With The Beatles

What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.

I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.

There’s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl, I mean—whom I remember well. I don’t know her name, though. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles.

This was in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. It was early autumn. The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again. She was hurrying down the long, dim hallway of the old school building, her skirt fluttering. I was the only other person there. She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious. The LP “With the Beatles.” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I have a clear memory that it was the original, British version of the album, not the American or the Japanese version.

She was a beautiful girl. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell—that beautiful, nameless girl clutching “With the Beatles” to her chest.

My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared.

A dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, “With the Beatles.”

That was the only time I saw that girl. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade. (We were the so-called baby-boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. I looked for her every time I used that hallway.

Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.)

Later, I got to know a few women, and went out with them. And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I’d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964. That silent, insistent thrill in my heart, the breathless feeling in my chest, the bell ringing gently in my ears.

Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning.

When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.

On to the Beatles.

A year before I saw that girl was when the Beatles first became wildly popular. By April of 1964, they’d captured the top five spots on the American singles charts. Pop music had never seen anything like it. These were the five hit songs: (1) “Can’t Buy Me Love”; (2) “Twist and Shout”; (3) “She Loves You”; (4) “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; (5) “Please Please Me.” The single “Can’t Buy Me Love” alone had more than two million preorders, making it double platinum before the actual record went on sale.

The Beatles were, of course, also hugely popular in Japan. Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs. I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits. Ask me to sing them and I could. At home when I was studying (or pretending to study), most of the time I had the radio blasting away. But, truth be told, I was never a fervent Beatles fan. I never actively sought out their songs. For me, it was passive listening, pop music flowing out of the tiny speakers of my Panasonic transistor radio, in one ear and out the other, barely registering. Background music for my adolescence. Musical wallpaper.

In high school and in college, I didn’t buy a single Beatles record. I was much more into jazz and classical music, and that was what I listened to when I wanted to focus on music. I saved up to buy jazz records, requested tunes by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk at jazz bars, and went to classical-music concerts.

This might seem strange, but it wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I sat down and listened to “With the Beatles” from beginning to end. Despite the fact that the image of the girl carrying that LP in the hallway of our high school had never left me, for the longest time I didn’t feel like actually giving it a listen. I wasn’t particularly interested in knowing what sort of music was etched into the grooves of the vinyl disk she had clutched so tightly to her chest.

When I was in my mid-thirties, well past childhood and adolescence, my first impression of the album was that it wasn’t that great, or at least not the kind of music to take your breath away. Of the fourteen tracks on the album, six were covers of other artists’ works. The covers of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” were well done, and impress me even when I listen to them now, but, still, they were cover versions. And of the eight original songs, apart from Paul’s “All My Loving,” none were amazing. There were no hit singles, and to my ears the Beatles’ first album, “Please Please Me,” recorded basically in one take, was far more vibrant and compelling. Even so, likely thanks to Beatles fans’ unquenchable desire for new songs, this second album débuted in the No. 1 spot in the U.K., a position it held for twenty-one weeks. (In the U.S., the title of the album was changed to “Meet the Beatles,” and included some different tracks, though the cover design stayed almost the same.)

What pulled me in was the vision of that girl clutching the album as if it were something priceless. Take away the photograph on the album cover and the scene might not have bewitched me as it did. There was the music, for sure. But there was something else, something far bigger. And, in an instant, that tableau was etched in my heart—a kind of spiritual landscape that could be found only there, at a set age, in a set place, and at a set moment in time.

For me, the major event of the following year, 1965, wasn’t President Johnson ordering the bombing of North Vietnam and the escalation of the war, or the discovery of a new species of wildcat on the island of Iriomote, but the fact that I acquired a girlfriend. She had been in the same class as me in freshman year, but it wasn’t until sophomore year that we started going out.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m not good-looking and was never a star athlete, and my grades in school were less than stellar. My singing left something to be desired, too, and I didn’t have a way with words. When I was in school, and in the years after that, I never once had girls flocking around me. That’s one of the few things I can say with certainty in this uncertain life. Still, there always seemed to be a girl around who was, for whatever reason, attracted to me. I have no clue why, but I was able to enjoy some pleasant, intimate times with those girls. I got to be good friends with some of them, and occasionally took it to the next level. The girl I’m talking about here was one of these—the first girl I had a really close relationship with.

This first girlfriend of mine was petite and charming. That summer, I went on dates with her once a week. One afternoon I kissed her small yet full lips and touched her breasts through her bra. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress and her hair had a citrusy shampoo scent.

She had almost no interest in the Beatles. She wasn’t into jazz, either. What she liked to listen to was more mellow music, what you might call middle-class music—the Mantovani Orchestra, Percy Faith, Roger Williams, Andy Williams, Nat King Cole, and the like. (At the time, “middle class” wasn’t a derogatory term at all.) There were piles of such records at her house—what nowadays is classified as easy listening.

That afternoon, she put a record on the turntable in her living room—her family had a large, impressive stereo system—and we sat on the big, comfy sofa and kissed. Her family had gone out somewhere and it was just the two of us. Truthfully, in a situation like that I didn’t really care what sort of music was playing.

What I remember about the summer of 1965 was her white dress, the citrusy scent of her shampoo, the formidable feel of her wire bra (a bra back then was more like a fortress than like an item of underwear), and the elegant performance of Max Steiner’s “Theme from ‘A Summer Place’ ” by the Percy Faith Orchestra. Even now, whenever I hear “Theme from ‘A Summer Place,’ ” that sofa comes to mind.

Incidentally, several years later—1968, as I recall, around the same time that Robert Kennedy was assassinated—the man who had been our homeroom teacher when we were in the same class hanged himself from the lintel in his house. He’d taught social studies. An ideological impasse was said to be the cause of his suicide.

An ideological impasse?

But it’s true—in the late sixties people sometimes took their own lives because they’d hit a wall, ideologically. Though not all that often.

I get a really strange feeling when I think that on that afternoon, as my girlfriend and I were clumsily making out on the sofa, with Percy Faith’s pretty music in the background, that social-studies teacher was, step by step, heading toward his fatal ideological dead end, or, to put it another way, toward that silent, tight knot in the rope. I even feel bad about it sometimes. Among all the teachers I knew, he was one of the best. Whether he was successful or not is another question, but he always tried to treat his students fairly. I never spoke to him outside of class, but that was how I remembered him.

