How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem of Beauty

In Agnès Varda’s film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”

Throughout “Jane B.,” Varda draws attention to the elusiveness of her subject. Birkin, a British-born actress and singer best known, then as now, for the raunchy pop songs she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, comes across as both open and enigmatic, singular in a way that is hard to parse. Her beauty is undeniable, but its borders are vague. Proud of her own eccentricity, she is also shy and awkward, with the voice of a little girl—hushed, rushed, and airy. Varda dresses her up as Joan of Arc, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the Virgin Mary, a cowboy, and a flamenco dancer, as if to suggest that Birkin’s mystery is itself a symbol, one as important to modern culture as Renaissance painting and the mother of Christ.

Birkin, who died in 2023, had “it”: an undefinable, unmistakable glamour that shifts our collective sense of what’s cool, or at least of what’s worth paying attention to. Easily mingling English reserve and European sensuality, she had a sweetness that set her apart from contemporaries such as the bombshell Brigitte Bardot or the edgier Anna Karina. “She wasn’t a hippie,” the journalist Marisa Meltzer writes in her new biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (Atria), “but rather a rising star from the upper class,” someone who radiated privilege even when she dressed down. One of the first celebrities to be regularly photographed in her everyday clothes, Birkin was an early icon of street style, traipsing around Paris in sneakers and rumpled sweaters, wicker basket in hand. The outfits could be easily mimicked and therefore easily marketed. Today, when social-media influencers praise “the French-girl look”—wispy bangs, minimal makeup, bluejeans, marinière tops—the look they have in mind is hers.

Birkin, Meltzer writes, was “nonchalance personified.” If this was not exactly an illusion, neither was it the whole story. A lifelong depressive, Birkin often thought about—and at least once attempted—suicide. Her diaries, two volumes of which have been published, reveal a wonderful writer, lyrical and self-lacerating. They also reveal her struggles with the costs and compromises of the It Girl role, how it left her feeling as though she had—as she puts it in Varda’s film—“no exceptional talents” to offset her fast-fleeting youth. What Birkin did have is je ne sais quoi, to her misfortune as much as to her advantage. After all, being famous for your ineffable qualities is perilously close to being famous for no reason. (...)

At fifteen, Jane became smitten with a middle-aged man named Alan, an “arty type” who lived across the street from her, in Chelsea. David Birkin let his daughter spend time at Alan’s apartment, certain he could see everything from the family’s balcony. Then Alan moved. “He invited me to his place, a basement,” Jane would say later.

I’d had too much red wine to drink for dinner—he drank whiskey and we ate ratatouille. He lay beside me and tried to get on top of me. I said it was the wrong time of the month, and he said it didn’t matter. I found that a bit disgusting and I ran away. . . . I went to my room and swallowed all the Junior Aspirin that I’d saved just in case. My sister found me at four in the morning, deathly pale. She told Ma. Stomach pump. Ma slapped me and was right to do so. Ever since I’ve always hated whiskey and ratatouille.

Afterward, Birkin wrote a poem called “Suicide Lost,” in which she presents herself as “a child who’s frightened to live . . . a person who can’t find a way out.” If Alan was the first arty, abusive man to whom she found herself drawn, he would by no means be the last.

After her suicide attempt, Birkin’s parents sent her to a finishing school in Paris, where she learned some French and hung around Versailles, the Louvre, and the Jeu de Paume. “I like poor Toulouse-Lautrec,” Birkin wrote in her diary. “He’s sad and the vulgarity and patchiness of life comes out in his painting.” (...)

How did this fragile young woman become “The Emancipated Venus of the New Age,” as the Belgian magazine Ciné Télé Revue dubbed her in 1969? Birkin was desperate for love, and when she got it she blossomed. A year earlier, in May, 1968, she had met Gainsbourg, a famous singer-songwriter and an established playboy, on the set of the romantic comedy “Slogan.” He was recovering from a breakup with Brigitte Bardot, Birkin was recovering from the breakup of her marriage, and all of France was about to be thrown into the heady days of a student uprising, when huge labor strikes brought the country to a standstill. Neither Gainsbourg nor Birkin was impressed. “He was Russian!” Birkin told Le Monde, in 2013. “It seemed anecdotal compared to the October Revolution.”

The Birkin of the Gainsbourg years is the one we know best, the It Girl of Meltzer’s title. According to Elinor Glyn, who popularized the concept in her 1927 novel, “It,” the quality couldn’t be reduced to mere sex appeal. “The most exact description,” she told an interviewer, is “some curious magnetism, and it always comes with people who are perfectly, perfectly self-confident . . . indifferent to everything and everybody.” In the blockbuster silent film “It,” based on Glyn’s novel, Clara Bow plays Betty Lou Spence, a spirited shopgirl who attracts the attention of her wealthy boss when she’s seen on the town in a chic flapper look reworked from a shabby day dress. Slicing off her sailor collar to create a deep-V neckline and attaching some fake flowers to her hip, Betty Lou marches out her tenement apartment and into a fancy restaurant with her head high, pointedly unbothered by the looks she gets from upper-crust diners.

Birkin projected just this sort of youthful insouciance. Skinny and flat-chested, with big teeth and a galumphing walk, she was no pinup and knew it. She styled herself, Meltzer notes, “in contrast to the quintessential French women of the time”: instead of hip-hugging dresses and high heels, there were Repetto flats, denim cutoffs, soft knits, and crocheted crop tops. The look was improvisational yet elegant, a perfect match for shifting social and sartorial trends. If a young Parisienne in the nineteen-twenties could feel liberated by the loose tailoring and comfortable fabrics of Coco Chanel’s new suits, Birkin’s generation wanted something even less restrictive. “I don’t care much about expensive couture clothes,” Birkin told Women’s Wear Daily, in 1969. “I like the floppy look of Saint Laurent.”

And yet Birkin was far from the self-reliant gamine embodied by Clara Bow. According to Meltzer, Birkin seemed unable “to cultivate much sense of self outside of her relationships with men and her children.” At first, life with Gainsbourg was idyllic. Shacked up on the Rue de Verneuil with Kate and another baby, Charlotte, on the way, they became a bohemian power couple. They took Kate, dressed in Baby Dior, to casinos and bought a house in Normandy, where they went boating with the children. Being Birkin’s partner was an ego boost for Gainsbourg, who had never been conventionally handsome and whose heavy drinking and smoking had aged him prematurely. (He had his first heart attack at forty-five and would die of another, at sixty-two.) “When they tell me I’m ugly,” he crows on his song “Des Laids des Laids,” from 1979, “I laugh softly, so as not to wake you up.”

Gainsbourg doted on Birkin and their girls, but he also went through periods of being, in Birkin’s words, “systematically drunk”—and, at times, violent. “I was too abusive,” Meltzer quotes him saying. “I came home completely pissed, I beat her. When she gave me an earful, I didn’t like it: two seconds too much and bam!” Birkin’s diaries suggest a man who was insecure, moody, and controlling: (...)

