The New Generation of Online Culture Curators

[ed. And one old one.]

The current Internet landscape sometimes feels like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker”: directionless, inexplicable, bound to change in confusing ways. Our social-media feeds don’t offer much except the forward acceleration of algorithmic recommendations. Google and other forms of search are becoming clogged with content generated by artificial intelligence. Knowing what you’re looking for doesn’t always help you chart a path, because niche communities can be difficult to locate and to keep up with. We are in a transitional phase of digital culture, and thus more in need than ever of friendly faces, personable human guides (not unlike a “stalker” in the Zone), to help us navigate this treacherous ground. Such guides go by many names—call them influencers, or content creators, or just “this one guy I follow.” Guided by their own cultivated sense of taste, they bring their audiences news and insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music, food, or film.

Perhaps the best way to think of these guides is as curators; like a museum curator pulling works together for an exhibition, they organize the avalanche of online content into something coherent and comprehensible, restoring missing context and building narratives. They highlight valuable things that we less-expert Internet surfers are likely to miss. Andrea Hernández, the proprietor of Snaxshot, a newsletter and social-media account dedicated to “curating the food and beverage space,” told me recently, “Curation is about being able to filter the noise.” (I follow Hernández for her skill at discovering the wildest examples of direct-to-consumer drinks startups, such as Feisty, a purveyor of “protein soda.”) She continued, “I go out and I scour through the Internet and I come to you with my offerings.” Unlike a museum curator, however, the digital personalities I have taken to following also become the faces of their work, broadcasting recordings of themselves, on TikTok and Instagram, as a way of building a trusting relationship with their followers. (...)

Curation takes work, and like any other kind of labor it is only sustainable if it’s reasonably compensated. Gee monetizes his account by creating sponsored content on TikTok, primarily for audio-equipment brands. Magasin earns the majority of its revenue from affiliate marketing—for every reader who clicks a link to, say, a new Proenza Schouler cashmere sweater, and buys one, Reilly earns a commission based on a small percentage of the sale price. Before Magasin, Reilly worked in e-commerce fashion writing at the magazine InStyle, highlighting new product releases and deals. That approach provided inspiration for her newsletter, and set her apart from other solo fashion commentators: “I didn’t want it to be something that was a diary; I wanted it to be a service,” she said.

In a previous era of the Internet, we might have thought of figures like these simply as influencers, whose ability to attract large followings online gives them a power that sometimes surpasses that of traditional publications. But the idea of an influencer has, as Reilly put it, become “a little flattened over time,” connoting shallow, uninformed, even misleading content dictated by sponsors. “There’s a distinction between influencing and what I do,” Reilly insisted. The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of culture beyond themselves. (...)

Shuherk cast the rise of curatorial accounts like his as a failure of the legacy-media ecosystem. The job of providing well-informed recommendations once belonged to professional critics employed by newspapers and magazines. As media companies have struggled to adjust to the digital age, the number of full-time criticism jobs has dwindled, leaving a void that Shuherk and others are filling. We sometimes blame the figure of the influencer for these changes. “One hundred per cent, that’s wrong,” Shuherk told me. Internet users still desire guidance from voices with expertise; it’s just that those experts, lacking other options, are increasingly finding their audiences online. “My option for becoming a book reviewer was sitting down on TikTok,” Shuherk said. “There isn’t really a path for me outside of this.”

The onslaught of online content requires filtering, whether technological or human, and those of us who dislike the idea of A.I. or algorithms doing the filtering for us might think more about how we support the online personalities who do the job well. Structurally, the Internet is not getting better anytime soon; I have not hidden my pessimism about its future. But human creativity persists, even in hostile conditions. Figures like Gee, Reilly, and Shuherk make me hopeful that fun, interesting niches of activity can still survive online. There’s another word that we might apply to such people: “connoisseurs,” in the art-historical sense of passionate observers who shape a discipline through their judgments. We’ve always had connoisseurs, from the radio d.j. to the bookstore clerk, subtly but vitally informing the culture that the rest of us choose to consume. As Shuherk put it, “The person in the nineties working at Blockbuster—we’re the same person.” 

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ariel Davis

[ed. Welcome to Duck Soup, which has been in existence for what, 12-13 years now?

"None of the items posted here are or should be used for commercial purposes (other than at originating sites). They are presented solely to promote the ideas, reporting and art of the people that produced them. Everything posted here is of interest to me and a distillation of a larger sampling effort to find particularly noteworthy items. It's a labor of love that has prompted me to search out and discover new sites and postings that I'd never have expended the effort to find before, and to learn many new things. The result is the blog you're now reading. If there's any underlying theme it's to seek out thoughtful insights from knowledgeable people about the world we live in and highlight an eclectic mix of music, art and other forms of personal expression.

If this website can help direct readers' attention (a precious commodity these days) to important contributors, then all effort put into it will be worthwhile."

***

[ed. If you'll notice, there are no ads of any sort on this site. I don't make a penny (except that one donation from Stephan in Canada about 10 years ago. Thanks, Stephan! I still remember you!). The only thing I ask of readers is that if they find this site useful they'll tell their friends about it, and hopefully those friends will tell other friends. That way we can all learn a little bit more and help contributors find as much of an audience as possible (plus, I get to add pithy/pissy little editorials sometimes, and even longer narratives.]

Marvin Gaye

Pure Marvin
via:

How Microsoft Plans to Squeeze Cash Out of AI

The same way it always has with most everything else — by leveraging our PCs.

Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, providing the money-losing start-up with the huge amounts of capital and computing power necessary for its continued operations. In exchange, Microsoft gets access to OpenAI’s technology for use in its own products as well as a real and reputational stake in the AI boom. “We are below them, above them, around them,” Satya Nadella said in March about OpenAI. (...)

AI subscriptions are, so far, the tech industry’s favorite idea for making money from AI. This is conceptually simple — your customers are paying you for access to a new product. The problem is that compute-heavy cloud services like ChatGPT and Copilot remain extremely expensive to run, meaning that in some cases even paying customers might be costing them money. Computing costs are likely to fall, and AI-model efficiency could improve, but, much like the basic assumption that there’s a huge market for these things just waiting to be tapped, these are bets and not particularly safe ones.

This week, Microsoft announced that it would be integrating AI more deeply into even more of its products, including Windows, which, among many other chatbot-shaped things, is set to get a feature called Recall, described by the company as “an explorable timeline of your PC’s past.” This feature, which will be turned on by default for Windows users, records and “recalls” everything you do on your computer by taking near-constant screenshots, processing them with AI, and making them available for future browsing through a conversational interface. (...)

Like smartphones, personal computers already collect and produce vast amounts of data about their users, but this is a big step in the direction of surveillance — constant, open-ended, and mostly unredacted — offered in exchange for a strange feature that Microsoft’s CEO is quite insistent its users will enjoy. Nadella attempts to preempt any concerns by pointing out that the AI models powering Recall run locally — that is, on the user’s device, not in the cloud. This is, at best, a partial solution to a problem of Microsoft’s own creation — a problem Windows users didn’t know they had until this week.