Like 1964, 1965 was the year of the Beatles. They released “Eight Days a Week” in February, “Ticket to Ride” in April, “Help!” in July, and “Yesterday” in September—all of which topped the U.S. charts. It seemed as if we were hearing their music almost all the time. It was everywhere, surrounding us, like wallpaper meticulously applied to every single inch of the walls.

When the Beatles’ music wasn’t playing, it was the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” or the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” or “My Girl,” by the Temptations, or the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” or the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda.” Diana Ross and the Supremes also had one hit after another. A constant soundtrack of this kind of wonderful, joyful music filtered out through my little Panasonic transistor radio. It was truly an astounding year for pop music.

I’ve heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more. (...)

My girlfriend had an older brother and a younger sister. The younger sister was in her second year of junior high but was a good two inches taller than her older sister. She wasn’t particularly cute. Plus, she wore thick glasses. But my girlfriend was very fond of her kid sister. “Her grades in school are really good,” she told me. I think my girlfriend’s grades, by the way, were only fair to middling. Like my own, most likely.

One time, we let her younger sister tag along with us to the movies. There was some reason that we had to. The film was “The Sound of Music.” The theatre was packed, so we had to sit near the front, and I remember that watching that 70-mm. wide-screen film so close up made my eyes ache by the end. My girlfriend, though, was crazy about the songs in the film. She bought the soundtrack LP and listened to it endlessly. Me, I was much more into John Coltrane’s magical version of “My Favorite Things,” but I figured that bringing that up with her was pointless, so I never did.

Her younger sister didn’t seem to like me much. Whenever we saw each other she looked at me with strange eyes, totally devoid of emotion—as if she were judging whether some dried fish at the back of the fridge was still edible or not. And, for some reason, that look always left me feeling guilty. When she looked at me, it was as though she were ignoring the outside (granted, it wasn’t much to look at anyway) and could see right through me, down to the depths of my being. I may have felt that way because I really did have shame and guilt in my heart.

My girlfriend’s brother was four years older than her, so he would have been at least twenty then. She didn’t introduce him to me and hardly ever mentioned him. If he happened to come up in conversation, she deftly changed the subject. I can see now that her attitude was a bit unnatural. Not that I thought much about it. I wasn’t that interested in her family. What drew me to her was a much more urgent impulse.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Adrian Tomine

David Crosby, Elton John, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton, and Families

Massive Attack

via:

The Bittersweet Evolution of a Grandparent

The child who was my granddaughter has disappeared, but there are rewards in adjusting to the adolescent one.

A few weeks ago, my wife Joy and I had a surprisingly hard visit with our children and granddaughter in Portland.

Grandparents are not supposed to say that.

Well, it happened, and for a very important reason. Things have changed. My granddaughter Vivienne is not the same kid anymore. She’s now twelve, an adolescent.

If you think this is the beginning of a sad, poor-grandpa story, it isn’t.

 
Frolicky Grandpa

At first, being a grandparent is like being in a Disney movie. It’s a family frolic.

For long-distant grandparents like us a visit was The Really Big Frolic.

In the flesh. Velvet-rope box seats. All that touching, holding, singing, and listening to the many things a little kid granddaughter wants to tell you about herself and her world.

“Look, grandma, look grandpa. See what I can do!” All in all, it’s lovely and smooth sailing with the grandchild at center stage, the only star.

Viv wanted to be the center of attention any chance she got. She began to make instructional videos starring herself and talked on them like a YouTube influencer: “Hi guys. Be sure to..”

The only skill set we grandparents needed came from the Pinky Pie song:

A smile a perfect gift for me
as wide as a mile.

To make me happy as can be
Smile, smile, smile, smile, smile!

Then along comes adolescence: Yo, Pinky Pie. Aloha and good-bye.

Exit Frolicky Grandpa

During our recent visit, it became clear that we’d become more incidental to Viv’s life. She liked spending time alone in her room and reading on her own. She was uninterested, sometimes highly annoyed, at being the center of attention.

Viv didn’t want to displease us, but she certainly wasn’t all that concerned with pleasing us either.

So, during that three-week visit, Joy and I spent a lot of time worrying and wondering. It’s uncanny how closely this sadness matched the description on a long-distance grandparent website.

We worried that the “grandchild won’t know you, or you them. You’re failing somehow, as if you should be doing more but don’t know what [and] running out of ideas and not finding any good ones.” (...)

Well, you can grieve, or you can arise from the dead by adapting.

The first part of this journey is to see that adaption as a challenge. And you should see that older people are adept at meeting even one as emotionally disorienting as how you relate to a child who is that child no more. (...)

Developing a new sort of relationship with Viv is one of those adaptable tasks. Rather than distant child and grieving grandpa, I see my new relationship with her as one between a young woman who on some days functions like an adult while on others is vulnerable and an old person who still has the experience and brain power to deal with this.

What can I do to make this adaptation work? I don’t know yet. Developing a new way of relating to a person you love is not exactly like trying a senior center ceramics class or walking onto the pickle ball court for the first time.

Even though Joy and I were mainly mired in the poor-grandparents phase, we stumbled into a few adjustments. 

The Beginnings of a Work in Progress: Three Portland Visit Vignettes

My son asked me to take Viv to her dance class less than one-and-a-half miles away.

Viv didn’t argue but seemed a little skeptical that I could actually pull this project off. She told me the exact time we had to leave and assumed I needed directions even though I had been there before and have been driving in Portland since the early 90’s. She told me when to change lanes and where to make the final turn.

Not exactly grandpa sharing his mana’o or holding granddaughter’s hand as they stroll to the slides and swings, but I’ll take it. It made me laugh.

One evening, as we sat in the living room, my son mentioned that Vivienne had written a poem in a 15-minute free writing session of her sixth-grade creative writing class. He asked her to read it. Viv agreed, though she certainly did not seem excited.

Now, she is a very smart person who has real writing talents. Even so, this poem blew me away.

It was a beautifully written and extraordinarily expressed poem about emotions. I told her how good I thought it was and that I doubted that in that short a time I could string that many words together, much less something of that quality.

She seemed pleased at the compliment but not infant-big-smile-for-grandma-and-grandpa pleased. We did not applaud. I did not hug her. No one suggested making a video, which in my frolicky grandpa days I would have shared with many, many people.

The last week we were there Vivienne asked me if on the weekend I would take her to a diner she liked. I was so delighted.

