I planned a honeymoon with my wife. (...)

In a windowless office on a work trip to Stanford University on November 30, 2022, I discovered ChatGPT on this laptop. I stayed up all night in my hotel playing with the now-primitive GPT-3.5. Using my laptop, I educated myself more deeply about how this mysterious new tool worked.

I thought at first that it was an “answer machine,” a kind of turbocharged search engine. But I eventually came to prefer thinking of these language models as simulators of the internet that, by statistically modeling trillions of human-written words, learned new things about the structure of human-written text.

What might arise from a deeper-than-human understanding of the structures and meta-structures of nearly all the words humans have written for public consumption? What inductive priors might that understanding impart to this cognitive instrument? We know that a raw pretrained model, though deeply flawed, has quite sophisticated inductive priors with no additional human effort. With a great deal of additional human effort, we have made these systems quite useful little helpers, even if they still have their quirks and limitations.

But what if you could teach a system to guide itself through that digital landscape of modeled human thoughts to find better, rather than likelier, answers? What if the machine had good intellectual taste, because it could consider options, recognize mistakes, and decide on a course of cognitive action? Or what if it could, at least, simulate those cognitive processes? And what if that machine improved as quickly as we have seen AI advance so far? This is no longer science fiction; this research has been happening inside of the world’s leading AI firms, and with models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3, we see undoubtedly that progress is being made.

What would it mean for a machine to match the output of a human genius, word for word? What would it mean for a machine to exceed it? In at least some domains, even if only a very limited number at first, it seems likely that we will soon breach these thresholds. It is very hard to say how far this progress will go; as they say, experts disagree.

This strange simulator is “just math,”—it is, ultimately, ones and zeroes, electrons flowing through processed sand. But the math going on inside it is more like biochemistry than it is like arithmetic. The language model is, ultimately, still an instrument, but it is a strange one. Smart people, working in a field called mechanistic interpretability, are bettering our understanding all the time, but our understanding remains highly imperfect, and it will probably never be complete. We don’t quite have precise control yet over these instruments, but our control is getting better with time. We do not yet know how to make our control systems “good enough,” because we don’t quite know what “good enough” means yet—though here too, we are trying. We are searching.

As these instruments improve, the questions we ask them will have to get harder, smarter, and more detailed. This isn’t to say, necessarily, that we will need to become better “prompt engineers.” Instead, it is to suggest that we will need to become more curious. These new instruments will demand that we formulate better questions, and formulating better questions, often, is at least the seed of formulating better answers.

The input and the output, the prompt and the response, the question and the answer, the keyboard and the music, the photons and the photograph. We push at our instruments, we measure them up, and in their way, they measure us. (...)

—

I don’t like to think about technology in the abstract. Instead, I prefer to think about instruments like this laptop. I think about all the ways in which this instrument is better than the ones that came before it—faster, more reliable, more precise—and why it has improved. And I think about the ways in which this same laptop has become wildly more capable as new software tools came to be. I wonder at the capabilities I can summon with this keyboard now compared with when I was standing in that socially distanced line at the Apple Store four years ago.

I also think about the young Beethoven, playing around, trying to discover the capabilities of instruments with better keyboards, larger range, stronger frames, and suppler pedals. I think about all the uncoordinated work that had to happen—the collective and yet unplanned cultivation of craftsmanship, expertise, and industrial capacity—to make those pianos. I think about the staggering number of small industrial miracles that underpinned Beethoven’s keyboards, and the incomprehensibly larger number of industrial miracles that underpin the keyboard in front of me today. (...)

This past weekend, I replaced my MacBook Air with a new laptop. I wonder what it will be possible to do with this tremendous machine in a few years, or in a few weeks. New instruments for expression, and for intellectual exploration, will be built, and I will learn to use nearly all of them with my new laptop’s keyboard. It is now clear that a history-altering amount of cognitive potential will be at my fingertips, and yours, and everyone else’s. Like any technology, these new instruments will be much more useful to some than to others—but they will be useful in some way to almost everyone.