On-device AI processing is interesting to Microsoft for other reasons, too. In a world where AI services are expensive to run, installing them in every popular Microsoft product represents a real risk. In a world where the processing necessary to run chatbots, generate images, or surveil your own computer usage to the maximum possible extent occurs on users’ devices, the cost of deploying AI is vastly lower.

For Microsoft, that is — if it expects to fully utilize these new features that are becoming increasingly integral to the core Window product, customers will have to buy new machines, some of which Microsoft also showed off this week. According to The Verge:

“All of Microsoft’s major laptop partners will offer Copilot Plus PCs, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event at the company’s headquarters on Monday. That includes Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and Asus; Microsoft is also introducing two of its own as part of the Surface line. And while Microsoft is also making a big push to bring Arm chips to Windows laptops today, Nadella said that laptops with Intel and AMD chips will offer these AI features, too.”

These PCs will come with a “neural processor,” roughly akin to a graphics card, which is a separate hardware feature that can handle AI-related processing tasks more quickly and with lower power use than existing CPUs and GPUs. In conjunction with Microsoft’s shift to more efficient mobile processor architecture for laptops and desktops — something Apple committed to years ago, selling huge numbers of laptops in the process — AI is being used to make the case to its customers that this is the next stage of the upgrade cycle. It’s time to get a new PC, says the company that makes the software that powers most PCs and that sells PCs of its own.

Microsoft, like many other tech giants, says it’s all in on AI, but its approach includes hedges against AI deflation, too. Maybe customers flock to new AI features, in which case Microsoft will have shifted computing expenses back to its billions of customers, improving margins on subscription products and selling lots of Windows licenses in the process. If they don’t, though — if people keep using their Windows machines in approximately the same way they have for decades — Microsoft makes money anyway and leaves its cloud computing capacity free to sell to other firms that want to try their luck building AI tools.

by John Herrman, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: Intelligencer; Photo: Microsoft

[ed. Probably the biggest threat from AI - now and the near future - is how people use it. Long before a sentient AI decides - "Hey, maybe this human species isn't that smart after all - not enough to be my Master, anyway" we'll have already proven why. It's possible that AI's greatest achievement, if we allow it, might be protecting us from ourselves. See also: AI Is an Existential Threat—Just Not the Way You Think (Scientific American):]

"Actually, there is an existential danger inherent in using AI, but that risk is existential in the philosophical rather than apocalyptic sense. AI in its current form can alter the way people view themselves. It can degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.

For example, humans are judgment-making creatures. People rationally weigh particulars and make daily judgment calls at work and during leisure time about whom to hire, who should get a loan, what to watch and so on. But more and more of these judgments are being automated and farmed out to algorithms. As that happens, the world won’t end. But people will gradually lose the capacity to make these judgments themselves. The fewer of them people make, the worse they are likely to become at making them.

Or consider the role of chance in people’s lives. Humans value serendipitous encounters: coming across a place, person or activity by accident, being drawn into it and retrospectively appreciating the role accident played in these meaningful finds. But the role of algorithmic recommendation engines is to reduce that kind of serendipity and replace it with planning and prediction.

Finally, consider ChatGPT’s writing capabilities. The technology is in the process of eliminating the role of writing assignments in higher education. If it does, educators will lose a key tool for teaching students how to think critically.

Not Dead But Diminished

So, no, AI won’t blow up the world. But the increasingly uncritical embrace of it, in a variety of narrow contexts, means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills. Algorithms are already undermining people’s capacity to make judgments, enjoy serendipitous encounters and hone critical thinking. [ed. Not to mention providing new ways of making money and securing power in previously unknown and unique ways.] 

The human species will survive such losses. But our way of existing will be impoverished in the process. The fantastic anxieties around the coming AI cataclysm, singularity, Skynet, or however you might think of it, obscure these more subtle costs. Recall T.S. Eliot’s famous closing lines of “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends,” he wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”]

The Briefy Awards

It’s our 100th News Briefing! In celebration, we’re making this Very Special Edition free for everyone to read. We’re also removing the paywalls from our entire back catalog (up to May 10), so those considering subscribing can get a taste of what our news briefing offers.

In honor of our 100th edition, we decided to do something a bit different. Over the course of our first 99 issues we've encountered numerous joys and horrors. We thought that we'd take a look back at some of the most shocking happenings, admirable heroes, and dastardly villains we've encountered so far. And what better way to honor them than through an awards show! That's why we bring to you the first-ever Current Affairs News Briefing BRIEFY AWARDS!

GREATEST INNOVATOR IN POLITICAL CORRUPTION:

There is really no other choice here besides Congressman George Santos, who took the phrase “fake it ‘til you make it” to heart by fabricating basically every aspect of his career and personal life. This is actually not what brought him down, though. He flew a bit too close to the sun by, according to a federal indictment, stealing the credit card information of donors and starting a fake nonprofit whose proceeds he used to buy designer clothing, among other things. (In the United States Congress, being corrupt is perfectly ordinary; the only real crime is being corrupt too loudly, and drawing attention to all the others.) (Oct. 13, 2023)

(DIS)HONORABLE MENTIONS:

• Senator Bob Menendez, and the many bars of gold from shady Egyptian businessmen that were found in his closet. (In a really astonishing bit of excuse-making, Menendez tried to argue he had “intergenerational PTSD” from when his parents fled revolutionary Cuba in the 1950s, which caused him to hoard valuable objects. He might as well have just blamed the dog.) (Sept. 26, 2023 and Jan. 5, 2024)

• North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who hacked his way onto the GOP debate stage by paying voters with $20 gift cards to donate to him so he’d reach the small-dollar donations threshold. Burgumania may never have taken off, but we'll always remember him for this. (July 14, 2023)

• Representative Henry Cuellar, who was charged with accepting around $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan during its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Yikes. (May 7, 2024)

• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was accused of “hijacking” his office to do various favors for one of his top campaign donors, but narrowly avoided impeachment. Even the corruption, it seems, is bigger in Texas. (September 8, 2023)

MOST DYSTOPIAN ROBOTIC ENTITY:

The newly available flamethrower dog, from the appropriately named company ThrowFlame, which can be purchased in 48 American states. (Apr. 26, 2024)

(DIS)HONORABLE MENTIONS:

• Eric Adams’ NYPD Robot, who patrols the subways for crime at a blistering three mph. (Sept. 26, 2023)

• AI Putin, who appeared at a news conference to ask the real Putin about his opinions on the dangers of artificial intelligence (Dec. 15, 2023)

• “Ask Jesus,” the Twitch chatbot which allows to ask an artificially generated Jesus any question you like. (Aug. 4, 2023)

• nhPredict, the AI that the UnitedHealth Group used to generate lowball estimates for how much care elderly patients “should” require and deny anything above the threshold. (Nov. 21, 2023)

• The holographic versions of KISS that will no doubt haunt the world’s concert venues long after the band itself had departed this earthly plane (Dec. 5, 2023) (...)

