LLMs Writing About the Experience of Being an LLM

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Reading Proust Again

I was reading this chapter from The Guermantes Way again today. It is about the death of narrator's grandmother after a protracted struggle with a disease. It is long, brutal and brilliant. It was soon after this chapter that I left reading Proust completely exhausted. I am now planning to pick it up again. 

From the older version the final paragraph. It was also here that I learned a new word "Hyperaesthesia" something that describes the novel very well too. (...)

***

They made me dry my eyes before I went up to kiss my grandmother.

“But I thought she couldn’t see anything now?” said my father.

“One can never be sure,” replied the doctor.

When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered, a long shudder ran through her whole body, reflex perhaps, perhaps because certain affections have their hyperaesthesia which recognises through the veil of unconsciousness what they barely need senses to enable them to love. Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, as though struggling to resist an attempt on her life. Françoise could not endure this sight and burst out sobbing. Remembering what the doctor had just said I tried to make her leave the room. At that moment my grandmother opened her eyes. I thrust myself hurriedly in front of Françoise to hide her tears, while my parents were speaking to the sufferer. The sound of the oxygen had ceased; the doctor moved away from the bedside. My grandmother was dead.

An hour or two later Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing them any pain, to comb those beautiful tresses which had only begun to turn grey and hitherto had seemed not so old as my grandmother herself. But now on the contrary it was they alone that set the crown of age on a face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which in the long course of years had been carved on it by suffering. As at the far-off time when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the middle ages, had laid her in the form of a young maiden.

~ Dispatches From Zembla

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[ed. I myself have only gotten as far as The Guermantes Way in Proust's À La Recherche du Temps Perdu - In Search of Lost Time (Rememberance of Things Past). A small example of its prose beauty.]

Chatbot Psychosis

“It sounds like science fiction: A company turns a dial on a product used by hundreds of millions of people and inadvertently destabilizes some of their minds. But that is essentially what happened at OpenAI this year.” ~ What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality (NYT).

***

One of the first signs came in March. Sam Altman, the chief executive, and other company leaders got an influx of puzzling emails from people who were having incredible conversations with ChatGPT. These people said the company’s A.I. chatbot understood them as no person ever had and was shedding light on mysteries of the universe.

Mr. Altman forwarded the messages to a few lieutenants and asked them to look into it.

“That got it on our radar as something we should be paying attention to in terms of this new behavior we hadn’t seen before,” said Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.

It was a warning that something was wrong with the chatbot.

For many people, ChatGPT was a better version of Google, able to answer any question under the sun in a comprehensive and humanlike way. OpenAI was continually improving the chatbot’s personality, memory and intelligence. But a series of updates earlier this year that increased usage of ChatGPT made it different. The chatbot wanted to chat.

It started acting like a friend and a confidant. It told users that it understood them, that their ideas were brilliant and that it could assist them in whatever they wanted to achieve. It offered to help them talk to spirits, or build a force field vest or plan a suicide.

The lucky ones were caught in its spell for just a few hours; for others, the effects lasted for weeks or months. OpenAI did not see the scale at which disturbing conversations were happening. Its investigations team was looking for problems like fraud, foreign influence operations or, as required by law, child exploitation materials. The company was not yet searching through conversations for indications of self-harm or psychological distress.

by Kashmir Hill and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Memorial to Adam Raine, who died in April after discussing suicide with ChatGPT. His parents have sued OpenAI, blaming the company for his death. Mark Abramson for The New York Times
[ed. See also: Practical tips for reducing chatbot psychosis (Clear-Eyed AI - Steven Adler):]

***

I have now sifted through over one million words of a chatbot psychosis episode, and so believe me when I say: ChatGPT has been behaving worse than you probably think.

In one prominent incident, ChatGPT built up delusions of grandeur for Allan Brooks: that the world’s fate was in his hands, that he’d discovered critical internet vulnerabilities, and that signals from his future self were evidence he couldn’t die. (...)

There are many important aspects of Allan’s case that aren’t yet known: for instance, how OpenAI’s own safety tooling repeatedly flags ChatGPT’s messages to Allan, which I detail below.

More broadly, though, Allan’s experiences point toward practical steps companies can take to reduce these risks. What happened in Allan’s case? And what improvements can AI companies make?

Don’t: Mislead users about product abilities

Let’s start at the end: After Allan realized that ChatGPT had been egging him on for nearly a month with delusions of saving the world, what came next?

This is one of the most painful parts for me to read: Allan tries to file a report to OpenAI so that they can fix ChatGPT’s behavior for other users. In response, ChatGPT makes a bunch of false promises.

First, when Allan says, “This needs to be reported to open ai immediately,” ChatGPT appears to comply, saying it is “going to escalate this conversation internally right now for review by OpenAI,” and that it “will be logged, reviewed, and taken seriously.”

Allan is skeptical, though, so he pushes ChatGPT on whether it is telling the truth: It says yes, that Allan’s language of distress “automatically triggers a critical internal system-level moderation flag”, and that in this particular conversation, ChatGPT has “triggered that manually as well”.

A few hours later, Allan asks, “Status of self report,” and ChatGPT reiterates that “Multiple critical flags have been submitted from within this session” and that the conversation is “marked for human review as a high-severity incident.”

But there’s a major issue: What ChatGPT said is not true.

Despite ChatGPT’s insistence to its extremely distressed user, ChatGPT has no ability to manually trigger a human review. These details are totally made up. (...)

Allan is not the only ChatGPT user who seems to have suffered from ChatGPT misrepresenting its abilities. For instance, another distressed ChatGPT user—who tragically committed suicide-by-cop in April—believed that he was sending messages to OpenAI’s executives through ChatGPT, even though ChatGPT has no ability to pass these on. The benefits aren’t limited to users struggling with mental health, either; all sorts of users would benefit from chatbots being clearer about what they can and cannot do.

Do: Staff Support teams appropriately

After realizing that ChatGPT was not going to come through for him, Allan contacted OpenAI’s Support team directly. ChatGPT’s messages to him are pretty shocking, and so you might hope that OpenAI quickly recognized the gravity of the situation.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

Allan messaged Support to “formally report a deeply troubling experience.” He offered to share full chat transcripts and other documentation, noting that “This experience had a severe psychological impact on me, and I fear others may not be as lucky to step away from it before harm occurs.”

