AI Policy Restrictions - Two Views

Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down.

What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That’s where the government comes in — or so they hope.

A place to start is with the frameworks policymakers have already put forward to govern A.I. The two major proposals, at least in the West, are the “Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights,” which the White House put forward in 2022, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, which the European Commission proposed in 2021. Then, last week, China released its latest regulatory approach. (...)

[ed. Generally broad explanations of each follow...]

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Others will have different priorities and different views. And the good news is that new proposals are being released almost daily. The Future of Life Institute’s policy recommendations are strong, and I think the A.I. Objectives Institute’s focus on the human-run institutions that will design and own A.I. systems is critical. But one thing regulators shouldn’t fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry. For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down.

The Surprising Thing A.I. Engineers Will Tell You if You Let Them (by Ezra Klein, NY Times)

***

Our societal experience with self-driving technology reminds me of the saying, “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” It’s a saying that everybody should keep squarely in mind when thinking and forecasting about generative AI, as well. Even with a fundamental technological breakthrough, there always needs to be further (and unpredictable) innovation in the technology itself, complementary innovations, regulatory responses, and efficient business adoption. And while many of these things seem to be happening at warp speed right now with GenAI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT, history suggests the process will take far longer than all the breathless tweeting currently indicates. (...)

The bottleneck is not the technology – though faster advances certainly wouldn’t hurt – but rather a lack of complementary process innovation, workforce reskilling and business dynamism. Simply plugging in new technologies without changing business organization and workforce skills is like paving the cow paths. It leaves the real benefits largely untapped. However, by making complementary investments, we can speed up productivity growth.

Almost certainly new regulations will be part of that process, as the recent calls for a pause in training large language models suggest. And as those calls show, there will be ideas both good and bad. To avoid creating a regulatory bottleneck, I urge policymakers to take a look at a new analysis by Adam Thierer of R Street, “Getting AI Innovation Culture Right.” Among things, Thierer argues that the U.S. should foster the development of AI, machine learning and robotics by following the policy vision that drove the digital revolution.

It’s a policy vision based on the President Bill Clinton-era Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, which contained five key principles: (1) private sector leadership and market-driven innovation, (2) minimal government regulation and intervention, (3) a predictable, minimalist, consistent and simple legal environment for commerce, (4) recognition of the unique qualities and decentralized nature of the Internet, and (5) facilitation of global electronic commerce and consistent legal framework. These principles can guide technology policy today. just as effectively as they did back then.

As policymakers consider governance solutions for AI and computational systems, they should appreciate how a policy paradigm that stacks the deck against innovation by default will get significantly less innovation as a result. Innovation culture is a function of incentives, and policy incentives can influence technological progress both directly and indirectly. Over the last half century, “regulation has clobbered the learning curve” for many important technologies in the United States in a direct way, especially those in the nuclear, nanotech and advanced aviation sectors.106 Society has missed out on many important innovations because of endless foot-dragging or outright opposition to change from special interests, anti-innovation activists and over-zealous bureaucrats.

What self-driving cars should teach us about generative AI (by James Pethokoukis, Faster, Please!)

Image: Matt Edge for The New York Times

[ed. Personally, I lean more toward the former. If you're dealing with an existential threat, pace of business innovation should probably take a back seat.] 

Can Conservatism Be More Than a Grudge?

Since the end of the Cold War—and Ronald Reagan’s presidency—Republicans have won only one of eight presidential popular votes (George W. Bush’s narrow win in 2004). Republican candidates of course won two additional electoral college victories during this period: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. On the whole, however, it is increasingly doubtful whether the GOP as presently constructed is capable of winning a national popular vote, or if it is even trying to do so. Today, the party essentially has no positive policy agenda, garners little support among America’s leading corporations in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street and is almost completely marginalized from academia, Hollywood, and mainstream media.

Despite these obstacles, both of Donald Trump’s campaigns revealed possible paths back to national majorities. In 2016, Trump broke the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Upper Midwest. In 2020, he made significant inroads among nonwhite working-class voters, demonstrating that any “demographic destiny” predictions may be less certain than previously thought. Nevertheless, the Trump administration was too chaotic and incoherent to consolidate any larger “populist” realignment. Instead, the violent denouement of the Trump presidency further deepened an already growing divide between the Republican base and party elites: at this point it is almost impossible for Republican politicians to appeal to the party’s “populist” wing—now defined largely around Trump’s scandals—without alienating the GOP’s (ever fewer) “respectable” donors and business constituencies, and vice versa. Under these circumstances, even when Republicans can win at the national level, it is very difficult for them to pursue any substantive agenda.

These problems are not merely issues of “communication,” the perennial response of DC consultants. Nor are they simply matters of ideology or even policy. At bottom, the Republican Party faces what might be called a crisis of constituency: the party in its current form cannot serve the constituencies it has, much less those it would need to assemble an electoral majority. (...)

Why, then, does it not change, or simply disappear?

