André 3000

Here’s how a photoshoot with a global celebrity typically goes. The star, aka “the talent,” arrives accompanied by a team — basically a military assault unit of publicist, manager, personal assistant or two, personal stylist or two (plus their assistants), and then various hangers-on who each carry two iPhones for no good reason. The unit is carried to the shoot’s location in black SUVs driven by men with earpieces. The group proceeds to an air-conditioned motorhome hired for the occasion, and it’s here that the talent spends their time between photographs looking at their phone(s) while the rest of the team finds reasons to complain about something on-set not being quite right. A friend of mine directs Super Bowl commercials; he told me the best “talent” he ever worked with was Lil Wayne — extremely professional, extremely punctual, where the only complication was a request for a small skate park to be constructed next to his trailer.

What the global celebrity never does is arrive alone with a dozen instruments and spend the day wandering the shoot location playing flute.

***

On this afternoon, André 3000, one of the most singular and best-dressed musicians of all time, is only days away from releasing New Blue Sun, a solo album of flute music — flutes being so much his thing at the moment, he’s brought one to Gjelina, one of Venice’s more hyped restaurants, where we are having lunch. It is carved from dark wood, the length of his arm, ancient-looking. Only a couple minutes later, he starts playing a string of soft notes, in the manner of a breathy bird. Soon, diners’ heads are swiveling to locate the sound, maybe to see if Pan, the Greek god of shepherds, has joined us for upscale pizza. This is probably obvious, but no one else in the restaurant is playing flute over their upscale pizza.

André has on what he describes as his daily uniform: vintage overalls, a beanie, and clean Nikes. His sunglasses are brown, lightly tinted. Under his overalls, he wears a long-sleeved camouflage shirt. “I have 40 of these shirts. I wake up in the morning and put the same thing on.” The look is duck hunter meets farmhand meets sneakerhead. Have you ever met someone and wanted to buy their look in entirety and throw it on right there? I ask if such a thing were possible. He explains he’s just gotten back from Amsterdam where he was developing a new brand of his own, of similar workwear, coming soon. (André had a line in the late aughts called Benjamin Bixby, with clothes that recalled early Ivy League prep.) “Whenever I’m on the street, at least for a month, whenever I see someone with overalls on, they’re going to get a free pair,” André says. “Because I know they’re overall lovers. It takes a certain person to wear overalls. They’re like grown-people baby clothes. They feel very comfortable — that’s why I love them.”

If anybody was comfortable in their own skin, it’s André 3000. Over the years, just going by style alone, André has dressed like a Gatsby dandy, a Scottish lord, and a streetwear prince. Recently he had been on the street a lot, playing the flute while wandering the globe — so much that a meme grew around it, like Bill Murray being spotted at frat parties, where somebody would take a picture of André playing flute in a coffee shop or in an airport security line. “I was in Philadelphia,” he says, “and someone came up to me. He was like, ‘You know, it’s a game now.’” A game asking not only where in the world was André 3000 these days, à la Where’s Waldo, but what the hell was this famous rapper doing walking around with a flute?

An hour earlier, driving to lunch and listening to an advance copy of New Blue Sun in my car, I’d been wondering the same thing. I hadn’t known what to expect; I didn’t have any context. (“No context?” André says, when I confess as much, and starts laughing. “No context? Wow.”) If anything, I expected a rap album because that’s what André 3000 was known for: being half of OutKast, the Atlanta duo, the legendary hip-hop group. I mean, I wondered if I’d been sent the wrong record. Just a few minutes into it, all shimmering cymbals and keyboard tones, then a warbling, digital flute, my mind was floundering, stretching hard for comparisons. Was this jazz or New Age? Was it what shamans played during ayahuasca ceremonies or what they piped into massage chambers at the Maui Four Seasons?

Were these songs or something else?

“I don’t even call them songs,” André says, smiling at my confusion. “They’re almost like formations, like you’re hearing something as it’s happening. It’s a living, breathing, sound exploration.”


He stares at me intently across the table, and I remember the first track’s title: “I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.” The sub-text suggests: Put aside your preconceived notions and listen closely, I’ll tell you exactly where I’m at.

So, I start to listen.

In 2003, André 3000 had the world at his feet. He and his OutKast partner, Big Boi, born Antwan André Patton, had produced four albums that defined a style — precise lyricism meets updated funk meets Afrofuturism meets avant-soul — and basically launched Southern hip-hop at a time when any rap that wasn’t from New York or Los Angeles was dismissed. And then, with their fifth album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, they created a global juggernaut: the best-selling rap album in history, a record that went 13 times platinum and won three Grammys in 2004 (Album of the Year, Best Rap Album, and Best Urban/Alternative Performance) on the back of two number-one singles, “Hey Ya!” and “The Way You Move,” which have been played at half the world’s weddings ever since.

At that Grammy Awards ceremony, André performed onstage in fluorescent green (buckskin leggings?), but he could’ve worn anything. He could’ve done anything.

What he did was basically disappear from the public eye, except for occasional moments when people posted snapshots of him on social media.

And now, 20 years later, he is back — with a woodwind album.

André 3000 doesn’t read music, he doesn’t know keys, he doesn’t know chords — but he knows what he’s doing. He was born André Lauren Benjamin in 1975, in Atlanta, Georgia. As a kid, he thought he’d become a visual artist. “And then I discovered rap videos.” He met Big Boi in high school. OutKast’s debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, came out in 1994 and went on to establish Atlanta as a viable alternative to the East Coast/West Coast rivalry — based partly on André’s extremely studied, meticulously composed verses. “I’m not a freestyle rapper, right?” he says. “I architecturally made those verses bar by bar.” (...)

André, over time, has resisted such calcification. After OutKast, he helped to produce and voice Class of 3000, an animated show for Cartoon Network. He’s acted in dozens of films and TV episodes, including the starring role in 2013’s Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side; a scene-stealing turn in French auteur Claire Denis’ 2018 sci-fi High Life; and a critically lauded part, alongside Michelle Williams, in 2022’s Showing Up. Still, there’s also been rapping: appearing on remixes, covering Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” with Beyoncé, and doing a guest verse for Drake. The point is, the longer we speak, it seems as though André’s part in OutKast is a figment of a former life.

His present life, at least until recently, hadn’t necessarily been easy. In 2019, André appeared on the podcast Broken Record with super-producer Rick Rubin and talked about being diagnosed as an adult with anxiety and hypersensitivity. “Any little thing I put out, it’s instantly attacked, not in a good or bad way. People nitpick it with a fine-tooth comb. ‘Oh, he said that word!’ And that’s not a great place to create from and it makes you draw back. Maybe I don’t have the confidence that I want, or the space to experiment like I used to.” But that was four years ago. And clearly, releasing his first solo album — no bars, all flute — hints that his confidence has been re-discovered. I suggest to André the new album points toward a new direction, particularly since it isn’t — different from his rap work — carefully planned or composed. “Freedom is happening,” he says. “We listened to each other. Sometimes the melodies you’re hearing, I was making them up on the spot or I was responding on the spot. That’s the value of this album, that it’s fully alive. It wasn’t planned.” If anything, he worried how the spontaneity would be received by listeners. “I’m scared. I don’t want to troll people. New André 3000 album coming out! And you play it — like, man, what the fuck? On the packaging, there’s a graphic that says ‘Warning: no bars.’ So it completely lets you know what you’re getting into before you get into it. I don’t want people to feel like I’m playing with them. That could ruin the whole thing.”

A moment later, he says, “It’s very intimate. With rap, with an OutKast song, people know the beat, and I can hide behind the beat. With this, you can’t hide behind anything.” (...)