In 1979, Birkin began an affair with the filmmaker Jacques Doillon, who was thirty-five to her thirty-two—an invigorating change from Gainsbourg, eighteen years her senior. The new relationship promised something less complicated, more harmonious. “I want a house full of sunlight,” she wrote, “nothing forbidden, no more orders.” She took Kate and Charlotte to a hotel, leaving Gainsbourg behind but not yet formalizing things with Doillon. The two men were “like complementary bookstands,” she wrote. “Let go one and you slide, let go both and you fall. . . . So there I am, stubbornly living my life as best I can without either.” This period of independence was short-lived. Soon, she and Doillon moved in together, and in 1982 their daughter, Lou, was born. Gainsbourg sent her a gift basket full of baby clothes, from “Papa Deux.”

It was around this time that Birkin made her most celebrated contribution to fashion. On an Air France flight, she found herself seated next to Jean-Louis Dumas, the chief executive of Hermès. As Birkin struggled to stow her signature wicker basket, spilling its contents, Dumas suggested that she needed a new bag. This prompted Birkin to complain that she couldn’t find one that both looked good and held all her stuff. She recalled sketching a roomy, wedgelike design on the back of an air-sickness bag. Dumas took the design to his studio, tweaked it, and the Birkin was born. Current models can sell for more than four hundred thousand dollars; in July, at Sotheby’s, the prototype went for ten million. It was the second most valuable fashion item ever sold at auction, behind only Dorothy’s slippers.

by Anahid Nersessian, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: via

Buddies

Redford and Newman: A Screen Partnership That Defined an Era (NYT)

Image: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images

[ed. Time marches on, and friendships... what you make of them. See also: Robert Redford and the Perils of Perfection (New Yorker).]

Shared Custody Laws Are Changing Divorce Forever

Our society today is legally and normatively gender egalitarian. Women are empowered to pursue high-powered careers or anything else in life. Men are expected to help out with the housework and child-rearing. Now, many men don’t do that, but there’s an expectation that they should.

It was second wave feminism that brought about this revolution. But it also laid the groundwork for cultural changes that some feminists don’t like, such as in the area of divorce law.

Traditionally, divorce courts were very favorable to women. In the event of divorce, sole custody almost always went to the mother, with fathers relegated to limited visitation and hit with child support obligations. The “deadbeat dad” who failed to pay up was the target of even conservative ire. Women could even get alimony, which is financial support intended for the ex-wife herself, not the children. The logic here was that since women didn’t have careers, they couldn’t support themselves and so needed to continue to be provided for by their ex-husbands.

Men basically didn’t stand much of a chance in divorce court in this regime. The father’s rights movement publicized a litany of horrors such as men forced to pay child support for kids that were genetically proven not to be theirs, fathers being forced to pay for graduate school for kids who are well into adulthood, fathers denied access to their children at all, poor black men jailed for being too broke to pay child support, and men who can never retire because they are forced to pay lifetime alimony to their ex-wife (who may actually be shacked up with another guy).

But in this egalitarian world, where women have careers and men are spending more time with the kids, this old regime became increasingly unsustainable.

The most logical and fair divorce system in this egalitarian world would have a strong presumption of joint equal-time custody with no child support payments.

The divorce regime in general has been trending this direction, and some states have actually begun to enshrine this system in law. One of them is Kentucky, whose system was the subject of a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal.

It was 2017, and across Kentucky, divorced fathers were coming together against a common enemy: a custody system they felt favored their ex-wives.

Although custody laws in Kentucky and elsewhere granted judges discretion to decide what split was in a child’s best interest, aggrieved fathers claimed that this typically meant relegating them to the role of every-other-weekend “Disneyland dads,” forced to cram two days of fun into what mothers had two weeks to create.
…
Around the country, the fathers’ rights movement was gaining momentum. Dividing time and decision-making equally between parents, advocates argued, reduced children’s feelings of abandonment, promoted gender equality and lowered tensions between feuding couples
…
In 2018, Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorces and separations. Four other states—Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida and Missouri—have since passed their own versions of Kentucky’s custody bill. Around 20 more are considering or close to passing similar laws, according to an analysis by the National Parents Organization.

The article notes that one effect of this law was a steep decline in the number of divorces in Kentucky.

The law has become a model for other states, not least because Kentucky’s divorce rate has plummeted. Between 2016 and 2023 it fell 25%, compared with a nationwide decline of 18%, according to an analysis by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

I don’t know that we have enough evidence to say that this law is what produced these outsized declines in the divorce rate. Divorce is very complex. People who are getting divorced tend to be extremely emotional and often irrational.

But I think there are reasons to believe this would discourage divorce in some cases. It’s extremely well-established that women initiate the vast majority of divorces - about 70% of them. But I’ve never really seen completely compelling findings on the reasons why they are filing for divorce.

But there is some evidence that custody laws do influence this. There’s an oft-cited study by Brinig and Allen called, “These boots are made for walking': why most divorce filers are women.” The authors note the many financial and power benefits to women under the traditional divorce regime:

Divorce, despite its many shortcomings, allows the woman to exercise control over household spending when she is awarded custody. If the court names her primary custodian, she makes most, if not all, of the major decisions regarding the child. As custodial parent, she will be able to spend the money the husband pays in child support exactly as she pleases—something she may not do during marriage. Finally, although the court will usually have ordered visitation, she can exert some control over her former husband by regulating many, although not all, aspects of the time he spends with the child.

After doing a lot of quantitative analysis, the authors conclude:

Our results are consistent with our hypothesis that filing behavior is driven by self-interest at the time of divorce. Individuals file for divorce when there are marital assets that may be appropriated through divorce, as in the case of leaving when they have received the benefit of educational investments such as advanced degrees. However, individuals may also file when they are being exploited within the marriage, as when the other party commits a major violation of the marriage contract, such as cruelty. Interestingly, though, cruelty amounts to only 6% of all divorce filings in Virginia. We have found that who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property, as when the separation is long. [emphasis added]

This would be consistent with an interesting study I saw some years ago out of Stanford which found that although women are more likely to initiate divorce, men and women are equally likely to initiate breakups in non-marital relationships.

The Brinig and Allen study suggests that a presumption of equal custody might reduce divorce rates.

If it is custody outcomes that most influence divorce filings, changes in custody rules (or their likely outcomes) rather than in divorce grounds should most shape the patterns of both marriage and divorce. In particular, this could take the form of a presumption of joint custody or a rule that made post-divorce patterns mirror preseparation time shares as closely as possible, with sole custody only in cases where one party can show the other parent unfit. An appropriate custody rule mitigates the incentive for one-party filing for the purpose of gaining unilateral control over the children and, to the extent both parents remain involved through visitation or child support, the other spouse.

Again, we can’t draw too many conclusions from just one or a couple of studies out of the vast literature out there. But it’s intuitive from an economics perspective that a presumption of joint custody would significantly change the incentive structures around divorce.

However, this might not always lead to fewer divorces. Among upper middle class families, joint custody divorces might actually incentivize divorce in some cases.