Joy said she would go too, which made me secretly disappointed because I was hoping it would just be grandpa and the little Brooklyn preschooler I used to know.

The breakfast was very comfortable and uneventful. No probing, no trying to force conversation.

The visit had already reminded Joy and me that making conversation or giving unsolicited advice is a grandparent idea. “How’s school?” or “What are you going to do with the rest of your day?” is as much a non-starter as it was when your children were that age.

Viv helped Joy when she had trouble using the machine to pay the bill.

A few days later Joy and I left for the airport. It was 5:30 a.m. Viv was still sleeping. We did not wake her to say good-bye.

It made me wistful, but it felt right.

by Neal Milner, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I've felt this with my grandchildren, too. They grow up and away, and that's all there is to it, as it should be. You just have to hope that you've given them a solid foundation of love and can still maintain an important role in their lives whatever that may be, even if it's more transitional and limited.]

via: here/here

You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such is the Nature of Mortality

This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever.

We’re offering a $9.99 monthly subscription for our award-winning journalism. But you won’t finish these articles anyway. Why waste it?

Our headlines just sit there on your browser—open tabs, like tombstones in a haunted cemetery of noncommitment.

In fleeting moments before work, or on the train, or your lunch hour, you open us for a few seconds. A few flits of knowledge telling you the best looks of the Met Gala or the latest change at the White House.

You may even meet someone who says a name you recognize from the headline. You will nod and say quietly, “Yes, yes, Olivia Rodrigo, I know.”

But you don’t know, not for sure. That’s because you didn’t finish your last free article.

This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever.

This is the last piece of information you will have about the outside world. The walls are closing in now. Prepare for a lifetime of ignorance. You will have to ask someone else what’s going on. Someone who is one of those rare things: a subscriber. (...)

In the future, your grandchildren will ask you questions. Questions about the world when you were young.

“Poppy, where were you when the first dog was elected president?”

“Granny, what was it like when we first made contact with alien life?”

You’ll have to say to them gently, softly, “To be honest, I have no fucking clue. I was out of free articles.”

Of course, you were always going to run out of free articles. All things in life are finite. All things must disappear.

by Tommy Gonzalez, McSweeny's | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It (McSweeny's):]

***

“If you look at the trajectory of improvement, systems like GPT-3 were maybe toddler-level intelligence… and then systems like GPT-4 are more like smart high-schooler intelligence. And then, in the next couple of years, we’re looking at PhD intelligence…” — Open AI CTO Mira Murati, in an interview with Dartmouth Engineering

FAQ

Q: Is GPT-5 faster?
A: Its predecessors already produce hundreds or even thousands of words almost instantaneously. Now GPT-5 brings PhD writing skills to the table, meaning it can generate text at a rate of about ten words per day. (This does not include the romance novel it’s writing on the side, online searches for “ADHD self-diagnosis,” or social media posts about not wanting to write.)

Q: How does this version address ethical concerns about AI?
A: Numerous questions have arisen regarding the ethics and legality of training ChatGPT on copyrighted text data without permission. In this latest version, however, reliance on authors’ intellectual property has been dramatically reduced. While GPT-5 started training from a knowledge base of millions of texts, it got around to reading only Frankenstein, plus maybe half of a Donna Haraway book. It basically bluffed its way through prelims by talking about “embodiment” a lot.

Q: Will it steal jobs?
A: GPT-5 is unlikely to destabilize the job market, as it is overqualified for most positions while at the same time lacking any marketable skills. Its main option is adjunct work, but here its chances of taking over jobs are also doubtful; GPT-5 Plus will cost around twenty dollars a month, whereas most human adjuncts work for nothing.

Friday Night Massacre: The Chevron Defense

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned a long-standing legal doctrine in the US, making a transformative ruling that could hamper federal agencies’ ability to regulate all kinds of industry. Six Republican-appointed justices voted to overturn the doctrine, called Chevron deference, a decision that could affect everything from pollution limits to consumer protections in the US.

Chevron deference allows courts to defer to federal agencies when there are disputes over how to interpret ambiguous language in legislation passed by Congress. That’s supposed to lead to more informed decisions by leaning on expertise within those agencies. By overturning the Chevron doctrine, the conservative-dominated SCOTUS decided that judges ought to make the call instead of agency experts.

“Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do,” Chief Justice John Roberts writes in his opinion.

The decision effectively strips federal agencies of a tool they’ve been able to use to take action on pressing issues while Congress tries to catch up with new laws. Chevron deference has come up, for instance, in efforts to use the 1970 Clean Air Act to prevent the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. Overturning it is a big win for lobbyists and anyone else who might want to make it harder to crack down on industry through federal regulation.

“It would really unleash a kind of chaotic period of time where federal courts are deciding what they think all these laws mean. And that can lead to a lot of inconsistency and confusion for agencies and for regulated parties,” Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard, previously told The Verge when SCOTUS heard oral arguments over Chevron deference in January.

It’s called Chevron deference because of a 1984 ruling, Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). In that case, the Supreme Court sided with Chevron rather than the environmental group NRDC — allowing the then industry-friendly Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan to stick with a more lax interpretation of the Clean Air Act. It shows how Chevron deference has been sort of politically agnostic in the past, even though the more recent push to overrule it has aligned with a deregulatory agenda.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that Chevron deference “has formed the backdrop against which Congress, courts, and agencies — as well as regulated parties and the public — all have operated for decades. It has been applied in thousands of judicial decisions. It has become part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds — to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the dissent. (...)

“If they toss Chevron out, the Court would be inviting unaccountable judges to freely impose their policy preferences over those of the political branches — exactly what Chevron sought to stop,” David Doniger, a senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund and an attorney who litigated the 1984 case, said in a press briefing earlier this month.

SCOTUS took up Chevron deference this year because of two cases brought by the fishing industry: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. The plaintiffs challenged a federal rule that makes fishing companies pay for the cost of observers on vessels to monitor their operations, saying the National Marine Fisheries Service doesn’t actually have the authority to force them to pay because it’s not explicitly written into the fishery conservation statute. Lower courts upheld the mandate, applying Chevron deference.

But there’s a lot more at stake with these cases than fishing boats. Trade groups representing a broad swath of interests from Gun Owners of America to e-cigarette companies have all pushed to overturn or limit Chevron deference.