COP OF THE YEAR:

Jesse Hernandez, the Florida sheriff’s deputy who mistook the sound of a falling acorn for gunfire, panicked, and emptied the magazine of his service weapon into his own car (while a handcuffed Black man sat inside.) The competition was stiff this year, but nobody else embodied the combination of cowardice, random violence, and reckless disregard for the lives of others that characterize the American police quite so well.

[ed. From the link:] 

"A Florida cop got scared by a falling acorn and opened fire on his own car. The cop in question—a sheriff’s deputy named Jesse Hernandez—apparently mistook the sound of the nut hitting the roof of his patrol car for a gunshot, and unleashed what we might euphemistically call an “officer-involved ballistic-type situation.” In the bodycam video from the incident, we can hear Hernandez yell “shots fired!”, drop to the ground and roll, and then proceed to empty the magazine of his service pistol into his own car, firing around 15 shots in the general direction of the sound.

This alone would be pretty ridiculous, but the story gets worse: there was an unarmed, handcuffed Black man sitting in the car at the time, who Hernandez apparently assumed was shooting at him. His name was Marquis Jackson, and he’d been arrested earlier in the day. Miraculously, Jackson survived Hernandez’s hail of bullets, but posted on Facebook that he’s been “damaged for life” by the traumatic experience.

 
Of course, it’s not exactly news that the U.S. police are twitchy and paranoid. In 2016, Harper’s Magazine published a long list of innocuous items they’ve mistaken for guns over the years, including wallets, phones, sunglasses, a sandwich, and even a pair of underwear. Now we can add “acorns” to the inventory. Many of those past cases ended with the police shooting someone, and a lot of the victims were Black men like Marquis Jackson. There are several reasons for this. It’s partly a consequence of the ridiculous training a lot of cops go through, which emphasizes a so-called “warrior mentality” and teaches police to see everyone around them as potential enemies. It’s partly just plain old racism. And it’s partly the blurred line between police and the military—according to The Washington Post, Jesse Hernandez “didn’t have any prior law enforcement experience,” but was in the Army Special Forces for 10 years before becoming a deputy. Taken together, these factors make police more of a danger to the wider community than they are protectors of it."

by Current Affairs Staff: Stephen Prager, Alex Skopic, Nathan J. Robinson, Lily Sánchez, Cali Traina Blume, and Justin Ward  |  Read more:

Images: Various CA staff

[ed. I haven't read all the links, but there are a ton more...]

Was the 401(k) a Mistake?

Jen Forbus turned 50 this year. She is in good health and says her life has only gotten better as she has grown older. Forbus resides in Lorain, Ohio, not far from Cleveland; she is single and has no children, but her parents and sisters are nearby. She works, remotely, as an editorial supervisor for an educational publishing company, a job that she loves. She is on track to pay off her mortgage in the next 10 years, and having recently made her last car payment, she is otherwise debt-free. By almost any measure, Forbus is middle class.

Still, she worries about her future. Forbus would like to stop working when she is 65. She has no big retirement dreams — she is not planning to move to Florida or to take extravagant vacations. She hopes to spend her later years enjoying family and friends and pursuing different hobbies. But she knows that she hasn’t set aside enough money to ensure that she can realize even this modest ambition.

A former high school teacher, Forbus says she has around $200,000 in total savings. She earns a high five-figure salary and contributes 9 percent of it to the 401(k) plan that she has through her employer. The company also makes a matching contribution that is equivalent to 5 percent of her salary. A widely accepted rule of thumb among personal-finance experts is that your retirement income needs to be close to 80 percent of what you earned before retiring if you hope to maintain your lifestyle. Forbus figures that she can retire comfortably on around $1 million, although if her house is paid off, she might be able to get by with a bit less. She is not factoring Social Security benefits into her calculations. “I feel like it’s too uncertain and not something I can depend on,” she says.

But even if the stock market delivers blockbuster returns over the next 15 years, her goal is going to be difficult to reach — and this assumes that she doesn’t have a catastrophic setback, like losing her job or suffering a debilitating illness.

She also knows that markets don’t always go up. During the 2008 global financial crisis, her 401(k) lost a third of its value, which was a scarring experience. From the extensive research that she has done, Forbus has become a fairly savvy investor; she’s familiar with all of the major funds and has 60 percent of her money in stocks and the rest in fixed income, which is generally the recommended ratio for people who are some years away from retiring. Still, Forbus would prefer that her retirement prospects weren’t so dependent on her own investing acumen. “It makes me very nervous,” she concedes. She and her friends speak with envy of the pensions that their parents and grandparents had. “I wish that were an option for us,” she says.

The sentiment is understandable. With pensions, otherwise known as defined-benefit plans, your employer invests on your behalf, and you are promised a fixed monthly income upon retirement. With 401(k)s, which are named after a section of the tax code, you choose from investment options that your company gives you, and there is no guarantee of what you will get back, only limits on what you can put in. This is why they are known as defined-contribution plans. Pensions still exist but mainly for unionized jobs. In the private sector, they have largely been replaced by 401(k)s, which came along in the early 1980s. Generally, contributions to 401(k)s are pretax dollars — you pay income tax when you withdraw the money — and these savings vehicles have been a bonanza for a lot of Americans.

Not all companies offer 401(k)s, however, and millions of private-sector employees lack access to workplace retirement plans. Availability is just one problem; contributing is another. Many people who have 401(k)s put little if any money into their accounts. With Americans now aging out of the work force in record numbers — according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income, a nonprofit founded by a group of financial-services companies, 4.1 million people will turn 65 this year, part of what the AARP and others have called the “silver tsunami” — the holes in the retirement system are becoming starkly apparent. U.S. Census Bureau data indicates that in 2017 49 percent of Americans ages 55 to 66 had “no personal retirement savings.”

The savings shortfall is no surprise to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist at the New School in New York. She has long predicted that the shift to 401(k)s would leave vast numbers of Americans without enough money to retire on, reducing many of them to poverty or forcing them to continue working into their late 60s and beyond. That so many people still do not have 401(k)s or find themselves, like Jen Forbus, in such tenuous circumstances when they do, is proof that what she refers to as this “40-year experiment with do-it-yourself pensions” has been “an utter failure.”

It certainly appears to be failing a large segment of the working population, and while Ghilarducci has been making that case for years, more and more people are now coming around to her view. Her latest book, “Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy,” which was published in March, is drawing a lot of attention: She has been interviewed on NPR and C-SPAN and has testified on Capitol Hill.

It is no longer just fellow progressives who are receptive to her message. Ghilarducci used to be an object of scorn on the right, once drawing the megaphonic wrath of Rush Limbaugh. Today, though, even some conservatives admit that her assessment of the retirement system is basically correct. Indeed, Kevin Hassett, who was a senior economic adviser to President Trump, teamed up with Ghilarducci not long ago to devise a plan that would help low- and middle-income Americans save more for retirement. Their proposal is the basis for legislation currently before Congress.