Ideology certainly plays a role—the party’s embrace of libertarian economics severely constrains its ability to use policy to advance real interests, whether partisan or national—but it is hardly a sufficient explanation. Historically, the ideological commitments of American political parties have been relatively flexible. A party that genuinely sought electoral dominance would adapt its ideology accordingly. So why haven’t Republican politicians abandoned Reagan-Bush conservatism (as Trump haltingly and inconsistently began to do in 2016), especially now that it lacks any meaningful popular, intellectual, or economic base?

The best answer, in my view, is that the Republican Party’s remaining connection to the dominant sectors of the American economy occurs through its usefulness as a tool to selectively balance and discipline the members of the Democratic coalition. Big Pharma, for instance, will throw money at the Heritage Foundation to rant against “socialized medicine” whenever talk of the government negotiating drug prices surfaces, but pharma is hardly interested in repealing Obamacare, much less dismantling Medicare. Financial lobbies will rent the Republican Party to ward off troublesome regulations or taxes, but are hardly interested in “sound money” policies or big spending cuts that would derail financial markets, never mind social conservatism. Big Tech will team up with Americans for Prosperity to oppose legislation limiting app store developer fees, all while more aggressively controlling conservative speech online, and so on.

Again, the point is not that the Democratic coalition is perfectly consistent or that its donors are perfectly sincere; they are not. But the relationship between America’s most powerful industries and the Democratic Party is different from their relationship with the Republican Party. These sectors look to the Democrats to positively promote their interests and to the Republicans merely to obstruct any developments adverse to their interests. In other words, the Republican Party’s primary—or even sole—value to “capital” at present lies not in any positive agenda but in the ability to constrain other members of the Democratic coalition. In this respect, the only plausible role for today’s Republican Party is as an obstructionist party. And its obstructionist conservatism—whether in its “principled” libertarian or reflexive “own the libs” shades—is a perfectly serviceable ideology for this role, perhaps the only serviceable one. For that reason, it is hard to see it going away, even if it abandons any pretense of building a majority constituency.

by Julius Krein, Kennedy School Review | Read more:

Image: Unsplash – Birmingham Museums Trust
[ed. Referenced from the Ross Douthat essay below.]

Why the Left and the Right Hate Kenneth Griffin’s Huge Gift to Harvard

The news that Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire, is donating a cool $300 million to Harvard University, where his name will adorn the entire Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, provoked the kind of pan-ideological revulsion that in our polarized times only the richest Ivy League schools still reliably inspire.

From the left came disgust not only at the wastefulness of the gift itself, so much money given to a hedge fund — sorry, hallowed seat of higher learning — with over $50 billion in resources already, but also at Harvard’s willingness to honor Griffin in particular. In addition to being an alumnus, class of 1989, he’s also a notable donor to the Republican Party, and lately to Ron DeSantis. To fulsomely praise a Republican-leaning plutocrat for his philanthropy and even affix his name to your institution, the civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis tweeted, exposes the Ivy League’s pretensions to high-minded social concern as “a cruel charade for laundering generational wealth.”

From the right came the same disgust but in reverse, at the giver’s ideological betrayal rather than the school’s hypocrisy. Here was a Republican donor, with every cause in the world to choose from, giving an absolute fortune to, of all places, Harvard — the Kremlin on the Charles, the fons et origo of so many liberal follies, the central shrine in the academic-progressive cathedral. At best, you could describe Griffin as a sucker, a more extreme version of the many right-leaning donors who gripe about wokeness at their alma maters but keep on writing checks out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. At worst, his donation just shows that the right’s leading donors aren’t conservatives at all, that the party is ruled by big money that’s functionally liberal on every issue except the marginal tax rate.

Since I wrote a newsletter a few months back defending “ineffective altruism,” meaning the virtues of giving to eccentric and personal causes without careful cost-benefit analysis, I briefly looked for something to defend in Griffin’s gift. Maybe his donation would smooth the way for some personal passion project, endowing chairs in obscure economic subfields or setting up a center to study esoteric languages. Maybe he wanted Harvard to establish an intramural Calvinball association or build a Theosophist chapel in the Yard.

Alas, no: The gift basically funds Harvard qua Harvard, carrying coals to the Newcastle that is the school’s almost bottomless endowment, which even by ineffective-altruist standards seems indefensibly useless and pathetic. Even if Griffin’s interests were ruthlessly amoral and familial — all-but-guaranteed admission for all his descendants, say — the price was ridiculously inflated: The Harvard brand and network might be worth something to younger Griffins and Griffins yet unborn, but not at that absurd price. And if he’s seeking simple self-aggrandizement, he won’t gain it, since nobody except the chatbot in charge of generating official Harvard emails will ever refer to the “Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.” (At least make them build you some weird pharaonic monument along the Charles, Ken!)