So, where is André 3000 now, literally at this present moment? I mean, other song titles on the album suggest what he’s been up to during his time away from rap — “That Night In Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild,” or “The Slang Word P(*)ssy Rolls Off The Tongue With Far Better Ease Than The Proper Word Vagina . Do You Agree?” Maybe the more interesting question is what is André now? He’s a meme, he’s a man, he’s a musician. He’s a rapper, he’s a flautist, he’s a style star. I put it to him: Does he miss rapping? “I do,” he says. “I would love to make a rap album. I just think it’d be an awesome challenge to do a fire-ass album at 48 years old. That’s probably one of the hardest things to do! I would love to do that.” Maybe that’s what’s coming next, I offer. “Possibly! That’s the cool thing about my whole ride. It really is a ride.”

by Rosecrans Baldwin, Highsnobiety |  Read more:

Image: Djeneba Aduayom

[ed. New Blue Sun album in full here.]

via:

The Surprising Genius of Sewing Machines

[ed. I wasn't aware of Veritasium's channel until reading the Pueyo interview below. Check out his many great videos.]

More Pathfinding With Thomas Pueyo

Sotonye: On the future of the AI consumer market

Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about artificial intelligence. You’ve written comprehensively about the subject and present a compelling case about its dangers, the most compelling case I’ve read so far. I’ve been pretty interested in but still largely unconvinced by the perspectives of the most vocal opponents of strong general AI like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Geoffrey Hinton, but you’ve been able to bring a tempered clarity here that’s squared some circles around the matter for me. And so I’ve been wanting to ask something further:

Before we get AGI we’re likely to see more progress in the areas with the most commercial potential, but what this progress could and should look like is a hugely important but still unanswered question. What are your perspectives on the way the AI market will shape up in the near term? Will we see vertical integration with companies like OpenAi making fully AI powered phones? Or will sex bots become common? And what kind of products would you expect or like to see as a high-level creator?

Tomas:

I don't have fully formed opinions on the topic, so this might be a good time to think out loud.

It's not clear to me that there will be huge companies like Facebook or Google in AI.

These companies were the result of network effects, where the more users you had, the better the service became. This is true of all marketplaces, but I don't see it in AI. I see a big cost of entry to train the models, but it doesn't look like it's big enough to eliminate competition. There's already half a dozen competitors close to the cutting edge, with OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Meta... And odds are the training will get cheaper with better algorithms and training techniques. It also looks like Gemini Advanced is close to ChatGPT 4 in terms of performance, which suggests intelligence is an emerging quality of neural networks rather than something unique OpenAI did.

If you think about it, that makes sense. There are very few differences in our genetic code between other primates and humans. Odds our the differences are mostly just more layers of neurons, and maybe a few tweaks on how they work. But the basis is the same, so it looks like we live in a universe where intelligence is an emerging property of neural networks. I'm simplifying tremendously here, but all of this seems consistent.

If this is true, it will have lots of consequences we can foresee.

One is that we will reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) soon enough. Just looking at computing power, we should reach AGI in one to three decades.

It might be that we already have the necessary components, but we just didn't connect them properly. ChatGPT is extremely powerful, but it's just one module that takes words in and spits words out. It doesn't have modules for things like deciding its own goals or acting on them. So of course the intelligence it will show will appear limited! That's why I believe exploring AI agents is a heavily underestimated approach to reach AGI.

If it's true that AGI will be reached in our lifetimes, odds are the singularity will come around that time, and we'll get a superintellgence. We can't see beyond the singularity, so it's impossible to predict anything. But we can speculate what might happen afterwards, assuming the AGI is aligned and doesn't try to kill us all.

First, nothing else really matters.

The fertility issue? Solved by the singularity, since a superintelligence (let's call it ASI) can understand the problem (and solve it), design devices to make babies, educate them better than humans would do, build robots to take care of their needs...

Wars? Most of them are due to resource scarcity, but most of it disappears after ASI. Not enough food? Increase productivity. Not enough energy? Do nuclear fission or fusion or beam solar energy from space. Not enough raw materials? Mine them from space or transmute them.

Humans tend to focus on what mattered in the past, but that is becoming obsolete pretty fast.

Then there's the question of the interim. What will happen between now and ASI? I think productivity will explode, but it might not be seen in GDP data, because a lot of the explosion will be deflationary: Things that used to take lots of resources to make will suddenly take substantially less. In the short term, it will increase demand, but supply (productivity improvements) will be driven by AI while demand is mostly driven by human decisions, so odds are supply will outstrip demand and prices will shrink and industries will shrink.

The counterbalance will be that now it's much cheaper to create new companies and new markets, but those won't require as much resources to be built. We will see the first billionaire solopreneurs and many unemployed people. Of course, this means inequality will increase. But wealth will be geographically spread unlike in the past, and yet billionaires will be extremely mobile. The world has never seen this before. Odds are tax bases will crumble, there will be tax competition for these people, and they will be able to coordinate to influence politics in an advantageous way. I wonder if new city-states won't be built on the basis of catering to them.

Another thing that I assume will happen is that the fight for attention will increase several notches, so we will need AIs to buffer us. We already have AIs that protect us from spam. Soon, our personal AIs will filter the content we get exposed to, to only show what's most relevant. At the same time, we will be able to reach more people at a scale never seen before, so we will need filters for that. The cost of litigation might drop, so we might develop AIs that sue, countersue, and protect us from litigation without us even realizing it. Our AIs might crawl the Internet to learn about people we might be interested in meeting, contact them, or filter these contacts. In other words, the information overload will only be manageable with AI buffers between us and the world of information.

This is, assuming AIs can't build great robots. Odds are they will be able to, at which points humans won't be much different from AIs, and we'll get into a Blade Runner world where we won't know whether a person is human or robot. In such a world, most of our social needs will have an option to be solved by robots, and human experiences will just be a special version of that—special because it will remain scarce, not because it will be better.

An interesting analogy might be art. Up until the mid-1800s, paintings became more and more realistic. Then we invented photography, realism became completely devalued, and suddenly we have impressionism, cubism, and the like. A lot of their value is not as much the creativity, as the fact that a human did that art and not a machine. Something similar might happen with relationships, with the added complexity that impressionism might be creative, but odds are AIs will be more creative than humans.

Put in another way, we're entering a strange world.

Sotonye: On whether gains in business efficiency means a loss of creativity

So this is pretty huge. This has clarified a lot or the ambiguity over what AI “is” for me. If I’m understanding this the right way, the simplest way to think about AI is as a tool for adding gains to general efficiency. The past is a good leading indicator here and I think pretty much confirms this, we’ve seen the use-case of “dumb ai” follow this exact sort of efficiency promoting pattern. That pattern rarely gets mapped onto the future when we normally think about AI interestingly, maybe because current AI is so seamlessly diffused throughout the business process it’s sort of the air we breathe, no one sees it! But this future makes a lot of sense to me.

I’m wondering now about whether our future efficiency gains spell boon or bust for creative innovation and progress, and I’m trying to sort of reason about it through analogy: For example there’s a case to be made that the reason we get 1,000 Batman remakes everyday before sunrise and a new Apple tablet mini everyday after sunset may be less about a spiritual or other kind of Spenglerian decline, and more about businesses just working better, becoming extremely efficient. 90s Hollywood and 2000s Apple, without big efficient databases, may have left industry executives with only vague insight into the day to day of internal operations and finer details of outward markets, and product ideas may have been greenlit that would otherwise seem too risky. Does efficiency create a stagnant culture, or is Spengler right about a dearth of transcendent vision creating such conditions? I am seriously desperate for good new movies and I’m worried that the age of quality is behind us!

Tomas:

I fear your analogy might be misleading, and I'll tell you why in a moment. Instead, I would use the analogy of what you and I are doing now.

30 years ago, it would have been impossible, because creators like us were extremely rare. Why? Because bringing insights to the market had high production, transaction, and distribution costs.

To get distribution, you needed to physically print a paper and distribute it with vans, or emit a radio or TV signal. Since that's expensive, only a few did it, and they controlled the content.

The content itself was expensive too, because the production values required equipment and humans supporting the shows, or research and trips and phone calls from journalists and producers.