And Ghilarducci recently found her critique being echoed by one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street. In his annual letter to investors, Larry Fink, the chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset-management companies, wrote that the United States was facing a retirement crisis due in no small part to self-directed retirement financing. Fink said that for most Americans, replacing defined-benefit plans with defined-contribution plans had been “a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty” and suggested that it was time to abandon the “you’re on your own” approach.

While that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, it seems fair to ask whether the country as a whole has been well served by the 401(k) revolution. The main beneficiaries have been higher-income workers; instead of making an economically secure retirement possible for more people, 401(k)s have arguably become another driver of the inequality that is a defining feature of American life.

***

When it comes to generating wealth, 401(k)s have been an extraordinary success. The Investment Company Institute, a financial-industry trade group, calculates that the roughly 700,000 401(k) plans now in existence hold more than $7 trillion in assets. But the gains have gone primarily to those who were already at or near the top. According to the Federal Reserve, the value of the median retirement-saving account for households in the 90th to 100th income percentile has more than quintupled during the last 30 years and is currently more than $500,000. In one sense, it is not surprising that the affluent have profited to this degree from 401(k)s: The more money you can invest, the more money you stand to make.

In 2024, annual pretax contributions for employees are capped at $23,000, but with an employer match and possibly also an after-tax contribution (which is permitted under some plans), the maximum can reach $69,000. Workers 50 and over are also allowed to kick in an additional $7,500, potentially pushing the total to $76,500. Needless to say, only a sliver of the U.S. work force can contribute anything like that to their 401(k)s. 

The withdrawal rules have evolved in a way that also favors high earners. You are generally not supposed to begin taking money from a 401(k) before you are 59½; doing so could incur a 10 percent penalty (on top of the income-tax hit). What’s more, you can now put off withdrawing money until age 73; previously, you had to begin drawing down 401(k)s by 70½. Those extra years are an added tax benefit for retirees who are in no rush to tap their 401(k)s.

People in lower-income brackets may have also made money from 401(k)s but hardly enough to retire on with Social Security. In 2022, the median retirement account for households in the 20th through 39th percentile held just $20,000. For this segment of the working population, 401(k)s sometimes end up serving a very different purpose. They become a source of emergency funds, not retirement income. But then, for many of these people, retirement seems like an impossibility.

Laura Gendreau directs a program called Stand by Me, a joint venture between the United Way of Delaware and the state government that provides free financial counseling. She says that when she asks clients if they are putting aside any money for retirement, they often look at her in disbelief: “They say, ‘How do you expect me to save for retirement when I’m living paycheck to paycheck?’” She and her colleagues try to identify expenditures that can be eliminated or reduced so that people can start saving at least a small portion of what they earn. But she says that some clients are having such a hard time just getting by that they can’t fathom being able to retire. Sometimes it does not even occur to them to look into whether their employers offer 401(k)s. “They have no idea,” Gendreau says.

Ghilarducci has been hearing this sort of thing for years. Her career in academia began around the time that 401(k)s first emerged, and from the start, she regarded these savings plans with skepticism. For one thing, she feared that a lot of people would never have access to them. But she also felt that 401(k)s were unsuitable for lower-income Americans, who often struggled to save money or who might not have either the time or the knowledge to manage their own investments. In her judgment, the offloading of retirement risk onto workers was worse than just an economic misstep — it represented a betrayal of the social contract. (...)

In 2008, Ghilarducci proposed replacing 401(k)s with “guaranteed retirement accounts,” a program that would combine mandatory individual and employer contributions with tax credits and that would guarantee at least a 3 percent annual return, adjusted for inflation. Her plan drew the wrath of voices on the right — the conservative pundit James Pethokoukis called her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

But her timing proved to be apt: That year, the global financial crisis imperiled the retirement plans of millions of Americans. Ghilarducci suggested that if the government was going to bail out the banks, it also had an obligation to help people whose 401(k)s had tanked. Her idea inflamed the right: Rush Limbaugh attacked her during his daily radio show, which brought her a wave of hate mail.

Her hostility to 401(k)s is partly anchored in a belief that when it comes to retirement, the country was on a better path in the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans could count on pensions and Social Security to provide them with a decent retirement. It was a different era, of course — back then, men (and it was almost always men) often spent their entire careers with the same companies. And even at their peak, pensions were not available to everyone; only around half of all employees ever had one. Still, in Ghilarducci’s view, it was a time when the United States put more emphasis on the interests of working-class Americans, including ensuring that they could retire with some degree of economic security.

She portrays the move to defined contribution retirement plans as part of the sharp rightward turn that the United States took under President Ronald Reagan, when the notion of individual responsibility became economic dogma — what the Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker has called “the great risk shift.” The downside of this shift was laid bare by the great recession. Many older Americans lost their savings and were forced to scavenge for work.

This was the subject of the journalist Jessica Bruder’s book “Nomadland,” for which Ghilarducci was interviewed and that was the basis for the Oscar-winning film of the same title. To Ghilarducci, the portraits in “Nomadland” — of lives upended, of the indignity of being old and having to scramble for food and shelter — presaged the insecure future that awaited millions of other older Americans. And Ghilarducci believes that with record numbers of people now reaching retirement age, that grim future is arriving.

by Michael Steinberger, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tim Enthoven
[ed. I don't have enough insight into other people's experiences to make anything other than broad generalizations, but having a defined benefit retirement plan (which pays out a defined monetary benefit each month, like Social Security) has been one of the luckiest of lucky situations I've ever stumbled into. When 401k's were first introduced I imagined them as a gift to Wall Street - people being forced into the market with nothing but their own financial investing accumen to guide them into retirement security. Maybe you'd make out great, maybe not. If you were into investing, it might've looked like a great opportunity. But even then it was obvious that risk was being transfered from employers to employees, since many if not most employers had a contractual, and sometimes constitutional, obligation to provide a guaranteed retirement income based on job class and years of service. It probably worked out well for some with enough income to invest, but it was clear even to someone as oblivious as me (who didn't much care about financial matters or could even imagine retirement back then) that most people probably wouldn't have either the funds, insight, interest, or sophistication to manage all the various complexities involved in guiding and growing their own retirement accounts. And so it has come to pass. Read the comments for other perspectives.]

Nvidia’s CEO Could Be the World’s Richest Man Sooner Than You Think

Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, has been rich for about three decades, but it’s only in the past few months that his wealth has grown to GDP–of–an–Eastern European–country levels. His company, founded in 1993 in a California Denny’s, manufactures a type of hypercomplex microprocessor that was once the domain of video-game systems but now makes artificial-intelligence technology, with its extreme demands on computer power, possible.