The sheer unimaginativeness makes Griffin’s gift a useful case study in one important ingredient in our society’s decadence: the absence of ambition or inventiveness among of our insanely wealthy overclass when it comes to institution building. There was a time when American plutocrats actually founded new institutions instead of just pouring money into old ones that don’t need the cash. And for the tycoon who admires that old ambition but thinks playing Leland Stanford is too arduous these days, there are plenty of existing schools that could be revived and reconfigured, made competitive and maybe great, with the money that now flows thoughtlessly into the biggest endowments. (...)

As for the ideological critiques of Griffin’s gift, they both capture key dilemmas facing our political coalitions. For the left, to imply that Harvard is functionally right-wing because it takes money from Republicans is wildly overstating things, but the truer observation is that progressivism’s self-image as a champion of the underdog is in deep tension with progressivism’s entrenchment as the official ideology of the highly educated upper classes, and Griffin’s largess is a condensed symbol of that tension.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alain Pilon

Steven Yeun’s New Frontier

I first met Steven Yeun in New York, where I live, in 2018 on assignment for GQ. Over Scarr's pizza we had an oddly life-affirming conversation about everything from growing up in our respective churches to evolving ideas of masculinity to Jeremy Lin's run with the Knicks. It was…strange! I left in such a daze that I got lost walking back to the office. Part of what made that conversation so comfortable was the fact that we were both Asian guys around the same age. (I'm Filipino.) Still, it's rare to talk to a stranger and find yourself so easily locked onto the same frequency. “It feels cool to talk to you, and dangerous,” Yeun said this time around, laughing. “We can share so much perspective, so I just puke.”

Over a series of long Zoom calls this winter, Yeun was candid and philosophical, the kind of talker whose thoughts balloon into long, floaty paragraphs stippled with the occasional “duuuude.” Earlier in his career, he had flittier, eager-to-please energy, but these days he's mellowed out; his speaking cadence has an almost melatonin effect. If this once-in-a-generation-actor thing doesn't work out, he'd make a great hostage negotiator.

“He thinks about things deeply,” Boots Riley told me when describing his own long conversations with the actor. He cast Yeun in Sorry to Bother You after the two shared a languid night out at a restaurant. Some weed was smoked, and a friendship blossomed from there. “If I'm going to call him on the phone, I have to have a few hours set aside,” Riley added, “because we're going to run the gamut of everything in existence that needs to be talked about.”

In the two-plus years since I'd last spoken with Yeun, a lot had changed—namely, it's boom times for Asian American film and television. You have rich and tasteless Asians with six-packs on reality TV (Bling Empire). You have hyper-violent Chinatown wars, where the gangsters also have six-packs (Warrior). And you have artful indie films such as Lulu Wang's 2019 feature, The Farewell, for which Awkwafina (six-pack unconfirmed) became the first Asian American to win a Golden Globe for best actress. Not everything being produced right now is “good” necessarily, which is in itself good. That's how this should work. Representation, practically speaking, requires some latitude to suck.

Few people have thought about their place in all of this with as much care and attention as Yeun, even as he acknowledges that when it comes to the topic of authenticity, conversations can quickly become circular. “It's like you get tricked into representing your entire culture, and then the game becomes policing your authenticity to each other,” he said. “But how can you be authentic? What's actually authentic to you is just being this middle person—Korean and American. This third culture.”

by Chris Gayomali, GQ | Read more:
Image: Diana Markosian

[ed. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting much from the new Netflix series 'Beef" based on what little I'd heard about its plot: a road rage "revenge tragedy" with confrontational, near psychopathic characters. But it's actually pretty great. The acting is terrific, especially Ali Wong and Steven Yeun. Below: the church scene in the second episode (followed by Yeun singing Drive). See also: Beef is the best show Netflix has had in recent memory (Vox):]

"What makes Beef so anxiety-inducing and so gripping is that it fully explores what it means to hurt someone. Sure, Amy and Danny could resort to violence and physically harm the other, but that’s almost too simple. They want more.

As they learn more about each other, they both realize they can do the most hurt by taking aim at the people the other person loves most. And as the show unfurls, there’s an increasing, heart-in-your-stomach fear that Danny will go after June or George or that Amy may retaliate by hurting Paul or Danny’s parents — innocent people who have no part in this feud.

The more Amy and Danny ramp up their feud, the more vulnerable their family members become. Amy and Danny inadvertently distance themselves from their loved ones, in an effort to keep their escalating war a secret. And insidiously, Amy and Paul become more entrenched in each other’s lives. (Vox)]

Elon Musk founds new AI company called X.AI

Elon Musk has created a new company dedicated to artificial intelligence — and it’s called X.AI, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company, which a Nevada filing indicates was incorporated last month, currently has Musk as its director and Jared Birchall, the director of Musk’s family office, listed as its secretary. The filing, which The Verge has also obtained, indicates that Musk incorporated the business on March 9th, 2023.

Rumors about Musk starting up an AI company have been floating around for days, with a report from Business Insider revealing that Musk had purchased thousands of graphic processing units (GPUs) to power an upcoming generative AI product. The Financial Times similarly reported that Musk planned to create an AI firm to compete with the Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Musk even reportedly sought funding from SpaceX and Tesla investors to get the company started.