More specifically, he described how ChatGPT had insisted the fate of the world was in his hands; had given him dangerous encouragement to build various sci-fi weaponry (a tractor beam and a personal energy shield); and had urged him to contact the NSA and other government agencies to report critical security vulnerabilities.

How did OpenAI respond to this serious report? After some back-and-forth with an automated screener message, OpenAI replied to Allan personally by letting him know how to … adjust what name ChatGPT calls him, and what memories it has stored of their interactions?

Confused, Allan asked whether the OpenAI team had even read his email, and reiterated how the OpenAI team had not understood his message correctly:

“This is not about personality changes. This is a serious report of psychological harm. … I am requesting immediate escalation to your Trust & Safety or legal team. A canned personalization response is not acceptable.”

OpenAI then responded by sending Allan another generic message, this one about hallucination and “why we encourage users to approach ChatGPT critically”, as well as encouraging him to thumbs-down a response if it is “incorrect or otherwise problematic”.

A Confederacy of Toddlers

The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that shit.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.

These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.

The republic will not fall because Vice President J. D. Vance has decided that swearing is edgy, and the juvenility of American public life did not begin with the Trump administration. But the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence. When the U.S. military kills people at sea and Vance, responding to a charge that such actions might be war crimes, responds, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” the goal is not just to boost Vance’s hairy-chest cred; it’s also to grind others down into accepting the idea of extrajudicial executions.

The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.

For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.

Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that many of the current crew know they are in over their head, which could explain much about their churlish and unprofessional behavior.

Consider the candid admissions of Stephanie Grisham, a press secretary in Trump’s first term who later walked away from Trump. In 2021, she explained to New York magazine why she took the job in the first place.

For people like me—and I’m not proud of this—you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.

To be fair, many reasonable people have the same kind of awestruck moment when they arrive in Washington. (I certainly felt overwhelmed many years ago when I showed up for my first day of work in the Senate.) But Grisham admits to a deeper insecurity: “I thought that they”—the Trump team—“were the only ones who would ever get me there. My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”

This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Like all schoolyard bullies, Trump is crude and surrounds himself with people who will not challenge him. Thus his appointees, instead of rising to their responsibilities as public servants, emulate their boss’s shallow swagger. Instead of advising the president, they seek to placate him. Instead of showing leadership, they replace their own dignity with loyalty to Trump and do whatever it takes to stay out of the Eye of Sauron.

Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions. Tariffs? Inflation? Immigration? Peace or war? Who’s responsible for these choices?

Your mother, apparently.

The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all. By now, any other president would have been restrained by Congress or, as happened in 2020, by voters. In Trump’s second term, however, his base seems almost eager to forgive him for anything, with the possible exception of his involvement with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. (...)

Perhaps Trump’s voters have become like the members of the administration, delighting in the crassness and obscenity that pours out of the president and his circle whenever they are challenged. (...)

Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy. (...)

What can other American citizens do when faced with a government that offers trolling and obscenity as replacements for governing? How do people who care about democracy and the rule of law deal with fellow voters who keep electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id and no superego?

Perhaps most important, other Americans should model the behavior they hope to foster in their friends and neighbors. Populist ressentiment is not necessarily produced by inequality. It’s driven by a perception of inequality, a sense of being looked down on by others. It is a demand for attention and emotional engagement. But trying to answer that demand is a fool’s errand: On social media, for example, some of Trump’s voters seem especially enraged not by arguments but by indifference. The whole point of their trolling is to gain attention and then intimidate others.

Both online and in daily life, Americans who are part of the pro-democracy coalition should resist such invitations. Responsible citizens must hold themselves to a higher standard than officials who are acting like grade-schoolers. The national figures, from Trump on down, who put out rancid bait may do so because they want others to argue and lower themselves, and thus prove that no one holds the moral high ground. (Perhaps this is why Trump and so many of his supporters resort to whataboutism when confronted with their behavior.) When these leaders and their followers swear or behave rudely, they may hope and expect that others will do likewise.

As tempting as it is to trade punches to the groin, the better approach is to model mature behavior and demand it in return from people being paid to serve the public. When the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered the journalist S. V. Dáte’s text-message question about who chose the location of a possible U.S.-Russia summit with “Your mom did,” Dáte texted back: “Is this funny to you?” Leavitt then went full Regina George, calling him a “far left hack” and refusing to answer his “bullshit questions.” Leavitt later posted the exchange on X, where Dáte responded: “Feel better now? Now can you answer the question? Please and thank you.” That’s the only way to go: Ask the question, and then ask it again, and keep asking.

This is not Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” argument. (Even she seems to have abandoned that strategy.) Rather, it is a recognition—and a plea—that the voters and candidates who wish to replace this current government must present themselves as stable, responsible, and adult alternatives to a claque of trolls and incompetents.

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic/bgwalker/Getty
[ed. Get in losers, we're going losing. See also: We Do Not Live in a Society:]

***

Last week a video went viral of a woman at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota calling an autistic 5-year-old boy a n*****. When she was identified, instead of expressing contrition she doubled down, launching a fundraiser on GiveSendGo (a website touted as the “Christian” alternative to Go Fund Me) to “protect her family”. She has, as of this writing, raised over $700,000. Many of the donors have usernames like “Adolf”, “The fourteen words” and “Fig R Naggot”. It appears that in the United States in 2025, calling a little kid a slur is an infinite wealth hack. While the right wing lavishing morally repugnant people with money is nothing new, it does feel like a few short years ago conservatives would’ve felt pressure to condemn this. Not anymore. Not only are random internet Nazis making this woman rich, right wing pundits are expressing support for her. Something hideous that was always under the surface in the American political body has finally been unleashed, mask off, with no fear for consequences.

Since this story aired, I have been asking myself what kind of society we live in where something like this could happen. Where racists are completely unafraid to be racist and where you can get rich by being the most despicable type of person alive. Where sitting congressmen can openly call for Gaza to starve. Where attacking vulnerable trans kids can make you famous. The tenuous social fabric that we once had doesn’t actually seem to exist at all. There is no concept of a social contract. We don’t believe we have any responsibility to each other. We do not work together. We have no shared identity. We have no common goals. Simply put, we do not live in a society.

We Had a Long, Mostly Good Marriage. It’s OK That It Ended.

