The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

I am increasingly convinced that the collapse of reading is one of the most profound social and cultural developments of modern times. For years surveys have shown that rates of reading have been falling precipitously since the advent of the smartphone. Now a report from the OECD finds that reading proficiency is falling around the world for the first time on record. Sarah O’Connor has written interestingly about the findings in the Financial Times:

Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education . . . “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child”

I think O’Connor is right to say that we are becoming a “post literate” society as scrolling and short form video rapidly replaces sustained reading. I know many intelligent educated adults who never read. Friends who are teachers and academics tell me that the practice of “reading for fun” is virtually dead among their students. Reports from universities confirm this impression. A recent piece in The Atlantic, The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, found that many university academics no longer assign long or complex texts because their students are now unable to cope with them: (...)

The great prophetic book on this subject is Neil Postman’s books Amusing Ourselves to Death. I spoke to Ian Leslie about it on the latest episode of his Ruffian podcast. Postman’s argument is that a culture of literacy is not just a nice thing to have but that it underpins our entire political culture. The habits of sustained attention, logical argument, and calm impersonal communication are fundamental to a democratic society. All modern democracies are products of the highly literate societies of the nineteenth century. Without literacy, democracy may not survive.

Indeed, the decline of reading is already transforming our political culture. O’Connor interestingly (and alarmingly) speculates that the decline of reading means that our society is already returning to some of the characteristics more usually associated with oral cultures:

by James Mariotte, Cultural Capital |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. (...)

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. 

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.” (...)

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (...)

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career. (...)

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

by Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva

2024 Lyttle Lytton Contest

Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Lyttle Lytton Contest.  This is the first year that entries generated by programs such as ChatGPT have been separated out into their own division; I was surprised to find that the increase in such entries from previous years, when computer-generated entries were included with the found entries, was negligible.  We’ll get to those spinoff divisions in a bit, but let’s start with the main event.  The winner of the 2024 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:

He slammed the door in my face, loud and sharp, like an acoustic lemon.

                                                        Erin McCourt

As I explain almost every year, this is not just a “write a funny sentence” contest: one of my criteria in deciding which entries will make it onto this page is my sense that some author out there could plausibly have tried start­ing a novel this way, and not as a joke.  I’m not quite as concerned about that for the honorable mentions, but for the winner, it’s very important.  And this year’s winner… I have to admit that when I was sixteen, I could have written this, and I would have thought that it was great.  That was the year I wrote a story in which a character’s voice “sparkled with strawberry overtones”, after all.  So here we go: what’s sharp?  A lemon!  A lemon tastes sharp!  So the sound of the door is like a lemon!  But it will be confusing to the reader if I don’t specify that it’s the sound that I’m comparing to a lemon!  So it’s an acoustic lemon!  And… I mean, the phrase “acoustic lemon” is completely ridi­culous, but I can absolutely see how an aspiring writer could get there.  So there was no agonizing over choosing a winner this year: this entry arrived quite early in the 2024 submission window, I flagged it as the current leader, and even the best entries to arrive over the course of the next eleven months never challenged it.

So, no other finalists this year, no second place… let’s get straight to the honorable mentions!

Lyttle Lytton Contest

Image: uncredited via

[ed. I'm not sure how this relates to the more well-known Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest but you can compare both and pick your favorites.]

Why AI Progress is Increasingly Invisible

On Dec. 20, OpenAI announced o3, its latest model, and reported new state-of-the-art performance on a number of the most challenging technical benchmarks out there, in many cases improving on the previous high score by double-digit percentage points. I believe that o3 signals that we are in a new paradigm of AI progress. And François Chollet a co-creator of the prominent ARC-AGI benchmark, who some consider to be an AI scaling skeptic, writes that the model represents a "genuine breakthrough."

However, in the weeks after OpenAI announced o3, many mainstream news sites made no mention of the new model. Around the time of the announcement, readers would find headlines at the Wall Street Journal, WIRED, and the New York Times suggesting AI was actually slowing down. The muted media response suggests that there is a growing gulf between what AI insiders are seeing and what the public is told.

Indeed, AI progress hasn't stalled—it's just become invisible to most people.