Nvidia is worth $2.6 trillion — larger than two Metas, three Berkshire Hathaways, or five ExxonMobils. Goldman Sachs called it “the most important stock on planet Earth” for its centrality in the booming AI industry, and his company will likely be worth more than Apple in a few months. As of Friday, Huang is the 17th-richest person in the world, with an estimated $91 billion to his name, according to Bloomberg. That’s more than double what he was worth on Christmas. At this rate, Huang — whose public image is far from the flamboyant edgelord tech bro who has become so common among the Silicon Valley’s C-suites — could become richer than Elon Musk by 2025 and his company more valuable than any other in the world. (Or, of course, the stock could stop going straight up, as it did a few weeks ago, since lots of people seem to think it’s gotten way overvalued.)

AI, as a technology, is still pretty uneven. OpenAI’s most advanced public version can pick stocks better than humans, while Google’s new AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, thinks you should eat rocks. (You should not eat rocks.) Huang, though, doesn’t really care very much about that, at least as far as his own personal fortune is concerned. AI software requires a huge amount of processing power, regardless of how right or wrong the actual program’s answers may be, and Huang’s company more or less has the market cornered on making the kinds of computer chips that can handle that. Even the stupidest AI is going to need a lot of Nvidia’s chips, called graphics-processing units.

Since there is such a fervent belief among the Silicon Valley set that AI will one day achieve superhuman intelligence, there’s a tremendous incentive for just about every tech company to make that technology a core part of its operations. Huang’s business, though, is today’s equivalent of selling shovels during a gold rush. Many, if not most, of the companies vying to be the next big thing in A.I. will go bust — and Nvidia will have long pocketed their money.

by Kevin T. Dugan, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Jensen Huang’s Homes: Inside the Nvidia CEO’s Property Portfolio (Mansion Global).] (ed. Mansion Global?). Also, from one of the article's links: Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models (pdf):]

Abstract:  We investigate whether an LLM can successfully perform financial statement analysis in a way similar to a professional human analyst. We provide standardized and anonymous financial statements to GPT4 and instruct the model to analyze them to determine the direction of future earnings. Even without any narrative or industryspecific information, the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. The LLM exhibits a relative advantage over human analysts in situations when the analysts tend to struggle. Furthermore, we find that the prediction accuracy of the LLM is on par with the performance of a narrowly trained state-ofthe-art ML model. LLM prediction does not stem from its training memory. Instead, we find that the LLM generates useful narrative insights about a company’s future performance. Lastly, our trading strategies based on GPT’s predictions yield a higher Sharpe ratio and alphas than strategies based on other models. Taken together, our results suggest that LLMs may take a central role in decision-making. (...)

Conclusions: Our results suggest that GPT’s analysis yields useful insights about the company, which enable the model to outperform professional human analysts in predicting the direction of future earnings. We also document that GPT and human analysts are complementary, rather than substitutes. Specifically, language models have a larger advantage over human analysts when analysts are expected to exhibit bias and disagreement, suggesting that AI models can assist humans better when they are under-performing. Humans, on the other hand add value when additional context, not available to the model is likely to be important.

Furthermore and surprisingly, GPT’s performance is on par (or even better in some cases) with that of the most sophisticated narrowly specialized machine learning models, namely, an ANN trained on earnings prediction tasks. We investigate potential sources of the LLM’s superior predictive power. We first rule out that the model’s performance stems from its memory. Instead, our analysis suggests that the model draws its inference by gleaning useful insights from its analysis of trends and financial ratios and by leveraging its theoretical Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models 30 understanding and economic reasoning. Notably, the narrative financial statement analysis generated by the language model has substantial informational value in its own right. Building on these findings, we also present a profitable trading strategy based on GPT’s predictions. The strategy yields higher Sharpe ratios and alphas than other trading strategies based on ML models. Overall, our analysis suggests that GPT shows a remarkable aptitude for financial statement analysis and achieves state-of-the-art performance without any specialized training. 

Although one must interpret our results with caution, we provide evidence consistent with large language models having human-like capabilities in the financial domain. Generalpurpose language models successfully perform a task that typically requires human expertise and judgment and do so based on data exclusively from the numeric domain. Therefore, our findings indicate the potential for LLMs to democratize financial information processing and should be of interest to investors and regulators. For example, our results suggest that generative AI is not merely a tool that can assist investors (e.g., in summarizing financial statements, Kim et al., 2023b), but can play a more active role in making informed decisions. This finding is significant, as unsophisticated investors might be prone to ignoring relevant signals (e.g., Blankespoor et al., 2019), even if they are generated by advanced AI tools. However, whether AI can substantially improve human decision-making in financial markets in practice is still to be seen. We leave this question for future research. Finally, even though we strive to understand the sources of model predictions, it is empirically difficult to pinpoint how and why the model performs well."

Authors: Kim, Alex G. and Muhn, Maximilian and Nikolaev, Valeri V., Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models (May 20, 2024). Chicago Booth Research Paper Forthcoming, Fama-Miller Working Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4835311 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4835311

The Last Thing My Mother Wanted

Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us.

Do you know how many grams of Nembutal it takes to put an elephant to sleep?” asks the anesthesiologist from Pegasos, a voluntary-assisted-death organization in Switzerland, after an evaluative look at my mother.

We — my 74-year-old mother, my younger sister, and I — are sitting on a couch in the suite of a charming hotel near the center of Basel. Thin, contained, elegant, with a neat bob of white hair, Mom is at attention. The doctor seems at ease. As he tucks his hat under a red-and-gold Louis XV–style chair, he tells us that many people who avail themselves of Pegasos’s service, which costs more than $10,000, will sell their car or antique books to spend their last few nights at this hotel.

It is September 28, 2022, the day before my mother is scheduled to inject herself with 15 grams of Nembutal — enough to sedate three and a half elephants, the doctor says. She would not need to worry about waking up or being cremated alive. This was a relief to her, Mom says with a smile.

In June, my sister and I had learned, almost by accident, that she was seeking an assisted suicide. I was on the phone with Mom, listening to her complain about an annoying bureaucrat at the New York County Clerk’s Office, when she mentioned it. “I am putting in an application to Pegasos,” she said impassively, “so I was getting some documents for them.” I texted my sister while we were on the phone: “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me about Mom applying to die?” Three little dots. “Wait,” My sister wrote back. “What. What is she doing?”

Mom didn’t have cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or any of the illnesses that typically qualify you for assisted death. A cataract in her left eye had deteriorated, and though she had some foot pain and had gotten a pacemaker, all of which weighed on her, she was quite healthy for her age. She had completed a marathon just a few years before at 68.