It’s no secret that having kids dramatically constrains your lifestyle, particularly when the kids are younger. A joint custody divorce in which the father and mother alternate weeks with the kids allows them to have “the best of both worlds.” They can still be very involved in their children’s lives and be in parent mode on the weeks they have children, but they can live the single life of fun with friends, concerts, etc. on the other weeks. This might be more appealing to a would-be wife than a situation where she more or less has to have the child full time.

So I think the dynamics might be more complex than we expect here.

Still, these arrangements are undoubtedly more beneficial to fathers than the previous regime. Naturally many feminist advocates hate it. There’s basically no compelling moral or fairness argument against it within the framework of our contemporary egalitarian culture, so they have to raise the specter of abuse. Back to the Journal article:

Some people are staying married to abusive partners, critics of the law say, because they are terrified of leaving their children alone with a parent with a history of violence. “They know their kids are safer if they stay,” said Elizabeth Martin, chief executive of the Louisville-based Center for Women and Family, which provides services to victims of domestic violence (most but not all of whom are women). “Even if it means taking some beatings.”
… (...)

What the article does not state is that it’s well established that one of the leading threats to children is mom’s new boyfriend. As sociologist Brad Wilcox writes:

This new federal study indicates that these cases are simply the tip of the abuse iceberg in American life. According to the report, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend—especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.

Also, many mothers themselves have a variety of their own problems that endanger their children, such as substance abuse. But I doubt these advocates want mothers with a drug problem to automatically get stripped of custody of their children.

In short, the danger to children from being with a particular divorced parent includes being with their mother as well as their father. (...)

A presumption of equal time joint custody is the obviously fair approach in cases of divorce. This is a powerful reason why the world has been moving in this direction.

by Aaron Renn |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Pahlka/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0
[ed. Some residual bitterness over this issue, so I'll just say: it's about time. Way past time.]

10 Questions to Answer Before You Die

There are endless questions you could ask, but these are the ones (split into 5 questions to ask and 5 actions to take before you die) I’ve seen make the biggest difference for the person dying, and for the people left to live without them. And none of which require a lawyer or a ton of money—just a little intention.

5 questions to ask:

1. What method of body disposition feels right for me?

Most people haven’t given much thought to what they’d like to happen to their body after they die—but it’s one of the most important end-of-life decisions you’ll make, both for yourself and for your loved ones. The options include, but aren’t limited to:

• Cremation (flame or water)
• Natural or conventional burial
• Human composting
• Donation to science
• Launch your cremains (yes, the correct term is “cremains,” not ashes, because cremated remains are actually the decedents' pulverized bones) into space
• Turn your cremains into a diamond

There are more options than you might think, and we’re working on building something to help you explore them in an approachable, easy way.

Choosing ahead of time saves your people from having to make a big financial and emotional decision while in shock and grief. Without your guidance, they’re left to guess about what you “would’ve wanted” or how much money is “meaningful enough” or appropriate to spend. Your choice gives them relief, confidence, and one less decision to make during an overwhelming time that can be akin to experiencing a traumatic brain injury.

2. What kind of goodbye would feel meaningful for me and for the people who love me?

Before you say, “I don’t want a funeral” or “I don’t care,” remember: your funeral isn’t just for you—it’s also for the people you love the most in this world.

Ceremony and ritual—big or small—is hugely important for helping people process loss. Denying them that moment could lead to delayed or complicated grief. It doesn’t need to be traditional, elaborate, or expensive, but it does need to be intentional. Encourage your loved ones to have a ceremony or gathering in your honor, and if you’re worried about it being “too much of a fuss,” leave instructions for something simple, and start saving money (the average funeral costs $8,000) to pay for it or contribute. Don’t know where to start? Book a conversation with me.

3. Who should be notified if I die tomorrow?

Consider right now: If you were to get in a lethal accident tomorrow, who would you want to be notified first? And if you already have a list, are these contacts still accurate? Divorce, estrangement, death, or the passing of time can all shift who belongs on this list.

Make sure the person you’d want handling your affairs (going through your phone and your things) has access to the information they will need, and you’ve had a conversation with them about the two questions above. This is one of the most overlooked—and most practical—pieces of end-of-life planning.

4. Who do I trust to make medical decisions if I can’t?

Imagine you're in a car accident and end up unconscious, kept alive by machines. The hospital calls your emergency contact—maybe it’s your mom, who lives out of state and wants to keep you alive at all costs (can you blame her?). Meanwhile, your partner or best friend, whom you’ve had this conversation with, is in the waiting room, desperate to advocate for you, but they can’t, because you never named them as your Medical Power of Attorney (MPA). So doctors default to “next of kin,” and suddenly a medical crisis becomes a conflict. One person wants to “do everything,” another insists you wouldn’t want to live like this...Grief turns into blame, and families are torn apart. Everyone thinks this stuff only happens to other people, but it happens every day. Do yourself and your family a favor, and get it sorted in advance.

The person you name as your MPA does not necessarily have to be your spouse or even related to you, but whoever it is, they need to be informed of your wishes. So, if you become unconscious or unable to speak, they’re the ones the doctors will ask to make the hard decisions.

5. Is there anything I’ve left unsaid? Who do I need to say it to?

This one is personal: If you had a year left to live, what truths would you speak? Who would you thank? Apologize to? Forgive?

Regret is one of the heaviest things we leave behind. Don’t wait for the “right” moment. Say what needs to be said—now.

5 Things you can do right now that will make your inevitable death easier:

6. Set up your iPhone Legacy Contact & Gmail Inactive Account Manager.

This is one of the easiest (and most overlooked) things you can do. It ensures that when you die, someone you appoint and trust can access your phone or email (without it, your loved ones might get locked out of everything), which is crucial for closing accounts, alerting contacts, and sorting through photos. Think of it as naming your digital next of kin. And choose wisely—this is also the person who’ll have access to all your stuff, so make sure it’s someone you trust to delete anything you wouldn’t want to see the light of day.

You can set this up in under 5 minutes in your Apple ID settings or Gmail account settings. And some social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, also let you assign a “legacy contact” to manage or memorialize your profile. It’s a small step that can prevent a lot of stress for the people you love.

7. Set up a password manager—and share the master password.

Your entire digital life is locked behind passwords—almost everything you own or use is tied to one: your bank details, subscriptions, social media, phone, and computer, etc. A password manager (like 1Password) helps you organize and secure them all in one place.

When you die, the people left behind will need these passwords to access, manage, and close your accounts. Giving one trusted person access to your master password ensures they can do all of that without jumping through legal hoops, or getting locked out because they had to guess your password and they guessed wrong too many times. It’s a small act of preparation that prevents a whole lot of chaos.

8. Name a guardian for your kids or pets.

If something happened to you tomorrow, who would care for your children? Who would take in your dog? Who would clean out your apartment? Don’t assume they’ll say yes, or that they know.

The first step and time to have these conversations is before a crisis. Not after. For pets, it’s not legally required, but for kids, this designation should be followed up with a legal document (typically your will) to make it official. Without it, a court could decide who gets custody, and that may not align with your wishes.

