via:
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Quiet Quitting
Gone are the days when employers could count on employees competing to go “above and beyond” to rise faster in their organizations. Employers now face “quiet quitting,” a trend that emerged in July 2022 from a viral TikTok video to become a phenomenon noted on Wikipedia and discussed in Forbes and The Wall Street Journal.
Quiet quitting is more than employees setting boundaries or intentionally putting a hard stop to their work day or week so they can create a work/life balance. Checked-out quiet quitters simply slack their way through their workweek by doing the bare minimum needed to keep their jobs, overloading their coworkers, frustrating their supervisors and draining productivity from their employers.
According to ResumeBuilder.com’s August 2022 survey of 1000 U.S. employees:21% of surveyed employees admit to “quiet quitting,” stating that they do only the bare minimum at work;
Some describe quiet quitting as a coping mechanism that employees intentionally choose to reduce internalized stress. Others see it as resulting from employees gaining “COVID clarity” concerning life priorities while working from home during the pandemic. They note that large numbers of employees became unwilling to sacrifice to “get ahead” with their employer, particularly after other employers desperate to fill vacancies wooed them with flexibility, higher wages and greater benefits if they jumped ship. Still others view it as an outgrowth of employee cynicism and entitlement, with employees no longer believing they need to work hard to get ahead. Gallup’s 2021 survey reports that only 36% of employees feel engaged in their jobs.
According to ResumeBuilder.com’s August 2022 survey of 1000 U.S. employees:21% of surveyed employees admit to “quiet quitting,” stating that they do only the bare minimum at work;
- 5% admit to doing even less than they’re paid to do;
- 8 in 10 “quiet quitters” report they’re “burnt out”;
- 46% of “quiet quitters” don’t want to do more work than they’re compensated to do or to compromise their work/life balance;
- 1 in 10 employees report they put in less effort than they did 6 months ago;
- 1 in 3 who have reduced effort have cut back the hours they spend working by more than half.
Some describe quiet quitting as a coping mechanism that employees intentionally choose to reduce internalized stress. Others see it as resulting from employees gaining “COVID clarity” concerning life priorities while working from home during the pandemic. They note that large numbers of employees became unwilling to sacrifice to “get ahead” with their employer, particularly after other employers desperate to fill vacancies wooed them with flexibility, higher wages and greater benefits if they jumped ship. Still others view it as an outgrowth of employee cynicism and entitlement, with employees no longer believing they need to work hard to get ahead. Gallup’s 2021 survey reports that only 36% of employees feel engaged in their jobs.
Lynn Curry, ADN | Read more:
Image: rudall30 via Getty Images/via:[ed. We've all seen the type. I don't think this is any particularly new trend, there've always been people just putting in time and collecting a paycheck (especially in their later years approaching retirement). It's pretty soul-killing.]
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
What Neuroscientists and Philosophers Understand About Addiction
When I was arrested and charged with possession with intent to sell cocaine in 1986, I was addicted to both coke and heroin. Although I was facing a 15 years-to-life sentence, the first thing I did after my parents bailed me out and held a family meeting was to find and secretly inject some prescription opioids that I knew the police hadn’t confiscated.
I knew that doing this further jeopardized my life prospects and my relationships with everyone I cared about. I knew it made no sense. But I didn’t believe that I could cope in any other way. Until I finally recognized that I needed treatment and began recovery in 1988 — with the prospect of that lengthy sentence under New York’s draconian Rockefeller laws still occluding my future — I didn’t think I had any real choice.
Was my brain hijacked by drugs — or was I willfully choosing to risk it all for a few hours of selfish pleasure? What makes people continue taking drugs like street fentanyl, which put them at daily risk of death?
These questions are at the heart of drug policy and the way we view and treat addiction. But simplistic answers have stymied efforts to ameliorate drug use disorders and reduce stigma.
Research now shows that addiction doesn’t mean either being completely subject to irresistible impulses, or making totally free choices. Addiction’s effects on decision-making are complex. Understanding them can help policymakers, treatment providers and family members aid recovery.
Claims that people with addiction are unable to control themselves are belied by basic facts. Few of us inject drugs in front of the police, which means that most are capable of delaying use. Addicted people often make complicated plans over days and months to obtain drugs and hide use from others, again indicating purposeful activity. Those given the option will use clean needles. Moreover, small rewards for drug-free urine tests — used in a treatment called contingency management — are quite successful at helping people quit, which couldn’t be possible if addiction obliterated choice.
However, those who contend that substance use disorder is just a series of self-centered decisions face conflicting evidence, too. The most obvious is the persistence of addiction despite dire losses like being cut off by family members or friends, getting fired, becoming homeless, contracting infectious diseases or being repeatedly incarcerated.
Most people who try drugs don’t get addicted, even to opioids or methamphetamine, which suggests that factors other than simply being exposed to a drug can contribute to addiction. The majority of people who do get hooked have other psychiatric disorders, traumatic childhoods or both — only 7 percent report no history of mental illness. Nearly 75 percent of women with heroin addiction were sexually abused as children — and most people with any type of addiction have suffered at least one and often many forms of childhood trauma. This data implies that genetic and environmental vulnerabilities influence risk.
So how does addiction affect choice? Neuroscientists and philosophers are beginning to converge on answers, which could help make policy more humane and more effective.
Brains can be seen as prediction engines, constantly calculating what is most likely to happen next and whether it will be beneficial or harmful. As children grow up, their emotions and desires get calibrated to guide them toward what their brains predict will meet their social and physical needs. Ideally, as we develop, we gain more control and optimize the ability to choose.
But there are many ways that these varied processes can go awry in addiction and alter how a person makes choices and responds to consequences.
by Maia Szalavitz, NY Times | Read more:
I knew that doing this further jeopardized my life prospects and my relationships with everyone I cared about. I knew it made no sense. But I didn’t believe that I could cope in any other way. Until I finally recognized that I needed treatment and began recovery in 1988 — with the prospect of that lengthy sentence under New York’s draconian Rockefeller laws still occluding my future — I didn’t think I had any real choice.
These questions are at the heart of drug policy and the way we view and treat addiction. But simplistic answers have stymied efforts to ameliorate drug use disorders and reduce stigma.
Research now shows that addiction doesn’t mean either being completely subject to irresistible impulses, or making totally free choices. Addiction’s effects on decision-making are complex. Understanding them can help policymakers, treatment providers and family members aid recovery.
Claims that people with addiction are unable to control themselves are belied by basic facts. Few of us inject drugs in front of the police, which means that most are capable of delaying use. Addicted people often make complicated plans over days and months to obtain drugs and hide use from others, again indicating purposeful activity. Those given the option will use clean needles. Moreover, small rewards for drug-free urine tests — used in a treatment called contingency management — are quite successful at helping people quit, which couldn’t be possible if addiction obliterated choice.
However, those who contend that substance use disorder is just a series of self-centered decisions face conflicting evidence, too. The most obvious is the persistence of addiction despite dire losses like being cut off by family members or friends, getting fired, becoming homeless, contracting infectious diseases or being repeatedly incarcerated.
Most people who try drugs don’t get addicted, even to opioids or methamphetamine, which suggests that factors other than simply being exposed to a drug can contribute to addiction. The majority of people who do get hooked have other psychiatric disorders, traumatic childhoods or both — only 7 percent report no history of mental illness. Nearly 75 percent of women with heroin addiction were sexually abused as children — and most people with any type of addiction have suffered at least one and often many forms of childhood trauma. This data implies that genetic and environmental vulnerabilities influence risk.
So how does addiction affect choice? Neuroscientists and philosophers are beginning to converge on answers, which could help make policy more humane and more effective.