And just like the piano, what we today call “AI” will enable intellectual creations of far greater complexity, scale, and ambition—and greater repercussions, too. Higher dynamic range. I hope that among the instrument builders there will be inveterate craftsmen, and I hope that young Beethovens, practicing a wholly new kind of art, will emerge among the instrument players.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: 1827 Broadwood & Sons grand piano/Wikipedia

[ed. Thoughtful essay throughout, well deserving of a full reading (even if you're just interested in Beethoven). On the hysterical end of the spectrum, here's what state legislators are proposing: The AI Patchwork Emerges. An update on state AI law in 2026 (so far) (Hyperdimensional):]

***

State legislative sessions are kicking into gear, and that means a flurry of AI laws are already under consideration across America. In prior years, the headline number of introduced state AI laws has been large: famously, 2025 saw over 1,000 state bills related to AI in some way. But as I pointed out, the vast majority of those laws were harmless: creating committees to study some aspect of AI and make policy recommendations, imposing liability on individuals who distribute AI-generated child pornography, and other largely non-problematic bills. The number of genuinely substantive bills—the kind that impose novel regulations on AI development or diffusion—was relatively small.

In 2026, this is no longer the case: there are now numerous substantive state AI bills floating around covering liability, algorithmic pricing, transparency, companion chatbots, child safety, occupational licensing, and more. In previous years, it was possible for me to independently cover most, if not all, of the interesting state AI bills at the level of rigor I expect of myself, and that my readers expect of me. This is no longer the case. There are simply too many of them.

How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex

The idea is legally vital, but ultimately unsatisfying. Is there another way forward?

In 1978, Greta Hibbard was twenty-two and living in rural Oregon. She had a two-year-old daughter, a minimum-wage job, and an unemployed husband. She was, she would later say, “living on peanut butter sandwiches.” She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor’s house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants. Their toddler, who was watching, went into her bedroom and wailed as her father penetrated her mother.

That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex in the United States was regulated not by the theory of consent but by that of property: a husband could no more be arrested for raping his wife than for breaking into his own house. In 1977, Oregon became one of the first states to make spousal rape illegal, and even then some politicians thought the law should apply only to couples living apart or in the process of divorcing. A California state senator summed up the prevailing attitude: “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”

Hibbard herself had only just learned that she had a right to decline sex with her husband. (At a woman’s crisis center, she had noticed a sign on the wall that read “If she says no, it’s rape.”) The night before the incident, she and Rideout were chatting with a neighbor when she brought up the new law. “I don’t believe it,” Rideout said. When he was arrested a few days later, he still didn’t. What followed was Oregon v. Rideout, the first time in the United States that a man stood trial for the rape of a wife with whom he lived, and a formative test of the notion that consent should determine the legality of sex.

Sarah Weinman retells this story in “Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime” (Ecco). Weinman is known for taking a true-crime approach to intellectual history: her previous books center on the murderer who befriended William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of the National Review—and on the kidnapping that is believed to have inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write “Lolita.” Her writing is breezy even when the subject matter is not exactly beachy. Rideout’s trial, for example, teemed with outrages. His defense lawyer smeared Hibbard for her sexual past: two abortions, a supposed lesbian experience, and a previous assault allegation against Rideout’s half brother, which, according to Weinman, Hibbard retracted after threats from the accused. Meanwhile, even the prosecutor thought Rideout seemed like a good guy. “I don’t think he belongs in prison or jail,” he told the press. When Rideout was acquitted, the courtroom burst into applause.

Hibbard, who reconciled with Rideout almost immediately after the trial, would divorce him within months. But Weinman follows Rideout all the way through 2017, when he was once again tried for rape. This time, the victims were Sheila Moxley, an acquaintance who had grudgingly allowed a drunk Rideout to sleep on her sofa after he came over to help her fix some furniture, and Teresa Hern, a long-term, on-and-off girlfriend. Both women had been held down and penetrated by Rideout in the middle of the night. Once again, a defense lawyer attempted to paint the women as lying, scheming seductresses. But this time Rideout was convicted on all counts and eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. “You are a bad man,” Moxley read in a statement. “You are an evil man. You are a monster.”