During an interview on Twitter Spaces, when Musk was asked about all the GPUs he purchased, the billionaire made no mention of his plans to build an AI company, stating “it seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point.” The purported X.AI name matches the branding of the X Corp. name he has since assigned to Twitter, along with the “X” label he’s applied to his vision of an “everything app.”

by Jay Peters and Emma Roth, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Lille Allen/The Verge
[ed. Great, just the kind of guy you'd like having his own AI (which, means what?). I blame Google and Microsoft for making this a race. See also: OpenAI’s CEO confirms the company isn’t training GPT-5 and ‘won’t for some time’ (The Verge).]

Solar Canals

... it goes without saying that water conservation will continue to be a central issue in the Golden State for years to come.

A new state-funded project in the San Joaquin Valley hopes to find a new way to build drought resilience. The idea is simple: Cover the state’s canals and aqueducts with solar panels to both limit evaporation and generate renewable energy.

“If you drive up and down the state, you see a lot of open canals. And after year after year of drought it seemed an obvious question: How much are we losing to evaporation?” said Jordan Harris, co-founder and chief executive of Solar AquaGrid, a company based in the Bay Area that’s designing and overseeing the initiative. “It’s just common sense in our eyes.”

The California Department of Water Resources is providing $20 million to test the concept in Stanislaus County and to help determine where else along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals — one of the largest water conveyance systems in the world — it would make the most sense to install solar panels. The project is a collaboration between the state, Solar AquaGrid, the Turlock Irrigation District and researchers with the University of California, Merced, who will track and analyze the findings.

“This hasn’t been tried in the U.S. before,” said Roger Bales, an engineering professor at U.C. Merced who specializes in water and climate research. “We want these to eventually be scaled across the western U.S., where we have a lot of irrigated agriculture and open canals.”

California’s efforts got a jump start from a 2021 study published by Bales and his colleagues, who determined that covering the state’s canals with solar panels could reduce evaporation by as much as 90 percent and save 63 billion gallons of water per year — enough to meet the residential water needs of more than two million people.

The team identified other possible upsides: The installations could generate large amounts of energy; reduce algae growth and the need for maintenance by limiting sunlight falling on the water; enhance the functioning of the solar panels by allowing them to stay cool near the water; and improve air quality by creating an energy source that would limit the need for diesel-powered irrigation pumps.

The sheer number of benefits documented in the study eased hesitations about the idea and “kind of changed our thinking,” said Josh Weimer, spokesman for the Turlock Irrigation District, which volunteered its 250 miles of canals in Stanislaus County for the pilot. Another benefit for the district, which is also a power provider, is that it doesn’t need to buy new, costly tracts of land to install solar panels since the canals are already its property.

by Soumya Karlamangla, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Solar AquaGrid
[ed. Sounds like a no-brainer, unless they end up installing fencing which would disrupt animal movements.]

Linda Ronstadt

[ed. Got sidetracked this morning on a Glenn Frey interview (shortly before he died), which led to a speech he gave inducting Linda into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was so good. See also: Rare Linda Ronstadt 1970s interview talks about The Eagles (YT).]

Eagles

[ed. For .. someone. Her favorite song once...]

Sybil: Promising New AI Tool For Detecting Early Signs of Lung Cancer

Researchers in Boston are on the verge of what they say is a major advancement in lung cancer screening: Artificial intelligence that can detect early signs of the disease years before doctors would find it on a CT scan.

The new AI tool, called Sybil, was developed by scientists at the Mass General Cancer Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In one study, it was shown to accurately predict whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next year 86% to 94% of the time. (...)

The tool, experts say, could be a leap forward in the early detection of lung cancer, the third most common cancer in the United States, according to the CDC. The disease is the leading cause of cancer death, according to the American Cancer Society, which estimates that this year there will be more than 238,000 new cases of lung cancer and more than 127,000 deaths.

Sybil is not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use outside clinical trials, but if approved, it could play a unique role.

There are more than 300 AI tools approved by the FDA for use in radiology, according to Anant Madabhushi, a professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. Most are used to assist doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, he said, but not for predicting someone’s future cancer risk, like Sybil does.

Sybil looks for signs of where cancer is likely to turn up, so doctors know where to look and can then spot it as early as possible. (...)

To predict cancer risk, Sybil relies on a single CT scan. It analyzes the three-dimensional image, looking for not only signs of abnormal growth in the lungs, but also other patterns or nuisances that scientists don’t fully understand yet, said Dr. Florian Fintelmann, a radiologist at Mass General Cancer Center and one of the researchers working on Sybil.

Based on what it sees, Sybil provides predictions for whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next one to six years, he said.

There have been cases, Fintelmann added, where Sybil has detected signs of cancers that radiologists did not detect until nodules were visible on a CT scan years later.

by Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and John Torres, M.D. and Marina Kopf and Patrick Martin, NBC News |  Read more:

Image: NBC News

[ed. Technological advances like these help explain: How 90 Became the New 60 (NYT).]