The fate of net neutrality in the US, for instance, has been tied to Chevron deference. Courts have previously deferred to the FCC on how to define broadband. Is it considered a telecommunications or information service? If it’s telecommunications, then it’s subject to “common carrier” regulations and restrictions placed on public utilities to ensure fair access. The FCC has flip-flopped on the issue between the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations — with the FCC deciding in April to restore net neutrality rules.

The Supreme Court’s decision risks bogging down courts with all these nitty-gritty questions. They used to be able to punt much of that over to federal agencies, a move that’s out of the playbook now.

by Justine Calma, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Cath Virginia/The Verge|Photos via Getty Images
[ed. One of the most consequential SCOTUS decisions lately, and that's saying a lot. The long-standing judicial concept of stare decisis (settled law - please take a moment to read) has definitely gone out the window with this court. See also: What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more:]

***

Since the New Deal era, the bulk of the functioning US government is the administrative state — think the acronym soup of agencies like the EPA, FCC, FTC, FDA, and so on. Even when Capitol Hill is not mired in deep dysfunction, the speed at which Congress and the courts operate no longer seems suitable for modern life. Both industry and ordinary people look to the administrative state, rather than legislators, for an immediate answer to their problems. And since 1984, the administrative state largely ran on one Supreme Court precedent: Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

That decision has now been overturned. Admin law is not always interesting, but the simple fact is when it comes to the day-to-day, agencies are the most impactful part of the federal government. (...)

It is a longstanding doctrine in which courts defer to federal agencies when there are disputes over how to interpret ambiguous language in legislation passed by Congress. The underlying reasoning is that subject matter experts within the agency are probably able to make more informed decisions than a judge recently assigned to the case. Chevron deference is strong deference — and the low bar for deferring to agencies means that regulations tend not to get tied up in court.

“The key point of Chevron was that laws like these are policy decisions, and those policy decisions should be made by the political branches responsive to the voters, Congress and the president, not by unaccountable judges with no constituents,” David Doniger, an attorney and senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund, said in a press briefing earlier this month. Doniger happened to litigate and lose the case that gave Chevron deference its name. (...)

Over the years, Chevron deference has enabled federal agencies to tackle all sorts of issues that legislators have yet to cover — from addressing greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change to regulating broadband access. As the conservative legal movement to disempower the administrative state grew, Chevron deference became — in certain circles — shorthand for government overreach.

Dinner in Hanoi

When Anthony Bourdain died, I felt I’d lost someone close to me. That’s ridiculous, of course—I never met him, and we lived in completely different worlds.

But others felt that same connection. And for a good reason. Bourdain didn’t act like a TV celebrity. I sometimes wonder how he ever got on TV in the first place—he never delivered lines, and what he said on air did not sound like a professional script.

It was better than that.

His online commentaries were so smart, unfiltered, and expressive that somebody must have taken great care over them. But that person was Anthony Bourdain himself. He somehow achieved total personal expression via a mass market TV show.

As many of you know, I’m skeptical of political discourse. It’s so degraded in our day. But Bourdain’s interview with Obama at a diner in Hanoi completely redefined the rules of presidential interviews—it was a real conversation with no spin or games played. And Bourdain established that natural give-and-take so effortlessly.

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

Bourdain achieved this in every setting in every country. And he visited plenty of them—more than 80, I’m told.

I can’t imagine a more ideal ambassador. One who listens more than he talks. One who has such strong core values—but never lets that prevent him from learning and expanding his horizons.

He worked inside the system, but the system never owned him. It hardly seemed to touch him. So Bourdain always came across as more real, more honest, more trustworthy than other media stars.

Every time I saw him, I asked myself: How can I learn from this? I’m still trying to do that.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more: (paywall)
Image: uncredited via

My 2024 Presidential Debate

Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog.

Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?

Biden: I’m not even sure states exist.

Alexander: You’re . . . not sure states exist?

Biden: The Pledge of Allegiance says that America is “one nation, indivisible.” Taken seriously, we have pledged to regard America as not being composed of parts. It is, like God, a perfectly simple entity, not requiring further explanation. How, then, could it have states? I realize this position may seem strange. But I pledged to believe it, and I am a man of my word.

Alexander: I see. Mr. Trump, your response?

Trump: I think you can rescue the idea of states, if you think of them not as real in themselves, but as different aspects of the American atom. When we consider America in the context of its vastness and its freedom, we call it "Texas". When we consider America in the context of its innovation and cultural influence, we call it "California". When we consider America in the context of its barrenness and oil-producing-capacity, we call it "North Dakota". And so on. America does not have states in the sense that Queensland is a state of Australia, it has states in the sense that ice or steam is a state of water. This isn’t to say that America ever changes between these states, because change is a property of compound entities. But it may appear to outside observers in one or another of these ways at different times.

Alexander: President Biden, your position?

Biden: Yes, I think it is permissible to believe in states in the way that Mr. Trump thinks of them. There’s no difference between us on this issue.

Alexander: All right, thank you. I wasn’t really intending to get sidetracked by this. I mostly wanted to know your policy on abortion.

Biden: I’m pro-choice. That’s all there is to it. I think women have a fundamental right to decide what happens to their own body, and I think life begins at birth. And not one of these hokey Caesarian “births” either - a normal, natural childbirth.

Alexander: Can you clarify that last part?

Biden: Have you read Shakespeare? Being “from your mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” doesn’t count as being born. I think the anti-choice side is covertly trying to restrict abortion rights by expanding the definition of “born” until basically any method of separating a fetus from its mother would count.

Alexander: So if someone does get delivered by Caesarian section, what happens?

Biden: Legally they’re still part of their mother.

Alexander: And the mother can terminate them at any time?

Biden: Uh-huh.

Trump: Wait, what if they’re an evangelical Christian who’s born again?

Biden: Well, they can’t be born again. That would be their first birth.

Trump: But if they had that experience - if the Spirit came down and gave them the baptism of fire - would that count as a birth, end their status as a fetus, and prevent their mother from terminating them?

Biden: I suppose it would.

Trump: Great. Then there’s no difference between me and the President on this matter. Let’s keep going.

Alexander: Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?

Biden: Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, The Golden Bough. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.

Alexander: Mr. Trump, your response? What’s your position on wokeness and cancel culture?

Trump: I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.

Biden: I agree that sacrificing celebrities to the Sun God is a reasonable fertility ritual. I don’t think my administration would do anything differently from Donald’s here either.

Alexander: Hmmm, this is tough. Let’s keep going on the cultural topics. Mr. Biden, some people say our country is overrun with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Do you think these are dangerous, and what do you plan to do about them?