Brains can be seen as prediction engines, constantly calculating what is most likely to happen next and whether it will be beneficial or harmful. As children grow up, their emotions and desires get calibrated to guide them toward what their brains predict will meet their social and physical needs. Ideally, as we develop, we gain more control and optimize the ability to choose.
But there are many ways that these varied processes can go awry in addiction and alter how a person makes choices and responds to consequences.
Image: Urbazon/E+, via Getty Images
Meet the ‘Elite’ Couples Breeding to Save Mankind
At the beginning of March, Aria Babu quit her job at a think tank to dedicate herself to something most people have never heard of. Having worked in public policy for several years, the 26-year-old Londoner had come to an alarming realisation about the future of the UK, the world – and the human species.
‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says. ‘Considering this is such a massive part of people’s lives, the fact that they were not able to fulfil this want was clearly indicative that something was wrong.’
The new focus of Babu’s career is a philosophy known as pronatalism, literally meaning pro-birth. Its core tenet is deceptively simple: our future depends on having enough children, and yet life in developed countries has become hostile to this basic biological imperative. Linked to the subcultures of rationalism and ‘effective altruism’ (EA), and bolstered by declining birth rates, it has been gaining currency in Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry – especially its more conservative corners.
‘I’ve been in various text threads with technology entrepreneurs who share that view… there are really smart people that have real concern around this,’ says Ben Lamm, a Texas biotech entrepreneur whose company Colossal is developing artificial wombs and other reproductive tech (or ‘reprotech’) that could boost future fertility. (...)
Easily the most famous person to espouse pronatalist ideas is Elon Musk, the galaxy’s richest human being, who has had 10 children with three different women. ‘If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble. Mark my words,’ Musk told a business summit in December 2021. He has described population collapse as ‘the biggest danger’ to humanity (exceeding climate change) and warned that Japan, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, ‘will eventually cease to exist’.
In an Insider article last November that helped bring the movement to wider attention, 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey acknowledged its influence on the Texan tech scene, while the managing director of an exclusive retreat, Dialog, co-founded by arch-conservative investor and PayPal pioneer Peter Thiel, said population decline was a frequent topic there.
Babu, who hopes to join or create a pronatalist organisation in the UK, says it is still ‘niche’ here but gaining ground on both the ‘swashbuckling intellectual Right’ and the more family-focused and Blue-Labour-tinged segments of the Left.
At the centre of it all are Simone and Malcolm Collins, two 30-something American entrepreneurs turned philosophers – and parents – who say they are only the most outspoken proponents of a belief that many prefer to keep private. In 2021 they founded a ‘non-denominational’ campaign group called Pronatalist.org, under the umbrella of their non-profit Pragmatist Foundation. Buoyed by a $482,000 (£385,000) donation from Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian tech billionaire who funds many rationalist and EA organisations, it is now lobbying governments, meeting business leaders, and seeking partnerships with reprotech companies and fertility clinics.
The Collinses did not coin the word ‘pronatalism’, which has long been used (along with ‘natalism’) to describe government policies aimed at increasing birth rates, or mainstream pro-birth positions such as that of the Catholic Church. Its opposite is ‘anti-natalism’, the idea that it is wrong to bring a new person into the world if they are unlikely to have a good life. Lyman Stone, a natalist demographer and research fellow at the US’s Institute for Family Studies, has described the Collinses’ philosophy as ‘a very unusual subculture’ compared to millions of everyday natalists. Yet it is their version – a secular, paradoxically unorthodox reconstruction of arguably the most traditional view on earth, driven by alarm about a looming population catastrophe – that is prospering among the tech elite.
‘I don’t think it’s appealing to [just] Silicon Valley people,’ Malcolm tells me on a long call from his home in Pennsylvania. ‘It’s more like, anyone who is familiar with modern science and familiar with the statistics is aware that this is an issue, and they are focused on it. The reason why you see Silicon Valley people disproportionately being drawn to this is they’re obsessed with data enough, and wealthy enough, to be looking at things – and who also have enough wealth and power that they’re not afraid of being cancelled.’
The problem, he concedes, is that falling birth rates are also a common preoccupation of neo-Nazis and other ethno-nationalists, who believe they are being outbred and ‘replaced’ by other races. ‘A lot of alleged concerns about fertility decline are really poorly masked racist ideas about what kinds of people they want on the planet,’ says demographer Bernice Kuang of the UK’s Centre for Population Change.
The Collinses strongly disavow racism and reject the idea that any country’s population should be homogenous. Still, Babu finds that many in the rationalist and EA community, which skews pale and male, are wary of exploring pronatalism – lest they be ‘tarred with the brush of another white man who just wants an Aryan trad-wife’.
Another issue is what you might call the Handmaid’s Tale problem. From Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals to the sprawling brood of infamous, Kansas-based ‘God hates fags’ preacher Fred Phelps, a zeal for large families has often been accompanied by patriarchal gender politics. For liberal Westerners, the idea that we need to have more babies – ‘we’ being a loaded pronoun when not all of us would actually bear them – may conjure images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. (...)
But the Collinses contend that this kind of future is exactly what they are trying to prevent. ‘People often compare our group to Handmaid’s Tale-like thinking,’ says Malcolm, ‘and I’m like: excuse me, do you know what happens if we, the voluntary movement, fails…? Cultures will eventually find a way to fix this; how horrifying those mechanisms are depends on whether or not our group finds an ethical way.’ Though they define themselves politically as conservatives – Malcolm invariably votes Republican – they claim to favour LGBT rights and abortion rights and oppose any attempt to pressure those who don’t want children into parenthood.
Instead, they say, their hope is to preserve a ‘diverse’ range of cultures that might otherwise begin to die out within the next 75 to 100 years. They want to build a movement that can support people of all colours and creeds who already want to have large families, but are stymied by society – so that ‘some iteration of something that looks like modern Western civilisation’ can be saved.
‘We are on the Titanic right now,’ says Malcolm. ‘The Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. There is no way around it at this point. Our goal is not to prevent the Titanic from hitting the iceberg; it’s to ready the life rafts.’
It was on the couple’s second date, sitting on a rooftop and gazing out at the nearby woods, that Malcolm first raised the prospect of children. Simone’s response was not enthusiastic.
‘I was very excited to spend my life alone, to never get married, to never have kids,’ she recalls. ‘People would be like, “Do you want to hold the baby?” I was one of those who’s like, “No, you keep it. I will watch that baby from behind glass and be a lot more comfortable.”’
As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest, occasionally burbling, while Malcolm has charge of their two sons Torsten, two, and Octavian, three.
[ed. Elizabeth Holmes just named her newborn Invictus, too ( Latin for "unconquered", also a famous poem devoted to "self-discipline and fortitude in adversity"). What is it with these people?]
‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says. ‘Considering this is such a massive part of people’s lives, the fact that they were not able to fulfil this want was clearly indicative that something was wrong.’
‘I’ve been in various text threads with technology entrepreneurs who share that view… there are really smart people that have real concern around this,’ says Ben Lamm, a Texas biotech entrepreneur whose company Colossal is developing artificial wombs and other reproductive tech (or ‘reprotech’) that could boost future fertility. (...)
Easily the most famous person to espouse pronatalist ideas is Elon Musk, the galaxy’s richest human being, who has had 10 children with three different women. ‘If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble. Mark my words,’ Musk told a business summit in December 2021. He has described population collapse as ‘the biggest danger’ to humanity (exceeding climate change) and warned that Japan, which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, ‘will eventually cease to exist’.
In an Insider article last November that helped bring the movement to wider attention, 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey acknowledged its influence on the Texan tech scene, while the managing director of an exclusive retreat, Dialog, co-founded by arch-conservative investor and PayPal pioneer Peter Thiel, said population decline was a frequent topic there.