Automating behind-the-scenes research

First, AI models are getting better at answering complex questions. For example, in June 2023, the best AI model barely scored better than chance on the hardest set of "Google-proof" PhD-level science questions. In September, OpenAI's o1 model became the first AI system to surpass the scores of human domain experts. And in December, OpenAI's o3 model improved on those scores by another 10%.

 

However, the vast majority of people won't notice this kind of improvement because they aren't doing graduate-level science work. But it will be a huge deal if AI starts meaningfully accelerating research and development in scientific fields, and there is some evidence that such an acceleration is already happening. A groundbreaking paper by Aidan Toner-Rodgers at MIT recently found that material scientists assisted by AI systems "discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation." Still, 82% of scientists report that the AI tools reduced their job satisfaction, mainly citing "skill underutilization and reduced creativity."

But the Holy Grail for AI companies is a system that can automate AI research itself, theoretically enabling an explosion in capabilities that drives progress across every other domain. The recent improvements made on this front may be even more dramatic than those made on hard sciences.

In an attempt to provide more realistic tests of AI programming capabilities, researchers developed SWE-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates how well AI agents can fix actual open problems in popular open-source software. The top score on the verified benchmark a year ago was 4.4%. The top score today is closer to 72%, achieved by OpenAI's o3 model.

This remarkable improvement—from struggling with even the simplest fixes to successfully handling nearly three-quarters of the set of real-world coding tasks—suggests AI systems are rapidly gaining the ability to understand and modify complex software projects. This marks a crucial step toward automating significant portions of software research and development. And this process appears to be well underway. Google's CEO recently told investors that "more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI." (...)

The problem with invisible innovation

The hidden improvements in AI over the last year may not represent as big a leap in overall performance as the jump between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. And it is possible we don't see a jump that big ever again. But the narrative that there hasn't been much progress since then is undermined by significant under-the-radar advancements. And this invisible progress could leave us dangerously unprepared for what is to come.

The big risk is that policymakers and the public tune out this progress because they can't see the improvements first-hand. Everyday users will still encounter frequent hallucinations and basic reasoning failures, which also get triumphantly amplified by AI skeptics. These obvious errors make it easy to dismiss AI's rapid advancement in more specialized domains.

There's a common view in the AI world, shared by both proponents and opponents of regulation, that the U.S. federal government won't mandate guardrails on the technology unless there's a major galvanizing incident. Such an incident, often called a "warning shot," could be innocuous, like a credible demonstration of dangerous AI capabilities that doesn't harm anyone. But it could also take the form of a major disaster caused or enabled by an AI system, or a society upended by devastating labor automation.

The worst-case scenario is that AI systems become scary powerful but no warning shots are fired (or heeded) before a system permanently escapes human control and acts decisively against us.

Last month, Apollo Research, an evaluations group that works with top AI companies, published evidence that, under the right conditions, the most capable AI models were able to scheme against their developers and users. When given instructions to strongly follow a goal, the systems sometimes attempted to subvert oversight, fake alignment, and hide their true capabilities. In rare cases, systems engaged in deceptive behavior without nudging from the evaluators. When the researchers inspected the models' reasoning, they found that the chatbots knew what they were doing, using language like “sabotage, lying, manipulation.”

This is not to say that these models are imminently about to conspire against humanity. But there has been a disturbing trend: as AI models get smarter, they get better at following instructions and understanding the intent behind their guidelines, but they also get better at deception. 

by Garrison Lovely, Time |  Read more:

Image: Ricardo Santos

[ed. You have to believe humanity has a death wish. If something can be built, it will be, and if it can be weaponized, all the better. We can't help ourselves. I'm reminded of Chekov's gun. See also: A Compilation of Tech Executives' Statements on AI Existential Risk (Obsolete Newsletter); and, Can Humanity Survive AI? (Jacobin):]

***

Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who’s worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental nonsense.”

In July, former Google DeepMind senior scientist Richard Sutton — one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, a major subfield of AI — said that the technology “could displace us from existence,” and that “we should not resist succession.” In a 2015 talk, Sutton said, suppose “everything fails” and AI “kill[s] us all”; he asked, “Is it so bad that humans are not the final form of intelligent life in the universe?”