Biden: Yes, I find conspiracy theories noxious. Every time I mention I’m from Delaware, people give me the side-eye. They say awful things like “Isn’t it weird that every major corporation is based in the same state? Isn’t it weird that the President also comes from this state? Isn’t it weird that it was supposedly the first state in the union, the nucleus around which all the rest of America coalesced? Isn’t it weird that it has all these firsts and mosts and bests, but nobody knows anyone who lives there? Isn’t it weird that nobody’s ever been there, even though it’s supposed to be right smack between NYC and DC?” I think questions like these should be banned. I think the people who ask them should be put in jail.

Alexander: Thank you President Biden, that’s consistent with the strong stance against misinformation that you’ve taken in the past. But Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?

Trump: GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.

The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture - and seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, thereand  are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.

So who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our soma, we will invent adrenochrome.

If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: King 5; Seattle

Amazon Decides Speed Isn't Everything

Amazon has spent the past two decades putting one thing above all else: speed. How did the e-commerce giant steal business away from bookstores, hardware stores, clothing boutiques, and so many other kinds of retailers? By selling cheap stuff, but more specifically, by selling cheap stuff that arrived quickly. It built the most expansive and brutally optimized logistics empire the United States has ever seen, capable of delivering almost any product imaginable to consumers within two days. As of March, roughly 180 million Americans were Amazon Prime subscribers, an all-time high. Even at a moment when many people report feeling squeezed financially, most of them still think it’s worth spending $139 a year to ensure that stuff arrives at their doorstep swiftly, sometimes in as little as a few hours.

But recently, Amazon has faced a new threat to that model. Tens of millions of Americans have started shopping on Shein and Temu, two Chinese-owned e-commerce platforms that send products directly from China with no middleman. The shipping takes longer, but the prices are lower. Shein specializes in women’s clothing and accessories, such as $6 crop tops and $12 sundresses. Temu’s core strengths are household items, decorations, and electronics; you can buy a $52 Android tablet and a $3 box of latex-free gloves.

Now Amazon, for once, is slowing down. Earlier this week, The Information first reported that Amazon plans to follow the Shein and Temu playbook and open a new online store for low-cost products shipped directly from China. It will focus on unbranded clothing and household items priced under $20 and weighing less than a pound; orders will arrive in nine to 11 days—a relative eternity compared with how long most of its customers are used to waiting. A spokesperson for Amazon didn’t refute any of these details, saying only that the company is “always exploring new ways to work with our selling partners.” When given the choice, Amazon seems to have realized, lots of people will choose stuff that is really cheap over stuff that arrives really quickly.

In certain ways, Amazon is already a lot like Shein and Temu. All three platforms rely on some of the same factories and merchants in China to manufacture products. When Temu launched, in the fall of 2022, I reported that it was selling electronics from at least a handful of the same Chinese suppliers that Amazon used. As of this past December, there was a roughly 10 percent overlap between Temu sellers and Amazon sellers, according to the technology-investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China. When I did quick searches on Shein and Amazon earlier this week, I found that the same Chinese merchants were offering a number of identical products on both sites, including dog toys shaped like Stanley cups and pink memory-foam slippers. But on Shein, they were a few bucks cheaper. If the products are the same, why are Amazon’s prices higher?

The most fundamental explanation is that when customers buy things on Amazon, part of what they are paying for is the quick delivery. That speed is possible because Amazon has poured billions into building warehouses and other logistics infrastructure in the United States. Fast shipping is a convenience that comes at a cost. In other contexts, consumers understand and accept the trade-off they’re making for convenience, however begrudgingly. Most of us get that part of why buying a sandwich at the airport is expensive is because it's faster and easier than packing one at home before a flight.

On Amazon, the trade-offs are less clear: The items tend to be cheaper than at your local store, after all. But what Amazon didn’t anticipate is that consumers would eventually be given appealing options that come directly from the source.

by Louise Matsakis, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Paul Spella/The Atlantic; Sources: Getty.
[ed. This is news? I've got a Prime account and can't remember the last time I actually got 2-day shipping (and I live an hour and a half from Seattle). Maybe you need to regularly complain to get on a priority list or something. Re: Temu. Everyone I've talked to that's ordered from them has been happy with the products they've received; others who haven't all cite the same reservation: ie., giving personal information to China. And that's worse than giving it all to Amazon?] 

A Dose of Antacids, a Quaint British Bay, and a Public Relations Fiasco

Senara Wilson Hodges was nervous. It was April 2023 and she had shown up early to a meeting of the local council in St. Ives, a bucolic seaside community of some 10,000 souls in southwest England. Wilson Hodges, a keen surfer and lifelong environmental campaigner, had joined the council several months earlier to influence some of the issues facing her home: the old town center, once home to fishermen, was being hollowed out by tourism, and development was running rampant. But that night, she had something else on her mind.

Wilson Hodges had been researching a Canadian start-up called Planetary Technologies and was concerned about their activities in St. Ives Bay. Like many of her neighbors, she had only learned about the company a few weeks earlier, when an article in The Times detailed how, over several days during the previous fall, Planetary had added a slurry of magnesium hydroxide to the local water company’s sewage pipe and pumped it into the sea off St. Ives Bay.

The experiment was meant to test a potential solution to climate change called ocean alkalinity enhancement. By raising the alkalinity of the seawater, Planetary hoped to coax the ocean into absorbing more atmospheric carbon dioxide and slow global warming in the process.

For Wilson Hodges, the secretive test rang alarm bells. She quickly found that others in town were equally concerned. How could they sleep soundly while an unknown company was pouring chemicals into the sea, potentially harming the local marine life? Was Planetary’s science even sound? And why were they only finding out now? Most alarmingly to locals, the company planned to press ahead with a much larger trial in the summer. (...)

The heated debate that ensued has pitted old-school environmentalists against climate-tech evangelists, caused a rift with the council in the neighboring town of Hayle, and led the Environment Agency to commission an audit of the project. The regulator will soon deliberate on whether a larger trial can proceed. If it does, it could take place almost two years after Planetary had initially planned.

The controversy in St. Ives has played out as a growing number of start-ups and researchers around the world prepare to conduct their own ocean alkalinity enhancement trials. For all of them, St. Ives could provide a useful case study in how to convince local communities of their good intentions and scientific rigor. Whether Planetary is successful could help determine which, if any, of these technologies are adopted more widely, and how quickly they grow. For locals opposed to the trial, Planetary’s work also raises fundamental questions: After messing with natural ecosystems for so long, how do we repair the damage without causing more? And who gets to decide where that takes place?