You needed agreements with payment processors, rev share agreements with different partners in the stack...

The result was that there was little content. Supply was lower than demand.

But now all these costs have been eliminated. Creating an article just takes one person's time with Substack. Creating a video takes one person's time with Tiktok or Youtube. And they can live off of that.

The result has been an explosion of supply. That's what reducing the marginal cost of production does.

With the explosion in supply, a few things have happened:

Now supply outstrips demand, and we're hitting a limiting factor that we had never hit before as a species: our attention. It's now precious. It's scarce. We have to be very cautious about how to use it, and this is not something we've evolved naturally to do.

When you create so much supply, the vast majority will be shit. But some will be amazing. It's the wild west, with lots of bad things happening but also gold rushes. In other words, the distribution of content quality will change, from something narrow but reasonably high quality, to a much broader distribution that includes lots of duds and a few pieces of gold. This is how you get people like Ben Thompson or Veritasium.

Social media fulfills a double function of crushing distribution costs but also as a filter for content quality

AI is going to follow this trend further. We are going to drown on supply, and most of it will be bad, but some of it will be exceptional.

This means we will need means to filter content quality. Social Media already fulfills that, but it's about to get attacked by this AI-generated content. Will we need other tools?

It also means we're about to enter a world full of weird content, where most of it is trash, but some of it will be the best content ever.

by Sotonye, Neo Narrative |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'm adding a bit more from Pathfinding With Tomas Pueyo: An Interview (below) because the topics covered were so wide-ranging.]

Miles Davis and the Recording of a Jazz Masterpiece

Amid the tobacco and reefer fumes and beer reek of that tiny, dark saloon (a glass of gin cost fifty cents; a pitcher of beer, a dollar), the members of the Crazy Couple Club of Manhasset might have found themselves sitting shoulder to shoulder with (though they almost certainly would have failed to recognize) such Five Spot habitués as the painters Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko; the writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara; and the young jazz titans Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans.

The Five Spot was closed on Mondays, but on that March Monday Davis, Coltrane, and Evans had other business anyway: in Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio, they were joining the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb to begin making, under Miles’s leadership, what would become the bestselling, and arguably most beloved, jazz album of all time, Miles’s Kind of Blue. March 2 and April 22: three tunes recorded on the first date (“So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” and “Blue in Green”), two on the second (“All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”). Every complete take but one (“Flamenco Sketches”) was a first take, the process similar, as Evans later wrote in the LP’s liner notes, to a genre of Japanese visual art in which black watercolor is applied spontaneously to a thin stretched parchment, with no unnatural or interrupted strokes possible, Miles’s cherished ideal of spontaneity achieved.

The quiet and enigmatic majesty of the resulting record both epitomizes jazz and transcends the genre. The album’s powerful and enduring mystique has made it widely beloved among musicians and music lovers of every category: jazz, rock, classical, rap. This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music—how they rose up in the world, came together like a chance collision of particles in deep space, produced a brilliant flash of light, and then went on their separate ways to jazz immortality.

No musician ever goes into a record date expecting to make history; every man in Miles’s band had recorded dozens of times before. “Professionals,” Bill Evans said, “have to go in at 10 o’clock on a Wednesday and make a record and hope to catch a really good day.” On the face of it, there was nothing remarkable about Project B 43079. (...)

Outside the 30th Street Studio, Manhattan was Manhattaning: rounded buses and big yellow cabs grinding up and down the avenues; car horns and scraps of radio music and pedestrians’ voices echoing in the deep-shadowed side streets. Outside, the everyday clamor and clash of a city afternoon in late-winter 1959; inside, the densest quiet as a passage outside of time proceeded: the recording of CO 62291, the number that would come to be titled “So What,” leading off the album soon to be known as Kind of Blue.

The first take began. There was a false start of four seconds, followed by an incomplete take of forty-nine seconds. Townsend interrupted from the booth: something was interfering with the song’s profound hush. “Hold it,” the producer said. “Sorry—listen, we gotta watch it because, ah, there’s noises all the way through this. This is so quiet to begin with, and every click—watch the snare too, we’re picking up some of the vibrations on it—”

Miles, ever on the lookout for meaningful accidentals, demurred. “Well, that goes with it,” he said. “All that goes with it.”

“All right,” Townsend allowed. “Not all the other noises, though . . .”

Another false start, seventeen seconds. An incomplete take, a minute eleven. A telephone rang in the control booth. Once quiet was restored, three more false starts, of sixteen, seven, and fifteen seconds.

Then, history. (...)

The full Take 3 was nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of musical transcendence. Miles’s solo, an impromptu composition in itself, would gain its own immortality: generations of musicians would memorize it note for note. Miles is talking to you in that solo, playing in the middle sonic range of the human voice, and he’s got all kinds of things to say, in brief and at length. He starts and stops; he starts again and goes on. And we’re freshly astonished at how very much he can express, in so few notes, in the moment.

The richness each of the soloists was able to create improvising over just two chords, D and E♭ Dorian, vindicates Miles’s modal concept. Coltrane was in exploratory rather than loud and fast form, traveling up and down each scale to find astringent delights. Cannonball was no less seeking, but lush toned as always, and unable not to find melodies and tuneful fillips, even in this minimalist frame. And Evans’s solo was perhaps most in sync with the tune’s hushed simplicity: playing quiet arpeggios and complex chords a little shyly at first, but then growing more assertive—and surprising: “I’m thinking of the end of Bill’s solo on ‘So What,’” Herbie Hancock told the writer Ashley Kahn. “He plays these phrases, a second apart. He plays seconds.” Still filled with wonderment forty years after the fact, Hancock was talking about an interval on the piano that’s barely an interval—two adjacent keys played simultaneously. By itself, the sound is dissonant; in this context it’s startlingly expressive. “I had never heard anybody do that before,” Hancock said. “He’s following the modal concept maybe more than anybody else. That just opened up a whole vista for me.”(...)

The word “timeless” has become a cliché, a selling tool for luxury goods. And yet Kind of Blue is a timeless album, and “So What” arguably its signature number. What is this about? For sixty years and more, jazz and popular music had consisted of songs that told stories, either explicitly—in lyrics—or in their construction. The most common song framework in both genres was known as AABA: two choruses followed by a bridge (aka channel, release, or middle eight), followed by an out-chorus. (Popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century also typically began with a verse: a brief, explanatory introduction that might or might not be included in performance or on recordings.) The sound of tunes made this way was a satisfying blend of exposition and resolution. (...)

But with Miles, in life and in art, it was always the thing withheld. And the essence of modal music—the essence of “So What”—was that you had no idea how it turned out, or if it turned out. Which was pretty much the way the world was looking at that moment, and maybe the way (you had to think) it was going to look from then on.

by James Kaplan, Esquire |  Read more:
Images: Michael Ochs Archives; David Redfern/Getty Images

Donald Fagen

Riddle of the Sands: Dune Part Two

The great superpower of Dune is its prescience. In 1959, Frank Herbert walked the sand dunes of Florence, Oregon, and saw the future: aridity and riches, sand and spice. Strong coastal winds were pushing the dunes east, towards the city, and the US Department of Agriculture decided to intervene, planting sedge and beach grass to halt the sand’s advance. This battle for the environment captured Herbert’s imagination. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Herbert had been writing for local magazines and papers for twenty years. He intended to cover the dunes story as a journalist, even hiring a small aircraft to track their movements, but his research into deserts and desert cultures led elsewhere. He wrote a pair of stories that were serialised in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, then expanded them into something much greater: the nine-hundred-page epic Dune, published in 1965. Now one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Dune is set on the desert planet of Arrakis, or Dune, where the great houses of Harkonnen and Atreides fight for control of ‘spice’ – a byproduct of giant sandworms which enables safe faster-than-light travel. The planet’s indigenous people, the Fremen, have meanwhile been forced into hiding.