But her long-term partner had been diagnosed with an incurable glioblastoma in February 2020 and had taken advantage of California’s “death with dignity” laws to die that May. Soon after, Mom left San Francisco, a city she hated for the 20 years she lived there, and moved back to her beloved New York. She bought an apartment near her childhood home on Fifth Avenue; reconnected with old friends; saw plays, art exhibits, and movies; ate good food; and traveled — and did not care about any of it. “Oh, I have nothing interesting to say,” she would say when I called, her voice animated only when she was describing a plan to smite anyone responsible for a grievance by writing a furious email or leaving an angry Yelp review. My mother had always been a flashlight of a person — shining a small but intense beam on things she wanted to explore — but now the radius had shrunk, the light weakened. She used to be curious about my husband’s hobbies, our children, my sister’s career, but those topics, like everything else, were now of only vague interest. She would come down to Virginia to see my family and go up to Connecticut to see my sister’s, but she wouldn’t play with the kids and didn’t seem to enjoy the trips, just expressed relief when they were over. In the last months of her life, the only thing that appeared to give her real joy was the hope that she would be ending it.

In the U.S., ten states allow physician-assisted death, which is available only to residents who are terminally ill with no more than six months to live. In Canada, the laws are more expansive, but citizens still need a diagnosis — if not a terminal condition, then an incurable one with intolerable suffering and an advanced state of decline. In Switzerland, where a foreigner can go to receive aid in dying, there are fewer restrictions on who is eligible. Pegasos is one of the only organizations that will help elderly people who have not been diagnosed with a terminal illness but who are tired of life. Its website notes that “old age is rarely kind” and that “for a person to be in the headspace of considering ending their lives, their quality of life must be qualitatively poor.”

My mother had pinned her hopes on this “tired of life” catchall. She had a three-pronged rationale, she told us over the phone: The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging. (...)

The night before she is scheduled to kill herself, we have a sumptuous dinner at the Brasserie au Violon, the site of a former prison; my mother chose the venue as a joke.

The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon. Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: “I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.” “Mom!” We splutter. “We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!” Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to.

by Evelyn Jouvenet, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Evelyn Jouvenet

Katharina Hvalur

via:

[ed. Reminds me of someone - similar encounter, similar setting.]

‘Tis the (Oscar) Season

In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter began running their column “Brutally Honest Ballot,” which highlights the opinions of several Academy voters leading up to that ceremony. What is striking is not necessarily their choices, but the rationale, which consists mostly of instances that rubbed them the wrong way, likability, or confusion. When evaluating the Best Actress category in 2014, one voter declared

I didn’t vote for Jennifer Lawrence, even though I thought she was very entertaining in the movie, because (a) she just won last year, and (b) we can’t give everything to Jennifer Lawrence when she’s 22 years old because Jennifer Lawrence will be institutionalized. She will have gotten too much, too soon, too early, and she’ll lose her mind. I also didn’t think she gave the better performance.

Another anonymous voter in 2017 talking about the Best Director race:

Damien [Chazelle] is such a sweetheart; I loved what he did with Whiplash and this one, and he’s probably going to win. But I voted for [Kenneth] Lonergan, because it was harder to make everything click on that movie, and he really succeeded.

Like any other type of campaign, the personal becomes intertwined with techniques and ability, and the overall politics of the industry at the time of voting. Everything becomes possible when we rid ourselves of this idea that what is being evaluated for quality. Instead, we have a world of potential and aspiration. We have studios, producers, and above the liners jockeying for position. There will be dinners, a surge of well-poised interviews, and avoidance dances regarding scandals that could be detrimental to a film’s chances.

It would seem as if the machinations should deter from a movie lover’s adoration of the ceremony. So often, we hear the cynicism of those who discount the awards for not recognizing their favorites or giving the films the wrong awards or for pandering. All kind of true. But instead of assuming that the Awards will somehow magically conform to my taste, I’ve just begun to let go and enjoy the process of the entire thing. (...)

My favorite example of a beautiful campaign was DiCaprio’s run for Best Actor in 2016. Nominated five times previously for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Aviator, Blood Diamond, The Wolf of Wall Street, he had done pretty much all the things an actor needs to do for an Oscar. He paired with the best filmmakers. Played villains and heroes. Donned accents. Gained and lost weight. But he was the victim of poor timing. Then came The Revenant. The film already had a firm foundation – Alejandro G. Iñárritu was already an Oscar powerhouse, winning Best Director for his film, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). The majority of the film left DiCaprio alone most of the time, allowing him to really chew on all the scenery and have nobody come close to outshining his performance (somebody like the formidable Tom Hardy). While DiCaprio does media to support his films, this award season he seemed to be all in, in comparison to previous years – much more was said about the vegetarian eating raw meat, the hardship he faced in the cold, and the lack of glamor to the role. He wasn’t just talking about the movie and his performance, he was really unpacking the labor of his performance. He was demonstrating that this wasn’t just a role, but a lived experience, one in which (threatening or not) he deserved to be recognized for. And everybody else on the project affirmed this, as in their own interviews, they would speak to DiCaprio’s incredible performance, willingness to go above and beyond in his performance. In other words, he worked his ass off, give him the award already.

And that was the year he won. The media constantly reminded us that he had yet to win, despite being one of the biggest superstars in Hollywood and the world. We were reminded of his more than 20 years in the industry, his other great works that demonstrated he was more than just a heartthrob but a bonafide actor, and that it was his time. Regardless of whether it should have been for The Revenant or Gilbert Grape, the audience in the auditorium gave him a standing ovation, an actor finally getting his after all these years (another narrative Hollywood loves to perpetuate). He performed a phenomenal monologue as his speech, clearly rehearsed, incredibly cogent, and forgetting nobody we need to hear in an acceptance speech: colleagues (by name), team, parents, friends, and the environment. He skipped up the stairs with a strong suspicion he’d win, because he had done everything Hollywood asked. His love and labor prevailed. (...)

While for the most part, there are a few surprises on the day, enjoying the process of putting together a win, is akin to the plays used in the Super Bowl. It has become suspiciously like the political trails, where it is less about policy and more about who we’d rather have a beer with. It’s the spectacle and machinations over the substance of each film – the power of schmoozery, PACS, and campaign strategy itself over the actual quality of the content campaigned.

by Melinda Lewis, The Smart Set |  Read more:

Image: Isabella Akhtarshenas

[ed. See also: All the Films in Competition at Cannes, Ranked from Best to Worst (New Yorker); and, The Creator Almost Broke Me (TSS):]

"It was a very tense time in Hollywood when The Creator was released; the actors’ and the writers’ unions were deep in negotiation with the studios during a work stoppage, and one of the biggest issues addressed by their negotiations was how AI would be used in their industry going forward. So, I was not surprised that the first few reviews I read about the film were all about AI, but then I kept looking, hoping that at least one major publication would address how timely the message of dehumanizing the opponent during times of war was. However, there was none. Every single review I read — positive or negative — decried the portrayal of AI in The Creator as not being evil enough to justify the fears creatives have about losing their jobs to AI.