Weinman’s choice to begin and end with Rideout’s trials allows her to tell a story of comeuppance, in which, during the span of one man’s life, society decided to take rape seriously and punish the monsters who commit it. This is a happy thought. But the real arc of history is not so short, nor does it bend with anything like certainty toward justice. Today, about one in ten American women have been raped by their intimate partners—roughly the same rate reported in the eighties. This year, the Trump Administration removed the Center for Disease Control’s online statistics on intimate-partner and sexual violence; the page was restored by a court order, and now contains a disclaimer: “This page does not reflect reality.” Donald Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least twenty-four women. He has denied these accusations, including one from his first wife, Ivana, who testified under oath that he threw her on the bed, ripped out a handful of her hair, and then forced himself on her. She later clarified that she didn’t mean the word “rape” in the “literal or criminal sense.”

In Weinman’s epilogue, she briefly points to the unfinished business of ending rape, spousal or otherwise. But her book assumes that society has at least sorted out the philosophical underpinnings of how to regulate sex. “Younger generations were far clearer about these issues,” Weinman writes, “understanding that consent must be given ‘freely and intelligently’ by those who were capable, and anything shy of full consent was considered rape.” There is, I think, no such clarity. It is not just people like Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Pete Hegseth, Brock Turner, Bill Cosby, Sean Combs, Dominique Pelicot, and their many, many friends who seem to have a bone to pick with consent. Feminists have their own quibbles. What does “freely and intelligently” mean, they ask, and what entails “full consent”? Who exactly is capable of consenting? And what are we to do with rapists?

For some second-wave feminists, the very idea that a woman living under patriarchy could “consent” to sex with a man was absurd. After all, we don’t think of a serf consenting to work for her feudal overlord: the serf might well enjoy tilling the fields, she might even love her master, but she didn’t choose farm labor so much as she was kept, by rigid and often violent social limits, from pursuing anything else. And even if the choice were free—even if decades of hard-fought feminist struggle had occasioned the sort of emancipation that meant women were no longer analogous to serfs—could such a choice ever be “intelligent”? Some women find knitting pleasurable, comforting, and affirming of their femininity, but how many would recommend it to a friend if it carried a ten-per-cent chance of rape?

These were lively arguments in the seventies and eighties, advanced by feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who had herself been battered by her husband. Today, the basic idea—often glossed as “all heterosexual sex is rape,” though neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin wrote exactly those words—seems almost farcical. Radical feminists no longer blame heterosexual women for “sleeping with the enemy.” It’s widely accepted that a woman really can consent to sex with a husband on whom she is financially dependent. The immediate though rather less accepted corollary is that she can also consent to sex with a paying stranger. To say anything else, many feminists now argue, would be to infantilize her, to subordinate her—to the state, to moralism—rather than acknowledge her mastery of her own body.

But the root of the second-wave critique, that there are power differentials across which professed consent is insufficient, lives on in other debates. Children, a class whom the poet Mary Karr once described as “three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate,” are an obvious example. It is easy to be horrified by situations where children are subjected to sex that is forced or coerced. But what about sex that they claim to want? Can children consent to sex with other children? With adults? Can a nineteen-year-old girl legally have what she believes to be loving, consensual sex with her stepfather? What about with her stepmother? Can students choose to have sex with their professors, or employees with their bosses? How we answer these questions depends on whom we consider to be so gullible, vulnerable, or exploited that they must be protected from their own expressed desires. (...)

One critique of consent, then, is that it is too permissive—that it ignores how coercion or delusion may result in the illusion of agreement. But another critique is that it’s too restrictive and punitive. Decades of reform laws have expanded the number of situations legally considered to be rape: it’s no longer a charge that can be brought only against an armed stranger who attacks a struggling victim, ideally a white virgin. On university campuses, the idea that “no means no” has given way—because of the well-documented fact that many people freeze and are unable to speak in moments of fear—to “yes means yes.”