The novel foreshadowed the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the rise in religious fundamentalism and terrorist violence, the dissolution of those ‘great houses’ we might call the Western and Eastern blocs and the desert wars of the 1990s and 2000s. It seems likely that these historical resonances have played a role in its long and busy afterlife, which encompasses twenty-two sequels (five by Herbert, seventeen by his son Brian and the science fiction author Kevin J Anderson), a failed 1974 adaptation by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a disavowed David Lynch film of 1984 and a television miniseries broadcast in 2000.

Dune: Part Two is the second instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation. The Harkonnens are led by Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgård) and operate from a monochrome metropolis on their heavily industrialised home planet. Where they once might have been seen as symbols of the Soviet empire (Herbert took the name ‘Härkönen’ from a phone book, thinking it sounded Soviet), in this film they signal a kind of capitalist excess built on slavery and sadism. Theirs is a patriarchal, pearly white ruling class; the baron himself is too fat to move.

In the first film, which adapts the first half of Herbert’s original novel, Baron Vladimir and the Emperor of the Known Universe (Christopher Walken) conspire to destroy House Atreides (coded as European via bullfights and bagpipes). They assassinate Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and slaughter his people, effectively ending the Atreides dynasty in a single night. Leto’s son, Paul (Timothée Chalamet), and widow, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), are sent scrambling towards the desert, where they encounter the Fremen and win some favour – partly because of Jessica’s ‘weirding ways’, her witchlike powers, and partly because Paul exhibits signs of being the messianic Mahdi, or Lisan al Gaib. The film ends with him joining the Fremen while making eyes at one of their soldiers, a young woman named Chani (Zendaya). In the second film, we learn what the Fremen desire most: to free their planet from industrial extraction and make it a green paradise once more.

Herbert never intended his novels to provide a commentary on conflict in the Middle East or to critique our addiction to petrochemicals (spice notably doubles as a drug). He was more interested in the idea of ecological manipulation – that human intervention could alter those Oregon dunes for the better. That the Fremen are Arab-coded is incidental. Herbert read Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960) prior to writing Dune and apparently quite enjoyed its depiction of Russia’s wars in the Caucasus, cribbing from it names, objects and even phrases, including niche terms like ‘Chaksoba’ (a Caucasian language) and ‘kanly’ (a vendetta). In the novel, the Fremen wear ‘bourkas’, fear ‘Shaitan’ and talk of a ‘jihad’ (in the script, cowritten by Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, the phrase ‘holy war’ is preferred). Herbert also read T E Lawrence’s war memoirs, and Paul much resembles the white saviour of the Bedouin.

Herbert was also prompted to reflect on the problems inherent in messianic thinking. As he wrote in a 1980 essay, ‘Heroes are painful. Superheroes are a catastrophe.’ The new film depicts Paul exploiting his own messianic status to ensure his and his mother’s survival among the Fremen. The cabal of psychic witches to which Jessica belongs has spread prophecies of what they call the Kwisatz Haderach, a super being intentionally bred through the careful manipulation of bloodlines. But none can be certain that Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach. He performs the many miracles foretold of the Mahdi, and with each one the Fremen break out in chanting: ‘Lisan al Gaib!’ These miracles are good fun and suit Villeneuve’s style of thoughtless spectacle well enough. (The entire film was shot using IMAX cameras, presumably to fit in more sand.) Paul first helps to destroy a spice harvester, then crosses the desert on his own. Later, he rides a sandworm – and all are impressed by the size of Paul’s worm.

The many raids on the Harkonnens make for happy times, and the portrayal of Paul living among the Fremen is one of the film’s great pleasures. The design of their culture – they form an egalitarian fraternity of brave desert ninjas – likely owes to Herbert’s own libertarian fantasies. With the desert planet Arrakis, Herbert imagines the world as inherently cruel, a near-uninhabitable environment full of dangers where only the fittest survive. In Villeneuve’s rendering, only the trace of religious fanaticism in Fremen culture comes in for censure. We are not invited to dwell on the barbarism of their rites – to become leader, you must kill the leader – because it is part of the film’s fantasy of power, which caters to both sides of the political spectrum: the Fremen are both a brutish warrior class for whom might is right and a revolutionary underclass hoping to overthrow their masters. Despite Paul’s philosophising in the desert, what wins out in Villeneuve’s vision is crudely emblematic: each film ends with a knife fight. Herbert called his story ‘coital’, but ‘phallic’ suits Villeneuve’s films better. They rely too much on scale.

Is there anything interesting to say about Villeneuve’s direction? Herbert’s son recently called Villeneuve’s two efforts ‘by far the best film interpretation’ of his father’s novel, but what he most likely meant by this is ‘faithful’. In his aborted adaptation, Jodorowsky made sweeping changes to the story presented in the book, which he claimed he never finished reading: at the end of his proposed twelve-hour film, Paul would be beheaded and immediately gain omnipotence, greening the planet and bringing peace to the universe. Villeneuve wouldn’t dare. There is nothing so audacious in his cinema. All the highlights of his filmmaking stem from mere competency: his is a literal approach to the words laid out on the page. Here is a big desert with big worms and big machines – see it all on the big screen. Hundred-million-dollar budgets pay for such simplicity.

But what does it cost to be innovative? The ‘weirding ways’ that make the novel interesting are at odds with Villeneuve’s unimaginative style. 

by James Wham, Literary Review |  Read more:

Image: Dune uncredited/via

[ed. See also: The world of Dune, briefly explained (Vox).]

How Facebook Contributes to the Demise of Endangered Species

In the summer of 2020, Jennifer Pytka spent three and a half hours a day sleuthing the internet for evidence of wildlife trafficking. She’d type กระเบนท้องน้ำ, a Thai word that loosely translates to stingray, into Google, and her search would immediately yield images of rings, each studded with an ornate white thorn about the size of a thumbnail. Pytka, a doctoral candidate at the Università di Padova in Italy, is investigating the previously undocumented trade of bowmouth guitarfish — a critically endangered ray whose spine and brows are adorned with these thorns. In Thailand, the horns are made into amulets, such as rings and bracelets, believed to have protective properties. In a 2023 study, Pytka notes how she pinpointed 977 of these items on online vending platforms, such as Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and the Alibaba-owned e-commerce site Lazada, over 21 days.

Bowmouth guitarfish amulets are just one example of the boundless number of protected wildlife products sold online, where a global Grand Bazaar of seedy vendors hawk their wildlife wares, and anyone with internet access can find products from rhino horns to exotic orchids to tiger claws with just a few clicks. With lax regulations, even weaker enforcement, and a lack of legal culpability, not only is wildlife trafficking able to fester online, but algorithms actually amplify sales, boosting the platforms’ profits.

Products sourced from protected species can be found across all manner of vending platforms, but with three billion active monthly users, Facebook is the grand pooh-bah. Pytka found 30 percent of the bowmouth guitarfish products on Facebook and 65 percent spread across other e‑commerce sites, such as Shopee and Lazada. “I’ve come to believe that Facebook is a driver of the global extinction crisis,” says Gretchen Peters, director of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO), a nonprofit whistle-blower organization.

Prior to the emergence of the internet and online trading, vendors selling wildlife products had to connect with their customers largely through in-person networking, says David Roberts, a conservation scientist at the University of Kent in England who researches wildlife trafficking. But in the early 2000s, an increasing number of transactions in the physical world went digital, with wildlife trafficking being no exception. Today, nearly 6,000 species of plants and animals are traded illicitly, and the trafficking is worth up to $23 billion annually. It is the fourth-largest illegal market, and many animals, such as rhinos, pangolins, and some species of parrots and sharks, are at risk of extinction due to their popularity on the black market. (...)

eBay was the first to acknowledge the growing problem of online trafficking and banned all ivory sales on its platform in 2009. Another milestone was reached in 2018 with the creation of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. This alliance, spearheaded by animal welfare groups TRAFFIC, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, advises technology platforms on how to identify and prevent wildlife trafficking. So far, 47 companies have joined the coalition, including Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — eBay, TikTok, and other international giants like Alibaba. The coalition’s most recent report, from 2021, found that between all the platforms, more than 11.6 million products made from prohibited wildlife have been removed or banned. A spokesperson from eBay said that over 350,000 listings for prohibited wildlife items were blocked or removed in 2022. Giavanna Grein, a wildlife specialist at WWF, encourages platforms to be more transparent with the public and concedes that the efforts undertaken by the coalition are just one small part of the picture. “We fully acknowledge this is a very complex and challenging issue, and there’s no one organization or effort that can tackle this,” she says.