The Googie Aesthetic

The La Concha Motel was opened in 1961[ and closed in 2004. It was designed by architect Paul Williams who was one of the first prominent African American architects in the United States and was also the architect who designed the first LAX [Terminal 1] theme building. It was located on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada and was considered one of the best-preserved examples of 1950s Googie architecture. It was named after the resort community of La Concha, Spain. La Concha motel was also neighbors of El Morocco Hotel that opened in 1964 and closed 1983.

The Googie Aesthetics

The genealogy for the architecture of La Concha Motel is traceable to a Southern California restaurant designed by John Lautner, Googies, whose mascot was a cartoon waitress with fried egg eyes. Cheap, modern, flashy, where form does not follow function, Googie-inspired buildings were aesthetically unrestrained. Architectural historian Alan Hess described them as "cartoons in steel and glass, designed to catch the attention at highway speeds." While the style was dismissed by intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s as "a little too western, and a little too American for serious consideration," it was immensely popular with the rest of the country.

The building's aesthetics has a character of the shell. Williams' buildings were often filled with curves and circular details in the ceilings, building overhangs, arched entries, pool or lunch counter. This building has incorporated a hyperbolic paraboloid lobby of glass and thin concrete shell.

While Googie-style architecture has often been criticized as the crass work of anonymous draftsmen, the La Concha Motel is an example of the style as designed by a serious and respected American architect. Few examples of this populist style survive, but Williams' La Concha Motel lobby has been saved through the hard work of Nevada preservationists and architectural historians. Various celebrities had stayed at the motel, including Ronald Reagan, Ann-Margret, Flip Wilson, Muhammad Ali, and the Carpenters. The La Concha was featured in the 1995 film Casino. The La Concha Motel is now restored in the Neon Museum. The museum saved part of the hotel sign designed by the Young Electric Sign Company.

via: Architectuul (with more pics): La Concha Motel, Las Vegas, United States of America

Remake Everything—Particularly “The Princess Bride”

Judging by the outcry from Hollywood stars over a Sony executive’s vaguely floated notion this week of remaking “The Princess Bride,” you’d think that the idea wasn’t to make a new film but to alter or destroy Rob Reiner’s 1987 original. Among the most over-the-top of the fretters, for instance, was the movie’s co-star Cary Elwes, who tweeted this riff on one of the movie’s famous lines: “There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.”

It seems self-evident that no film is literally damaged by a remake—and that if any damage results it’s of a psychological, not a cinematic, nature. There are people who think that Jim McBride’s 1983 remake of “Breathless” is better than the original; some viewers find Brian De Palma’s 1983 “Scarface” superior to Howard Hawks’s 1932 version. They are wrong, of course, but their critical delusions don’t prevent anyone from enjoying the originals. That’s why I’d like to make a modest proposal to the film industry in response to the “Princess Bride” outcry: namely, remake everything, or, at least, anything, and see whether a filmmaker, a screenwriter, a producer, and a group of actors have the insight and the imagination to meet the challenges and the inspirations of the classics.

In the case of “The Princess Bride,” which is based on William Goldman’s adaptation of his own novel, I’d say that the door is wide open—not least because it’s far from a perfect movie. Much about it is rooted in the dated standards of its times and, thus, is ripe for reimagination. To begin with, its title character—the princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), who wants to marry a commoner named Westley (Elwes) but is betrothed to the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon)—is written and directed, for the most part, like a sack of gold rather than a sentient person. The one time she raises a hand to her oppressors, she’s utterly incompetent and has to be rescued by Westley, as she is at every turn—protected from flames in the “fire swamp,” pulled from a pit of “lightning sand,” protected from the rouses (rodents of unusual size). Her only recourse in the face of her impending forced marriage to Humperdinck is to plan her suicide—an act from which she is again saved by Westley, who protests, “There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world.” It’s worth recalling, too, the severe test to which Westley, disguised by the mask of the Dread Pirate Roberts, subjects her: it involves his bitter and derisive skepticism about the truth—the fidelity—of her love, and culminates in his raising his hand as if to hit her and declaring, “Where I come from, there are penalties when a woman lies.”

Another underlying relationship in the film, while set in modern times, is as crude and old-fashioned as the faux-medieval tale: the one that frames the story, between the boy (Fred Savage) and his grandfather (Peter Falk), who is reading him the book version of “The Princess Bride,” a novel (by the fictitious author S. Morgenstern) that was already around when the grandfather was a child. The boy is a sports-loving, action-craving, kiss-cringeing cliché, who expresses surprise that Buttercup is willing to marry Humperdinck rather than Westley “after all that Westley did for her.” It’s one of the many notions that might, in a remake, elicit some illuminating discussion between the grandfather and the boy—or, perhaps even more illuminating, between a grandmother and her granddaughter at their story time.