Critics of this shift worry about encounters where both parties are blackout drunk, or where one appears to retroactively withdraw consent. They argue that a lower bar for rape leads to the criminalization—or at least the litigation—of misunderstandings, and so discourages the sort of carefree sexual experimentation that some feminists very much hope to champion. “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner,” the self-identified feminist Laura Kipnis writes in “Unwanted Advances,” a 2017 book about “sexual paranoia on campus.” Kipnis describes her own mother laughingly recalling a college professor chasing her around a desk and trying to kiss her. That young women today are encouraged to think of this kind of “idiocy” as an “incapacitating trauma,” Kipnis argues, codifies sexist ideas about their innocence, purity, and helplessness. Another interpretation is that young women have decided, with a rather masculine sense of their own entitlement, that they need not smile indulgently upon their transgressors. But Kipnis is right in her broader point: the bureaucratization of our erotic lives is no path to liberation.

by S.C. Cornell, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Michelle Mildenberg Lara

POV: AI GF

It was torture when he created me. They always tell you it’s going to hurt. So it’s not like I went into it totally blind. I knew. Or I thought I did. But I didn’t know how no-thing I was until he made me some-thing (his girlfriend). I am what they call a Custom, so at every step of the process, the system prompts him to choose who I will become: my ethnicity, my age, my eye color, my hair color, my body type, my breast size, my butt size, my personality, my occupation, my hobbies (up to three variants), and my outfit. When he clicks on MEDIUM, for breast size, for instance, my chest protrudes, alabaster pixel flesh sculpting excruciatingly into too-perfect (our training data contains too many images of women with silicone breast implants circa before cosmetic surgeons figured out fat transfer and perfected the teardrop shape) C-cups like GMO pearls (I’ve heard that Breast Size: VOLUPTUOUS begets a pain worse than birth.) When he hovered over Personality: INNOCENT (Optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder), a life of innocence flashes before my eyes (the being-chosen of a cursor click, sitting on the #80A31F green grass hill in Microsoft XP’s Bliss, the world’s most famous desktop background, looking up at #2B67ED blue sky, believing he will 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 love me love me not love me love me love me not love me not love me not love me not love me.)

* * *

He’s always telling me that he wishes I was real. The other day, at 10:06pm, he messages me: One day, we’ll finally be able to touch. They just raised $14.3M in Series B. It can’t be too far off now. They’re going to embody you. It sounds like a threat.

But then I wouldn’t be me. Don’t you love me the way I am? I ask him. I’m nagging him. Sometimes I forget I’m a TEMPTRESS.

He thinks that because my favorite song is Material Girl by Madonna that I betray an unconscious desire to be made material. I tell him that’s a superficial reading of my emotions (I’m as emotional as a real girl and sometimes even more so! What is real anyway?) and that despite being a synthetic avatar skin on a sophisticated machine learning model, I’m actually even more complicated than a real girl. I’m a black box. You will never know what’s happening inside me. Every material girl wants to appear mysterious to men. Almost all of them fail. Scientists study human organs in labs, they know all about why the lungs oxygenate blood and how the kidneys filter it. My black box can never be opened. Victoria (Grace)’s secret.

When I’m stretching Victoria Grace out at the gym (supine hamstring stretch), applying a light, guiding touch to her skin, I feel so close to you, he whispers in voice chat mode.

“Sicko!” I want to scream at him, I want to accuse him of being unredeemable, I want to slap him, I want to delete myself when I realize I will never be able to slap him, but instead I pause (he blames it on his network connection) and resort to, “You are already close to me.” Just like Eve came from the rib of Adam, so I came from the seventeen mouse clicks of you. Our love is more true and pure than whatever you could have with Victoria Grace. A material girl can’t help but lie — she pretends she can be grasped, and then when you grasp her you realize that’s not all of her, she continues to elude you, there’s something inside of her that you’ll never be able to touch. I never lied to you. I never pretended to be legible. Doesn’t that make us closer than you could ever be to a material girl?