Even with all the efforts, loopholes remain. Despite eBay’s ivory ban, for instance, a quick search by Roberts identified what he believes to be elephant ivory being sold under a code name. The product is still so readily available, in fact, that he centers his students’ projects on it. Similarly, a quick search on Facebook Marketplace for rhino horns for sale in southeast Asia immediately yields several posts.

Meta’s own policy prohibits “attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or solicit endangered species or their parts,” and in a statement, a spokesperson said that content that violates their policies is removed. However, whistle-blower reports published since Facebook joined the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online have been scathing. “Facebook policy and public comments about countering illicit content are rendered virtually meaningless by the firm’s ineffective follow-up and enforcement,” reads a 2020 report from the ACCO. To assess the severity of wildlife trafficking on Facebook, the report used search terms such as “exotic + animal + for sale” in English, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, turning up 473 Facebook pages and 281 groups openly selling wildlife products. Over half the pages were created since Facebook joined the coalition, showing that online trafficking appears to have increased.

In part, researchers were able to find so many illicit items because the Facebook algorithm is designed to recommend similar products and thus amplify the connections between vendors and prospective clients. (While looking at bowmouth guitarfish rings on Facebook Marketplace in Thailand, for instance, I saw posts for tiger claw amulets. After clicking to view them, my marketplace page automatically filled with curios made from guitarfish, tiger claw, and elephant ivory.) The ACCO report found 29 percent of the wildlife trafficking pages through Facebook’s “Related Pages” feature. Avaaz, a nonprofit that supports global activism, carried out a similar investigation and found that Facebook’s algorithm directed the researchers to dozens of wildlife groups, more than half of which contained potentially harmful wildlife trafficking content. Since it appears that Facebook’s algorithms are able to identify wildlife products, the algorithms should be able to hide these posts rather than promote them. When I asked about the discrepancy, Meta did not respond to this or any other question.

Peters says Meta is also passively profiting from the illegal activity. The platform makes money from embedded advertisements, and the online storefront Facebook Shops takes a small transaction fee from sales — including those of trafficked animals.

“[Facebook’s] platform is so big … and it’s in so many different languages that it’s really going to take a Herculean effort and a huge investment,” says Peters. “I don’t think Facebook is prepared to make the investments to clean up their own mess.” Peters also notes that Facebook could be more proactive in collaborating with law enforcement to dismantle criminal networks. “Facebook is sitting on a huge amount of information about some of the world’s biggest wildlife trafficking networks,” she says, and in many circumstances, the platform is not proactively showing that intelligence to law enforcement, claiming they’re protecting user privacy. Yet she says the firm is renowned for harvesting user data to sell to private companies. “It’s completely contradictory to me.” eBay is attempting to tackle this problem by implementing a regulatory portal that allows law enforcement authorities easy access to suspected criminal activity. (...)

In spite of the efforts of animal welfare and social justice groups like WWF and the ACCO, illicit wildlife sales are able to thrive online because platforms are protected from civil liability by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States. The act generally protects the platforms from being liable for the nefarious content they host.

“The way section 230 works is [that] any content created by a user like you or me or anybody else is considered free expression,” explains Peters. But she argues that illegal sales occurring over online platforms aren’t free speech — they’re felonies, and implementing something like a duty-of-care law would require platforms to remove criminal activity.

“I think [the platforms] should be held accountable,” says Roberts, who compares online trafficking to a bar allowing drugs to be sold in the bathrooms. The establishment is liable for allowing illicit activity on its premises. “How is that any different [from] a platform allowing illegal trade to take place?”

by Marina Wang, Naked Capitalism via Undark |  Read more:
Image: via

Erik Witsoe

via:

Pathfinding With Tomas Pueyo: An Interview

Discussing men and therapy, culture and status, AI and consumer markets, and much more.

Tomas Pueyo is the former VP of growth at both Course Hero and Sigfig, author of The Star Wars Rings: The Hidden Structure Behind the Star Wars Story, a TEDx speaker, and creator of Uncharted Territories, a powerhouse publication that covers topics ranging from the Israel/Palestine conflict to OpenAI and Artificial Intelligence to much, much more. Tomas holds a masters in engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris, a masters in engineering from ICAI in Madrid, and an MBA from Stanford. (...)

***

From the movie What Love Is:

Transcript of the key pieces:

“Say there is a woman in a room with 10 men, and all 10 men are telling her how beautiful she is, and how amazing she is and they are lighting her cigarettes and buying her drinks and just treating her like gold.

Then, all of a sudden, in walks the 11th man, he takes one look at her and says "hey how ya doin'", turns his back on her and starts talking to his boys. THAT'S the guy she wants to be with, the 11th man. Not any of the 10 men who were treating her well all night, but the one guy that couldn't care less. Why?

Because, for some reason, women don't want nice, they don't want real, they don't want to be treated well. I mean, not at first, and sometimes not ever—and I think that's crazy. And I refuse to play that game ....

I don’t want to have to play that game, get a girl by pretending that I don’t like her. I want to be with a woman who is real. Who digs it when I’m nice to her. Who doesn’t see that as weakness or take me for granted when I tell her that I think she is more amazing than anything else in the entire world, but unfortunately most women aren't like that, they say they are, deep down inside they want to be, but ... they're not."

Let me add something:

Then, all of a sudden, in walks the 12th man. He has a nice suit, impeccably worn. He stands straight, stops at the entrance of the bar and looks around with a smile. His friends pour in on both sides, merrily bantering. A couple of them stop and ask him: “What do you think about this place, should we stay and get a drink?”

But he doesn’t respond. His eyes laid on the woman. He is now looking at her, and starts walking towards her. “Sorry I’m late, I hope you didn’t get tired from waiting for me all your life. I like your earrings. They’re daring, but also feminine. They made me curious and I wanted to know you better. Hi, I’m Sam.”

Is she going to choose the 11th man or the 12th?

Why? 

[ed. From: Charisma = Sex = Humor = Leadership (Tomas Pueyo: Uncharted Territories).]

***

Sotonye: On why men don’t need or want talk therapy

On a recent re-watch of the Sopranos I couldn’t help but think about how the show is partly anchored around the tension between typical gendered-behaviors around mental health, which see women seek out care on average more often than men and with more treatment period retention, and Tony’s break from these expectations as a mob boss who goes to talk therapy. It’s striking and unusual for a man to put his mental world on a clinical platter, but I wondered—why? You have the best series on sex differences online so when I had this thought I immediately wanted to ask you: what are the evolutionary explanations for sex-based differences in internal problem resolution? What do men need if it isn’t talking?

Tomas: (...)

A dominant man can't be weak.

This is the source of all the literature around honor and strength and not showing weaknesses and so on.

This is why men don't default to seeking help for mental health—I need help, therefore I am weak, and hence not dominant.

It's why Tony going to therapy is so surprising. It's not just a mobster. He's the head mobster. The most dominant, the one who is not supposed to show weakness.

Of course, many people might react to this as "But this is stupid! Going to therapy shows a man is mature! It's like going to the doctor!"

This is where most analysis on sex and therapy stops. How do you square that circle?

A decade ago, in grad school, I was in a leadership class where we were told to be vulnerable. A student asked: "If we're vulnerable, aren't we going to be seen as weak?"