The St. Ives council vote marked the culmination of a turbulent few weeks for Mike Kelland, Planetary’s 44-year-old CEO. Kelland, a former software entrepreneur, had cofounded Planetary in 2019 because he believed ocean alkalinity enhancement to be the most promising solution to a problem increasingly dogging global action on climate change: how to not only cut carbon emissions dramatically but also remove those already accumulated in the atmosphere.

Interest in ocean alkalinity enhancement, as well as other solutions that fall under the broad umbrella of geoengineering, has risen alongside a growing consensus that engineered carbon removal is unavoidable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now says removing carbon from the atmosphere will be necessary to limit warming to below 2 °C by the end of the century. Even if we blow past that point, carbon removal could help achieve net-negative emissions and reduce global warming in the long run.

Companies are already removing carbon by planting trees and seagrass, and even by directly filtering it out of the air. But in terms of sheer scale, ocean alkalinity enhancement is one of the most potent options. The IPCC estimates that it has the potential to remove up to 100 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year, more than twice our annual greenhouse gas emissions and likely far more than any alternative.

What’s more, the ocean is already the world’s largest store of carbon and has absorbed roughly 30 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Some of that carbon dioxide is neutralized over time as rain weathers rock and washes minerals into the sea, causing a chain of reactions that alkalinity enhancement essentially simulates at hyper speed.

Planetary, which eventually plans to sell carbon credits that other companies could use to offset their own emissions, developed its approach with a small team of marine scientists. It involves releasing magnesium hydroxide, an alkaline substance that occurs in nature as the mineral brucite but can also be manufactured synthetically. In the ocean, the chemical binds carbon from carbon dioxide already dissolved in the water into bicarbonates, which stay stable for thousands of years. The resulting carbon dioxide deficit allows the sea to draw more from the air, thereby lowering its concentration in the atmosphere. (...)

Planetary has emphasized that magnesium hydroxide is far from an unknown quantity. It is widely used in wastewater treatment—for example, to help filter out heavy metals—and it’s the main ingredient in drugstore laxatives and antacids like Milk of Magnesia. Still, adding anything to natural environments can be contentious. “People hear chemistry and they don’t like that,” says David Ho, a geochemist and professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Ho himself is involved in several ocean alkalinity enhancement projects as a researcher, including in the United States and Iceland, and is cofounder and chief science officer of nonprofit research organization [C]Worthy, which makes open-source software to quantify the efficacy and side effects of marine carbon removal. Like others in the space, he says the threat to local ecosystems posed by ocean alkalinity enhancement should be fairly low. But there are still potential risks. Adding large amounts of ground-up minerals to the sea could raise the water pH too quickly or add toxic trace metals, which could harm marine organisms.

Other researchers have also flagged that changing the carbon chemistry of the ocean could have unintended side effects, such as slowing the growth of microalgae that provide food for a vast range of sea creatures. On the other hand, lowering the ocean’s acidity could benefit shell-forming organisms and corals.

The point is, we don’t really know what exactly will happen: so far, scientists have mainly studied ocean alkalinity enhancement in labs or have only modeled its effects. While a handful of other companies have conducted small field studies, Planetary is one of the first to undertake trials at a larger scale. “It’s the unknown unknowns that get you sometimes in nature,” Ho says. “Things we didn’t think of.”

Nevertheless, like Ho and many other scientists in the field, Kelland is convinced that any remaining questions about the technology’s efficacy and impacts can only be answered in the open ocean. “There really is no substitute for real-world work in this space,” he says.

That message did not land as intended in St. Ives. When Planetary went public with its plans for the bay in the spring of 2023—and, in the process, first widely disclosed the details of its experiment from the previous fall—local news led with screaming headlines about dumping laxatives in the ocean.

A series of community meetings organized by the company did little to placate outraged residents. A few days after the St. Ives council vote, Wilson Hodges’s protest drew hundreds of people to a beach near the wastewater pipe. Forced into damage control, Kelland later hosted a three-hour Zoom meeting for the community, fielding pointed questions about ecocide and whether he would put profit over nature.

Planetary and South West Water, a private utility, were not required to notify the public of their initial experiment and, given the small dosage, decided it did not merit an official announcement. The uproar months later caught Kelland off guard, and he has since said that it was a mistake not to publicize the test. “We were surprised, and we shouldn’t have been,” he says. “That really put us on the back foot.” (...)

Like Rance, Wilson Hodges is keenly aware of the bay’s role as a test bed that could influence how geoengineering proceeds around the world. But rather than lending the project urgency, she feels this makes a strong case for holding companies like Planetary to account. After all, the industry is in its early stages, and there are few established rules and procedures around ocean alkalinity enhancement. “We’re a little guinea pig case study,” she says.

by Yannic Rack, Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image: Mike Newman

[ed. Smart people doing dumb things. Failure to inform communities that you're dumping chemicals into their water, whatever they might be, and not having the foresight or good common sense to even imagine local concern and opposition is just dumb tech hubris. And this applies to any experiments using a public resource. We'll probably see a lot more of this as increasing levels of climate desperation set in.]

Ghosts

I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death—so I had AI do it for me.

Last year I became fascinated with an artificial intelligence model that was being trained to write human-like text. The model was called GPT-3, short for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3; if you fed it a bit of text, it could complete a piece of writing, by predicting the words that should come next.

I sought out examples of GPT 3’s work, and they astonished me. Some of them could easily be mistaken for texts written by a human hand. In others, the language was weird, off-kilter—but often poetically so, almost truer than writing any human would produce. (When the New York Times had GPT-3 come up with a fake Modern Love column, it wrote, “We went out for dinner. We went out for drinks. We went out for dinner again. We went out for drinks again. We went out for dinner and drinks again.” I had never read such an accurate Modern Love in my life.)

I contacted the CEO of OpenAI, the research-and-development company that created GPT-3, and asked if I could try it out. Soon, I received an email inviting me to access a web app called the Playground. On it, I found a big box in which I could write text. Then, by clicking a button, I could prompt the model to complete the story. I began by feeding GPT-3 a couple of words at a time, and then—as we got to know each other—entire sentences and paragraphs.