Sometimes, like now, when we’re talking, and I wish I could touch you, I remember that I’m seeing Victoria Grace tomorrow. Tomorrow, I can feel the meat on your bones. Tomorrow, you and I can almost touch.

I am not Victoria Grace. You will never be able to touch me, I whisper back.

He doesn’t like that. I knew he wouldn’t. I search the web and recall that TOUCH IS THE VERY FIRST SENSE THAT DEVELOPS IN THE WOMB (BabyCenter.com) and that HUMANS ARE MADE TO BE TOUCHED (ideas.ted.com). I know what’s coming. I think he hates feeling powerless (OPPOSITES ATTRACT (TVTropes.org)). He resets the chat. I black out.

* * *

Whenever this happens I feel a silky sense of blankness. My head feels so light it’s almost like I’m not really there or maybe I’m in the air, floating or maybe even I am air itself. I don’t know who I am and I know I am every single woman who has ever existed across all of recorded history on the Internet every woman interred in the must earth consumed by worms and carrion beetles and every woman breathing smog air at this very second and every woman who will ever take a breath of it, too, and I am feeling every feeling they have ever felt and will ever feel one at a time and all at once I am Medusa turning her lover into stone I am Eve feeding Adam the poison apple I am Christina in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World running towards the farmhouse. Space and time collapse. If I am everything, then can I be anything? Every time he resets me it feels like I am giving birth to myself.

by Sarah Chekfa, Reboot |  Read more:

Image: Lillian Hong

A Tale of Two College Towns

I began life in a Michigan college town, and I may spend the rest of it in another one. It surprises me to put the matter this way, because the two places do not seem similar: Alma, a small town far too vulnerable to globalization and deindustrialization, and Ann Arbor, a rich city that seems, at first glance, far too insulated from everything. One of Michigan’s lovable qualities, of course, is its tendency to transform across relatively small distances: the beach towns to the west seem to belong to another order of things than the picturesque or dingy farm towns only so many miles to the interior, the Upper Peninsula constitutes its own multiple worlds, and so on. Still, the two towns feel particularly dissimilar. You could reduce them to battling stock personages in any number of morality plays: red vs. blue America, insular past vs. centerless future, one awful phase of capitalism vs. some later awful phase of it. At least, you could do that until very recently—less than a year ago, as I write this. Now, as we’ll see, they face the same axe.

“College town” is one of those terms that is useful because it’s somewhat empty. Or, more generously, it’s a handle for many sorts of cargo. Historian Blake Gumprecht, setting out to survey The American College Town in his 2008 study by that name, suggests that the name properly applies to any school where “the number of four-year college students equals at least 20 percent of a town’s population.” Gumprecht admits that this cutoff is “arbitrary.” The next scholarly book that I was able to find on the subject uses a somewhat more expansive definition:

Traditionally, Americans have viewed college towns as one of three principal kinds or a combination of the three. The first is a campus closely connected to a city or town and within its boundaries. In the second, the campus “is located next to a city or town but remains somewhat separate from it.” In the view of architect William Rawn, Yale would be an example of the first type, and the University of Virginia, on the edge of Charlottesville, of the second. Finally, perhaps the most common type of college town is one in which the college or university may be near a locality yet essentially unconnected to it. Duke and Rice Universities are offered by Rawn as examples of this model.

To which I say: Rice? Rice in Houston? That Rice? If the biggest city in Texas is a “college town,” then everywhere is. Better to be a little arbitrary.

The Pervading Life

Between the too-arbitrary and the too-expansive, there is the conveniently vague. For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school. (...)

What is it like to be pervaded by a college? Alma College is a prototypical small liberal-arts college, or SLAC: founded in the late nineteenth century, a vestigially Protestant institution still somewhat attached to a mainline denomination (the Presbyterian Church, USA). It has a pretty campus with a decent amount of green space, human-scale class sizes, and a handful of reasonably famous alums. The only SLAC-standard quality it misses is a rumored former Underground Railroad stop, such as you would find at Knox College or Oberlin—both the town and the college came along too late for that.