Babu, who hopes to join or create a pronatalist organisation in the UK, says it is still ‘niche’ here but gaining ground on both the ‘swashbuckling intellectual Right’ and the more family-focused and Blue-Labour-tinged segments of the Left.
At the centre of it all are Simone and Malcolm Collins, two 30-something American entrepreneurs turned philosophers – and parents – who say they are only the most outspoken proponents of a belief that many prefer to keep private. In 2021 they founded a ‘non-denominational’ campaign group called Pronatalist.org, under the umbrella of their non-profit Pragmatist Foundation. Buoyed by a $482,000 (£385,000) donation from Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian tech billionaire who funds many rationalist and EA organisations, it is now lobbying governments, meeting business leaders, and seeking partnerships with reprotech companies and fertility clinics.
The Collinses did not coin the word ‘pronatalism’, which has long been used (along with ‘natalism’) to describe government policies aimed at increasing birth rates, or mainstream pro-birth positions such as that of the Catholic Church. Its opposite is ‘anti-natalism’, the idea that it is wrong to bring a new person into the world if they are unlikely to have a good life. Lyman Stone, a natalist demographer and research fellow at the US’s Institute for Family Studies, has described the Collinses’ philosophy as ‘a very unusual subculture’ compared to millions of everyday natalists. Yet it is their version – a secular, paradoxically unorthodox reconstruction of arguably the most traditional view on earth, driven by alarm about a looming population catastrophe – that is prospering among the tech elite.
‘I don’t think it’s appealing to [just] Silicon Valley people,’ Malcolm tells me on a long call from his home in Pennsylvania. ‘It’s more like, anyone who is familiar with modern science and familiar with the statistics is aware that this is an issue, and they are focused on it. The reason why you see Silicon Valley people disproportionately being drawn to this is they’re obsessed with data enough, and wealthy enough, to be looking at things – and who also have enough wealth and power that they’re not afraid of being cancelled.’
The problem, he concedes, is that falling birth rates are also a common preoccupation of neo-Nazis and other ethno-nationalists, who believe they are being outbred and ‘replaced’ by other races. ‘A lot of alleged concerns about fertility decline are really poorly masked racist ideas about what kinds of people they want on the planet,’ says demographer Bernice Kuang of the UK’s Centre for Population Change.
The Collinses strongly disavow racism and reject the idea that any country’s population should be homogenous. Still, Babu finds that many in the rationalist and EA community, which skews pale and male, are wary of exploring pronatalism – lest they be ‘tarred with the brush of another white man who just wants an Aryan trad-wife’.
Another issue is what you might call the Handmaid’s Tale problem. From Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals to the sprawling brood of infamous, Kansas-based ‘God hates fags’ preacher Fred Phelps, a zeal for large families has often been accompanied by patriarchal gender politics. For liberal Westerners, the idea that we need to have more babies – ‘we’ being a loaded pronoun when not all of us would actually bear them – may conjure images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. (...)
But the Collinses contend that this kind of future is exactly what they are trying to prevent. ‘People often compare our group to Handmaid’s Tale-like thinking,’ says Malcolm, ‘and I’m like: excuse me, do you know what happens if we, the voluntary movement, fails…? Cultures will eventually find a way to fix this; how horrifying those mechanisms are depends on whether or not our group finds an ethical way.’ Though they define themselves politically as conservatives – Malcolm invariably votes Republican – they claim to favour LGBT rights and abortion rights and oppose any attempt to pressure those who don’t want children into parenthood.
Instead, they say, their hope is to preserve a ‘diverse’ range of cultures that might otherwise begin to die out within the next 75 to 100 years. They want to build a movement that can support people of all colours and creeds who already want to have large families, but are stymied by society – so that ‘some iteration of something that looks like modern Western civilisation’ can be saved.
‘We are on the Titanic right now,’ says Malcolm. ‘The Titanic is going to hit the iceberg. There is no way around it at this point. Our goal is not to prevent the Titanic from hitting the iceberg; it’s to ready the life rafts.’
It was on the couple’s second date, sitting on a rooftop and gazing out at the nearby woods, that Malcolm first raised the prospect of children. Simone’s response was not enthusiastic.
‘I was very excited to spend my life alone, to never get married, to never have kids,’ she recalls. ‘People would be like, “Do you want to hold the baby?” I was one of those who’s like, “No, you keep it. I will watch that baby from behind glass and be a lot more comfortable.”’
As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest, occasionally burbling, while Malcolm has charge of their two sons Torsten, two, and Octavian, three.
by Io Dodds, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: Winnie Au[ed. Elizabeth Holmes just named her newborn Invictus, too ( Latin for "unconquered", also a famous poem devoted to "self-discipline and fortitude in adversity"). What is it with these people?]
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Monday, April 24, 2023
Thank You For Your Service
FOX News Media released a statement on Monday announcing that the network and its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, have agreed to part ways. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor," the press release continued. "Mr. Carlson's last program was Friday April 21st." By the looks of his final show last week, Carlson did not have any indication that he'd be out of the chair a few days later. Media reporter Brian Stelter, a longtime foe of Fox News and its primetime stars, suggests it is telling that Carlson was not offered the chance to host a final show where he could sign off on his own terms and, perhaps, give his fans an indication of where he intends to go next.
The timing of Carlson's departure is likely instructive. Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems up to $787 million last week to settle a lawsuit regarding false claims made on Fox airwaves alleging Dominion played some role in rigging the 2020 election against Donald Trump. It’s not just that the claims were demonstrably false, something Fox admitted as part of the settlement. Through the discovery process in the case, Dominion also dug up texts and emails showing Fox News stars and executives—including Tucker Carlson—knew full well the election-fraud claims were lies and allowed them to proliferate on the number-one cable news channel regardless. They told each other so and mocked Trumpworld figures, like the putative attorney Sidney Powell, for believing them. A defamation case is difficult to win in the United States, but this was about as open-and-shut as it gets.
Carlson also disparaged a number of people in and around the Fox News network in his communications, and perhaps most importantly, he slagged off Donald Trump repeatedly. He said the man who’s now once again leading the polls to become the Republican presidential nominee was a “destroyer” and a “disaster” and a “demonic force.” He said he “hates” Trump “passionately.” The departure could come down to burned bridges within Fox, or—don’t laugh—a genuine attempt from the network to respond to the substance of the Dominion case. But it’s also worth considering that the texts and emails surfaced in the Dominion case revealed Fox News got into the election conspiracy game in the first place because they feared they were losing viewers and market share to even loonier networks that were going full-throttle on the stolen-election nonsense.
Fox may have settled to avoid a larger payment to Dominion, or they might have settled to avoid having their biggest stars and most powerful executives—up to and including Rupert Murdoch—testify. But they also might have settled to avoid court proceedings that would have shined a brighter light, for longer, on the reality that many at the network are not True Believers. That, just like any failure to toe Trump’s line back in 2020, posed a risk to market share. It surely could be damaging to Fox News for their viewers to learn the network’s biggest star hates the Republican Party’s standard-bearer but pretends the opposite while on-air for their viewing pleasure. As we laid out last week, $787 million is not a hugely destructive figure in the grand scheme of Fox's business, but the settlement is a black eye for the company that they’re hoping to keep mostly obscured from their customers. Granted, Carlson’s departure may get some Fox superfans asking questions they mightn’t have otherwise.