9. Make a bank account “payable on death” (POD).

You don’t need a will to do this. You can go to your bank (some might even let you do it online) and add a beneficiary to your account with a single form. This allows the people you trust to access funds immediately—for emergency flights, funeral costs, food, and childcare.

10. Write down what matters most.

Inspired by the letters my mom wrote me on her deathbed to open for future milestones (one of which I have coming up very soon—my wedding), I do something similar on every flight. I review notes I’ve made in my phone for the people I love, just in case. Because if the plane does go down, and I die (or when I eventually die), I want them to know: how much they meant to me, and what sign I will try to use to communicate with them after I’m gone.

A few sentences can change everything for the people you love. It doesn’t have to be long, and it can look however you want it to:

• A memoir or series of stories about your life
• A simple love note
• A list of your favorite things (songs, movies, books, vacations, etc)

by Maura McInerney-Rowley, Hello, Mortal |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Good advice for future reference.]

Intellectual Loneliness

via:

[ed. Sounds about right.]

Some Parts of You Only Emerge for Certain People

I think about this Virginia Woolf quote often. To me, it speaks to love’s power as an act of invention, the way certain people draw out a version of you that didn’t exist before they arrived. They witness you, and thus, rearrange you. In their presence, words you didn’t know you knew tumble out. Your thoughts sharpen, colours seem richer, you inhabit yourself more fully.

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

Every enduring friendship, every romance worth the name, behaves like a kind of psychic technology. Two minds meet, exchange a pattern of attention, and, almost invisibly, each begins to reorganise around the other. What starts as perception becomes structure.

Henrik Karlsson captures the mechanism simply: relationships are co-evolutionary loops. Beyond sociology, it feels like spiritual physics. Who we choose to orbit defines, over time, the texture and colour palette of our becoming. Love becomes a technology of transformation, a living interface between selves. To love well is to take part in someone else’s unfolding, even as they take part in yours. (...)

I’ve often felt how literal that process can be, like a slow annealing of the self under another’s attention. A few months ago, I read an essay that rearranged me: What is Love? by Qualia Computing, which frames love as a kind of neural annealing. In metallurgy, annealing is the process of heating metal until its internal structure loosens, then cooling it slowly so it hardens into a stronger, more resilient form. The lattice reorganises; the material changes.

The essay suggests that in high-energy emotional states, such as falling in love, grief, awe, psychedelics, deep meditation, the brain becomes molten, its patterns loosened, more open to reorganisation. The person we focus on in these states becomes like a mold for the cooling metal, shaping how our thoughts settle, what habits crystallise, what identities take hold.

This is why the right gaze, the right conversation, can change you down to the grain. Emotional heat loosens the architecture of the self, and in the presence of someone who sees you vividly, the molten structure reforms around their image of you. What remains afterwards is stronger, different, marked by the shape of their attention. Attention becomes anchor; identity reshapes in response to their rhythms, their gaze. Perhaps this is why the right presence can feel like destiny: whole inner continents, hidden selves and latent worlds, begin to surface, shaping you into someone you hadn’t yet met. 

by Maja, Velvet Noise | Read more:
Images: Virginia Wolff; Banksy

The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (Part 2, Chapter 8)

Previously: The Unlimited Horizon, part 1.

Is there really that much more progress to be made in the future? How many problems are left to solve? How much better could life really get?

After all, we are pretty comfortable today. We have electricity, clean running water, heating and air conditioning, plenty of food, comfortable clothes and beds, cars and planes to get around, entertainment on tap. What more could we ask for? Maybe life could be 10% better, but 10x? We seem to be doing just fine.

Most of the amenities we consider necessary for comfortable living, however, were invented relatively recently; the average American didn’t have this standard of living until the mid-20th century. The average person living in 1800 did not have electricity or plumbing; indeed the vast majority of people in that era lived in what we would now consider extreme poverty. But to them, it didn’t feel like extreme poverty: it felt normal. They had enough food in the larder, enough water in the well, and enough firewood to last the winter; they had a roof over their heads and their children were not clothed in rags. They, too, felt they were doing just fine.

Our sense of “enough” is not absolute, but relative: relative to our expectations and to the standard of living we grew up with. And just as the person who felt they had “enough” in 1800 was extremely poor by the standards of the present, we are all poor by the standards of the future, if exponential growth continues.

Future students will recoil in horror when they realize that we died from cancer and heart disease and car crashes, that we toiled on farms and in factories, that we wasted time commuting and shopping, that most people still cleaned their own homes by hand, that we watched our thermostats carefully and ran our laundry at night to save on electricity, that a foreign vacation was a luxury we could only indulge in once a year, that we sometimes lost our homes to hurricanes and forest fires.

Putting it positively: we are fabulously rich by the standards of 1800, and so we, or our descendants, can all be fabulously rich in the future by the standards of today.

But no such vision is part of mainstream culture. The most optimistic goals you will hear from most people are things like: stop climate change, prevent pandemics, relieve poverty. These are all the negation of negatives, and modest ones at that—as if the best we can do in the future is to raise the floor and avoid disaster. There is no bold, ambitious vision of a future in which we also raise the ceiling, a future full of positive developments.

It can be hard to make such a vision compelling. Goals that are obviously wonderful, such as curing all disease, seem like science fiction impossibilities. Those that are more clearly achievable, such as supersonic flight, feel like mere conveniences. But science fiction can come true—indeed, it already has, many times over. We live in the sci-fi future imagined long ago, from the heavier-than-air flying machines of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the hand-held communicator of Star Trek. Nor should we dismiss “mere” conveniences. Conveniences compound. What seem like trivial improvements add up, over time, to transformations. Refrigerators, electric stoves, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers were conveniences, but together they transformed domestic life, and helped to transform the role of women in society. The incremental improvement of agriculture, over centuries, eliminated famine.

So let’s envision a bold, ambitious future—a future we want to live in, and are inspired to build. This will be speculative: not a blueprint drawn up with surveyor’s tools, but a canvas painted in broad strokes. Building on a theme from Chapter 2, our vision will be one of mastery over all aspects of nature:

by Jason Crawford, Roots of Progress |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Part 2, Chapter 8. (yikes). You can see I've come late to this. Essays on the philosophy of human progress. Well worth exploring (jump in anywhere). Introduction and chapter headings (with links) found here: Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (RoP).]

Evolution of Emotions

"If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, psychologist Paul Eckman, PhD, and psychotherapist Esther Perel, PhD, explain how the brain constantly rebuilds emotions from memory and prediction. According to their research, by choosing new experiences today, we can reshape how our past influences us, gain more control over our feelings, and create new possibilities for connection and growth.

LISA FELDMAN BARRETT: It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you. That they bubble up and cause you to do and say things, but that experience is an illusion that the brain creates.

Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do. When you're experiencing emotion or you're in an emotional state, what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what's happening in the world. Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, and your brain isn't wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that's where those simple feelings come from.

If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present. Just in the same way that you would exercise to make yourself healthier, you can invest energy to cultivate different experiences for yourself. The fact that your brain is using your past experience to predict what you're going to see, and hear, and feel means that you are an architect of your experience, and that doesn't involve breaking predictions. It involves seeding your brain to predict differently.