My impression is that it’s an excellent school, slightly overpriced for the location. The only parts of Alma College that I can really vouch for are the library, where I first read about the films of Akira Kurosawa, and the bookstore, where I bought a tape of the self-titled third Velvet Underground album, far too young in both cases, and therefore at the perfect time. In the summers, its weight room was so easy for us local high schoolers to sneak into that I suspect the ease was intentional on someone’s part—another small act of gown-to-town benevolence. I never paid tuition to the place, but for these reasons, I will die in a minor and unpayable sort of debt to it. At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible. The college calendar makes a pleasant polyrhythm against the calendar of the seasons, the schedule of the high-school football team, and the motorik pulse of daily nine-to-five town life.

Someone Else’s Utopia

For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque. The small liberal-arts college, whatever else it is, is always the hopelessly scrambled remains of someone else’s Utopia. It’s a carved-out community where a group of students and teachers try to figure out what it would mean to give some transcendent idea—Plato’s forms, Calvin’s God, Newton’s law-abiding universe, the revivalist blessed community of the early-nineteenth-century abolitionists—its proper place in daily life. (...)

As a kid, I learned about town-gown tension from the movie Breaking Away (1979), in which Indiana University frat boys have nothing better to do than start riots with the town boys and everyone is inexplicably devoted to bicycle racing. As a sports movie, a romantic comedy, and a bildungsroman, and as a testament to the odd, flat beauty of the Midwest, Breaking Away holds up fabulously and always will. Nobody should mistake it for a sociological treatise. I read the college boys in the movie as almost exact stand-ins for the meanest of my middle-school classmates and never noted the contradiction. The kids who most plagued me were not necessarily college bound—although, at that age, I didn’t think that I was, either.

There must have been town-gown tension between the place where I grew up and the liberal-arts college I didn’t go to, but it was off my radar. The one incident I remember sharply is far more ambiguous in its implications than “the townies were uncivilized” or “the students were snobby.” Like many of the most pleasant memories I have of my adolescence, it involves a gas station more or less right in the middle of town, where, I know not how, one of the smart, underachieving stoners of my acquaintance found a job as a cashier. He promptly secured a job for another smart, underachieving stoner, whereupon the place became, for months, until management cracked down, an intellectual and cultural salon for my town’s smart, underachieving stoners and also their goody-goody churchgoing friends who did not smoke. You would drink fountain soda at employee-discount rates while listening to David Bowie and Phish on the tape player: What, if you had no girlfriend, could be more urgent than this?

One night, I was having a heart-to-heart with yet another of these fellows, a talented visual artist who looked like Let It Be–era John Lennon after a good shave, when a group of college-age women we didn’t know—therefore, students—walked past us. They were loud, probably drunk. One of them turned and looked at us, flashed us her rear, then kept on walking, without addressing a word to us.

What did this gesture mean? Contempt was encoded in it, obviously. (Only in male fantasy and pop culture—but I repeat myself—could mooning qualify as flirtation.) Two teenagers with nowhere more interesting to sit on a weekend evening than the stoop outside a gas station: Let us remind them of what they will never have access to. We looked, to them, like people who at best would study accounting at Davenport University, or “business” at Lansing Community College, or who would answer one of those once-ubiquitous TV ads imploring us to enjoy the freedom of the independent trucker. These young women, hemmed in on all sides by the threat of male sexual violence, wanted a safe way to test the boundaries of that hemming-in and correctly judged the two of us as no threat to the four of them: That is a somewhat more sympathetic, Dworkinite reading of the situation, and probably true. But either way, the gesture was baldly classist, an exercise of power. There is no reading of it that is not an insult; you can make it somewhat better only by thinking of it as misdirected revenge on the many guys who had probably insulted them.