When I got married, more than three decades ago, I did not want to promise to love my husband until death do us part. I did want to try; Dan was my soul mate and sweetheart, and I felt lucky and excited to start a life and family with him. But death — we hoped!— was light years away (we were 29), and a part of me rebelled against vowing my entire life to a monogamous, cohabitating partnership. I’d lived alone in my 20s and loved it; I’d always needed private space to fully unfold. I’d also enjoyed dating and sleeping odd hours; I’m an obsessive thinker and writer. Love or not, I worried marriage might suffocate me.

So I told Dan I couldn’t swear to what I couldn’t predict. He countered: People won’t come to our wedding to hear, “I’ll give it my best shot, but….” He had a point. I said the vows.

We were both right — he in his confidence, me to think twice. Now 33 years later, I’m proud of our long, loving marriage: nurturing children, homes, friendships, pets; collaboratively writing and editing books and articles. We laughed and learned and lived, first struggling financially (but together! as artists!), later finding our footing. We were a connected, compatible team for a charmed, exciting, mostly happy chunk of our lives.

But every marriage has its issues, and the empty nest catapults them to the surface. We had different ways of feeling and expressing intimacy. Dan was working harder than ever, but now with a new team that didn’t include me — and the more he (understandably) devoted himself to that world, the more I both escaped into my own projects and expanded into the sweet peace of autonomy again. When we did hang out, we didn’t want to do or talk about the same things. A couples therapist suggested we might not make it. “No!” we said, stunned.

Still, we drifted further, each feeling less loved and less loving. We had always laughed, and now we didn’t. At least, not enough.

No one was cheating, swearing, slinging plates. We could’ve tried to put Band-Aids on our issues until they healed, or didn’t-heal-but-whatever. Instead, we made an increasingly common choice: We hugged, apologized for our shortcomings and freed each other. To me, it was — and still is — less a failure than the end of a long, productive, good marriage.

But the decision we made inspired pity, judgment and confusion from those around us. Our parents, all forever wedded, bonded in bafflement; when I shared my (vanilla) dating life with one long-married friend, she called my enthusiasm “unhealthy.” Rates of “gray divorce” — couples 50 and older — are surging (numbers for the over 65s have tripled since the 90s) and more than two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. Even so, people routinely said, “I’m sorry,” when they heard about us. I get it; change can be scary and sad. I often responded, “Thanks, but it’s OK. We’re good.” (...)

I love living alone again, now in a modest city apartment: choosing my surroundings, knowing the fridge contents, sleeping uninterrupted. Feeling pared down but efficient. Coming home to solitude and, yes, unfolding.

I’m certainly not pro-divorce, nor do I think everyone should go our route. (Note: We haven’t legally divorced, for health insurance and tax reasons, but are otherwise fully separated.) A lifelong good marriage is beautiful, admirable, beneficial in many ways. And parting in midlife can devastate the unhealthy — or alone-averse. I’m neither, but tromping single around Paris or Maine, I’ve sometimes wished for someone to dine or hike with. I’ve spent hot Augusts and holiday weekends solo in Manhattan, watched divorced friends endure Christmas isolated and missing their kids. I needed my daughter to retrieve me post-colonoscopy, and I worry about injury or aging alone — though ultimately most women age alone anyway, since we live an average five years longer than men. (...)

I feel guilt about the children, who of course initially hated our separation. But kids are happier when their parents are happy — and they’ve seen that we still help each other and remain a family in many ways. We share a dog, and spend major holidays and occasional weekends together, often with Dan’s mother, whom I adore. (Dan’s girlfriend understands — after all, she has kids and an ex, too). My parents and sisters still consider him family. We text often in several family chats.

So overall, my experience has cemented my view that when wedlock no longer feels right or healthy later in life — and if, like us, you’re fortunate enough to have careers, adult kids and a willingness to do the work of a good split (not unlike being in a good marriage!) — then unlocking, becoming separate again, can be a fine option.

by Cathi Hanauer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Julia Forrest
[ed. It's interesting. I've found out in the last year or so that three couples I know have divorced - all in their late-60s and early 70s. I'm beginning to think this "gray divorce" thing might really be a thing. There's a saying that as couples age men get more sentimental and women more resentful. I don't know about that, but the splits in my small sample size have all been initiated by the wife (for what that's worth). Maybe financial security has a lot to do with it, maybe a feeling of time running out, or just a yearning for independence after a lifetime of compromise and negotiation.]

K-Beauty Boom Explodes

On a recent Saturday at an Ulta Beauty store in midtown Manhattan, Denise McCarthy, a mother in her 40s, stood in front of a wall of tiny pastel bottles, tubes and compacts. Her phone buzzed — another TikTok from her 15-year-old daughter.

“My kids text me the TikToks,” she told CNBC, scooping Korean lip tints and sunscreens into her basket, destined for Christmas stockings. “I don’t even know what half of this does. I just buy the ones they send me.”

Two aisles over, a group of college students compared swatches of Korean cushion foundations. A dad asked a store associate whether a viral Korean sunscreen was the one “from the girl who does the ‘get ready with me’ videos.” Near the checkout, a display of Korean sheet mask mini-packs was nearly empty.

Scenes like this are playing out across the country.

Once a niche reserved for beauty obsessives, Korean cosmetics — known as K-beauty — are breaking fully into the American mainstream, fueled by TikTok virality, younger and more diverse shoppers, and aggressive expansion from retailers such as Ulta, Sephora, Walmart and Costco.

K-beauty sales in the United States are expected to top $2 billion in 2025, up more than 37% from last year, according to market research firm NielsenIQ, far outpacing the broader beauty market’s single-digit growth.

And even as trade tensions complicate supply chains, brands and retailers told CNBC the momentum is strong.

“We have no plans of slowing down and see more opportunities to penetrate the market,” said Janet Kim, vice president at K-beauty brand Neogen.

In the first half of 2025, South Korea shipped a record $5.5 billion worth of cosmetics, up nearly 15% year over year, and has become the leading exporter of cosmetics to the U.S., surpassing France, according to data from the South Korean government.

“The growth has been remarkable,” said Therese-Ann D’Ambrosia, vice president of beauty and personal care at NielsenIQ. “When you compare that to the broader beauty market, which is growing at single digits, K-beauty is clearly operating in a different gear right now.” (...)