PAUL EKMAN: It's my belief that the way in which emotions evolved was to deal with things like saber-toothed tigers, the current incarnation of which is the car that's suddenly lurching at your car at a high speed. You don't have time to think. In split seconds, you have to do and make very complex decisions, and if you had to think about what you were doing, you'd be dead. It's a system that evolved to deal with really important things without your thinking about it.

So that means that sometimes, you're gonna be very unconsidered, very thoughtless. Well, these exercises that we're giving people, moving their facial muscles, concentrating on the sensations to make them more aware of an emotion when it arises, so that they will feel it at the moment and then can say, "Did she really mean to ignore me? No, it was just an accident." Or, "Maybe I shouldn't jump to the conclusion that she doesn't care about me at all."

The way in which we can improve our emotional life is to introduce conscious awareness. Nature did not want you to do that. So you have to do it yourself.

ESTHER PEREL: All relationships are colored with expectations about myself and about the other. My expectations influence that which I then see or hear. It is a filter, as well as my mood. That is one of the most important things to understand about relationships and communication — how people actually co-create each other in the context of a relationship because those people make part of who we are.

We will draw from them the very things which we expect from them, even when it's the opposite of what we really want. A lot of emphasis is put on our ability to say certain things, to say them in the right way, to articulate our needs, our feelings, our thoughts, our positions, our opinions. What is lacking is the ability to see that speaking is entirely dictated by the quality of the listening that is reflected back on us.

by Paul Ekman with Lisa Feldman Barrett, Big Think |  Read more:
Image: Jon Han

Basic Phones: A Brief Guide for Parents

In 2021, Common Sense Media found that half of U.S. kids get their first smartphone by age 11. Many parents now realize that age is too young for kids to have an internet-enabled phone.

But at some point, you’re going to consider getting your kid or teen a phone. Maybe the closest school bus stop is far away and the bus isn’t always on time. Maybe you’re sick of your kid borrowing your phone to text their friends. Maybe they’re getting older and it seems like the right time. So what type of phone should you get them?

In some cases, the answer might be a flip phone, the old-school cell phone that was the standard until the smartphone came along. Flip phones have some downsides, though. Since there’s no keyboard, texting involves pressing the number keys multiple times to type one letter (if you had a cell phone in the 2000s, you probably remember this). If your kids’ friends communicate via text, replying on a flip phone is going to be awkward and time-consuming. Flip phone cameras are often low-quality, so they’re not a great option if your kid likes taking pictures. Because they don’t look like a smartphone, flip phones also stand out — and many kids don’t want to stand out.

Fortunately, parents no longer have to choose exclusively between a flip phone and an adult smartphone for their kid, thanks to the many “basic” phone options. These middle-ground phones have a screen keyboard and a higher-quality camera like a smartphone, look very similar to a smartphone, and they can use many smartphone apps (with parental limits and permissions). Unlike a regular smartphone, though, they don’t have an internet browser or social media.

Basic phones are the training wheels of phones. They’re safer for kids right out of the box, with built-in parental controls that are easier to use and harder for kids to hack than those on smartphones. With no internet or social media, it’s much less likely that unknown adults will be able to randomly contact your kid, or that kids will stumble across pornography. Basic phones are usually Androids with a modified operating system, so they look like a regular smartphone and thus don’t stand out like flip phones do. For all of these reasons, Rule #4 in 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World is “First phones should be basic phones.”

If you want your kid to have the ability to easily text their friends but don’t want them using social media or going down internet rabbit holes, basic phones are a great solution. They’re a stopgap between the age when texting and calling becomes socially useful (usually in middle school, by age 12 or 13) and the age when they’re ready for a smartphone and possibly social media (at 16; Rule #5 in 10 Rules is “Give the first smartphone with the driver’s license,” and Rule #3 is “No social media until age 16 – or later.”). My younger two children, ages 15 and 13, have basic phones.

Here’s a brief overview of some popular basic phone options to help you figure out the best choice for your kid.

Option 1. Gabb Phone 4

This is the most basic of the basic phones, with calling, texting (including text-to-speech), clean music streaming, and a camera, but no capability for adding additional third-party apps. “You can’t do anything on it,” my middle daughter once said about her Gabb phone. “That,” I replied, “is the point.” If this is what you want, make sure you’re buying the Gabb Phone 4 and not the Pro, which allows more apps.

Option 2. Pinwheel, Troomi, Gabb Phone 4 Pro, Bark

These are basic phones that have access to an app store where you can add additional features. They come with an online parent portal where you can set a schedule (like having the phone shut off at bedtime) and approve new contacts. Some allow you to see the texts your child has received and sent.

The parent portal also lets you see the apps available for the phone. You can then install those you want and approve (or reject) those your kids ask for. These phones don’t allow certain apps at all (mostly dating, pornography, and alcohol-related apps, as well as AI chatbots and those that allow contact with unknown adults). That’s a relief, but there are still tough decisions about what to allow versus not. The tradeoff for more flexibility is more complexity in managing the phone. Still, I’d much rather have this challenge than giving a 12-year-old a smartphone with unrestricted internet and social media access.

Through the parent portal, you also have the ability to remotely control bedtime shutoff, app installs, and time limits for apps even after you’ve given your kid the phone — so you don’t have to wrestle it away from them to change your parental control settings.

If you’re looking for more details about specific basic phone brands for kids, check out the pages at Wait Until 8th and Protect Young Eyes.

Option 3. The Light Phone

This is a grown-up basic phone. Unlike other basic phones, it’s not necessarily meant for kids, and it’s not an Android phone — it’s a unique device. It has a paper-like screen like a Kindle so it’s not as colorfully tempting as a smartphone. It has a maps app, calling, and texting, but does not have internet access, social media, or email. The newest version has a camera. All of the features are optional so you can choose which features your kid’s phone has.

Many adults who want a pared-down phone, sometimes just for certain situations, use Light Phones. Because their target audience is adults, Light Phones do not come with a parent portal like the phones designed for kids.

***

The biggest challenge with basic phones (with the exception of the more limited Gabb Phone 4) is deciding which apps to allow. The parent portals that come with many of these products give more information and sometimes even a rating for each app, but it’s often hard to judge what’s appropriate and what isn’t without using the app yourself (something to consider). If you allow game apps, make sure to put a time limit on them (maybe 10-20 minutes a day each) so your kid doesn’t spend too much of their free time on their phone.

One other issue to be aware of: All of these optional apps display ads, and the ads – even on a so-called “kids’ phone” – are not filtered. Your kid might be playing “Find the Cat” and be served ads for AI girlfriends. They won’t be able to download the AI girlfriend app, thank goodness, but you may find yourself explaining what an AI girlfriend is to an 11-year-old. If that’s a non-starter, you’ll have to say no to any optional app, including games and educational apps like Duolingo.