Or maybe none of that really matters, and there’s some other reason for Tucker’s exit still to be revealed. What Carlson was almost certainly not dismissed for was an absolutely barbaric record as a television presenter. He's lived many lives in media, including as a bowtie-toting Reasonable Conservative on CNN and MSNBC and as a talk-radio guest overeager to impress and as a talented writer for this very magazine, but Carlson found a new kind of influence and success on the Trump-era Fox News Channel. The man is an almost comic exaggeration of a trust-fund kid—Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson’s brother is named Buckley Carlson—who’s come to represent the very worst of the low-taxes-and-lacrosse types who matriculate through schools like Carlson’s Trinity College. He ditched concern for small government and free markets in favor of vicious anti-immigrant fervor, endless culture war food fights, and the now familiar MAGA embrace of foreign despots including Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. These strongmen, like Trump, were packaged for Fox’s aging audience as warriors on behalf of Real Americans whose lives and values were under siege from shadowy forces attacking from all sides and within.
Carlson did take on some of Trump’s more useful rhetoric around American workers who’ve been left behind by ruthless corporate behavior and a government too often in thrall to the same interests. (He illustrated this part of his new persona well in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro, who remains a more traditional servant to the American money power.) But like Trump’s shtick, it was all a show. When it comes down to it, nobody said it better than a Dutch historian whom Carlson invited on in 2019 to rail against the (deservedly railed-against) congregants at Davos only to refuse to air the interview when he got owned too hard: “What the Murdoch family basically want you to do is to scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance,” Walker Bregman told him, adding he’s also worked for Koch Brothers-funded institutions. “It works by you taking their dirty money, it's as simple as that. You are a millionaire funded by billionaires, that's what you are.”
This overgrown frat sophomore should have been fired the morning after he declared that immigrants make the United States “poor and dirtier.” But that would have been impossible: he was selling the exact product Fox News had positioned itself to sell, and he was their best salesman.
This kind of channel will be more desperately needed in the future, as the unhinged populism unleashed by Murdoch sweeps everything in its path, from “establishment” Republicans to, quite possibly, Fox itself. The shame of Rupert Murdoch is that he wasn’t the man to do it. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Carlson also disparaged a number of people in and around the Fox News network in his communications, and perhaps most importantly, he slagged off Donald Trump repeatedly. He said the man who’s now once again leading the polls to become the Republican presidential nominee was a “destroyer” and a “disaster” and a “demonic force.” He said he “hates” Trump “passionately.” The departure could come down to burned bridges within Fox, or—don’t laugh—a genuine attempt from the network to respond to the substance of the Dominion case. But it’s also worth considering that the texts and emails surfaced in the Dominion case revealed Fox News got into the election conspiracy game in the first place because they feared they were losing viewers and market share to even loonier networks that were going full-throttle on the stolen-election nonsense.
Fox may have settled to avoid a larger payment to Dominion, or they might have settled to avoid having their biggest stars and most powerful executives—up to and including Rupert Murdoch—testify. But they also might have settled to avoid court proceedings that would have shined a brighter light, for longer, on the reality that many at the network are not True Believers. That, just like any failure to toe Trump’s line back in 2020, posed a risk to market share. It surely could be damaging to Fox News for their viewers to learn the network’s biggest star hates the Republican Party’s standard-bearer but pretends the opposite while on-air for their viewing pleasure. As we laid out last week, $787 million is not a hugely destructive figure in the grand scheme of Fox's business, but the settlement is a black eye for the company that they’re hoping to keep mostly obscured from their customers. Granted, Carlson’s departure may get some Fox superfans asking questions they mightn’t have otherwise.
Carlson did take on some of Trump’s more useful rhetoric around American workers who’ve been left behind by ruthless corporate behavior and a government too often in thrall to the same interests. (He illustrated this part of his new persona well in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro, who remains a more traditional servant to the American money power.) But like Trump’s shtick, it was all a show. When it comes down to it, nobody said it better than a Dutch historian whom Carlson invited on in 2019 to rail against the (deservedly railed-against) congregants at Davos only to refuse to air the interview when he got owned too hard: “What the Murdoch family basically want you to do is to scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance,” Walker Bregman told him, adding he’s also worked for Koch Brothers-funded institutions. “It works by you taking their dirty money, it's as simple as that. You are a millionaire funded by billionaires, that's what you are.”
This overgrown frat sophomore should have been fired the morning after he declared that immigrants make the United States “poor and dirtier.” But that would have been impossible: he was selling the exact product Fox News had positioned itself to sell, and he was their best salesman.
by Jack Holmes, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Jason Koerner/Getty Images
[ed. Haha. Seems like the term schadenfruede might apply here. But, as the article suggests, this could be a net positive if it's a springboard for higher office (and why wouldn't it be... voters seem to love electing lying assholes these days). He's gotten used to living the good life, can't see him giving it up now. See also: this better than usual commentary by Bret Stephens: The Tragedy of Fox News (NYT):]
So am I gleeful? Not at all.
Part of it is the thought that, whatever Carlson does next, it will probably be even more unhinged and toxic than his previous incarnation: This is a guy whose career arc has moved from William F. Buckley wannabe to Bill O’Reilly wannabe to soon, I expect, Father Coughlin wannabe. Nobody should rule out the possibility of his going into politics, either as Donald Trump’s running mate or as the Republican Party’s compromise candidate between Trump and Ron DeSantis.
But there’s also the sense of what Fox might have become. Murdoch had an opportunity to build something the country genuinely needed in the mid-1990s, when the G.O.P. was moving away from the optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush toward the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay: an effective center-right counterbalance to the overwhelmingly liberal tilt (as conservatives usually see it) of most major news media.
In other words, instead of trying to surf a killer wave, Murdoch could have purchased a ship and steered it. It might not have had the ratings that Fox would get — though Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan.
Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism: the idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.
[ed. Haha. Seems like the term schadenfruede might apply here. But, as the article suggests, this could be a net positive if it's a springboard for higher office (and why wouldn't it be... voters seem to love electing lying assholes these days). He's gotten used to living the good life, can't see him giving it up now. See also: this better than usual commentary by Bret Stephens: The Tragedy of Fox News (NYT):]
So am I gleeful? Not at all.
Part of it is the thought that, whatever Carlson does next, it will probably be even more unhinged and toxic than his previous incarnation: This is a guy whose career arc has moved from William F. Buckley wannabe to Bill O’Reilly wannabe to soon, I expect, Father Coughlin wannabe. Nobody should rule out the possibility of his going into politics, either as Donald Trump’s running mate or as the Republican Party’s compromise candidate between Trump and Ron DeSantis.
But there’s also the sense of what Fox might have become. Murdoch had an opportunity to build something the country genuinely needed in the mid-1990s, when the G.O.P. was moving away from the optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush toward the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay: an effective center-right counterbalance to the overwhelmingly liberal tilt (as conservatives usually see it) of most major news media.
In other words, instead of trying to surf a killer wave, Murdoch could have purchased a ship and steered it. It might not have had the ratings that Fox would get — though Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan.
Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism: the idea that immigrants are an asset, not a liability; that the freedoms of speech and conscience must extend to those whose ideas we loathe; that American power ought to be harnessed to protect the world’s democracies from aggressive dictators; that we are richer at home by freely trading goods abroad; that nothing is more sacred than democracy and the rule of law; that patriotism is about preserving the capacity to criticize a country we love while loving the country we criticize.
This kind of channel will be more desperately needed in the future, as the unhinged populism unleashed by Murdoch sweeps everything in its path, from “establishment” Republicans to, quite possibly, Fox itself. The shame of Rupert Murdoch is that he wasn’t the man to do it. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
This Bud's For You
How Weed Strains Get Their (Amusing, Provocative, Downright Wacky) Names
I grew up smoking cannabis—or “pot,” as I called it until about 20 minutes ago—crouching in a fetid little nook between a dumpster and a stack of tires at the neighborhood Texaco station, a place that already smelled like shit and where a few puffs of smoke and a little coughing wouldn’t catch anyone’s attention.