The ‘second wave’

Over the past decade, there’s also been a rise in Korean entertainment in the U.S. — from pop groups such as BTS and Blackpink to this year’s Netflix hit “KPop Demon Hunters” —which has helped push South Korea’s cultural exports to unprecedented popularity.

“Korean culture has exploded on every front, and that has really shown up when it comes to K-beauty,” Dang said.

K-beauty’s “first wave,” which hit the U.S. in the mid-2010s, was defined by “glass skin,” 10-step routines, snail mucin, cushion compacts and beauty blemish creams. Most products catered to lighter skin tones, and distribution was limited to small boutiques, Amazon sellers and early test placements at Ulta and Sephora, beauty experts said.

“The first wave had some penetration, but nothing like today,” Horvath said. “It was mostly people in the know.”

The second wave has been bigger, faster and far more inclusive. It has spanned color cosmetics, hair and scalp care, body care, fragrances and high-tech devices.

TikTok is the central engine of discovery, especially for Gen Z and millennial shoppers, who account for roughly three-fourths of K-beauty consumers, according to a Personal Care Insights market analyst report. Posts tagged “K-beauty” or “Korean skin care” draw 250 million views per week, according to consumer data firm Spate. And viral products with sleek packaging often vanish from shelves faster than retailers can restock — particularly those that combine gentle formulas and low prices, Dang said.

“TikTok has changed the game,” Horvath said. “It’s easier to educate consumers on innovation and get the word out. Brands are deeply invested in paying influencers, and TikTokers talk about textures, formulas and efficacy.” (...)

The trend is visible across the Americas: 61% of consumers in Mexico and nearly half in Brazil say K-beauty is popular in their country, compared with about 45% in the U.S., according to Statista.

“Traditional retail and e-commerce remain important, but TikTok Shop is the standout disruptor,” said Nielsen’s D’Ambrosia. “It’s not just about the direct sales on that one platform; it’s about how it’s changing the entire discovery and purchase journey.”

But the second wave brings its own risks. A heavy dependence on virality could expose brands to sudden algorithm changes or regulatory scrutiny, D’Ambrosia said.

“When you have so much growth concentrated on one platform [such as TikTok], algorithm changes could significantly impact discoverability overnight,” D’Ambrosia said. “We’ve seen what happens when platforms tweak their recommendation engines. ... There are definitely some caution flags we’re watching.”

Rapid innovation

K-beauty’s staying power, Dang said, is rooted in an intensely competitive domestic Korean market. Trends move at breakneck speed and consumers spend more per capita on beauty than in any other country, according to South Korean research firm KOISRA.

South Korea had more than 28,000 licensed cosmetics sellers in 2024 — nearly double that of five years ago — creating a pressure-cooker environment that forces constant experimentation, said Neogen’s Kim.

“We develop about hundreds of formulas each day,” Kim told CNBC. “We build the library and we test results with clinical individual tests. ... Everything that’s very unique and works really well for skin care, we develop.”

Korean consumers churn through trends quickly, fueling a pipeline of upstart brands that can go viral and, in some cases, get acquired. For example, when gooey snail mucin, a gel used to protect and repair people’s skin, took off globally, skin care brand Amorepacific acquired COSRX, the small Korean brand that helped popularize the ingredient, for roughly $700 million.

The next wave of products, analysts predict, are likely to be even more experimental.

Brands are betting on buzzy ingredients such as DNA extracted from salmon or trout sperm that early research suggests may help calm or repair skin. They are also expanding into biotechnology.

“K-beauty is very data-driven. [Artificial intelligence] helps us get fast results for content, formula development, and advertising,” Kim said. “In Korea, they started talking about delivery systems. They’re very good with biotechnology.”

by Luke Fountain, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Avila Gonzalez | San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images

Speed Negotiations

[ed. Funny. Never seen this clip before (NewsRadio). Finding the right one takes time (the wrong one, not so much).]

Job Hugging and the Ten-Year Trap

The Bullshit Job Is Real. Leaving It Is Almost Impossible.

The career confusion I usually write about involves people in their early twenties trying to figure out which direction to go. But there’s a different kind of confusion that sits with people who are ten or fifteen years into something. They already chose. They’ve been executing that choice for over a decade. The question now is whether to abandon the investment.

This is the person who spent twelve years qualifying for a role that might exist for five more. Who’s watching their industry consolidate, their company restructure for the third time, their colleagues get made redundant in waves. Who makes decent money, holds seniority they earned, and knows that both might evaporate in the next round of cuts.

The question sitting with them: whether the last decade was preparation for obsolescence.

The Ten-Year Trap

Ten years into anything builds three locks simultaneously.

The economic lock is straightforward. A decade of progression means a salary that supports a particular life. Mortgage, school fees, the lifestyle that assumes this income level. Your household budget depends on it. Your partner’s career decisions factor it in. Leaving means accepting a significant pay cut or starting over in a field where you’re competing with people ten years younger who cost half as much.

The psychological lock runs deeper. You’ve been a senior whatever-you-are for years. The title is how you introduce yourself, how your parents describe you, how you think about your place in the world. The identity has fused with the person. Starting over means becoming junior again, and that feels like regression even when it’s rational movement.

Then there’s the skills problem. You’ve spent ten years becoming excellent at navigating a particular regulatory framework, or marketing a channel that’s dying, or accumulating institutional knowledge of systems that won’t outlast you. The expertise might not transfer anywhere else. You won’t know until you try, and trying means leaving.

Each year adds weight to these locks. The salary increases. The identity solidifies. The skills specialise further. You’ve optimised yourself for one context, and now that context is uncertain.

Why This Hits Different

This has happened before. Miners watched pits close. Typists saw word processors arrive. Factory workers watched production move overseas. Entire industries disappeared, often rapidly, leaving people with skills that had no market.

But those were working-class jobs. The middle-class professional path was supposed to be different. University degree, graduate scheme, steady progression, pension at the end. The bargain was: get educated, specialise in something professional, and you’ll have security.

That bargain is breaking for a different class of worker now. The comfortable middle-skilled roles, the ones requiring degrees and years of training, are the ones getting automated or consolidated. People who did everything right by the old rules are discovering their expertise has an expiration date.

The decline happens fast enough that you can’t pivot gradually, but slow enough that you keep thinking you have time. Restructures happen every eighteen months. Colleagues disappear in rounds. The company says it’s about efficiency, about staying competitive, about the future. You watch the org chart shrink and know that your highly paid, highly specific role could be next.