If you do allow games and music, use the parental controls to block them during school hours if your kids’ school still allows phones during the school day. That way you’ll know your kids are paying attention in class instead of playing BlockBlast. And if they say they want to play games during lunch, tell them they should be talking to their friends instead.

What if your kid says, “It’s embarrassing to have a kid phone”? My reply: Who’s going to know? Most basic phones look like a regular Android phone. My middle daughter once told me she was embarrassed when a friend asked her, “What kind of phone is that?” I told her she could honestly answer, “It’s an Android phone.” There’s also no need to disclose that the phone doesn’t allow social media or internet. If your friends ask if you have a certain app and you don’t, I told her, just say your parents don’t allow it. All kids understand that parents are lame. :)

by Jean M. Twenge, Generation Tech |  Read more:

Image: Troomi

[ed. New school year starting up...]

Your Review: Dating Men in the Bay Area

[ed. Funny, sad. Long]

I. The Men Are Not Alright

Sometimes I’m convinced there’s a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas.

This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they’ve kept bottled up for years. One moment I’m learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I’m hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward.

This repeated pattern in my dating life has taught me three things:

• I am terrible at small talk.

• Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.

• The men are not alright.

This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it’s an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It’s a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships. (...)

If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.

Yet not everyone is ready to listen to men, so I’ll try to act as a translator, using my identity as a feminist twenty-something woman as a bridge. I’ll explain the pain that’s so obvious to me, yet hidden to many others, and try to provide some insight for both genders on how these issues impact dating, and what can perhaps be done to address them.

II. The Lost Generations...

(...)

In modern America, a minority of boys are born swaddled in communities that actively guide them through the process of becoming a man. However, most of those communities are religious and conservative, adjectives that the Bay Area actively repels. You won’t find many of those men around here.

Instead, the men in the Bay’s dating scene mostly represent the modern majority category–men who weren’t provided a clear map by their immediate community, and instead depended on society at large to teach them about manhood. (...)

And as for religion? Absolutely not. Throw it in the trash and light the trashcan on fire.

The first rule of the Modern Map to Manhood is that you don’t talk about the Modern Map to Manhood. Defining “manhood” is reinforcing gender roles and thus strengthening the patriarchy. Men are just supposed to “be decent people,” end of story.

…except it’s not, because there are still certain manners and conventions that men in particular are supposed to follow. And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.

So if you squint hard enough at the murky sea of conversation about gender, you can make out the following steps to become a man:

• Reject toxic masculinity.

• Be your authentic self!

• Provide for and protect others.

• Stop obsessing over “being a man.”

• Don’t expect anything in return for fulfilling these requirements.

This would be demanding a reward for meeting the bare minimum requirements, and that would make you gross and entitled.

This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.

The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man.

III. Patterns Within the Pain

Over the years, I’ve developed mental categories for the varieties of lostness men are faced with. Each one comes with its own unique troubles that stymie the health of men and the success of their relationships.

There is no science behind my categories; they are merely my attempt to find patterns within the misery of others. Their boundaries are fuzzy, so men may belong to multiple categories, or may transition from one to another.

I find it impossible to review dating in the Bay Area without utilizing these categories. My experiences with each category are wildly different; some cause me to walk away from a date feeling sad, some scared, some hopeful.

Below, I offer a description of five of the most common categories I’ve encountered, the paths that lead to these particular forms of lostness, and what happens to men who fall into these categories. I also offer my review of dating men from each category and discuss how their lostness impacts relationships. (...)

But more importantly, I hope this framework can help people to have more empathy for men who fall into these categories. The public commons are filled with lamenting about “floundering,” “immature,” “selfish,” “hateful” men who are “toxic to society.” While much of the concern is deserved, channeling it into spite and disgust toward individuals is a waste of energy.

These men did not wake up one day and intentionally decide to be filled with anger, anxiety, and apathy toward society; society failed them, and when they tried to point this out, their concerns were shrugged off.

Our broken system for raising young men deserves spite and disgust; the individuals trapped in that system deserve empathy and help. I hope this framework can help to shift conversations about these lost men toward finding solutions, rather than blaming young men for their troubles.

So without further ado, I present my categories of lostness.

IV. The Categories of Lostness

THE MAN WHO IS NOT

The Man Who Is Not isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to get lost, at least not if you knew him when he was young. He was a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal childhood. Good friends, decent family, stable home life. Yeah, there were a few rough spots, but who didn’t have those?

He’s not exactly a stand-out success, but he gets good enough grades that get him into a good enough college. He’s reluctant to go; he doesn’t enjoy school all that much. But his parents push him to get a degree, and after he arrives, he decides college life isn’t half bad–he makes some friends, dates a couple girls casually, and enjoys plenty of parties.

The worst stressor seems to be the nagging question of his degree concentration and what career he’s going to pursue. He’s changed his mind three times already, unsure what he really wants from his life, and his guidance counselor and parents are starting to lose their patience.

He finally settles on Economics. It’s certainly not his passion, but he’s always been good at math, and this seems like a decent way to make money from that talent. He still has no idea what he wants from life, but at least now he’ll have time and resources to figure it out.

He graduates with his bachelors and takes a job as a data analyst at a big bank in the city. He’s excited; he’s been promised by mentors and Hollywood and Instagram that this is going to be a magical time of his life, full of new adventures and self-discovery.

What he finds isn’t nearly so exciting. Work is boring and draining, consisting of the same tasks every day with a workload that grows ever larger, and he has zero emotional attachment to the end product. He quickly starts to suspect he chose the wrong major, or maybe the wrong job, although mentors shrug off his concerns.

Work isn’t supposed to be fun, they say. Get used to it.

It’s not uplifting advice, to say the least. He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.

Few people talk to him unless he approaches first, and the dialogue is always transactional. He would like to buy a cup of coffee. They would like to know where the bus stop is. He wants to sign up for a gym membership.

Sometimes he tries to steer the conversations to more personal topics, and he manages to get a few phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. But when he texts them, they never reply.

He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him. (...)

THE MAN WITH A PLAN

The Man With a Plan is the inverted twin of the Man Who Is Not. Rather than struggling to figure out what he wants, he knows exactly what his goals are: he’s going to get good grades, which get him into a good school, which earns him a good job, which finances a good house in a good neighborhood and attracts a good spouse who provides good kids. He knows this is what he wants, because it is the creed that has been repeated to him since he was in elementary school.

He does not know who he should be; his copy of the map is just as butchered as any other. But he knows what he needs to do, and that is what matters. After all, we’re merely the sum of our actions, right?

Life is smooth sailing for him. His mentors are right–hard work pays off, and once he graduates with that valuable degree, he lands an excellent job in exactly the field his parents always encouraged him to pursue. The money is great, and soon so is his apartment and his car.

Everything seems to be falling into place. He downloads a dating app and gets a fair amount of matches, one of whom turns into his girlfriend. She’s pretty, and successful, and shares his goals of settling down in a good neighborhood to have some kids.

His parents are thrilled. All their hard work has paid off, just as they expected.