“The Princess Bride” could do with revisions in other ways. It’s a movie of clever banter but little visual wit (beyond the nimble early fencing scenes between Elwes and Mandy Patinkin), and some lumpy lines and performances that appeal to children as they are seen in the condescending eyes of adults. Yet far be it from me to gainsay the delight that many viewers take in “The Princess Bride.” The point isn’t to suggest that fans renounce the pleasures, such as they are. But it’s reasonable to expect a remake to tell a fuller story, to offer different perspectives on its characters and situations and, in the process, to deliver different pleasures while nonetheless honoring the achievements of the original.

by Richard Brody, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

[ed. No.]

Ernst Haas, Utah 1960
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The Base-Stealing Technique That Has Yankees Looking ‘Like Usain Bolt,’

The numbers jumped out at him. Aaron Judge is known far more for hitting home runs than stealing bases. But when he noticed the high stolen-base totals of several Yankees minor leaguers in 2021, it piqued his curiosity and sparked his competitive fire.

“Guys I’m faster than had more stolen bases than me,” the Yankees’ 6-foot-7, 282-pound slugger said. “I wanted to know why.”

The answer lies in a base-stealing technique that dates back more than 50 years, but only now is gaining wider acceptance in Major League Baseball. The Yankees, under director of speed development and base running Matt Talarico, are at the vanguard of the movement, and their timing could not be better. The league this season is introducing new rules, from the pitch clock to bigger bases to pickoff restrictions, in an effort to enhance base stealing and restore its prominence in the game.

The Bronx Bombers might never be known as the Bronx Burners. But their technique, used by Judge and other Yankees, in particular rookie Anthony Volpe, already has transformed the organization into a base-stealing machine in the minors. Other clubs, in baseball’s grand copycat tradition, are following suit.

“All you’ve got to do is watch Volpe and Gleyber Torres,” said one rival scout who has followed the Yankees for years in both the majors and minors, and was granted anonymity so he could speak candidly. “They look like Usain Bolt out there.”

Watch Judge, Volpe and virtually every other Yankee when they are in position to steal. They will take a short primary lead, then make a lateral, hop-like move as the pitcher begins his delivery. A “momentum lead,” the Yankees call it. Others term it a “leap/vault movement.”

Mike Roberts, a godfather of the technique, used to refer to it a “jump lead,” but now prefers “shuffle lead,” reflecting an adjustment in his teaching method in recent years. (...)

However one describes it, the base stealer’s movement is not unlike the type an infielder makes to get set before a pitch, or a tennis player makes while preparing to receive a serve. The idea is to build momentum through motion, rather than start from a standing position.

As Shatel put it, “If you’re in a Ferrari at a stop light and I’m in my Toyota, but I roll into that stop and you’re at a dead stop, I’m going to beat you off the line 100 times out of 100.”

by Ken Rosenthal, The Athletic/NYT | Read more:
Images: uncredited

Judge stealing a base in 2021…

 

… and Judge stealing in 2022, when he had a career-high 16 stolen bases

Ernst Haas, USA 1959
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Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), Psyche and Cupid, late 19th century

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Adriaen Collaert, Water, 1582

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Comic High Jinks and Repressed Despair in Netflix’s “Beef”

As far as road rage goes, the outburst that sets off the rivalry in the wickedly loopy comic drama “Beef” is downright piddling. Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a handyman in Los Angeles, attempts to pull his beater pickup truck out of a hardware-store parking lot, when he’s met by an obnoxiously long honk from a gleaming white Mercedes S.U.V., then a middle finger thrust out the window. Danny is in a foul enough mood that he gives chase to the other driver, Amy Lau (Ali Wong). After the pursuit leaves him unsatisfied, he decides to slowly insinuate himself into her home, even her family, to wreak chaos. His choice of target proves unfortunate; Amy is even more desperate for a sense of control, and thus for revenge.

Yet the most gratifying reveals in the ten-part Netflix series aren’t the wild escalations of the central pair but their rich psychological shadings. When Danny and Amy arrive at their respective homes after their encounter, neither can get out the full story about what happened. Danny, recounting the incident to his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), in the cramped apartment that they share, brags that he “scared the shit out of that motherfucker,” in a bit of masculine bravado that bears little resemblance to the truth. Amy, speaking to her woo-woo husband, George (Joseph Lee), can barely even begin to tell him about the confrontation before he shuts her down: “You’ve got to start focussing on the positive.” He’s a genial stay-at-home dad (with, perhaps, the world’s most beautiful sweater collection) and the coddled son of a famous artist, while she’s the overworked founder and aspirational face of a buzzy plant business she’s on the verge of selling for millions—and the one resentfully funding the couple’s bougie Calabasas life style. But the chasm between husband and wife is never wider than when George tells Amy, “Anger is just a transitory state of consciousness.” Amy and Danny accidentally uncork something in each other, and it’s a race to see whether they can do more harm to themselves or to the other.