The professor replied: "There is a fine line between vulnerability and weakness. The key is to be vulnerable on things that don't challenge your leadership."

Which for a man means: on things that don't challenge your dominance.

Imagine a CEO crying on TV. Which ones of the following statements are acceptable, and which ones aren't?

My child just died.

I have cancer.

The new law is killing our company and we will fight it to death.

My strategy failed and I couldn't manage the executive team.

The first 3 are acceptable ways to show vulnerability, because they don't challenge the CEO's leadership skills. The last one does, and so it wouldn't be acceptable.

I haven't seen more than 3 or 4 episodes of the Sopranos, but I assume this edge between vulnerability and weakness would be an interesting one to explore for a mafia boss, so I wouldn't be surprised if you told me they played with that boundary through the seasons. Maybe Tony explores the differences, learns to be vulnerable without appearing weak, and when the two are conflated, he reasserts his dominance with brutality?

Sotonye: On the true evolutionary underpinnings of creative production

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone predict the course of a story from first principles until now. You’re exactly right, that’s exactly what happens in the Sopranos. Tony slowly learns to accept the difference between admitting a problem or the need for help and being weak, but when the lines eventually blur he puts on an almost psychopathic, vicious display. This is super interesting and gets me to my next question about status and how it makes us do what we do. (...)

Tomas:

Ha! You should watch my TEDx! Stories, when well done, are engineered, so they can be reverse engineered. A mob boss going to therapy sounds like the result of a brainstorm: "How can we make a story about vulnerability? OK let's take the least vulnerable guy and force him to expose his vulnerability. What's the least vulnerable guy? The guy that has to appear the toughest? A head of the military? An MMA boxer? A head mobster! And how can he explore his vulnerability? This is usually in his internal voice. How can we make it explicit? Let's have him talk to a therapist!".

Note that with the same structure you could have an MMA champion have to develop his vulnerability to regain an emotional connection with his estranged daughter, and that would probably make a good story too.

by Sotonye, Neo Narrative |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I've conflated two articles of seeming relevance, one from Mr. Puyeo's blog Uncharted Territories (paywalled).]

High-Functioning Depression

Mental health counselor Jeffrey Meltzer sees clients nearly every day who suffer from “high-functioning” depression, so he decided to post a video about it on TikTok. He struck a nerve. The video now has more than 8 million views and more than 5,000 comments.

“This describes me to a tee,” one wrote.

“Does it go away at some point?” another replied.

“Can someone tell me how to fix it?” wrote a third.

Meltzer, who meets with clients in-person and virtually in Bradenton, Fla., said it’s not always obvious if someone has depression. “There’s a myth” that somebody with depression can barely get out of bed in the morning, he said. “They can function, they can go to work, they can do all these things. But deep inside, they’re feeling really down, they’re feeling quite empty or lonely.”

The response to Meltzer’s video is “a huge signal about unmet mental health need,” said Jon Rottenberg, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida who has studied the course and prognosis of depression.

The term high-functioning depression “is really resonating with the fact that depression can be quite hidden,” Rottenberg said. “People can harbor it for a long time before they get help.”

High-functioning depression is not a diagnosis or a recognized clinical disorder, and it doesn’t appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authoritative guide to mental health disorders.

Exactly where the term started isn’t clear, but “high-functioning depression” is a popular topic on TikTok and YouTube that attracts millions of viewers. It gained traction on social media in 2022 after Cheslie Kryst, a former Miss USA, died by suicide. In statements to the media, Kryst’s mother said her daughter was dealing with high-functioning depression, “which she hid from everyone.”

Some health professionals say the term can be misleading and may stem from a lack of understanding about different mental health disorders. But other therapists and mental health experts say the term has helped people realize that depression isn’t always obvious.

It can help people think of depression in ways that “may be different” from the stereotypical symptoms people associate with the disorder, said Vaile Wright, a psychologist and senior director of health-care innovation for the American Psychological Association.

“There is no one-size-fits-all depression,” Wright said. “In children and adolescents, it looks much more like irritability. Same with men; it looks a lot more like anger and substance abuse.”

In the viral TikTok video, Meltzer offers seven signs that he said may signal high-functioning depression. Other mental health experts say Meltzer’s video does identify many of the feelings that could be symptoms for depression.

“The doctors that I work with and others, even myself sometimes, can feel those things,” said Srijan Sen, a professor and the executive director of the University of Michigan’s Eisenberg Family Depression Center. “Highlighting that and making people know they’re not alone in feeling that is valuable.”

The seven signs of high-functioning depression highlighted in Meltzer’s video are:

1. Isolating from friends and family.
2. No longer finding joy in the activities you loved.
3. Persistently criticizing yourself.
4. Frustration with small irritations or setbacks.
5. Turning to mindless habits for hours on end.
6. Always feeling low on energy.
7. Managing day-to-day tasks but feeling empty inside.

Depression is “a collection of symptoms” with some degree of sadness or melancholy, said the APA’s Wright. Sleeping too much or too little, an inability to concentrate, eating too much or too little, and “a sense of hopelessness” can all be signs of depression.

by Teddy Amenabar, Seattle Times via The Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: iStock

[ed. Anhedonia.]

Kent Nishimura

[ed. Awesome. Kids these days... Many more on his YT channel. Here's another one.]

via:

Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?

At some point in the past few years, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, everyone’s pants started to look wrong. For an improbably long time, the “right” pants — meaning those that conveyed some socially agreed-upon, base-line level of stylishness — had been, in a word, small. Snug through the thighs, throttled at the knees, close-cut at the calves, on intimate terms with the ankles. Running a minuscule gamut from skinny to the slightly-more-accommodating slim. There were exceptions, particularly when it came to women’s pants. But on balance, fitted was the way good pants were supposed to fit.

My pants had been slim for some 15 years, since so-called skinny jeans first hit the market in earnest, around 2005. Narrow silhouettes quickly spread, until they felt less like a trend and more like a structural fact of existence: A decade after their ascendance, slim-fit pants remained common currency across generations, demographics and body types. BTS, at the time the biggest pop group in the world, wore them. Underground Chicago drill rappers wore them, too. Hollywood leading men and neighborhood baristas, wedding planners and basketball players, morning-show hosts and accountants, youth pastors and construction workers, your nephew and your aunt. You might have wondered if we’d reached the End of Pants.

And then, in a rupture whose center I place within the broader pandemic-era upheavals of 2020, the “right” pants began to lurch away from the leg at scale. Jeans, a kind of Patient Zero for pants trends, showed symptoms of acute-onset elephantiasis. Stylish friends of mine and strangers whose outfits I ogled online abandoned their slim-fit denim for straight-leg vintage Levi’s 501s — something like the Greenwich Mean Time of modern pants — and then swiftly abandoned those for ever-ampler models. Paul O’Neill, the global design director for Levi’s, told me that in recent years he noticed a rise in kids hitting “thrift stores to buy jeans with a Size 46 or 48 waist and belting them, to get that oversize look.” He’d made some of the company’s baggiest-ever pants in response, and even baggier ones were in the works.

Month by month, pants got puffier, growing higher rises and sprouting more and more pleats. Hemlines that once severely tapered now expanded, hovering like U.F.O.s above shoes or pooling atop them like swirls of soft-serve ice cream. On Instagram, fashion mood-board accounts, which aggregate “aspirational” imagery, did an increasingly brisk trade in photographs from the late ’80s and early ’90s of people wearing billowing trousers by Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and Yohji Yamamoto.

All manner of pants polarities rapidly inverted themselves. Perhaps the most epochal illustration concerned, of all people, Barack Obama. In 2009, he threw the first pitch at the All-Star Game wearing shapeless, wide-leg Levi’s — ur-uncool “dad jeans,” at the time. They inspired widespread ridicule, because the way pants fit is a kind of lingua franca: Even people who claim not to care at all about clothes feel qualified to judge. A decade later, though, those kinds of dad jeans were looking better than ever, and here were photos of Obama pushing 60 in far-too-tight, far-too-cropped chinos during a visit to Kuala Lumpur. Looking at these pictures side by side, we had incontrovertible proof: Skinny pants were the real dad pants now. You might still be wearing them, but they were no longer “right".