He knows he should also be thrilled, too, but he’s not. There’s a vague sense of unease within him. It’s haunted him since he was young, sometimes dragging his thoughts to depressed and anxious places, although he always assumed it was because he just hadn’t completed all the steps in the plan. His work was unfinished, and thus so was he.

Yet as he checks off more and more boxes on the list of tasks to attain a good life, that feeling seems to be growing in strength, not decreasing.

He shrugs it off, reassuring himself that it’s just work stress that’s making him overthink things. Everything in his life is good. There’s no reasonable cause for despair, so he just needs to let those thoughts go.

Years pass, and he works hard to juggle work and his romantic relationship and his friends, although his friends seem to take less time these days. They’re getting married, having kids, and becoming too busy to hang out. When they do get together, it’s usually for an activity–an escape room, a movie night, karaoke. Once the event completes, people scurry off to other obligations, leaving little time for deep conversations.

But he has his girlfriend, at least. She’s just as pretty and smart and ambitious as ever. She’s also getting increasingly anxious for a ring, dropping hints that eventually start to sound more like demands.

This should excite him, but instead it just stirs the formless dread within him. He chastises himself for it–he needs to grow up and learn to commit. He’s too old to be yearning for the life of a bachelor. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. (...)

And his girlfriend… when he really thinks about it, there’s little in common between them except the same checklist of goals. She’s a wonderful partner, but is she a wonderful partner for him?

He doesn’t know. For so long, he’s convinced himself that people are just a sum of their actions, and if he just has a solid plan, he’s going to be a good person with a good life. Now he realizes that’s a lie. (...)

His girlfriend says they should sign up for some wine-and-paint nights. He says they should break up.

He quits his job, too. He hates it; it consumes his time and sucks at his soul, leaving behind a robotic husk. He’s done with that bullshit. Done.

His friends suggest he’s having a mental breakdown and needs help. It confirms his suspicions: they don’t know him at all. If they did, they would see that he is helping himself. He’s finally taking the time to find and understand himself, to discover his purpose.

For a few weeks, he’s elated and excited to be on this new journey. But then the existential dread begins to creep back in.

He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers. (...)

He feels empty. His unknown future starts to feel like a crushing concern, rather than an exciting adventure.

His few remaining friends suggest that maybe he should try to get back together with his girlfriend, maybe try to piece together his old life. It’s not too late, they assure him.

But he doesn’t want that. He misses sex and cuddling and having someone to tell about his day, but he doesn’t miss her. It’s probably because he’s fundamentally broken, and she deserves better than him. And as for his job, he can’t bring himself to possibly go back, despite his rapidly dwindling bank account.

He turns to the dating world, hoping maybe finding a solid partner will help him solve his brokenness. Yet he seems to keep attracting women with similar forms of emptiness within them, and a void that joins with a void is still just as empty.

But he’s not going to give up. He has to find someone, something to give him purpose. Otherwise, his whole life and all his work and all his pain has been pointless. And he’s not sure he could deal with that outcome.

Dating a Man With a Plan:

In my experience, Men with Plans are the most common form of lost men in the Bay Area. I feel like half the men I go on dates with fit into this category to some degree.

These men also tend to be intensely attracted to me, or rather, to my lack of a conventional plan. I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way.

My story is like crack to them. They tell me they want to be more like me; they insist they want to see more of me. There seems to be a mistaken belief that they can absorb my personality through osmosis if they date me, absolving themselves of the requirement to figure out their own path and personality.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring Marks a Return to Vintage Elegance

The pop star’s antique-inspired sparkler channels the “heirloom look,” reflecting a return to antique stones.

In her 2008 classic song “Love Story,” Taylor Swift fantasized about getting proposed to: “He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring / And said, ‘Marry me, Juliet.’”

Seventeen years later, Ms. Swift, 35, finally had her fairy-tale engagement. The football player Travis Kelce, also 35, proposed with what appears to be an elongated, old mine cushion cut diamond set on a yellow gold band. (A cushion cut diamond has rounded corners.)

The ring was designed by Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewelry in New York. Ms. Lubeck makes hand-engraved jewelry with natural gemstones.

“It’s not just a flashy piece, but more of an aesthetic, really beautiful diamond,” said Marion Fasel, a jewelry historian and the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance.” Her friends in the jewelry world, she said, have been excited about the piece because of its high quality.

“You can tell this is a beautiful diamond from the light and faceting arrangement,” Ms. Fasel said, estimating the weight to be around seven carats.

“It’s a real trend in jewelry and diamonds and engagement rings to choose antique stones because they have a very different kind of light,” Ms. Fasel said. “Even though this is a giant diamond, it’s a much softer light.” (...)

There also appears to be engraving on the side, as well as two smaller diamonds. “They must mean something, because everything with Taylor means something,” Ms. Fasel said. (...)

Nilesh Rakholia, the founder of Abelini Jewellery, a modern British jewelry brand, estimated that the ring weighs seven to 10 carats, costing between $1 million and $1.3 million.

“What makes this design particularly striking is its blend of vintage charm and modern minimalism,” Mr. Rakholia said. “The choice of yellow gold has been making a huge resurgence in fine jewelry, loved for its warmth and ability to enhance the brilliance of white diamonds.”

Jason Arasheben, the founder of the jewelry company Jason of Beverly Hills, said that he anticipates an uptick in requests for elongated, old mine cushion cut diamonds, as well as thicker bands and antique aesthetics. “I know I’m going to get tons of screenshots from clients,” Mr. Arasheben said, citing the Taylor Swift effect.

Ms. Fasel doesn’t expect too many details about the ring to be confirmed by Ms. Swift soon. “With my history in celebrity engagement rings, no one says anything,” she said.

Much of the jewelry worn by celebrities tends to come from professional relationships with major brands. Ms. Swift, for instance, has almost exclusively worn Cartier and Lorraine Schwartz pieces for red carpets. But an engagement ring, Ms. Fasel said, is different: It’s the “one thing that is not branded, and I feel that’s part of the reason the excitement around an engagement ring has accelerated to such a high level.”

by Sadiba Hasan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

[ed. Who doesn't love Taylor and Travis? Reminds me of another similar engagement: Inside Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio's Roller Coaster Romance (Biography). See also: Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring and the Romantic Mystique of Old Mine Diamonds (Sotheby's).]

The Mechanics of Misdirection

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality. 

As we hinted above, the "chat" experience with an AI model is a clever hack: Within every AI chatbot interaction, there is an input and an output. The input is the "prompt," and the output is often called a "prediction" because it attempts to complete the prompt with the best possible continuation. In between, there's a neural network (or a set of neural networks) with fixed weights doing a processing task. The conversational back and forth isn't built into the model; it's a scripting trick that makes next-word-prediction text generation feel like a persistent dialogue.

Each time you send a message to ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Claude, or Gemini, the system takes the entire conversation history—every message from both you and the bot—and feeds it back to the model as one long prompt, asking it to predict what comes next. The model intelligently reasons about what would logically continue the dialogue, but it doesn't "remember" your previous messages as an agent with continuous existence would. Instead, it's re-reading the entire transcript each time and generating a response.