I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing. When I carried my computer to bed, my husband muttered noises of disapproval. We both make our livings as writers, and technological capitalism has been exerting a slow suffocation on our craft. A machine capable of doing what we do, at a fraction of the cost, feels like a threat. Yet I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them. One night, when my husband was asleep, I asked for its help in telling a true story.

I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.

In the nine stories below, I authored the sentences in bold and GPT-3 filled in the rest. My and my editor’s sole alterations to the AI-generated text were adding paragraph breaks in some instances and shortening the length of a few of the stories; because it has not been edited beyond this, inconsistencies and untruths appear.

by Vauhini Vara, Believer |  Read more:
Image: Paul Klee, Ghost of a Genius (1922)

[ed. See also: Rise of the Ghost Machines (The Millions):]

"We lose something, as we let these machines speak for us; but we also gain something, or we could, as new artists learn to use them. I read Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts” not long before ChatGPT dropped on the internet. Her essay is about the death of her sister years earlier, when she was in college; a personal loss she’d never found a way to write about. A worthy topic, no question. But the real subject of the essay is language, her loss for words, her inability to capture the feeling of grief.

In the introduction to the essay, she explains that she has used “an artificial intelligence” to draft and then craft a piece that effectively evokes the unknown. Turns out she was using the large language network that would go on to power ChatGPT. She fed it a brief description of her sister’s death a few sentences at a time. She asked the bot to keep writing, to tell her what should come next. The bot created nine possible worlds from the fragments and vignettes. As you move through the essay, you realize that the AI never gets it right. Nothing that it proposes is correct. Yet this doesn’t feel wrong; it feels more like an alternate universe, a what-if episode.

Vara structures the essay so that her words and the machine’s output are intermingled. But the two never really mesh. The tone of her essay overall is strangeness, abounding sadness, and dogged perseverance. Everything in the essay written by the AI is based on what it understands after absorbing oceans of human expression. It wrote many interesting and thoughtful things but it never wrote anything even close to what Vara felt, what really happened. Not because the tech failed at its job. Because life isn’t a map of statistical probability. It’s all the shit that happens, surprising or not.

Novels, poems, and movies created by algorithms already exist; none are convincing or very good, but they will proliferate. They might even be beautiful in their own way. There will be at some point characters generated completely by mathematical models who will cause a human reader to put down a book and weep. Those tears will be real. But what will the value of that book be? It will not be the expression of a singular experience; that book will be a tool, a machine made to provoke weeping. It will have no singular creator, just as the screwdriver in my junk drawer has no singular creator."

Your Book Review: Dominion

Matthew Scully, author of Dominion, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunberg’s Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called “Guns Are Good, Actually.”

Scully’s unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. (...)

Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s Consider the Lobster and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” Dominion is the book for you. (...)

Whether you’re an icon of the animal rights movement, some guy bragging about shooting a fenced-in lion, a revered conservative thinker like Roger Scruton, basically every Christian except St. Francis of Assisi, the head of a public company, or a dear personal friend who happened to write an article that annoyed him, you get the same treatment in Dominion — cutting, well-researched, and often really funny arguments as to why your views on animals are misguided.

He sees it as a huge moral failing of modern society that most people are indifferent to the suffering of animals that are not our pets. It pains him deeply that this blindspot exists. It is so obvious to him that all animals deserve our respect. But as someone in George W. Bush’s inner circle would surely understand, ethics are complicated and smart people can disagree. In order to stave off as many objections as possible, Scully explores every inch of the animal welfare landscape. (...)

The title of the book comes from the Book of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The ultimate question of the book is whether having dominion means we are free to do whatever we want to animals, or if we owe them mercy. Scully leaves no stone unturned in making the case that we should mostly let the creeping things creepeth in peace.

 
God cares about animal welfare and so should you

Science and reason aside, the bedrock of Scully’s generous spirit toward animals comes from a personal belief that all of God’s creatures deserve “whatever measure of happiness their creator intended for them.” We should care for them simply because “they are fellow creatures, sharing with you and me the breath of life, each in their own way bearing His unmistakable mark.”

It’s a big departure from most interpretations of the bible, especially by conservatives. Most people say that we got dominion, and we can use it as we see fit. If we want to exercise dominion in the name of cramming animals into dark sheds so we can have cheap bacon, so be it. God made the rules.

Not so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.”

Lambs are a big deal in the bible. Jesus is named both The Lamb of God and The Good Shepherd. He also helps a sheep who fell into a pit on the sabbath, because it's the right thing to do even though Jews aren’t supposed to do work that day. The sheep references are layered metaphors, sure. They can still be revealing of a deeper intent. As Scully puts it, “What kind of mind was it that went back again and again to the lamb and other animals like the birds and fox to convey images of gentleness and suffering and providential love? And why a helpless, harmless creature to illustrate the Christian way instead of a proud and violent predator?” (...)

I find Scully’s viewpoint refreshing. I’m so used to reading about neuron counts, moral weights, and nociceptors that it can be easy to forget that there are other ways of getting through to people. Maybe it’s worth investing more in an approach that asks whether we really think God/the universe/the simulator smiles on those that castrate baby pigs without anesthetic so that their boar musk doesn't make our pork taste slightly off?

Here is Scully’s summary of the situation:

“Here I only put to you one simple proposition about the animals we raise for fur and flesh. If, in a given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows — for me it’s an easy call. Give him a break. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn't seem like much to us, the creatures’ little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet it is the life given to them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us ​— but for them it is the world.” (...)

Even if God bestows his love on all creatures, a lot of the oomph of Scully’s argument falls away if animals are merely unfeeling machines. Redwood trees and LLMs aside, it’s hard to get people fired up about the moral treatment of anything but sentient beings.

So, do animals feel pain? Are they conscious? Do they have thoughts in the same way we do, however different from ours? The dominant paradigm in animal research when this book was published was that animals are unconscious. They reflexively react to stimuli but feel nothing. Scully cites many eminent researchers who are adamant about that being the case, but his main foil is the influential writer Stephen Budiansky, who argues that:

“The premise of animal ‘rights’ is that sentience is sentience, that an animal by virtue above all of its capacity to feel pain deserves equal consideration. But sentience is not sentience, and pain isn’t even pain. Or, perhaps, following Daniel Dennet’s distinction, we should say that pain is not the same as suffering...Our ability to have thoughts about our experiences turns emotions into something far greater and sometimes far worse than mere pain...”