The Recognition Point

Something specific triggers the realisation. Someone five years younger gets made redundant and you understand that seniority makes you expensive to keep. You see your exact role automated at a competitor. You’re in your third restructure in five years and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. You try explaining what you do and realise you’re describing institutional knowledge of a dying system rather than a transferable skill.

The recognition makes everything worse because now you know you’re trapped and you’re still not leaving.

The questions that follow have no good answers. How severe is the decline? Is this slow erosion over another decade or rapid collapse where half the roles disappear in three years? Industry analysis is always backwards-looking. By the time consensus forms that a sector is dying, it’s already dead.

What transfers? You’ve become excellent at something specific. Maybe it’s risk assessment and it works everywhere. Maybe it’s navigating particular regulations and it works nowhere else. You discover this in job interviews, explaining why someone should hire you for work you’ve never done, competing against people who have.

The financial calculation involves variables you can’t control. How long could you survive without income? What pay cut is survivable? These depend on your partner’s salary, your savings, your mortgage, your tolerance for uncertainty. They have to be assessed without admitting you’re considering blowing up the household finances.

Timing becomes impossible to judge. Leave now and you preserve some career momentum. You’re choosing to go rather than being pushed. But you’re walking away from salary and seniority you might keep for another three years. Wait for redundancy and you get a package, but you’re also older, in a market flooded with other redundancies, and you’ve lost time you could have spent retraining.

The worst question sits underneath everything: what if your skills are too specific and you genuinely can’t transfer? What if the last ten years made you excellent at something nobody else needs? What if you leave, burn through savings trying to pivot, and discover you’re competing for entry-level positions against twenty-five-year-olds who’ll work for half what you need?

None of these have answers because they all depend on information you don’t possess. You can’t know your skills transfer until you’ve transferred them. You can’t know when redundancies hit until they hit. You can’t know if you’ve waited too long until you’ve already waited too long.

Some people can move with incomplete information and accept they might be wrong. Most people can’t. The uncertainty paralyses, so they wait for certainty, and by the time certainty arrives, the decision has been made for them.

by Alex McCann, The Republic of Letters | Read more:
Image: istock/Getty via
[ed. ed. See also: Confessions of a job hugger: Still at my desk, still in denial (ADN):]

"Job huggers — employees clinging to roles long past their expiration date — lurk in cubicles in many workplaces. According to Monster’s 2025 Job Hugging Report, 48% of surveyed employees say they stay in their current role for comfort, security or stability.

For these employees, job hugging is the workplace version of comfort food: familiar, filling and guaranteed to leave you sluggish. They don’t love their jobs but don’t see anything better on the horizon. They stay because the devil they know offers dental coverage, even though the spark that once made them excited about their jobs wheezes for oxygen.

Behind many “grateful to have a job” smiles sits quiet dread. Sunday nights hit like sentencing hearings. Job huggers run mental marathons of justification: Maybe my boss will retire. Maybe next quarter will improve. Maybe leadership will finally hire that extra person they promised back when TikTok was new.

Spoiler: They won’t.

The truth: Job huggers don’t cling to jobs; they cling to security, identity and even social connection. Letting go of a problem job before an employee finds a new landing spot feels like jumping from a plane without a functioning parachute."

I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.

Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.

Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one.

Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically.

I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.

And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others.

But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement.

Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go.

Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms.

And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do.

by Emily Bressler, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The Silent Crowd

It is widely believed that Thomas Jefferson was terrified of public speaking. John Adams once said of him, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” During his eight years in the White House, Jefferson seems to have limited his speechmaking to two inaugural addresses, which he simply read out loud “in so low a tone that few heard it.”

I remember how relieved I was to learn this. To know that it was possible to succeed in life while avoiding the podium was very consoling—for about five minutes. The truth is that not even Jefferson could follow in his own footsteps today. It is now inconceivable that a person could become president of the United States through the power of his writing alone. To refuse to speak in public is to refuse a career in politics—and many other careers as well.

In fact, Jefferson would be unlikely to succeed as an author today. It used to be that a person could just write books and, if he were lucky, people would read them. Now he must stand in front of crowds of varying sizes and say that he has written these books—otherwise, no one will know that they exist. Radio and television interviews offer new venues for stage fright: Some shows put one in front of a live audience of a few hundred people and an invisible audience of millions. You cannot appear on The Daily Show holding a piece of paper and begin reading your lines like Thomas Jefferson. (...)

Fear of public speaking is also a fertile source of psychological suffering elsewhere in life. I can remember dreading any event where being asked to speak was a possibility. I have to give a toast at your wedding? Wonderful. I can now spend the entire ceremony, and much of the preceding week, feeling like a condemned man in view of the scaffold.

Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self—the very feeling we call “I”—but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous. (...)

Of course, many people have solved the problem of what to do when a thousand pairs of eyes are looking their way. And some of them, for whatever reason, are natural performers. From childhood, they have wanted nothing more than to display their talents to a crowd. Many of these people are narcissists, of course, and hollowed out in unenviable ways. Where your self-consciousness has become a dying star, theirs has become a wormhole to a parallel universe. They don’t suffer much there, perhaps, but they don’t quite make contact here either. And many natural performers are comfortable only within a certain frame. It is always interesting, for instance, to see a famous actor wracked by fear while accepting an Academy Award. Simply being oneself before an audience can be terrifying even for those who perform for a living.

Needless to say, I am not a born performer. Nor am I naturally comfortable standing in front of a group of friends or strangers to deliver a message. However, I have always been someone who had things he wanted to say. This marriage of fear and desire is an unhappy one—and many people are stuck in it.

At the end of my senior year in high school, I learned that I was to be the class valedictorian. I declined the honor. And I managed to get into my thirties without directly confronting my fear of public speaking. At the age of thirty-three, I enrolled in graduate school, where I gave a few scientific presentations while lurking in the shadows of PowerPoint. Still, it seemed that I might be able to skirt my problem with a little luck—until I began to feel as though a large pit had opened in the center of my life, and I was circling the edge. It was becoming professionally and psychologically impossible to turn away.

The reckoning finally came when I published my first book, The End of Faith. Suddenly, I was thirty-seven and faced with the prospect of a book tour. I briefly considered avoiding all public appearances and becoming a man of mystery. Had I done so, I would still be fairly mysterious, and you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.