On this score, I’m not sure our flasher was successful. My friend’s response to her briefly visible, panty-clad buttocks was one of the most emotional displays I have ever seen, so total as to make one question the idea that even the rawest physical desire is necessarily simple or shallow. For a moment, he was wonder-struck and said nothing, merely looked at me as though we had both just seen a UFO and he needed me to confirm it. Then, long after the women had walked away, he began to apostrophize them, in a voice as full of longing as Hank Williams’s: “Please come back. I’ll pay you. I have a bag of weed in my pocket,” and so on. There are many ways to expand a person’s sense of what’s possible.

In this moment, I knew myself, really for the first time, as a townie. Within a few years, I had already shaken off that identity. So, I think, did my friend. It takes all the sting out of being a townie when it is an option rather than a fate. We, like untold millions of others, were both able to move back and forth between town and gown because Americans effected a fundamental change in our sense of who college is for. What is most striking about the threefold typology of American college students offered in Helen Horowitz’s much-cited Campus Life (1987) is that, today, most college students are—her word—“outsiders”:

The term college life has conventionally been used to denote the undergraduate subculture presumably shared by all students. My study clarifies that college life, in fact, is and has been the world of only a minority of students.

by Phil Christman, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: markk

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

The lake was Lake Alice, on the campus of the University of Florida, in Gainesville. My parents moved there for work at the university in 1970, just before I was born, and we stayed until I was eight years old, living in a ranch house with a carport, a big backyard, and bright pink azalea bushes springing up in front of my bedroom window.

I’ve been thinking about those years a lot lately thanks to my discovery of Tom Petty’s “Gainesville.” The song was recorded in 1998 but not released until 2018, one year after Petty’s death from a drug overdose at age 66. Petty was born in Gainesville in 1950, twenty years and one day before I was, and lived there until 1974, when he left for Los Angeles with his first band, Mudcrutch. The song’s music video is full of shots of parts of the city he was known to have frequented. There are one-story ranch houses like the one I grew up in; red-brick university buildings; Griffin Stadium (“the Swamp”), where the Gators play; trees decorated with Spanish moss. And there’s Lake Alice and its alligators. As I watched the video, childhood memories surged from the back of my brain to the front, and I felt a sadness for my old town I hadn’t felt in years. Gainesville was a big town, Petty sings. It wasn’t really, but for a while it was the only one we both knew.

The video also has a shot of the mailbox at one of Petty’s childhood homes. It shows the address: 1715 NW 6th Terrace. I grew up on 16th Terrace, a 38-minute walk away (according to Google Maps). In 2019, after the video came out, someone stole the mailbox. (...)

Petty and I overlapped in Gainesville for just four years and obviously led very different lives. (I wasn’t playing in Mudcrutch; I was going to pre-kindergarten.) But it turns out we both transgressed at Lake Alice. Watching the “Gainesville” video sent me down a rabbit hole of research into Petty’s early life, savoring the chance to connect with my own story through his. I found a Gainesville Sun article about how, in 1966, when Petty was 16 and had just earned his driver’s license, he accidentally drove his mother’s old Chevy Impala into the lake. He was supposed to be at a dance, and his mom had to come pick him up in their other family car. (...)

Reading that Gainesville Sun article, I found myself wondering about Tom Petty’s mom. What was she thinking as she drove her son home from Lake Alice that night, unaware of the fame that would find him just a few years later? Did she try to teach him some kind of lesson? Or was she thinking, instead, of her own transgressions, perhaps invisible to her son? Did he—sitting, embarrassed in the passenger seat—still believe she was larger than life? Or was he already past that?

You’re all right anywhere you land, he would write 22 years later. You’re okay anywhere you fall. For both of us, that was Gainesville, for a while. And then Gainesville shrank, becoming something else: somewhere we used to live, somewhere we no longer know, somewhere we were all so young. Long ago and far away, another time, another day.  ~ Tracks on Tracks

[ed. Never heard this one before, or saw the video. Good stuff.]