If, like me, you came of age before legalization, you will recall one thing about procuring weed back in the day: You didn’t have a lot of choices. In fact, you had one: nickel bag or a dime bag. You couldn’t specify indica or sativa, flower or edible, tincture or rosin or vape. You couldn’t select your THC content. You couldn’t choose between OG Kush or Bombay Crush, between Cheese Dog and Chem Dawg, between Grape Ape and Gorilla Glue. No. You got whatever Danny’s older brother sold you. And you were stoked.
But that was then and this is now, and the cannabis space has entered a fascinating, fast-flowing moment where legalization—which begat commercialization, which begat corporatization, which begat commodification—has created today’s modern dispensary where the choices for consumers can be dizzying. As it turns out, there may be no better gauge of the changes rippling through cannabis culture than the humble menu at your local dispensary. Weed names have always added to the fun and intrigue (as a teen, even the relatively straightforward Thai Stick sounded entrancingly exotic), but today, as the power dynamic shifts from seller to buyer, and as growers and retailers find themselves strategizing to make their products stand out on increasingly crowded shelves, the names are taking on even more importance.
The names. Dear lord, the names. Strawberry Cough. Kosher Kush. Blueberry Mojito. Glueberry Slurm. Pineapple Trainwreck. Donkey Butter. Animal Face. Pink Panties. Purple Haze. Sour Joker. Sweet Jesus. Moby Dick. Fugu. Fatso.Tongue Kiss. Cat Piss.
Cat Piss?
Who comes up with this stuff … and how? Stoners trying to out-clever each other with inside stoner jokes about oblique stoner references? Advertising creatives at boutique firms working long hours in Stance socks? Gen Z focus groups run by blue-chip marketing firms with execs staring through one-way mirrors, scribbling notes?
The question of who names my weed has actually been banging around in my head since sometime late in 1978, when I was on the far side of 13 and my bar mitzvah money was burning a hole in my OP shorts. I’d managed to score a small bag of Maui Waui, and as a friend and I passed an anorexic doobie back and forth behind the Texaco tires, we ended up repeating the words Maui Waui Maui Waui—a name full of rhyme and promise—again and again until they became nothing more than strange sounds in our mouths. I never wondered about who grew my weed or even how it made its way to Danny’s older brother. I wondered who named it. Truth is, I still wonder about this every time I walk into a dispensary. And every time I walk out, small glass jar cupped in my hand.
I decided to find out. And what I learned from talking to folks up and down the weed chain—rock-star breeders and farmers, boutique retailers and publically traded cannabis corporations, a marketing exec who moved from Coca-Cola to cannabis—is not only who concocts these catchy names and how that concoction happens, but that legalization is quickly changing much about how naming will look in the future. “It’s a really complex time for naming,” one longtime farmer told me. That’s because as more people stream into the legalized market, the customer base is shape-shifting: We’re no longer talking about old hippies or young hip-hoppers but, well, everyone, from connoisseurs who focus on trichomes, terpenes, and terroir to juice-cleansed “I’ll have the tincture, please” wellness types to, well, my mom. There are no stats on hippie consumers, or on my mom, but in just the last four years, the percentage of women-buyers bumped from 38 to 49 percent. And with the average dispensary customer now dropping $52 a month, retailers are feverishly looking to fill their cases with more SKUs, which means more—and more eye-catching—names. As amusingly goofy as cannabis names often are, a lot of thought can go into selecting a name. (...)
I’m speaking with the man who gave the name “Outback” to Subaru, the name “Pentium” to Intel’s processor, the man who named the Swiffer, the Blackberry, the Impossible Burger, not to mention Dasani, Sonos, and Febreze. His name is David Placek, and David Placek and I are talking about weed. Specifically, we’re talking about the names given to cannabis strains and whether Placek, whose Sausalito-based Lexicon Branding has notched some 3,600 consumer product names, thinks the most popular strain names have a winning ring to them. If corporate America ever comes hard for cannabis names, Placek’s insights would likely filter onto dispensary labels.
If, like me, you came of age before legalization, you will recall one thing about procuring weed back in the day: You didn’t have a lot of choices. In fact, you had one: nickel bag or a dime bag. You couldn’t specify indica or sativa, flower or edible, tincture or rosin or vape. You couldn’t select your THC content. You couldn’t choose between OG Kush or Bombay Crush, between Cheese Dog and Chem Dawg, between Grape Ape and Gorilla Glue. No. You got whatever Danny’s older brother sold you. And you were stoked.
The names. Dear lord, the names. Strawberry Cough. Kosher Kush. Blueberry Mojito. Glueberry Slurm. Pineapple Trainwreck. Donkey Butter. Animal Face. Pink Panties. Purple Haze. Sour Joker. Sweet Jesus. Moby Dick. Fugu. Fatso.Tongue Kiss. Cat Piss.
Cat Piss?
Who comes up with this stuff … and how? Stoners trying to out-clever each other with inside stoner jokes about oblique stoner references? Advertising creatives at boutique firms working long hours in Stance socks? Gen Z focus groups run by blue-chip marketing firms with execs staring through one-way mirrors, scribbling notes?
The question of who names my weed has actually been banging around in my head since sometime late in 1978, when I was on the far side of 13 and my bar mitzvah money was burning a hole in my OP shorts. I’d managed to score a small bag of Maui Waui, and as a friend and I passed an anorexic doobie back and forth behind the Texaco tires, we ended up repeating the words Maui Waui Maui Waui—a name full of rhyme and promise—again and again until they became nothing more than strange sounds in our mouths. I never wondered about who grew my weed or even how it made its way to Danny’s older brother. I wondered who named it. Truth is, I still wonder about this every time I walk into a dispensary. And every time I walk out, small glass jar cupped in my hand.
I decided to find out. And what I learned from talking to folks up and down the weed chain—rock-star breeders and farmers, boutique retailers and publically traded cannabis corporations, a marketing exec who moved from Coca-Cola to cannabis—is not only who concocts these catchy names and how that concoction happens, but that legalization is quickly changing much about how naming will look in the future. “It’s a really complex time for naming,” one longtime farmer told me. That’s because as more people stream into the legalized market, the customer base is shape-shifting: We’re no longer talking about old hippies or young hip-hoppers but, well, everyone, from connoisseurs who focus on trichomes, terpenes, and terroir to juice-cleansed “I’ll have the tincture, please” wellness types to, well, my mom. There are no stats on hippie consumers, or on my mom, but in just the last four years, the percentage of women-buyers bumped from 38 to 49 percent. And with the average dispensary customer now dropping $52 a month, retailers are feverishly looking to fill their cases with more SKUs, which means more—and more eye-catching—names. As amusingly goofy as cannabis names often are, a lot of thought can go into selecting a name. (...)
I’m speaking with the man who gave the name “Outback” to Subaru, the name “Pentium” to Intel’s processor, the man who named the Swiffer, the Blackberry, the Impossible Burger, not to mention Dasani, Sonos, and Febreze. His name is David Placek, and David Placek and I are talking about weed. Specifically, we’re talking about the names given to cannabis strains and whether Placek, whose Sausalito-based Lexicon Branding has notched some 3,600 consumer product names, thinks the most popular strain names have a winning ring to them. If corporate America ever comes hard for cannabis names, Placek’s insights would likely filter onto dispensary labels.
by Bill Shapiro, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Humboldt Seed Company’s Nutter Budder strain, sold by Burr’s Place/Kandid Kush
Tulsa Time
Something interesting is happening in Tulsa
This past weekend, I went on what was essentially a Birthright Trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My plane flight, accommodations, and food were all paid for with the explicit intention of convincing me, as a Jewish person, to move to Tulsa. This was an odd, fascinating experience, and I’m breaking my usual convention of not writing about my personal life because I think it’s interesting to share.