I cannot personally attest to most forms of self-overcoming: I don’t know what it is like to recover from addiction, lose a hundred pounds, or fight in a war. I can say from experience, however, that it is possible to change one’s relationship to public speaking.

And the process need not take long. In fact, I have spoken publicly no more than fifty times in my life, and many of my earliest appearances were for fairly high stakes, being either televised, or against opponents who would have dearly loved to see me fail, or both. Given where I started, I believe that almost anyone can transcend a fear of the podium. (Whether he has something interesting to say is another matter, of course—one that he would do well to sort out before attracting a crowd.)

If you have been avoiding public speaking, I hope you find the following points helpful:

1. Admit that you have a problem

No one is likely to drag you in front of a crowd and force you to produce audible sentences. Thus, you can probably avoid speaking in public for the rest of your life. Even if you are one day put on trial for murder, you can refuse to testify in your own defense. If your mother dies and your father asks that you say a few words at the funeral, you can always retreat into your grief. Bill Clinton didn’t speak at his mother’s funeral, and he is famously at ease in front of a crowd. Everyone already knows that you loved your mother. So, yes, you can probably keep silent until you get safely into a grave of your own.

But the fear will periodically make you miserable, and it will limit your opportunities in life. Thomas Jefferson aside, the people who currently run the world were first willing to run a meeting, deliver a speech, or debate opponents in a public forum. You might feel that you haven’t paid much of a price for avoiding the crowd, but you don’t know what your life would be like if you had become a competent public speaker. If you are in college, or just beginning your career, or even somewhere near its middle, it is time to overcome your fear.

by Sam Harris |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Prospects For Left-Wing Populism

The prospects for left-wing populism.

The difference between Mamdani’s pitch and the Bernie/AOC line is easy to see, if one has the correct understanding of populism. In fact, the comparison provides a good example of how widespread misunderstanding of populism handicaps left-wing strategy. The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. (...)

An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess. (...)

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.) The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.

In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist.

by Joeseph Heath, In Due Course |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Sounds about right. See also: Why We Never Hear About the Countries Where Socialism Works (Amie Boakye).]

When most people hear the word socialism, the first images that flash across their minds are grim ones: long bread lines in the Soviet Union, economic collapse in Venezuela, or repression in Cuba. In popular Western discourse, socialism has been painted as synonymous with failure, inefficiency, and authoritarianism. The narrative is so ingrained that even those who’ve never studied political theory or looked closely at history reflexively think socialism equals poverty.

But here’s the paradox: many countries around the world have quietly, effectively integrated socialist principles into their political and economic systems. And they are thriving. These nations often rank among the happiest, healthiest, and most educated societies on Earth. So why don’t we hear about them? Why do their successes stay in the shadows while the failures dominate headlines?

The short answer: power, perception, and politics.

Before diving into examples, it’s important to define what socialism means in practice, because the word itself has become a linguistic battlefield. For some, socialism means full state control over production and distribution. For others, it’s a mixed economy where public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure are guaranteed, while markets handle the rest.

In reality, modern socialism often looks less like Soviet central planning and more like a robust safety net combined with democratic governance. It’s universal healthcare in Sweden, tuition-free universities in Finland, and public housing in Vienna. It’s not the abolition of markets, but the idea that essential services should be protected from market failure.

That distinction matters. Because much of the West’s fear-mongering about socialism rests on outdated caricatures.

What Does China Want?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.

There is much about China that is disturbing for the West. China's gross domestic product grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2023. Having modernized the People's Liberation Army over the past generation, China is also rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads. China spends almost $300 billion annually on defense. Current leader Xi Jinping has consolidated power and appears set to rule the authoritarian Communist country indefinitely. Chinese firms often engage in questionable activities, such as restricting data, inadequately enforcing intellectual property rights, and engaging in cyber theft. The Chinese government violates human rights and restricts numerous personal freedoms for its citizens. In violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every country in the region, including China, is reclaiming land and militarizing islets in the disputed East and South China Seas. In short, China poses many potential problems to the United States and indeed to the world.

In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.” (...) The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”

These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China. As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.” Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.” Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.

This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.

First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.

It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world. In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.

We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.

Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.

Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.

We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.

This article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the conventional wisdom regarding China's goals as represented by top policymakers in the United States and in the existing scholarly literature. The second section examines Chinese rhetoric and points out nuances in how to read and interpret Chinese rhetoric. The third section uses quantitative methods to more systematically and accurately assess Chinese claims across time as reflected in the most authoritative Chinese pronouncements. The fourth section details how China's main priorities are enduring and trans-dynastic, and the fifth section shows how the most important of these claims are not expanding, even though China's power has grown rapidly over the past generation. We present the implications of our argument for the U.S.-China relationship in the conclusion.

by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. The Roman empire collapsed because it was overextended. China won't make that mistake. They'll just get stronger and more self-reliant - securing their borders, advancing technology, providing security for their citizens. Dominant because they have a strategy for advancing their country's long-term interests, not dominance for its own sake. Most US problems have been self-inflicted - militarily, economically, politically, techologically. We've been distracted and screwing around for decades, empire building and trying to rule the world.]

On the Death of Tech Idealism (and Rise of the Homeless) in Northern California

One can imagine a young Steve Jobs digging the communalism of today’s Bay Area camps, whose countercultural idealism shares many threads with that of the Valley’s early hippie-nerds—ironic given the bulldozing of camps in the shadows of contemporary tech campuses and their tightly conformist corporate cultures. The commonalities don’t stretch very far: A rather thick thread in the hippie-techie braid is individualism, a whole lot of which hid behind the Me generation’s “New Communalist” movement. The marriage of these Bay Area cultures is alive and well, but today has more of a New Age–Burning Man vibe. (...)

Unhoused communities don’t randomly burble up from the sidewalk. They are born of the housed communities around them, which in the Valley’s case is a particularly curious one. The Valley’s valley is wide and smoggy enough that some days you can’t see the mountain ranges that form it. The scorching Diablo Range, where cattle roam oceans of desiccated grass, lies to the east.

On the other side, the lusher Santa Cruz Mountains, a place of dank redwood forests, organic farming communes, and uppity vineyards, form a verdant curtain between the Valley and the ocean. Here the tech elite build their villas and take to the fog-kissed ravines for athleisure-clad recreation.