“Biological extinction, that’s not the point,” Sutton, sixty-six, told me. “The light of humanity and our understanding, our intelligence — our consciousness, if you will — can go on without meat humans.”

Yoshua Bengio, fifty-nine, is the second-most cited living scientist, noted for his foundational work on deep learning. Responding to Page and Sutton, Bengio told me, “What they want, I think it’s playing dice with humanity’s future. I personally think this should be criminalized.” A bit surprised, I asked what exactly he wanted outlawed, and he said efforts to build “AI systems that could overpower us and have their own self-interest by design.” In May, Bengio began writing and speaking about how advanced AI systems might go rogue and pose an extinction risk to humanity.

Bengio posits that future, genuinely human-level AI systems could improve their own capabilities, functionally creating a new, more intelligent species. Humanity has driven hundreds of other species extinct, largely by accident. He fears that we could be next — and he isn’t alone.

Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award, computing’s Nobel Prize, with fellow deep learning pioneers Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton, the most cited living scientist, made waves in May when he resigned from his senior role at Google to more freely sound off about the possibility that future AI systems could wipe out humanity. Hinton and Bengio are the two most prominent AI researchers to join the “x-risk” community. Sometimes referred to as AI safety advocates or doomers, this loose-knit group worries that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.

In the same month that Hinton resigned from Google, hundreds of AI researchers and notable figures signed an open letter stating, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Hinton and Bengio were the lead signatories, followed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the heads of other top AI labs. (...)

In spite of all this uncertainty, AI companies see themselves as being in a race to make these systems as powerful as they can — without a workable plan to understand how the things they’re creating actually function, all while cutting corners on safety to win more market share. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the holy grail that leading AI labs are explicitly working toward. AGI is often defined as a system that is at least as good as humans at almost any intellectual task. It’s also the thing that Bengio and Hinton believe could lead to the end of humanity.

Bizarrely, many of the people actively advancing AI capabilities think there’s a significant chance that doing so will ultimately cause the apocalypse. A 2022 survey of machine learning researchers found that nearly half of them thought there was at least a 10 percent chance advanced AI could lead to “human extinction or [a] similarly permanent and severe disempowerment” of humanity. Just months before he cofounded OpenAI, Altman said, “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

A Week For the Ages

In the days before Donald J. Trump Part II: This Time It’s Who the Hell Knows really kicks off, the United States put on a preemptive display for the ages.

Just this week, we had SpaceX launching its latest iteration of Starship (complete with a catch of the returned bottom part of the spacecraft and a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the top part), Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin flying its New Glenn rocket to orbit for the first time, SpaceX and Firefly sending a lunar lander to the Moon, Varda sending its second factory into orbit and Planet putting up more of its imaging satellites. And that was just space.

Anduril also opened its massive, new Arsenal-1 factory in Columbus, Ohio. The $1 billion manufacturing plant very much represents the future of the company and its ambition to pump out tens of thousands of autonomous aircraft and weapons systems.

I’m not a major flag-waver type. Overzealous patriotism, nationalism and all forms of groupthink make me nervous. That said, if the U.S. is going to spend money on things, it might as well do it in a competent fashion, and, if we hit the more than competent bar, then even better. So here’s why these things were a big deal for the U.S. and why you might want to feel some genuine pride for American ingenuity.

Blue Origin opened its doors in 2000. It had a couple false starts and then put a lot of attention toward its New Shepard vehicle for space tourism flights before really ramping up its efforts on the New Glenn rocket about a decade ago. Is 25 years a long time to bring these two programs to life? My god, yes. It’s NASA speed at best, and that’s not what you want to see from a commercial aerospace start-up.

To the Blue Origin team and Bezos’s credit, though, the company stuck with it and now appears poised for very big things. New Glenn is a large, reusable rocket meant to carry huge numbers of satellites into orbit. Blue Origin didn’t manage to stick the landing on the reuse technology during its first launch, but it did have a successful flight into space, and that pretty much never, ever happens with a first rocket.