When I signed up for this trip, I had zero background for it. I saw a Facebook ad advertising free trips to Tulsa for young Jews and signed up because that seemed like an interesting thing to do. Even when I got to Tulsa, I still had very little context as to why I was there. I had to piece it together over the course of the weekend. To save you from the same detective work, I’ll just present it here.
Tulsa is in a weird spot. It’s a little over 100 years old, and has always been a frontier town. Its fortunes have waxed and waned with the oil and gas industry, which alternately produces millionaires, billionaires, and bankruptcies. The town itself was basically stolen from the Indians a bit over a hundred years ago, laid out on a grid, and then developed in fits and spurts as city tax revenues swelled and declined with its main industry. This means that Tulsa has some beautiful art deco buildings, a strange layout including massive parking lots in the middle of downtown and full on suburbs 5 minutes from the city center, and a still unsettled sense of place.
In the 80s and 90s, Tulsa experienced a decline. It got gross and dangerous. Starting in the late 90s, George Kaiser, a local billionaire (oil and gas, naturally, and then banking), decided to do something about it. He established the George Kaiser Family Foundation and then the Tulsa Community Foundation to house the assets of it. The Tulsa Community Foundation, with GKKF’s assets, rapidly grew into the second largest community foundation in the nation, behind only the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It has over $4 billion in assets, and is almost completely unaccountable to anyone except the people who donate to it (namely, Tulsan billionaires). Because of its structure, it doesn’t even have the normal nonprofit requirements of donating 5% of its assets every year.
So, the single largest force in Tulsan civic life is an opaque, unaccountable community foundation funded mostly by George Kaiser and partially by Lynn Schusterman, who are two elderly Jewish billionaires. And what’s really weird is that this is happening in an otherwise normal, Bible Belt city of 1 million people (and a Jewish population of roughly 2000) with a median household income of $60k. Compare this to Silicon Valley, which has a median household income of $140k and no shortage of billionaires, and you’ll understand the Tulsa Community Foundation’s outsized impact.
By all reports, this has been a very positive relationship. The Tulsa Community Foundation (or, more specifically, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and, to a lesser extent, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, as TCF is just a house for these family foundations) have spent enormous amounts of money trying to make Tulsa a better place to live. They’ve built multiple beautiful parks (including one incredible one called the Gathering Place), a children’s museum, revitalized downtown, launched scores of programs to improve the lives of Tulsa’s underprivileged children, created Tulsa Remote (which offers $10k and relocation assistance for any remote worker to move to Tulsa for one year), and funded a bunch of different business assistance programs. And all of this is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know about.
The tide that George Kaiser is beating back is, of course, Tulsa’s natural decay as a midwest, Bible Belt city. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, every young person who could afford to leave Tulsa did so. This included Tulsa’s Jewish population, which declined from about 5000 in the 90s to less than half that number today.
And that’s where my weekend comes in. I visited Tulsa through Tulsa Tomorrow, a program that flies out young Jews to Tulsa for a weekend to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own numbers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70-80 have moved.
Tulsa Tomorrow is partially funded by George Kaiser, but it’s mostly funded by the rest of Tulsa’s Jewish community, with the majority coming from a local family who made their fortune as a fabric distributor. The scion of that family, Dave, was, not coincidentally, one of our main hosts for the weekend.
The pitch that Dave and his fellow Tulsan Jews made to us was simple. In Tulsa, your dreams can come true.
Of course, they didn’t pitch it quite like that. Instead, they put it something like this: Tulsa itself has a few natural advantages. It has cheap housing (e.g. $350k for a 4 bed, 2 bathroom house 5 minutes from downtown), mostly warm weather in the winters, and zero traffic. Also, recently, Tulsa itself has become a cute, fun city, thanks in large part to the largesse of George Kaiser. Over the course of our visit, we were shown museums, a Tiki bar, a hip brunch place, and a dueling piano bar. We were also told that we had just missed a Journey concert, and that Lizzo was coming to Tulsa shortly on her tour.
But that’s why to come to Tulsa more generally. More importantly, they wanted to pitch us on why to come to Tulsa as a Jew. Their argument here was basically that the Tulsan Jewish community is insanely well-resourced and organized. If you move here, they can pretty much guarantee you a nice job at a Jewish nonprofit and a social event every week at least. That’s not to mention all the social clubs and volunteer opportunities that are available through those nonprofits.
Meanwhile, if your ambitions stretch farther than that, that can also be accommodated. Over the course of the weekend, I heard from a bunch of people who had taken advantage of just that.
When I signed up for this trip, I had zero background for it. I saw a Facebook ad advertising free trips to Tulsa for young Jews and signed up because that seemed like an interesting thing to do. Even when I got to Tulsa, I still had very little context as to why I was there. I had to piece it together over the course of the weekend. To save you from the same detective work, I’ll just present it here.
Tulsa is in a weird spot. It’s a little over 100 years old, and has always been a frontier town. Its fortunes have waxed and waned with the oil and gas industry, which alternately produces millionaires, billionaires, and bankruptcies. The town itself was basically stolen from the Indians a bit over a hundred years ago, laid out on a grid, and then developed in fits and spurts as city tax revenues swelled and declined with its main industry. This means that Tulsa has some beautiful art deco buildings, a strange layout including massive parking lots in the middle of downtown and full on suburbs 5 minutes from the city center, and a still unsettled sense of place.
So, the single largest force in Tulsan civic life is an opaque, unaccountable community foundation funded mostly by George Kaiser and partially by Lynn Schusterman, who are two elderly Jewish billionaires. And what’s really weird is that this is happening in an otherwise normal, Bible Belt city of 1 million people (and a Jewish population of roughly 2000) with a median household income of $60k. Compare this to Silicon Valley, which has a median household income of $140k and no shortage of billionaires, and you’ll understand the Tulsa Community Foundation’s outsized impact.
By all reports, this has been a very positive relationship. The Tulsa Community Foundation (or, more specifically, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and, to a lesser extent, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, as TCF is just a house for these family foundations) have spent enormous amounts of money trying to make Tulsa a better place to live. They’ve built multiple beautiful parks (including one incredible one called the Gathering Place), a children’s museum, revitalized downtown, launched scores of programs to improve the lives of Tulsa’s underprivileged children, created Tulsa Remote (which offers $10k and relocation assistance for any remote worker to move to Tulsa for one year), and funded a bunch of different business assistance programs. And all of this is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know about.
The tide that George Kaiser is beating back is, of course, Tulsa’s natural decay as a midwest, Bible Belt city. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, every young person who could afford to leave Tulsa did so. This included Tulsa’s Jewish population, which declined from about 5000 in the 90s to less than half that number today.
And that’s where my weekend comes in. I visited Tulsa through Tulsa Tomorrow, a program that flies out young Jews to Tulsa for a weekend to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own numbers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70-80 have moved.
Tulsa Tomorrow is partially funded by George Kaiser, but it’s mostly funded by the rest of Tulsa’s Jewish community, with the majority coming from a local family who made their fortune as a fabric distributor. The scion of that family, Dave, was, not coincidentally, one of our main hosts for the weekend.
The pitch that Dave and his fellow Tulsan Jews made to us was simple. In Tulsa, your dreams can come true.
Of course, they didn’t pitch it quite like that. Instead, they put it something like this: Tulsa itself has a few natural advantages. It has cheap housing (e.g. $350k for a 4 bed, 2 bathroom house 5 minutes from downtown), mostly warm weather in the winters, and zero traffic. Also, recently, Tulsa itself has become a cute, fun city, thanks in large part to the largesse of George Kaiser. Over the course of our visit, we were shown museums, a Tiki bar, a hip brunch place, and a dueling piano bar. We were also told that we had just missed a Journey concert, and that Lizzo was coming to Tulsa shortly on her tour.