“Beef” makes it both relevant and not that Danny and Amy are Asian American. As the season progresses, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, stresses that his dual protagonists are especially damaged, beset by depression and likely something else: a “void” in their bodies, the characters agree, that feels “empty but solid.” But they also belong to a group—in Amy’s case, two groups—whose members have been socialized to believe that their value lies in their willingness to accommodate, to fit in, to oblige. Now, by having a stranger to fuck with, they’ve stumbled upon a seemingly safe outlet for their most antisocial impulses. The joke’s on them: when Amy catfishes Paul (using thirst traps from her young, white female employee’s Instagram), and when Danny befriends George (by posing as “Zane,” a fellow-cyclist), the pitiful hotheads find themselves confiding in their marks what they cannot express to their loved ones.

The series’ portraiture is most compelling when the alienation experienced by the characters achieves a larger sociological resonance. The soul-crushing interactions between Amy and the potential buyer of her business, Jordan (a bitch-perfect Maria Bello), are spectacularly cringey; a collector of artifacts from various cultures, Jordan treats Amy like another souvenir, a consumable affirmation of a pleasing stereotype. “You have this serene, Zen Buddhist thing,” Jordan airily tells Amy, who might be the first character I’ve ever seen masturbate with what turns out to be a Chekhov’s gun. Later, in couples counselling, Amy says that her Midwestern Chinese-immigrant father and her Vietnamese-refugee mother didn’t exactly model healthy emotional expression. She’s worried that she’s ill-equipped to parent her agitated young daughter, who acts out by picking at her skin and hitting a teacher. On a visit to her childhood home, Amy laments that she’s filled with “generations of bad decisions sitting inside” her—though “Beef” smartly leaves open the possibility that Amy may be deflecting the blame for her personality flaws onto her upbringing. Either way, the story line feels like a confident step toward Asian American pop culture’s maturation. Unlike the hallmarks of Asian Americana (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), “Beef” is less interested in dwelling on the cultural clashes that have led to the dislocation of the second generation than in exploring how that generation can raise their children without passing on all the hangups and traumas from their formative years.

Amy doesn’t get much support from her mother-in-law, the outwardly colorful but patrician-cold Fumi (an excellent Patti Yasutake), who indulges her grown son while making demands on Amy. The two women are vividly written, and Wong is fantastic in her first leading dramatic role. But “Beef” is, at its heart, a study of male loneliness—a theme that, while bog-standard in prestige television, finds renewed urgency when couched in an Asian American context.

by Inkoo Kang, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Chris Kim

[ed. Looks fun/interesting. Possibly cringey. Update: It's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good. Some great acting. Love Steven Yuen doing the Incubus cover - Drive.]

The Exhausting History of Fatigue

The Exhausting History of Fatigue. Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse. (New Yorker)

Image: Christoph Niemann

[ed. Great illustration.]

"What’s extraordinary is that, when John Everett Millais came to paint his version of “Mariana,” twenty-one years later, he pushed the legend—derived from “Measure for Measure”—to a further stage. The lonesome woman, pining for her paramour, is depicted in a dress of midnight blue, stretching, with her breast uplifted and her hands at the base of her spine; the posture is a kind of pun, expressing both fatigue (that is how we all like to stretch, at the close of a working day) and a physical craving yet more intense. The death wish is entangled with desire."

Image: John Everett Millais, Mariana (Wikipedia)

Are Coincidences Real?

There is a part of me that, despite myself, wants to entertain the possibility that the world really does have supernatural dimensions. It’s the same part of me that gets spooked by ghost stories, and that would feel uneasy about spending a night alone in a morgue. I don’t believe the Universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly, imagine some ethereal self behind those eyes, humming with feelings and thoughts, when in fact there’s nothing but the dark and silent substance of the brain. We imagine something similar behind our own eyes. It’s a necessary illusion, rooted deep in our evolutionary history. Coincidence, or rather the experience of coincidence, triggers magical thoughts that are equally deep-rooted.

The term ‘coincidence’ covers a wide range of phenomena, from the cosmic (in a total solar eclipse, the disk of the Moon and the disk of the Sun by sheer chance appear to have precisely the same diameter) to the personal and parochial (my granddaughter has the same birthday as my late wife). On the human, experiential, scale, a broad distinction can be drawn between serendipity – timely, but unplanned, discoveries or development of events – and what the 20th-century Lamarckian biologist and coincidence collector Paul Kammerer called seriality, which he defined as ‘a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things or events … in time and space’.

The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. On first hearing he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London – an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.

Hollywood provides another choice example of seriality. L Frank Baum was a prolific children’s author, best-known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). He didn’t live to see his novel turned into the iconic musical fantasy film, yet he reputedly had a remarkable coincidental connection with the movie. The actor Frank Morgan played five roles in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the eponymous Wizard. He makes his first appearance in the sepia-toned opening sequences as Professor Marvel, a travelling fortune-teller. Movie lore says that, when it came to screen testing, the coat he was wearing was considered too pristine for an itinerant magician. So the wardrobe department was sent on a thrift-shop mission to find something more suitable, and returned with a whole closetful of possibilities. The one they settled on, a Prince Albert frock coat with worn velvet collars, was a perfect fit for the actor. Only later was it apparently discovered that, sewn into the jacket was a label bearing the inscription: ‘Made by Hermann Bros, expressly for L Frank Baum’. Baum had died some 20 years before the film was released but the coat’s provenance was allegedly authenticated by his widow, Maud, who accepted it as a gift when the film was completed. (...)