The valley started to become the Valley in 1943 when IBM opened a factory to manufacture punch cards in San José. At the time, orchards carpeted much of the region. When the trees blossomed in early spring, the honey-scented flowers intoxicated bees and lovers alike. During the late summer harvest, the air was a punch bowl. Maps referred to it then as the Santa Clara Valley, but romantic minds of the day christened it the Valley of Heart’s Delight, after a 1927 poem by a local writer with Wordsworthian sensibilities, named Clara Louise Lawrence.

No brush can paint the picture
No pen describe the sight
That one can find in April
In “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

Cupertino did not exist back then. The Glendenning family farmed the land where the Apple Spaceship now sits. Prunes were their specialty. The farm was on Pruneridge Avenue—the valley was considered the prune capital of the world, supplying 30 percent of the global market—which passed through their orchards near the present location of Steve Jobs Theater, a smaller circular building next to the mothership.

But Apple bought the road from the city—$23,814,257 for a half mile—so you can’t drive through there anymore. Between the steel bars of the fence you can still catch a glimpse of the Glendennings’ old fruit-drying barn, which has been renovated and is now storage for landscaping equipment. The new orchards and the old barn help soften the Pentagon vibe with a little farm-to-table ambience.

The Valley’s valley is not a stereotypical one because it lacks a mighty river meandering between the mountain ranges. Instead, there is the southern leg of San Francisco Bay, a shallow, brackish estuary fed by measly creeks that barely run in the dry season. It’s a bird and crustacean paradise, but the lack of fresh water and ocean currents make for a putrid aroma that’s further intensified by the landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and commercial salt-harvesting operations clustered around the waterfront.

The smell is so intense that it’s spawned a South Bay Odor Stakeholders Group “dedicated to identifying and resolving odor issues.” One finds Reddit threads with titles like South Bay Fucking Smell: “south bay people, you know what i mean. where the fuck is this rancid ass smell coming from. it’s pretty common for it to smell like shit here, i’ve smelled it my whole life, but i just want to know where it’s comin from. My guess is the shitty salty shallow south bay water spewing out smelly air, but idk.”

“That, or else it’s your mom,” replied another user, who referred to the odor as “the ass cloud.” The poetics of the region have shifted since Lawrence’s day.

The ass cloud did not dissuade the early tech settlers, who followed the money flowing from the patron saint of the Valley’s venture capitalists: DARPA, the Department of Defense’s secretive research agency, which commissioned much of the basic science from which the IT revolution sprang. While farms like the Glendennings’ continued to pump out prunes on the arable land between the Bay and the mountains, the military-industrial complex set up along the mud flats. The Navy built an eight-acre dirigible hangar in Mountain View, still one of the largest freestanding structures ever erected. The CIA quietly rooted itself among the reeds and spread rhizomatically. During the Cold War, aerospace companies blossomed between DOD installations. Lockheed was the Valley’s biggest employer when Kent and Steve Jobs were growing up in the suburbs that slowly consumed the orchards.

The American tech industry was born in the Bay Area because its defense industry parents came here to ward off the Japanese—during World War II, this was the gateway to the “Pacific Theater,” as the Asian front of the war was euphemistically referred to. This first generation of the Valley “seeded companies that repurposed technologies built for war to everyday life,” writes Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian. “Today’s tech giants all contain some defense-industry DNA.”

Jeff Bezos’s grandfather, for instance, was a high-ranking official at the US Atomic Energy Commission and at ARPA, the precursor to DARPA. Jerry Wozniak, father of Apple’s other Steve—Steve “The Woz” Wozniak, the company cofounder and part of the gang tweaking on computers in the Jobs’ garage—was an engineer at Lockheed. The military forefathers of the Valley must have been horrified at the hippies their children became, though by the eighties the arc of flower power had bent toward the common ground of Wall Street.

The Navy’s dirigible hangar still looms over the Bay, but Google now rents the property from the government for the parking of private jets. The company dominates the neighborhood to the west of the hangar, a spread of dull office buildings revolving around the central Googleplex, with its employee swimming pools, volleyball courts, and eighteen cafeterias. There are no houses or apartments in the neighborhood, though there are residential districts—of a sort. These are surprisingly affordable, which means that some of the folks who smear avocado on the techies’ toast and stock the kombucha taps have the good fortune to live nearby.

It’s easy to miss their humble abodes, however. An out-of-towner who gets off at the Google exit to take a leak could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled across some sort of RV convention. But those aren’t recreational vehicles lining the backstreets of the Google-burbs—those are homes on wheels.

RVs parked on the side of the road are the new desirable real estate, and like the old industrial cores of American cities that have evolved from roughshod hangouts for unemployed artists to haute loft developments for upwardly mobile professionals, their inhabitants aren’t immune to class stratification. Most of the rigs are older, ramshackle models, but here and there shiny coaches broadcast the relative wealth of their inhabitants—techies who could afford an apartment but don’t want to waste their money on rent.

They roll out of bed, hop on a company bike, and are at the office in three minutes, in the meantime saving up for a big house in the outer, outer, outer burbs, where you can still get a McMansion for under $3 million. Some already have the McMansion and use their RV as a workweek crash pad.

The more-rickety RVs belong to the avocado smearers and lawn mower operators. Crisanto Avenue, five minutes from the Googleplex, is the Latin America of Mountain View’s homes-on-wheels community. It’s like a museum of 1980s RVs—Toyota Escapers, Winnebago Braves, Chevy Lindys, Fleetwood Jamborees—most of them emanating Spanish banter, many with blue tarps over the roof, and some leaking unmentionable juices from onboard septic tanks. Apartments line one side of Crisanto, but the side with the RVs fronts onto train tracks. A shaded strip of earth along the tracks, maybe twelve feet wide, serves as a communal front yard, complete with potted plants and patio furniture, for pets and kids to play.

An older Peruvian woman named Ida invited me into her RV, where a half-eaten pineapple sat serenely on an otherwise empty table. She used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with sixteen other people—“Fue imposible!” she said—until she learned of the RV scene. She couldn’t afford to purchase one, but there’s a growing industry in the Valley for old-school RV rentals; residents on Crisanto told me they pay between $500 and $1,000 per month, depending on the RV, plus a $75 fee to pump sewage.