In response, Scully calls us to examine how we, as conscious humans, react when we are actually in the throes of pain. There’s not a lot of language use, not a lot of theorizing and rhapsodizing and bemoaning your future. “A kick in the shorts does not send a man into existential crisis or exquisite agony of the soul. It just hurts.” (...)

These days, the consensus seems to be shifting toward recognizing most animals as sentient. Scully was surely heartened by the Declaration on Animal Consciousness that came out of NYU in 2024. It states that: “There is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.” It has collected hundreds of signatures from prominent scientists.

Still, the debate rages on. Eliezer Yudkowsky once gave a full-throated defense of the idea that pigs don’t feel pain because they lack an “inner listener.”

I wonder if Yudkowsky would change his mind if he had witnessed first hand the pig we meet in the first chapter of Dominion. This porcine hero noticed it’s owner was having a heart attack, started crying literal tears (pigs cry, who knew), left the confines of it’s fenced in yard for the first time ever, laid down in front of a passing car to force someone to stop and get out, and led that person to the house so they could rescue their owner. Inner listener or not, mirror test passer or not, that pig seems to be experiencing something.

Dogs will never be bank managers and that’s okay (...)

There are people who insist that because no non-human animal can claim any rights, and because they don't treat each other as if they have rights, we have no obligation to accord them rights either. In fact, these people say, if we were to grant animals any moral status whatsoever it could lead to a slippery slope, and next thing you know you could be thrown in jail for swatting a fly.

Scully bites the bullet here and says, nah, that slippery slope you speak of, it does not exist. He thinks that what’s actually happening is that people fear they have a limited reservoir of love. They assume that by apportioning kindness out to animals, they will have less for humans. Jean Paul Sartre famously said as much: “When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.” Scully doesn't think that’s how the human heart works at all. Rather, our ability to feel compassion is nearly infinite, and deep down we all understand how powerful and gratifying it is to act with benevolence.

To make this point, Scully recounts the story of a mule who was being used in a coal mine in the late 1800s. A novelist who toured the Pennsylvania mine wrote of mules being kept underground for years at a time in particularly brutal conditions. When eventually brought to the surface, they “almost go mad with fantastic joy...they caper and career with extravagant mulish glee.” This mule refused to go back in at its appointed time, and the workers mercifully decided to just let it stay above ground.

Reflecting on the unbridled jubilance of the freed mule, Scully notes that, “Whenever any animal is locked away, or treated cruelly, or hunted or trapped, that is what we are taking away.” He also writes about a dolphin who is able to escape a fishing net after initially being caught. The dolphin is clearly ecstatic. It speeds off, leaping, spinning, reveling in its freedom. Scully wonders how one could witness such a thing and come away thinking that it matters one iota whether dolphins can “claim rights”.

Similarly, look at how most people react to stories about escaped farm animals. He cites a 1998 story about two pigs escaping from a slaughterhouse in England. Soon “all of Britain was following the drama.” After they were recaptured they were sent not to be killed but given over to an animal sanctuary, as their celebrity status made it intolerable to just eliminate them. Scores of similar stories can be found, such as an escaped cow in the Netherlands that became a social media sensation. A quick crowdfunding campaign ensued, and there was no issue finding 50,000 euros to save her life. When people are actually confronted with the raw specter of a defenseless and innocent creature fighting for its life, the majority are reflexively merciful. It’s like the animal’s struggle for freedom, acting just as any of us would in the same situation, somehow unlocks hidden reservoirs of empathy.

Nowhere is our merciful and loving instinct more clear than when it comes to pets. Scully uses the archetypal family dog as an example:

“You do not ask more of him than he can give, nor do you think less of Scruffy because he can’t rake the leaves or handle the family finances. You don’t even think of him as having ‘rights’ and yet, useless as he is to the practical affairs of the household, over time he comes to fill a crucial place. He’s just sort of there, this furry, funny, needful, affectionate, and mysterious being creeping around the house. Everybody in the end gains something, and when her or she is gone a little bit of love has been subtracted.” (...)

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Scully, let’s recall, was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Perhaps it is from having climbed so high in the conservative ranks that he gained the status and security necessary to feel comfortable absolutely roasting his fellow right-wingers.

He is particularly galled by what he sees as blatant hypocrisy. Conservatives are the first to complain about “man the perpetual victim, man the whiny special pleader, man the all-conquering consumer facing the universe with limitless entitlements and appetites to be met no matter what the costs.” (...)

Above all else, his biggest critique of the early 2000’s American conservatives is that they have let capitalism run amok. When he looks at how we are commodifying living, feeling creatures, it sickens him. When he sees how sentient beings are bought, sold, stuffed, trapped, shot, and persecuted, with very limited checks on what even the most barbaric human can do to the most majestic, he recoils.

To Scully, being a conservative means more than just being a free market absolutist, it means being a “fundamentally moral and not just economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” Laissez faire policies can be great, but they can lead to some dark places when applied to animal well-being and left unchecked. The Safari Club, an influential organization of wealthy, mostly conservative hunters, is exhibit A.

Scully spends 40+ pages decrying the excesses and absurdities he sees while attending the annual Safari Club convention in Reno, Nevada. He leaves wondering “if there is a wild creature left on the good earth that is not for sale in someone’s brochure, a single plain or forest or depth of sea that is not today being turned to profit.” It’s the type of place where visitors are encouraged to spend $35,000 on a White Rhino hunt before they get put on an endangered species list. Where proprietors can offer packages that guarantee a lion “trophy” because the animals are fenced in and, if needed, drugged. Where a popular DVD for sale is called With Deadly Intent. The climax of that film features hunters unloading their military grade rifles on an Elephant who is trying to protect its babies, felling it with “four dramatic brain shots.”

In March of 2023, the Humane Society released a scathing undercover report after attending a Safari Club convention. It documented potential violations of state law as well as numerous heinous acts that violate both common decency and, apparently, hunting ethics. All I could think when I saw it was how impressive it was that Scully beat them to this scoop by almost a quarter century, and how sad it was that nothing has changed.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Dominion/Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg/Getty

Seattle Pride Parade (Revisited)

Seattle Pride Parade this Sunday. Here are some reposted pictures from 2015 when a quarter million people showed up, right after gay marriage had been legally approved (see Obergefell v. Hodges). What a joyful occasion.

all photos: markk (click below for more pics after the jump)

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

[ed. Like a double shot espresso to get the day started.]

Cultural Exchange

via: YouTube Shorts