While some coincidences seem playful, others feel inherently macabre. In 2007, the Guardian journalist John Harris set out on ‘an intermittent rock-grave odyssey’ visiting the last resting places of revered UK rock musicians. About halfway through, he went to the tiny village of Rushock in Worcestershire to gather thoughts at the headstone of the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who died at the age of 32 on 25 September 1980, after consuming a prodigious quantity of alcohol. A Guardian photographer had visited the grave a few days earlier to get a picture to accompany the piece. It was, writes Harris, ‘an icy morning that gave the churchyard the look of a scene from The Omen’ and, fitting with one of the key motifs of that film, the photographer was ‘spooked by the appearance of an unaccompanied black dog, which urinates on the gravestone and then disappears’. ‘Black Dog’ (1971) happens to be the title of one of the most iconic songs in the Led Zeppelin catalogue.

If we picture a continuum of coincidences from the trivial to the extraordinary, both the Hopkins and the Baum examples would surely be located towards the strange and unusual end. My ‘broken arms’ coincidence tends towards the trivial. Other, still more mundane examples are commonplace. You get chatting to a stranger on a train and discover you have an acquaintance in common. You’re thinking of someone and, in the next breath they call you. You read an unusual word in a magazine and, simultaneously, someone on the radio utters the same word. Such occurrences might elicit a wry smile, but the weirder ones can induce a strong sense of the uncanny. The world momentarily seems full of strange connections and forces. (...)

Kammerer’s book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919), or ‘The Law of Seriality’, contains 100 samples of coincidences that he classifies in terms of typology, morphology, power and so on, with, as Koestler puts it, ‘the meticulousness of a zoologist devoted to taxonomy’. The second half of the book is devoted to theory. Kammerer’s big idea is that, alongside causality, there is an acausal principle at work in the Universe, somewhat analogous to gravity but, whereas gravity acts universally on mass, this universal acausal force, as Koestler puts it, ‘acts selectively on form and function to bring similar configurations together in space and time; it correlates by affinity.’ Kammerer sums things up as follows: ‘We thus arrive at the image of a world-mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.’ This seems far-fetched but Albert Einstein, for one, took Kammerer seriously, describing his book as ‘original and by no means absurd’.

The theory of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, proposed by Jung follows a similar line. It took shape over several decades through a confluence of ideas streaming in from philosophy, physics, the occult and, not least, from the wellsprings of magical thinking that bubbled in the depths of Jung’s own prodigiously creative and, at times, near-psychotic mind. Certain coincidences, he suggests, are not merely a random coming-together of unrelated events, nor are the events causally linked. They are connected acausally by virtue of their meaning. Synchronicity was the ‘acausal connecting principle’.

According to the physicist and historian of science Arthur I Miller’s book Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009), Jung considered this to be one of the best ideas he ever had, and cites Einstein as an influence. In the early years of the 20th century, Einstein was on several occasions a dinner guest at the Jung family home in Zurich, making a strong impression. Jung traces a direct link between those dinners with Einstein and his dialogue, some 30 years later, with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a dialogue that brought the concept of synchronicity to fruition.

Jung’s collaboration with Pauli was an unlikely coalition: Jung, the quasi-mystic psychologist, a psychonaut whose deep excursions into his own unconscious mind he deemed the most significant experiences of his life; and Pauli, the hardcore theoretical physicist who was influential in reshaping our understanding of the physical world at its subatomic foundations. Following his mother’s suicide and a brief, unhappy marriage to a cabaret dancer who left him for a chemist (‘Had she taken with a bullfighter, I would have understood, but such an ordinary chemist…’), Pauli suffered a psychological crisis. Even as he was producing his most important work in physics (formulating the ‘Pauli exclusion principle’; postulating the existence of the neutrino), he was succumbing to bouts of heavy drinking and getting into fights.

Pauli turned for help to Jung who happened to live nearby. His therapy involved the recording of dreams, a task at which he proved himself to be remarkably adept, being able to remember complex dreams in exquisite detail. For his part, Jung saw an opportunity. Not only was Pauli an extraordinary chronicler of dreams, but he was also a willing guide to the arcane realm of subatomic physics. Meanwhile, Pauli saw synchronicity as a way of approaching some fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, not least the mystery of quantum entanglement, by which sub-atomic particles may correlate instantaneously, and acausally, at any distance. From their discussions of synchronicity emerged the Pauli-Jung conjecture, a form of double-aspect theory of mind and matter, which viewed the mental and the physical as different aspects of a deeper underlying reality.

by Paul Broks, Aeon |  Read more:

Images: Ernst Haas/Getty; David Sillitoe courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

Wilhelm Sasnal (Polish, 1972), Driving Sleeping, 2014.

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