But that’s why to come to Tulsa more generally. More importantly, they wanted to pitch us on why to come to Tulsa as a Jew. Their argument here was basically that the Tulsan Jewish community is insanely well-resourced and organized. If you move here, they can pretty much guarantee you a nice job at a Jewish nonprofit and a social event every week at least. That’s not to mention all the social clubs and volunteer opportunities that are available through those nonprofits.
Meanwhile, if your ambitions stretch farther than that, that can also be accommodated. Over the course of the weekend, I heard from a bunch of people who had taken advantage of just that.
by Trevor Klee, Trevor Klee's Newsletter | Read more:
Image: Playground section of the Gathering Place/uncredited[ed. I hear stories about political relocations (eg. conservatives moving to northern Idaho and eastern Oregon; liberals to blue states/cities) and wonder if this type of targeting might increase, beyond the traditional approach of focusing on specific business sectors - tech, manufacturing, retail, etc.? Or one-off deal?]
Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down
Eliezer Yudkowsky is a decision theorist from the U.S. and leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.
An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin.
I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.
The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die (ed. emphasis added). Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.
Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.
Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” (...)
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
by Eliezer Yudowsky, Time | Read more:
Also this:
An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin.
I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.
Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die (ed. emphasis added). Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.
Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.
Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” (...)
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
by Eliezer Yudowsky, Time | Read more:
Image: Lon Tweeten
[ed. AI Alignment goes mainstream. See also: Artificial intelligence 'godfather' on AI possibly wiping out humanity: ‘It's not inconceivable’ (Fox):]
"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI. And now I think it may be 20 years or less," Hinton predicted. Asked specifically the chances of AI "wiping out humanity," Hinton said, "I think it's not inconceivable. That's all I'll say."
[ed. AI Alignment goes mainstream. See also: Artificial intelligence 'godfather' on AI possibly wiping out humanity: ‘It's not inconceivable’ (Fox):]
"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general purpose AI. And now I think it may be 20 years or less," Hinton predicted. Asked specifically the chances of AI "wiping out humanity," Hinton said, "I think it's not inconceivable. That's all I'll say."
Also this:
I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible. I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to. Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along. (Jackson Greathouse Fall, Twitter thread).
Pear Ring
The social experiment that wants to end dating apps
News outlets are beating the drums about the Pear Ring, dubbed the world's biggest social experiment. Millions of people have reportedly joined this experiment that wants to end the culture of dating apps. But what is the Pear Ring, who should get one, and what are the likely outcomes of wearing it? Here are some answers.
According to its website, The Pear Ring is the opposite of engagement rings. Wearing one signals to others that an individual is single and looking to strike up a relationship. The website also claims that this is a real-life social experiment live in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Canada, and Australia and will be launched in other countries soon.
Why does one need a Pear Ring?
Dating apps have been the more accessible option for many individuals who find it hard to strike up conversations as the algorithms have been doing the hard work of matching people up. However, the chances of finding the right person have been low, even with the technology. Instead, the apps have further increased the likelihood of experiencing social anxiety and compounded the risks of having eating disorders among users, studies have shown.
The Pear Ring experiment attempts to move people away from the apps and help them make real-life connections. By wearing the green-colored ring, an individual makes known their availability for dating in the real world, increasing their chances of being hit up at the gym, bar, train, restaurant, wedding, or almost anywhere where more humans are around. (...)
With millions of rings already sold, one could argue that the ring is simply the insertion of consumerism in an activity that would have happened anyway. Moreover, wearing the ring gives others more authority to approach the person than empowering the wearer themselves.
by Ameya Paleja, Interesting Engineering | Read more:
According to its website, The Pear Ring is the opposite of engagement rings. Wearing one signals to others that an individual is single and looking to strike up a relationship. The website also claims that this is a real-life social experiment live in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Canada, and Australia and will be launched in other countries soon.
Why does one need a Pear Ring?
The Pear Ring experiment attempts to move people away from the apps and help them make real-life connections. By wearing the green-colored ring, an individual makes known their availability for dating in the real world, increasing their chances of being hit up at the gym, bar, train, restaurant, wedding, or almost anywhere where more humans are around. (...)
With millions of rings already sold, one could argue that the ring is simply the insertion of consumerism in an activity that would have happened anyway. Moreover, wearing the ring gives others more authority to approach the person than empowering the wearer themselves.
by Ameya Paleja, Interesting Engineering | Read more:
Image: Pear Ring
[ed. Pear-ring= pairing. Low tech.]
Sunday, April 23, 2023
Jimmy Giuffrè
How Saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre Taught Me Organizational Theory (Honest Broker)
[ed. Wow. Next level.]
Sinclair Broadcast Group
[ed. Sinclair Broadcast Group (Wikipedia), what an operation. Extremely dangerous to our democracy. Read the Wikipedia entry to get a full sense of how broad and deeply embeded this media corporation's tentacles are. See also: Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO).]
2008-2018: Seattle’s Transformative Decade
Between 2008 and 2017, Seattle added more than 100,000 people. For a Sun Belt metropolis, this is an average pace. For Seattle, with fewer than 84 square miles, the growth was staggering.
Comparisons can be found only in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. In the former, Seattle almost doubled in population. Between 1900 and 1910, it grew from about 80,600, to more than 237,000.
The past decade also saw Seattle and the Puget Sound region solidify its place as one of the most economically potent spots in North America, with headquarters of two of the five Big Tech giants and a varied set of other assets. A diverse world city facing Asia for the Asian Century.
To be sure, not everyone is happy about it. This transformative period also saw housing grow more expensive, and traffic increase. The number of people panhandling on city streets or living in makeshift camps also increased. Collegial “Seattle nice” politics was replaced by a hard-left City Council where crowds of “activists” sometimes shout down other-thinking people who try to speak. A scandal forced out the mayor.
Longtime resident Connie De Roy says, “I have lived in Seattle for 63 years and have renounced this city as the home of my heart, even though I still live here. It’s a different place. I loved the Seattle I grew up in. It was a fun and special place back then.”
By most measures, it still is — this is one reason people keep moving here. But it’s much changed from 10 years ago. (...)
For such a fortunate place, the city overflows with new crises: the housing affordability crisis, inequality crisis, drug-abuse crisis, police-brutality crisis and homeless crisis.
All these are concerns, but the overuse of “crisis” makes it difficult to evaluate the severity of each, the national context, its particular effect in Seattle and constructive measures available. Or even to get our bearings.
The overheated environment is a direct result of a revolution in city politics. We’ve come a long way from stolid Mayor Greg Nickels, a center-liberal council and the famously slow “Seattle process.”
The decade saw a hard-left swing on City Council, backed by protests and large contingents of activists attending municipal meetings. A Socialist Alternative candidate, Kshama Sawant, was elected in 2013. Outrage became a dominant theme.
How this came about should intrigue historians and political scientists for decades. (...)
Decades of arbitrary measurements. Yet the 10 years from 2008 to 2018 transformed Seattle and the nation. One question is how much they set a trajectory for the future, too. (...)
Even if Democrats gain the gerrymandered Congress this year and Trump loses the White House in 2020, precious time has been lost in combating human-caused climate change. Seattle weather is already turned screwy. Valuable fisheries are at risk. Climate refugees from the Southwest could make the population growth of the past decade look like a trickle.
Do the changes seen over this past turbulent decade give us a preview of what’s to come?