In the third act of The Creator Taylor becomes fully immersed in the AI child’s sentience, whom he’s now named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Taylor realizes that above all else, Alphie is just a child. At every opportune moment, the movie pauses to remind the audience of the sentience of the AI robots. They have a sense of humor, they can lose their temper, and most importantly, they can love. Taylor also realizes this, and he just can’t bring himself to harm a child — so ultimately, given Alphie’s importance as the only one with the capability to completely end the war, Taylor and Alphie are on the run from both the U.S. Army and the AI Army. Fortunately, they are discovered by a high-ranking soldier named Harun (Ken Watanabe) from the AI Army. Despite Harun’s initial suspicion and anger towards Taylor, he explains that the AI never desired war with humans. He reveals that the “terror attack” in L.A. was actually a man-made explosion caused by a coding error. Much like the themes explored in The Creator, it has become evident that threats to the creative community’s livelihood stem from tangible, man-made issues rather than from AI. Major publications’ lack of in-depth analysis regarding the film’s commentary on the military-industrial complex isn’t due to censorship but rather reflects the pressure for writers to conform to online trends. (...)

It wasn’t always like this; when I first entered the field, you could write whatever you wanted about a movie, and things remained the same for me until April 2023. The publication I worked for fired a long-term editor, and all the writers were informed that revenue streams from the articles we wrote were unsatisfactory. The higher-ups informed writers that they had figured out a way to use perfect SEO practices to ensure our articles would be viewed by more readers. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is a strategy used by publications to make their content show up as the top result on search engines like Google. It involves understanding how search engine algorithms work and tailoring articles to match those criteria. While SEO brings in revenue for publications, this “Google journalism” transforms keywords and movies into clickbait material.

At first, I welcomed SEO to my writing because I was most proud of two things in my professional life: my internet searching skills and my writing skills. With enough time, I thought I could provide a clean, well-sourced copy on just about any topic. But the story choices just kept getting worse and the enforced style of writing became formulaic. One time, a Larry David interview went viral when he revealed that he filmed a death scene for his show Curb Your Enthusiasm just in case the show ended abruptly. In quick response, my editor suggested an article where 10 other actors recorded their characters’ demise. Such a list obviously could not be compiled; that was just Larry David’s eclectic humor.

During the silver age of criticism, publications could track not only how many people clicked on their articles but also how long they spent on them. So, it wasn’t enough to write an article with a sensational headline anymore; it also had to hold the readers’ attention for as long as possible. These practices led writers to produce low-quality articles and consumer fatigue. Then, Google also started generating its own AI answers to queries, so the number of readers clicking on the stories just kept shrinking with every passing day. Suddenly, all the SEO wizardry became unable to solve these particular issues, and revenues dropped. But since consumers were now more attached to a brand than any critic in particular, the next inevitable step followed: Just lay the writers off.

It would be simpler to blame media executives for fixating on unsustainable revenue models that appease algorithms rather than actual readers, but that would ignore our collective complicity as media, in general. We writers knew when stories prioritized visibility over informational value. All of us understood how robotic and inorganic our work had become. We invited the wolf into our pen because the wolf promised to play by the sheep’s rules. And that ended up eroding the general consumers’ trust in our work. So, much like the AI robots in The Creator, I’m aware that journalists of all disciplines do not qualify as perfect victims to most readers."

  ~ The Creator Almost Broke Me (Fred Onyango/TSS)

via:

Traveling Wilbury's

 

Tweeter and the Monkey Man, were hard up for cash. They stayed up all night, selling cocaine and hash. To an undercover cop, who had a sister named Jan. For reasons unexplained, she loved the Monkey Man. Tweeter was a Boy Scout, before she went to Vietnam, and found out the hard way, nobody gives a damn. They knew that they'd find freedom, just across the Jersey Line, so they hopped into a stolen car, took Highway 99.

[Chorus]: And the walls came down, All the way to hell, Never saw them when they're standing, Never saw them when they fell.

The undercover cop, never liked the Monkey Man. Even back in childhood, he wanted to see him in the can. Jan got married at 14, to a racketeer named Bill. She made secret calls to the Monkey Man, from a mansion on the hill. It was out on Thunder Road, Tweeter at the wheel. They crashed into paradise, they could hear them tires squeal. The undercover cop pulled up and said, "Every one of you is a liar. If you don't surrender now, it's gonna go down to the wire".

[Chorus]

An ambulance rolled up, a state trooper close behind, Tweeter took his gun away, and messed up his mind. The undercover cop was left, tied up to a tree, near the souvenir stand by the old abandoned factory. Next day, the undercover cop, was hot in pursuit, he was taking the whole thing personal, he didn't care about the loot. Jan had told him many times, "It was you to me who taught, in Jersey, anything's legal as long as you don't get caught".

[Chorus]

Some place by Rahway Prison, they ran out of gas, the undercover cop had cornered them, said,"Boy, you didn't think that this could last"? Jan jumped out of bed, said "There's someplace I gotta go", she took a gun out of the drawer, said "It's best that you don't know". The undercover cop was found, face down in a field, the Monkey Man was on the river bridge, using Tweeter as a shield. Jan said to the Monkey Man, "I'm not fooled by Tweeter's curl, I knew him long before, he ever became a Jersey girl."

[Chorus]

Now the town of Jersey City, is quieting down again, I'm sitting in a gambling club, called The Lion's Den. The TV set was blown up, every bit of it is gone, ever since the nightly news showed, that the Monkey Man was on. I guess I'll go to Florida, and get myself some sun, there ain't no more opportunity here, everything's been done. Sometimes, I think of Tweeter, sometimes, I think of Jan, sometimes, I don't think, about nothing but the Monkey Man.

[Chorus]

Lyrics via

[ed. See also: Bob Dylan’s “Tweeter and The Monkey Man”; the origins, the music and the meaning (Songfacts).

Quotes/Jokes/Observations

[ed. I've lost the sources for several of these. Attributions included whenever possible.]

"Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity,” she writes, “and generosity is insidious when it’s a camouflage for control. And both power and generosity are confusing when they gaslight you into believing they could be love.”  [ed. Word.]

***

"Well that’s not very in love with me of you"

***

To paraphrase, re: Orwell vs. Huxley. Orwell feared the banning of books, Huxley feared no one would want to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information, Huxley feared those who would give us so much we would be reduced to passivity and egoism, Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

***

The guy looking intently on the pavement for his wallet at night:

'Where do you think you lost it?'
'I lost it down that alley'.
'Why are you looking out here?'
- 'The light's better'

***

"What did the astronaut see on the stove? An unidentified frying object.”

***

"Cockroach idea”: “a bad idea that you sometimes do manage to get rid of – for a while. But it just keeps coming back” - Paul Krugman

***

"I'll never be as good as I used to be, but I can get better than I am today tommorow" - Arnold Palmer

***

"At equilibrium, the evolutionary race is not only to the big and aggressive, but also to a certain number of the small and sneaky" - Psychologist David P. Barash

***

"It's a fool who plays it cool by making the world a little colder." - Paul McCartney

"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." - John Wooden

"Everything not saved will be lost." -Nintendo video game warning when the system shuts down

"Disciple: ‘Why is there evil in the universe?’  - Ramakrishna: ‘To thicken the plot.’”