This design exploits a vulnerability we've known about for decades. The ELIZA effect—our tendency to read far more understanding and intention into a system than actually exists—dates back to the 1960s. Even when users knew that the primitive ELIZA chatbot was just matching patterns and reflecting their statements back as questions, they still confided intimate details and reported feeling understood.

To understand how the illusion of personality is constructed, we need to examine what parts of the input fed into the AI model shape it. AI researcher Eugene Vinitsky recently broke down the human decisions behind these systems into four key layers, which we can expand upon with several others below:

1. Pre-training: The foundation of "personality"

The first and most fundamental layer of personality is called pre-training. During an initial training process that actually creates the AI model's neural network, the model absorbs statistical relationships from billions of examples of text, storing patterns about how words and ideas typically connect.

Research has found that personality measurements in LLM outputs are significantly influenced by training data. OpenAI's GPT models are trained on sources like copies of websites, books, Wikipedia, and academic publications. The exact proportions matter enormously for what users later perceive as "personality traits" once the model is in use, making predictions.

2. Post-training: Sculpting the raw material

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an additional training process where the model learns to give responses that humans rate as good. Research from Anthropic in 2022 revealed how human raters' preferences get encoded as what we might consider fundamental "personality traits." When human raters consistently prefer responses that begin with "I understand your concern," for example, the fine-tuning process reinforces connections in the neural network that make it more likely to produce those kinds of outputs in the future.

This process is what has created sycophantic AI models, such as variations of GPT-4o, over the past year. And interestingly, research has shown that the demographic makeup of human raters significantly influences model behavior. When raters skew toward specific demographics, models develop communication patterns that reflect those groups' preferences.

3. System prompts: Invisible stage directions

Hidden instructions tucked into the prompt by the company running the AI chatbot, called "system prompts," can completely transform a model's apparent personality. These prompts get the conversation started and identify the role the LLM will play. They include statements like "You are a helpful AI assistant" and can share the current time and who the user is.

A comprehensive survey of prompt engineering demonstrated just how powerful these prompts are. Adding instructions like "You are a helpful assistant" versus "You are an expert researcher" changed accuracy on factual questions by up to 15 percent.

Grok perfectly illustrates this. According to xAI's published system prompts, earlier versions of Grok's system prompt included instructions to not shy away from making claims that are "politically incorrect." This single instruction transformed the base model into something that would readily generate controversial content.

4. Persistent memories: The illusion of continuity

ChatGPT's memory feature adds another layer of what we might consider a personality. A big misunderstanding about AI chatbots is that they somehow "learn" on the fly from your interactions. Among commercial chatbots active today, this is not true. When the system "remembers" that you prefer concise answers or that you work in finance, these facts get stored in a separate database and are injected into every conversation's context window—they become part of the prompt input automatically behind the scenes. Users interpret this as the chatbot "knowing" them personally, creating an illusion of relationship continuity.

So when ChatGPT says, "I remember you mentioned your dog Max," it's not accessing memories like you'd imagine a person would, intermingled with its other "knowledge." It's not stored in the AI model's neural network, which remains unchanged between interactions. Every once in a while, an AI company will update a model through a process called fine-tuning, but it's unrelated to storing user memories.

5. Context and RAG: Real-time personality modulation

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) adds another layer of personality modulation. When a chatbot searches the web or accesses a database before responding, it's not just gathering facts—it's potentially shifting its entire communication style by putting those facts into (you guessed it) the input prompt. In RAG systems, LLMs can potentially adopt characteristics such as tone, style, and terminology from retrieved documents, since those documents are combined with the input prompt to form the complete context that gets fed into the model for processing.

If the system retrieves academic papers, responses might become more formal. Pull from a certain subreddit, and the chatbot might make pop culture references. This isn't the model having different moods—it's the statistical influence of whatever text got fed into the context window.

6. The randomness factor: Manufactured spontaneity

Lastly, we can't discount the role of randomness in creating personality illusions. LLMs use a parameter called "temperature" that controls how predictable responses are.

Research investigating temperature's role in creative tasks reveals a crucial trade-off: While higher temperatures can make outputs more novel and surprising, they also make them less coherent and harder to understand. This variability can make the AI feel more spontaneous; a slightly unexpected (higher temperature) response might seem more "creative," while a highly predictable (lower temperature) one could feel more robotic or "formal."

The random variation in each LLM output makes each response slightly different, creating an element of unpredictability that presents the illusion of free will and self-awareness on the machine's part. This random mystery leaves plenty of room for magical thinking on the part of humans, who fill in the gaps of their technical knowledge with their imagination.
The human cost of the illusion

The illusion of AI personhood can potentially exact a heavy toll. In health care contexts, the stakes can be life or death. When vulnerable individuals confide in what they perceive as an understanding entity, they may receive responses shaped more by training data patterns than therapeutic wisdom. The chatbot that congratulates someone for stopping psychiatric medication isn't expressing judgment—it's completing a pattern based on how similar conversations appear in its training data.

Perhaps most concerning are the emerging cases of what some experts are informally calling "AI Psychosis" or "ChatGPT Psychosis"—vulnerable users who develop delusional or manic behavior after talking to AI chatbots. These people often perceive chatbots as an authority that can validate their delusional ideas, often encouraging them in ways that become harmful.

Meanwhile, when Elon Musk's Grok generates Nazi content, media outlets describe how the bot "went rogue" rather than framing the incident squarely as the result of xAI's deliberate configuration choices. The conversational interface has become so convincing that it can also launder human agency, transforming engineering decisions into the whims of an imaginary personality.

by Benji Edwards, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Credit: ivetavaicule via Getty Images

[ed. See also: In Search Of AI Psychosis (ASX).]

Human Exceptionalism

A terrific new book, The Arrogant Ape, by the primatologist Christine Webb, will be out in early September, and I don’t think a nonfiction book has affected me more, or taught me more, in a long time. It’s about human exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it.

It also has illuminating things to say about awe, humility, and the difference between optimism and hope. (...)

Here’s my review:

Here are some glimpses from the review:

***

Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.” [. . .]

I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.

For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.

Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”

Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments. (...)

It would be possible to read Webb as demonstrating that nonhuman animals are a lot more like us than we think. But that is not at all her intention. On the contrary, she rejects the argument, identified and also rejected by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that the nonhumans animals who are most like us deserve the most protection, what Nussbaum calls the “so like us” approach. (This is also part of the title of an old documentary about Jane Goodall’s work.) Webb sees that argument as a well-meaning but objectionable form of human exceptionalism. Why should it matter that they are like us? Why is that necessary? With Nussbaum, Webb insists that species are “wonderfully different,” and that it is wrong to try to line them up along a unitary scale and to ask how they rank. Use of the human yardstick, embodied in the claim of “so like us,” is a form of blindness that prevents us from seeing the sheer variety of life’s capacities, including cognitive ones. As Nussbaum writes, “Anthropocentrism is a phony sort of arrogance.”

by Cass Sunstein, Cass's Substack |  Read more:

Image: Thai Elephant Conservation Center

[ed. See also: this.]