Some are undoubtedly turning points here to stay — a larger, denser city; the primacy of the knowledge economy; and more conflict in politics, among them.
Comparisons can be found only in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. In the former, Seattle almost doubled in population. Between 1900 and 1910, it grew from about 80,600, to more than 237,000.
The past decade also saw Seattle and the Puget Sound region solidify its place as one of the most economically potent spots in North America, with headquarters of two of the five Big Tech giants and a varied set of other assets. A diverse world city facing Asia for the Asian Century.
Longtime resident Connie De Roy says, “I have lived in Seattle for 63 years and have renounced this city as the home of my heart, even though I still live here. It’s a different place. I loved the Seattle I grew up in. It was a fun and special place back then.”
By most measures, it still is — this is one reason people keep moving here. But it’s much changed from 10 years ago. (...)
For such a fortunate place, the city overflows with new crises: the housing affordability crisis, inequality crisis, drug-abuse crisis, police-brutality crisis and homeless crisis.
All these are concerns, but the overuse of “crisis” makes it difficult to evaluate the severity of each, the national context, its particular effect in Seattle and constructive measures available. Or even to get our bearings.
The overheated environment is a direct result of a revolution in city politics. We’ve come a long way from stolid Mayor Greg Nickels, a center-liberal council and the famously slow “Seattle process.”
The decade saw a hard-left swing on City Council, backed by protests and large contingents of activists attending municipal meetings. A Socialist Alternative candidate, Kshama Sawant, was elected in 2013. Outrage became a dominant theme.
How this came about should intrigue historians and political scientists for decades. (...)
Decades of arbitrary measurements. Yet the 10 years from 2008 to 2018 transformed Seattle and the nation. One question is how much they set a trajectory for the future, too. (...)
Even if Democrats gain the gerrymandered Congress this year and Trump loses the White House in 2020, precious time has been lost in combating human-caused climate change. Seattle weather is already turned screwy. Valuable fisheries are at risk. Climate refugees from the Southwest could make the population growth of the past decade look like a trickle.
Do the changes seen over this past turbulent decade give us a preview of what’s to come?
Some are undoubtedly turning points here to stay — a larger, denser city; the primacy of the knowledge economy; and more conflict in politics, among them.
by Jon Talton, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: David Miller/The Seattle Times
[ed. The traffic and parking headaches, oy...]
[ed. The traffic and parking headaches, oy...]
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra—his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on—and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism—a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.
Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.
Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.
For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people—his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five—which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done. (...)
The two blondes, who seemed to be in their middle thirties, were preened and polished, their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits. They sat, legs crossed, perched on the high bar stools. They listened to the music. Then one of them pulled out a Kent and Sinatra quickly placed his gold lighter under it and she held his hand, looked at his fingers: they were nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles. He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week. The most distinguishing thing about Sinatra's face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as now, reflect a vague detachment that keeps his friends silent and distant. (...)
Now Sinatra said a few words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra's other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra.
The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers.
It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.
Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.
Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.
"Hey," he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. "Those Italian boots?"
"No," Ellison said.
"Spanish?"
"No."
"Are they English boots?"
"Look, I donno, man," Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.
Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra's shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: "You expecting a storm?"
Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. "Look, is there any reason why you're talking to me?"
"I don't like the way you're dressed," Sinatra said.
"Hate to shake you up," Ellison said, "but I dress to suit myself."
Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, "Com'on, Harlan, let's get out of here," and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, "Yeah, com'on."
But Ellison stood his ground.
Sinatra said, "What do you do?"
"I'm a plumber," Ellison said.
"No, no, he's not," another young man quickly yelled from across the table. "He wrote The Oscar."
"Oh, yeah," Sinatra said, "well I've seen it, and it's a piece of crap."
"That's strange," Ellison said, "because they haven't even released it yet."
"Well, I've seen it," Sinatra repeated, "and it's a piece of crap."
Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, "Com'on, kid, I don't want you in this room."
"Hey," Sinatra interrupted Dexter, "can't you see I'm talking to this guy?"
Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, "Why do you persist in tormenting me?"
The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it—and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.
Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.
For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people—his own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five—which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. In an age when the very young seem to be taking over, protesting and picketing and demanding change, Frank Sinatra survives as a national phenomenon, one of the few prewar products to withstand the test of time. He is the champ who made the big comeback, the man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do: he uprooted his life, left his family, broke with everything that was familiar, learning in the process that one way to hold a woman is not to hold her. Now he has the affection of Nancy and Ava and Mia, the fine female produce of three generations, and still has the adoration of his children, the freedom of a bachelor, he does not feel old, he makes old men feel young, makes them think that if Frank Sinatra can do it, it can be done; not that they could do it, but it is still nice for other men to know, at fifty, that it can be done. (...)
The two blondes, who seemed to be in their middle thirties, were preened and polished, their matured bodies softly molded within tight dark suits. They sat, legs crossed, perched on the high bar stools. They listened to the music. Then one of them pulled out a Kent and Sinatra quickly placed his gold lighter under it and she held his hand, looked at his fingers: they were nubby and raw, and the pinkies protruded, being so stiff from arthritis that he could barely bend them. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles. He also wore, as everybody seemed to know, a remarkably convincing black hairpiece, one of sixty that he owns, most of them under the care of an inconspicuous little grey-haired lady who, holding his hair in a tiny satchel, follows him around whenever he performs. She earns $400 a week. The most distinguishing thing about Sinatra's face are his eyes, clear blue and alert, eyes that within seconds can go cold with anger, or glow with affection, or, as now, reflect a vague detachment that keeps his friends silent and distant. (...)
Now Sinatra said a few words to the blondes. Then he turned from the bar and began to walk toward the poolroom. One of Sinatra's other men friends moved in to keep the girls company. Brad Dexter, who had been standing in the corner talking to some other people, now followed Sinatra.
The room cracked with the clack of billiard balls. There were about a dozen spectators in the room, most of them young men who were watching Leo Durocher shoot against two other aspiring hustlers who were not very good. This private drinking club has among its membership many actors, directors, writers, models, nearly all of them a good deal younger than Sinatra or Durocher and much more casual in the way they dress for the evening. Many of the young women, their long hair flowing loosely below their shoulders, wore tight, fanny-fitting Jax pants and very expensive sweaters; and a few of the young men wore blue or green velour shirts with high collars and narrow tight pants, and Italian loafers.
It was obvious from the way Sinatra looked at these people in the poolroom that they were not his style, but he leaned back against a high stool that was against the wall, holding his drink in his right hand, and said nothing, just watched Durocher slam the billiard balls back and forth. The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.
Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.
Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.
"Hey," he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. "Those Italian boots?"
"No," Ellison said.
"Spanish?"
"No."
"Are they English boots?"
"Look, I donno, man," Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.
Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra's shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: "You expecting a storm?"
Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. "Look, is there any reason why you're talking to me?"
"I don't like the way you're dressed," Sinatra said.
"Hate to shake you up," Ellison said, "but I dress to suit myself."
Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, "Com'on, Harlan, let's get out of here," and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, "Yeah, com'on."
But Ellison stood his ground.
Sinatra said, "What do you do?"
"I'm a plumber," Ellison said.
"No, no, he's not," another young man quickly yelled from across the table. "He wrote The Oscar."
"Oh, yeah," Sinatra said, "well I've seen it, and it's a piece of crap."
"That's strange," Ellison said, "because they haven't even released it yet."
"Well, I've seen it," Sinatra repeated, "and it's a piece of crap."
Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, "Com'on, kid, I don't want you in this room."
"Hey," Sinatra interrupted Dexter, "can't you see I'm talking to this guy?"
Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, "Why do you persist in tormenting me?"
The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it—and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.
by Gay Talese, Esquire | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, April 21, 2023
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