SpaceX has been lapping the world with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets for the big stuff, and Rocket Lab has been lapping the world with its smaller Electron. Now, the US has another viable large, reusable rocket that will, no doubt, be backed with increasing investment. Not to mention – there are also a handful of other rocket players with medium-sized vehicles that are either launching or about to launch.

With this bevy of options for reaching space and Trump coming in, I very much suspect that the government will kill NASA’s Space Launch System. This is NASA’s enormous rocket that has cost more than $25 billion to build since its development began way back in 2011. (For a full assessment of the debacle that SLS is, head here.)

Killing the SLS could be just fine for NASA and even for its builders Boeing and Lockheed Martin. These organizations could refocus on whatever they do best and not have this particular national disgrace hanging over them anymore.

And the U.S. will be just fine too.

When SpaceX and Blue Origin started around 2000, the U.S. space program was in very bad shape. NASA was heading toward ending the Space Shuttle program, cutting off the U.S.’s ability to send humans into space. Boeing and Lockheed were charging obscene amounts of money to put satellites into orbit and had little to no innovative ideas on their roadmap. China’s space program was gearing up for a tremendous run.

Here in 2025, the U.S. is doing a decade’s worth of space stuff in a week. Should Europe ever want to catch up to the U.S. space program, it would take fifteen or twenty years and a monumental vibe shift. Russia’s space program is in dire straits due to corruption, the war, competition from SpaceX and the lack of commercial space start-ups. Only China can compete with the U.S. thanks to massive government investment, and it still trails the quantity and quality of rocket and satellite programs by a large margin.

The government has, of course, played a major role in the development of commercial space in the U.S. and should be applauded for what it got right. Rocket companies still depend on government contracts for much of their business. The U.S., though, has made the transition from government-first space to commercial-first space, and the pace of development that has resulted cannot be questioned. (I wrote a whole book about this and made a movie about it, so I’m biased but also not wrong.)

The last week confirmed that the U.S. is the envy of the world when it comes to space. Don’t take it for granted, patriots. This easily could not have happened. We could still be using Russian engines to power our rockets. And we could be reading about China’s great space successes with nervous envy.

Now to Anduril.

In 2000, Congress issued a mandate that called for one-third of the military’s deep strike aircraft to be unmanned by 2010. It also demanded that one-third of combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015.

Stop and read that again because it feels, even to me, like I’m making it up. But, no, there’s proof and everything.

We read about drone strikes all the time, and I think this gives a false impression of the U.S.’s autonomous warfighting abilities. Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel and now analyst with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, studies autonomous systems and had this perspective to share.

“The Marine Corps has talked about going 50 percent unmanned, and the Navy has talked about going to 40 percent,” Cancian says. “But, if you look at their programs, they’re down in the two percent to three percent range. So, they’re doing even worse than the Air Force, which has been stuck at six percent. The Air Force has about 300 attack drones, the Army is building up to 200, and the Marine Corps is at three.” (...)

Away from hardware, other efforts to modernize the military have been SLS-level horrors. May you gently weep reading about the Army’s Future Combat Systems program. RIP.

Anduril has much work to do to shift the U.S. from the current state of affairs to a massive, quick-moving autonomous weapons powerhouse. But the creation of Arsenal-1 is certainly a step in that direction.

To date, Anduril has been making a wide variety of drones, surveillance systems, submarines and weapons at relatively modest-sized factories scattered around the country (and Australia). It does volumes in the thousands. Arsenal-1 is meant to take the company to the tens of thousands range with futuristic unmanned fighters and weapons the likes of which no other company has yet even thought of building. (...)

The U.S. is in desperate need of a company that can build things well. This story from 2023 in the New York Times received some attention but not as much as it should. The war in Ukraine has drained the U.S.’s supply of things like Stinger and Javelin missiles, and it turns out that we’ve kind of, sort of forgotten how to make more of them. The Times wrote:

In the first 10 months after Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Washington to approve $33 billion in military aid so far, the United States sent Ukraine so many Stinger missiles from its own stocks that it would take 13 years’ worth of production at recent capacity levels to replace them. It has sent so many Javelin missiles that it would take five years at last year’s rates to replace them, according to Raytheon, the company that helps make the missile systems. [Emphasis and screams into the night are mine.]