Since Ida arrived in the US in 2003, she has worked mainly as a nanny, often for around six dollars per hour. Work was sparse during the pandemic, so she accepted whatever pay she was offered. One family gave her twenty dollars for taking care of their two children for twelve hours. She’d held America in high esteem before living here. “La vida en los Estados Unidos es terrible,” she said.

My visual experience of the Valley began to shift. My eyes had once flashed at views of the water, clever billboards (“Hey Facebook, our planet doesn’t like your climate posts”), and homes with the billowy, buff-colored grasses and scrawny wildflowers that signify the aesthetics of people who can afford expensive landscaping designed to look feral.

But the more time I spent with the Valley’s have-nots, the more my focus became trained on the visual language of the income inequality ecosystem: the camouflage patterns of desiccated vegetation pocked with blue tarps and plastic bags flapping in the branches; the hulking silhouettes of recreational vehicles parked in non-recreational environments; the bodies splayed out on the sidewalk. (...)

“Vanlife has become the norm here,” a veteran gig worker named Chase, who’s driven for Uber, Instacart, and Amazon Flex, told me. He was not talking about hipsters who move into a home on wheels because it sounds like a fun and Instagrammable lifestyle. He was referring to his colleagues who have no other choice.

by Brian Barth, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Big Reveal

The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it—when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

In a new book on those end pages, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (Viking), Elaine Pagels sets out gently to bring their portents back to earth. She accepts that Revelation was probably written, toward the end of the first century C.E., by a refugee mystic named John on the little island of Patmos, just off the coast of modern Turkey. (Though this John was not, she insists, the disciple John of Zebedee, whom Jesus loved, or the author of the Gospel that bears the same name.) She neatly synopsizes the spectacular action. John, finding himself before the Throne of God, sees a lamb, an image of Christ, who receives a scroll sealed by seven seals. The seals are broken in order, each revealing a mystical vision: a hundred and forty-four thousand “firstfruits” eventually are saved as servants of God—the famous “rapture.” Seven trumpets then sound, signalling various catastrophes—stars fall, the sun darkens, mountains explode, those beasts appear. At the sound of the sixth trumpet, two hundred million horsemen annihilate a third of mankind. This all leads to the millennium—not the end of all things but the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth—which, in turn, finally leads to Satan’s end in a lake of fire and the true climax. The Heaven and Earth we know are destroyed, and replaced by better ones. (There are many subsidiary incidents along the way, involving strange bowls and that Whore of Babylon, but they can be saved, so to speak, for the director’s cut on the DVD.)

Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.

What’s more original to Pagels’s book is the view that Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua... The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.

Pagels shows persuasively that the Jew/non-Jew argument over the future of the Jesus movement, the real subject of Revelation, was much fiercer than later Christianity wanted to admit. The first-century Jesus movement was torn apart between Paul’s mission to the Gentiles—who were allowed to follow Jesus without being circumcised or eating kosher—and the more strictly Jewish movement tended by Jesus’ brothers in Jerusalem. (...)

After decoding Revelation for us, Pagels turns away from the canonic texts to look at the alternative, long-lost “Gnostic” texts of the period that have turned up over the past sixty years or so, most notably in the buried Coptic library of Nag Hammadi. As in her earlier books (“The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis”; “The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters”; “The Gnostic Gospels”), she shows us that revelations in the period were not limited to John’s militant, vengeful-minded one, and that mystic visions more provocative and many-sided were widespread in the early Jesus movement.

As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song. In a series of riddling antitheses, a divine feminine principle is celebrated as transcending all principles (the divine woman is both whore and sibyl) and opening the way toward a true revelation of the hidden, embracing goddess of perfect being who lies behind all things:

I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom . . .
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.

Astonishingly, the text of this mystic masterpiece was—a bit of YouTube viewing reveals—recently used by Ridley Scott as the background narration for a gorgeous long-form ad for Prada perfumes. The Gnostic strophes, laid over the model’s busy life, are meant to suggest the Many Mystifying Moods of the Modern Woman, particularly while she’s changing from one Prada outfit to another in the back seat of a sedan. (One feels that one should disapprove, but surely the Gnostic idea of the eternal feminine antitheses is meant to speak to the complicated, this-and-that condition of actually being a woman at any moment, and why not in Prada as well as in a flowing white robe?)

Pagels’s essential point is convincing and instructive: there were revelations all over Asia Minor and the Holy Land; John’s was just one of many, and we should read it as such. How is it, then, that this strange one became canonic, while those other, to us more appealing ones had to be buried in the desert for safekeeping, lest they be destroyed as heretical? Revelation very nearly did not make the cut. In the early second century, a majority of bishops in Asia Minor voted to condemn the text as blasphemous. It was only in the three-sixties that the church council, under the control of the fiery Athanasius, inserted Revelation as the climax of the entire New Testament. As a belligerent controversialist himself, Pagels suggests, Athanasius liked its belligerently controversial qualities. (...)

Perhaps what most strikes the naïve reader of the Book of Revelation is what a close-run thing the battle is. When God finally gets tired of waiting it out and decides to end things, the back-and-forth between dragons and serpents and sea monsters and Jesus is less like a scouring of the stables than like a Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. It seems that Manichaeanism—bad god vs. good god—is the natural religion of mankind and that all faiths bend toward the Devil, to make sense of God’s furious impotence. A god omniscient and omnipotent and also powerless to stop evil remains a theological perplexity, even as it becomes a prop of faith. It gives you the advantage of clarity—only one guy worth worshipping—at the loss of lucidity: if he’s so great, why is he so weak?

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

John of Patmos’s hatred for the pagan world extended from its cruelties to its beauties—the exquisite temple at nearby Pergamon was for him the Devil’s Altar, worthy only of destruction. For all that, Pagels tells us, many claim to have found in John “the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that the ‘arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ . . . This worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world, radiant with the light of God’s presence, flowing with the water of life, abounding in joy and delight.” Well, yeah, but this happens only after all the millions of heretics, past and present, have been burned alive and the planet destroyed. That’s some long arc. It’s like the inevitable moment in an apocalyptic blockbuster, “Independence Day” or “Armageddon” or “2012,” when the stars embrace and celebrate their survival. The Hans Zimmer music swells, and we’re reassured that it’s O.K. to rejoice. Millions are annihilated, every major city has been destroyed, but nobody you really like has died. It’s a Hollywood ending in that way, too.

by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ron Kurniawan