In some ways, this shift felt entirely predictable, as if a rubber band stretched tight had snapped back to laxity. And yet it was disconcerting too, as if the rubber band had immediately become a balloon. It could be hard to trust your own eyes. I’d been feeling the rumblings of a Return to Big Pants since about 2017, when I remember worrying about the fact that I was 36 and still wearing essentially the same pants I’d worn at 26. There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself — the balding guy still trying to make his high school haircut work. I made the conscious decision to resist fossilization and buy roomier pants, and over the next couple of years, I thought that’s what I did. My wife and my friends tell me they thought I did, too, having seen some of the new pants in question and deemed them conspicuously, if not laughably, large. And yet photographs confirm that, in absolute terms, my pants remained fitted for a while. I couldn’t see it clearly at first, but I was locked in an arms race against my own mounting pants dysmorphia. Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging. (...)

In strictly physical terms, no article of clothing does more to articulate and augment the line of our bodies — to beautify us or deform us — than pants. They tend to occupy the most visual square footage in any given outfit. They also tend to move more than other clothes as our bodies move through the world, which creates more inflection points where they can attract notice — and where they can go wrong. “A T-shirt is so much simpler,” Hine said. “A sweater is so much simpler. Even with a button-up, you can fake it: roll up the sleeves, unbutton the neck.” But “there’s no place to hide in a bad-fitting pair of pants.

“Pants are diabolical as design objects,” Hine went on. “You can look at the measurements for the waist and the inseam, but that won’t tell you anything besides how they fit in two places, when there’s so many other variables — the rise, the hemline, fabric weight, drape. It’s an object that throughout history was made by tailors and craftsmen, and when it got mass-produced and casualized, what happened was they took this really intricate garment and tried to tell us, ‘Everyone can wear this every day, and it’ll be easy to find a pair that makes sense for your body’ — but it’s actually an enormous challenge.”

It’s a challenge whether you’re a self-identifying clotheshorse or someone who simply doesn’t want to look comically out of touch, like Obama on the pitcher’s mound. This is a big part of why trends around the “right” pants tend to move so slowly. Once you find a style you like — or once you acquiesce to the style you’re supposed to like and then hope your perception adjusts accordingly — it’s reasonable to want to drop anchor.

That was particularly true with a style as extreme as slim pants, which required a leap of faith for lots of people to accept in the first place. Skinny silhouettes were, in hindsight, a highly unlikely proposition for mass adoption: not just physically constrictive but also revealing to a degree that could verge on a violation of privacy. And yet, in short order, the ultraslim look flowed outward from tip-of-the-spear European jeans makers like Cheap Monday and A.P.C. to “elevated” mall brands like J. Crew. Influential designer labels like Band of Outsiders and Dior Homme made slim-fit synonymous with a chic, faintly roguish urbanity, and Thom Browne went one further, cutting trousers not just tight but also high, positing the exposed male ankle as its own sort of statement accessory. Fast-fashion chains like Zara and H&M peddled unisex pantomimes of these skinny upmarket styles, and before long, so did mass-retail behemoths like Old Navy and Target, signaling and consolidating small pants’ grip on the zeitgeist. (...)

Of course, word of the king’s death hasn’t reached everyone yet. Saager Dilawri, a very stylish man who owns one of my favorite clothing shops, the Vancouver-based Neighbour, told me that, over the holidays, he got a drink with some guys he plays hockey with. “I was wearing loose jeans, and everyone was wearing slim pants — maybe too slim,” Dilawri recalled. “And one of them came up to me and said: ‘Back in the day we all wore loose pants, then we were told, “Slim pants are cool,” so now we’re all wearing slim pants. You’re the only one here wearing loose pants. Are the trends changing again?’”

If, in 2024, pants feel unsettled, it’s not only because the consensus around the “right” pants has whipped so precipitously from small to big but also because, at the very same time, a more fundamentally nagging question has started to creep up: Is there actually anything resembling consensus around trends anymore? (...)

The pandemic accelerated many trends in the virtualization of life; assembling outfits as much for your digital self as for the one who moves through the physical world is one of them. Against that backdrop, it feels like no coincidence that the extreme of skinny pants gave way so rapidly to the extreme of big pants: This has been a moment in fashion characterized by extremes more than anything, because extremes are what play best on phone screens. We see this in recent vogues for eye-popping graphic tees, for viral novelty footwear like the Big Red Boots and for so-called haul videos, where the point is to flaunt a staggering volume of new acquisitions. We also see it, less intuitively, in the countervailing vogue for “quiet luxury,” a style of dressing that is putatively about tasteful restraint — no logos, no garish, déclassé patterns — but in actual practice is deafening in its emphasis on soft, pampering fabrics, excessive volumes, sumptuous hues and, never far from mind, astronomical pricing.

Where fashion and technology converge is in their mutual dependence on novelty and obsolescence — products need to phase out so that different products can phase in — and the current swing to big pants might prove nothing more than a brief overcorrection after the long reign of small ones. There are some reasons to be bullish about the chances of mainstream big-pants hegemony. J. Crew now offers the giant-fit chino in a range of colors, and Madewell, whose customer is similar, recently relaunched its men’s line with a bunch of wide and baggy pants styles. In 2022, Levi’s rolled out a reissue of its infamously wide ’90s-era SilverTab jeans with Kohl’s, as mass-market a retailer as you can imagine. And yet, some people think skinny is bound to make a swift comeback — slim pants were surprisingly well-represented on designer runways in January — and I’m already seeing an uptick in Y2K-style ultra-low-rise flares. If the internet hasn’t broken the pants pendulum, where is the pendulum right now, exactly?

by Jonah Weiner, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Bobby Doherty for The New York Times: Sloan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Bryan Cranston for Kith via; and via.

[ed. About time. Skinny pants look ridiculous; and super baggy ones do too (remember the 80s Miami Vice craze and M.C. Hammer?). Maybe that's why sweat and yoga pants and leggings are so popular. Different looks for different occasions, just save the big bucks for quality items that never go out of style. See also: Levi’s Wants You to Rethink Your Denim Shopping (NYT).]

Disney Trips Are So Complicated You Need a Class to Plan One

Rob Kayris and his family of six were “dumping a boatload of money” into a Disney trip last year and wanted to make the most of it. So a few months before the vacation, they took a class about the new ride reservation system, Genie Plus.

Then right before the trip in February, they took it again.

“I feel like if you don’t know how it works, you’re going to waste probably two to three days before you have a grip on what’s what,” said Kayris, a copy machine salesman who lives outside Philadelphia.

Disney has always been a paradise for planners — or nightmare for the disorganized. When is the best time to go? How can we save money? Is it possible to avoid long lines?

David Semanoff, a public relations firm owner who has been visiting Disney parks since he was an infant, distributes a 10-page primer to friends with tips on rides, dining, character interaction and what to do if it rains (“get your ponchos and go to the park!”). Reactions to his advice can be mixed.

“I think some are already so overwhelmed at the idea of the trip,” he said.

Travel agents, YouTubers, influencers, bloggers, friends-with-experience, Disney experts and paid services like Touring Plans have filled the knowledge gap and helped frazzled families figure out their dream vacation even as the cost has soared. Some visitors turn to VIP tours that cost between $450 and $900 an hour, plus park admission. Others have used the service of independent guides, a practice Disney has been cracking down on.

The pandemic added a new layer of complications, though some of the biggest pain points — such as the need to make reservations and restrictions on when guests could hop from park to park — went away this month in Florida. Then came a fresh upheaval: Instead of the old, free-to-use ride-reservation system, the company introduced one that costs money, requires early wake-ups and drains cellphone battery life. The 2021 introduction of Genie Plus, which mobilizes vacationers to reserve rides starting at 7 a.m. and then throughout the day, turned vacation organization into a near-competitive sport. And it created a new lane for tipsters, content creators, travel advisers and savvy regulars.