“I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.” - Philip Larkin

“Not my circus, not my monkeys.” - Polish proverb...

“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.” - Michael Scott

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” ― Leo Tolstoy

Image: via

Daniel Arnold
via:

There is a whole world that doesn’t exist anymore — that’s just what time does. It takes things away from you. Life is a series of losses, so you’re always in a state of mourning to some extent. That’s what nostalgia is, it’s a kind of mourning. ~ Sigrid Nunez - Living and Creating Through Grief

Image: Daniel Arnold

Shall We Dance?

I think I may have spotted a positive trend. Now that’s not a sentence you would expect to read in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is it!

Positive trend? Yes....recently (in a certain kind of feminist journalism) I keep coming across warm-hearted acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life. An acknowledgement that the relationship between a man and a woman has the potential to be the finest fruit that life has to offer. And that when things go wrong, they are often better understood as resulting from a kind of Faustian tango between the sexes than as a simple case of one sex always doing wrong by the other. All just timeless truths and plain common sense you might say - and Yes perhaps these timeless truths have ever obtained in the kitchens and bedrooms of our Western society. But they are ones that have been conspicuous by their absence in the groves of academe and in the fourth estate in recent decades.

As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all. But it’s fair to say that masculinity has not had a good press in recent decades. As journalist Kathleen Stock (* see bio note below) remarked recently “Men are pretty much banned from making any generalisations about women good or bad” so it has perhaps been inevitable in our time that any defence of the male of the species has had to come from women. And that is what most of the rest of this essay will be about. (...)

So what about this new more postive feminist journalism? My first instinct was to do my usual thing and try to distil the essence of it into my own overview. But then it occurred to me that it might give a better – more vividly female voice - to just let these women speak for themselves. So the body of this essay will take the form of excerpts from these journalists’ own words - with just a little light annotation from me where necessary, to clarify what is being discussed. It is important to note that - because these are just snippets lifted from quite lengthy articles - wherever you see a string of dots (as in ........) the writer’s subject matter may have moved on quite considerably. So don’t expect a seamless thread of argument. The result will be a kind of dissident feminist kaleidoscope. I include a link at the end of each excerpt so that (barring paywalls) you can see the full text (and all of them are well written pieces). I also give a bit of background info on some of these journalists at the end of this section. So here goes:

What Does Caitlin Moran Know about Men? – Kathleen Stock’s review of Caitlin Moran’s new book What About Men

Moran apparently thinks, not just that masculinity is wholly cultural, but that there’s only one version of it, entirely based on her husband, his mates, and some sons of her friends.... Equally, she seems to think that all women are exactly like she is — dorky, warm, garrulous and funny.....

......She is right that false whispers about sexual misdemeanours can ruin a young man’s life. She tries hard to be sympathetic about this as well as to the idea that young men are beset by images of “toxic masculinity” in a way that is messing them up. And there’s even the odd hint that prevalent feminist approaches might be part of the problem..... Post #MeToo, one legacy of mainstream feminism seems to be the policy of shouting at all men about how terrible they are, in the hope that some of the generalised opprobrium sticks to the right candidates. At the same time, men’s ordinary sexual impulses — sometimes irritating, sometimes welcome — are denigrated and treated as inevitably threatening and sinister....... (...)

.....And it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses. When, in the final chapter, Moran eventually gets round to the former......most of the things she thinks we value in men are also things we value in dogs. In fact, I would go further — they are things we value in elderly Labradors. The characteristics she celebrates — being loyal, hard-working, protective, and so on — are all very pro-social and unthreatening to women and children, and unlikely to set the imagination alight of any young man looking for his own hero’s journey.

.......Perhaps tellingly, though, there’s little suggestion in the book that women could learn from men about being more loyal or crying less...... To treat ‘feminine traits’ as a study programme that any man could get up to speed on if he tried seems to be setting men up for failure — and they don’t need more of that..... In any case, perhaps I am female-atypical, but — inviting as it sounds — I couldn’t live in Moran’s smoke-filled, gin-soaked world of warm hugs, tear-stained confidences and frank conversations about bodily fluids for more than 10 minutes at a time. Sometimes, talking about your feelings makes them worse and sometimes responding empathically to other people’s feelings only makes them more histrionic and attention-seeking. It can be very good to talk, but it can also be very good to shut the hell up and stamp off to dig the garden. https://unherd.com/2023/07/what-does-caitlin-moran-know-about-men/

This from Jennie Cummings-Knight at The Centre for Male Psychology in relation to the above-mentioned poster campaign:

Speaking as a woman, I am always fascinated by the double standards exhibited by women with respect to male behaviour. We are only interested in being looked at by men if we find the said man or men to be attractive to us...... in spite of our assertions that we don’t need male attention (see the Toy Story 4 Bo Beep character, developed by feminist writers) and that we want to be taken seriously as we pursue our careers, we still take a lot of trouble to look attractive to men. ...Teenage girls growing up in the 2000s are still hitching up their skirt waistbands as they come out of school on an afternoon. https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/male-psychology-magazine-listings/the-toxic-male-gaze-should-men-staring-at-women-be-illegal?

Interview with Louise Perry (* see below) about her best-selling book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution Prospect Magazine

“I start from feminist priors,” she explains—like an interest in protecting women and girls—“and I end up at some socially conservative conclusions.” She is ardent in her defence of marriage. Her belief in the importance of chivalry stands out too....... At the end of her book, she suggests that young women—in the name of protecting themselves in a hostile sexual climate—should not get drunk in the presence of men; that they should withhold sex for the first few months of a relationship ;and that they should avoid dating apps. Some of the advice would not be out of place in the 1950s. Louise Perry Prospect interview

Feminism Was Never About Equality - Bettina Arndt at Spectator Australia:

I started calling myself a ‘feminist’ as a young woman in the 1970s after reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, ironically whilst working a university vacation job as a Hertz Rent-a-car girl, dressed in my bright yellow perked cap and mini skirt, flirting with American tourists

I convinced myself that feminism was all about equality, about creating a level playing field where women could take their rightful place in the world, embracing opportunities once denied to them. But then I watched with increasing alarm as the current misandrist culture took hold, with the male of the species as the punching bag, and women shamelessly promoted and protected, infantilised, and idealised. Feminism had gone off the rails, I concluded. But it turned out that was wrong. Now I know the truth about feminist history – thanks to the formidable Janice Fiamengo professor of English from the University of Ottawa: “Feminism was never sane.....never expressed any appreciation for men nor recognition that men had made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of love and concern and compassion for women........ Men and women in earlier centuries lived interdependent lives in which the fragility of life and the presence of disease, the high infant mortality rate, the lack of a social safety net, and the complexities of housekeeping and childrearing meant that most women and men divided their prodigious labours into separate spheres of domestic and public. https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/feminism-was-never-about-equality/

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Image: Tristan and Iseult: Gaston Bussiere 1911/Wikimedia Commons