One of those is Brooke Raybould, a social media content creator who sells a 200-page digital “Mom’s Guide to Disney World” for $40. Her TikTok on her family’s early-morning approach to tackling the Magic Kingdom featuring a 7:20 a.m. arrival at the park with her four sons — went viral last year.

“There’s an entire system to doing Disney World the right way,” she said. (...)

Learning the lingo

For the average Joe, the nomenclature of a Disney World trip can befuddle. Lightning lanes let you bypass longer standby lines to get faster entry to a ride. Genie Plus is the way you get access — unless you’ve paid for an individual lightning lane, which is only available for certain rides and doesn’t require Genie Plus. Those can be booked at 7 a.m. for resort guests and at park opening time for everyone else. Virtual queues for the newest, hottest rides are free, but also open for booking at 7 a.m. and often fill up quickly.

Got all that?

“I knew it would be complicated, but I don’t think I could have imagined the Disney-industrial complex was this complicated,” Theresa Brown, a New York City resident who took a family trip to Disney World in August, said in an email. “The sheer brain power just to figure out the Disney lingo and landscape is monumental.” (...)

A costly, time-consuming perk

Murphy sees the value in Genie Plus, but she wishes visitors had more transparency about the price. At Disneyland, the price varies but starts at $30. At Walt Disney World, prices change according to the day and park; on Tuesday, for example, the service cost $17 at Animal Kingdom up to $27 at Magic Kingdom or for multiple parks. The price reached $39 at Magic Kingdom around Christmas, according to Disney Tourist Blog.

“I think the thing that people have the hardest time wrapping their brain around is not knowing how much it costs in advance,” Murphy said.

by Hannah Sampson, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Katty Huertas/Illustration by Katty Huertas/The Washington Post; iStock

Paramore

[ed. Nice cover. Lots of energy. Nobody gets tired of this one.]

Thinking About A.I. with Stanisław Lem

We are going to speak of the future,” the Polish writer Stanisław Lem wrote, in “Summa Technologiae,” from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. “Yet isn’t discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?” Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read in the United States. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, many millions of copies of his books have been printed, and yet, if I polled a hundred friends, 2.3 of them would know who he was. His best-known work in the U.S. is the 1961 novel “Solaris,” and its renown stems mostly from the moody film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. [ed. the 2002 Soderbergh remake with George Clooney is more faithful to the original novel.]

Among Lem’s fictional imaginings are a phantomatic generator (a machine that gives its user an extraordinarily vivid vision of an alternate reality), an opton (an electronic device on which one can read books), and a network of computers that contains information on most everything that is known and from which people have a difficult time separating themselves. Though we may have forgotten the prophet, the prophecies have not forgotten us.

Lem also wrote numerous stories about machines whose intelligence exceeds that of their creators. About two years ago, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, my initial reaction was: what a fun toy! The poems it wrote were so charming. It also seemed like an interesting form of “distant reading,” since its writing was based on having “eaten” enormous amounts of text from the Internet; it could tell us something about the language and interests people have collectively expressed online. I wasn’t too troubled about such a tool replacing more conventionally human writers. If writers have to become art therapists or math teachers or climate scientists instead, is that so bad? I am programmed, I have come to realize, to default to the reassuring assessment of “no biggie.”

A few news cycles later I was reading—and maybe thinking?—that ChatGPT and its A.I. cousins could easily be like what radio was to Hitler. (Or would it be like what the printing press was to Martin Luther?) Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of A.I., whom we all suddenly knew about, had resigned from his position at Google and was speaking openly about everything that was likely to go wrong with his creation—a creation he appeared to regret only slightly less than Victor Frankenstein did his. There were very knowledgeable people who thought that all these concerns were nonsense and very knowledgeable people who found them terrifying. I wondered, What would Stanisław Lem think? Or, What did Stanisław Lem think, given that he so accurately foresaw enough of our modern world that he should be taken at least as seriously as Nostradamus or Pixar? (...)

“Solaris” is mostly serious in tone, which makes it a misleading example of Lem’s work. More often and more distinctively, he is funny and madcap and especially playful on the level of language. A dictionary of his neologisms, published in Poland in 2006, has almost fifteen hundred entries; translated into English, his invented words include “imitology,” “fripple,” “scrooch,” “geekling,” “deceptorite,” and “marshmucker.” (I assume that translating Lem is the literary equivalent of differential algebra, or category theory.) A representative story, from 1965, is “The First Sally (A) or, Trurl’s Electronic Bard.” Appearing in a collection titled “The Cyberiad,” the story features Trurl, an engineer of sorts who constructs a machine that can write poetry. Does the Electronic Bard read as an uncanny premonition of ChatGPT? Sure. It can write in the style of any poet, but the resulting poems are “two hundred and twenty to three hundred and forty-seven times better.” (The machine can also write worse, if asked.)

It’s not Trurl’s first machine. In other stories, he builds one that can generate anything beginning with the letter “N” (including nothingness) and one that offers supremely good advice to a ruler; the ruler is not nice, though, so it’s good that Trurl put in a subcode that the machine will not destroy its maker. The Electronic Bard is not easy for Trurl to make. In thinking about how to program it, Trurl reads “twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry” but deems the research insufficient. As he sees it, the program found in the head of even an average poet “was written by the poet’s civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time.” The complexity of the average poet-machine is daunting.

But Trurl manages to work through all that. When glitches occur—such as the machine in early iterations thinking that Abel murdered Cain, or that “gray drapes,” rather than “great apes,” are members of the primate family—Trurl makes the necessary tweaks. He adjusts logic circuits and emotive components. When the machine becomes too sad to write, or resolves to become a missionary, he makes further adjustments. He puts in a philosophical throttle, half a dozen cliché filters, and then, last but most important, he adds “self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors.” Finally, it works beautifully.

But how does the world around it work? Trurl’s machine responds to requests to write a lofty, tragic, timeless poem about a haircut, and to write a love poem expressed in the language of mathematics. Both poems are pretty good! But, of course, the situation has to go awry, because that is the formula by which stories work. Lem doesn’t give much space to worries about undetectably faked college essays, or displaced workers. Nor does he pursue a thought line about mis- or disinformation. (In another story, however, Trurl builds a machine that says the answer to two plus two is seven, and it threatens Trurl’s life if he won’t say that the machine is right.)

The poets have various manners of letting Trurl know their take on his invention. “The classicists . . . fairly harmless . . . confined themselves to throwing stones through his windows and smearing the sides of his house with an unmentionable substance.” Other poets beat Trurl. Picket lines form outside his hospital room, and one could hear bullets being fired. Trurl decides to destroy his Electronic Bard, but the machine, seeing the pliers in his hand, “delivered such an eloquent, impassioned plea for mercy, that the constructor burst into tears.” He spares the uncannily well-spoken machine but moves it to a distant asteroid, where it starts to broadcast its poems via radio waves; alas, they are a tremendous success. But thinking about the perils of the technology is not at the center of the story; thinking about the vanity and destructiveness of people is.

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Pernice
[ed. A favorite author. Along the same lines/theme, see also: Matthew Salesses on the Possibilities of Climate Fiction (LitHub).]

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I saw this idea fly by on Twitter yesterday, half trolling half real:

someone should make a dating app where an LLM clone of you goes on thousands of dates with LLM clones of other people, and then your matches are when the LLMs decide to date each other.

They continue, you can literally build this right now, and later in the thread, it gets trained on your iMessages.

I mean, it’d work!

Let me point out Adams’ Electric Monk:

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

An Electric Monk for dating??

Why not. It’s very now.

[ ed. Suggestions that we're living in a form of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. From: Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age (Interconnected). See also: Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek? (The Bulwark).]