When Raytheon is copping to things like that out loud, the situation has gotten very bad indeed.

by Ashlee Vance, Core Memory |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Bob Dylan/Weird Al Yankovic

[ed. One of them is having a moment these days. See also: Embracing X and a turn by Timothée Chalamet: how Bob Dylan is capturing gen Z (Guardian). And, as a bonus - this gloriously deranged video (backwards cowboy hat and all... Cold Irons Bound).]

Attention is Power (and the Problem)

Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.

On Monday, Donald Trump is going to take the oath of office for the second time. During his first administration, there were questions around how he would instrumentalize policy in the government, how he would raise money. We’re used to talking about that with politicians.

But there was also the separate question — of how Trump wields and uses attention.

He’s a master at it. And I’d say he has a disciple, an ally, in Elon Musk. Musk is probably the most attentionally rich person in the world alongside Donald Trump, and Musk’s attentional riches might be more important now than his financial riches.

And so if you’re going to think about politics predictively, you have to scrutinize how attention is being spent, amassed and controlled. And that’s what this conversation is about. It’s a curtain raiser on the attentional regime we’re about to enter.

My friend Chris Hayes is best known as the host of MSNBC’s 8 p.m. show, “All In With Chris Hayes.” But he just wrote a great book called “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”

I’ve read most of the books on attention out there. This one is, I think, the best at understanding the value of attention today. Because it isn’t just endangered — it is the world’s most valuable resource. And the people who are on top of the world right now understand its value. (...)

Ezra Klein: Chris Hayes, welcome to the show.

Chris Hayes: Really great to be here.

So you’ve got a cable news show. You’re an attention merchant. What is different about the way attention felt and worked in the early 2000s when you were starting out, when I was starting out, and the way it feels and works for you now?

That’s a great question. One is there’s so much more competition. The notion now is that at every single moment when you are competing for someone’s attention, you are competing against literally every piece of content ever produced.

I love this thing that happened a few years ago where “Suits,” which was a network show, had become the most-watched show on Netflix. It never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that I might be fighting for eyeballs with someone watching “Suits.”

But at every single moment that you are trying to get someone’s attention now, the totality of human content is the library of your competition. And that was not true in 2000. (...)

You talk in the book about attention now being the most valuable commodity, the most important commodity, the commodity that so many of the great modern businesses, among other things, are built on. Like Google and Meta.

I still think we’re realizing attention was undervalued. Or maybe that its most important value isn’t selling it off to advertisers. So I’ve been thinking a lot about Elon Musk, who emerges in your book as a slightly pathetic figure trying to fill this howling void he has for attention.

Yes, the book was written before I think he got a second chapter.

Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter at $44 billion. It is not a business, as he has said himself, worth $44 billion. On the other hand, the amount of attention that he is capable of controlling and amassing and manipulating through Twitter, cannot be traded directly for $44 billion dollars. But it’s clearly worth more than $44 billion dollars.

So how do you think about this translation that we’re seeing happen right now between attention as a financial commodity and attention as having more worth, frankly, than the money it would fetch on the open market?

Yes, I think he backed into the purchase of Twitter based on a kind of howling personal void.

But in the same way that Donald Trump backed into the same insight borne of his personality and his upbringing in the New York tabloid world, he figured out something that has been obviously tremendously valuable in dollar terms. One of the really important ironies here, which I think does map onto labor, is that the aggregate of attention — like lots of attention or the collective public attention — is wildly valuable.

Volodymyr Zelensky is a great example of this. The president of Ukraine understands that attention on Ukraine’s plight is essentially the engine for securing the weaponry and resources his country needs to defend itself.

And yet even though the aggregate of attention is very valuable, in market terms, our individual attention, second to second, is fractions of pennies.

And that was exactly what it was like with labor. When Marxists would say labor is a source of all value, they were right in the aggregate. Take away all the workers and the Industrial Revolution doesn’t happen. But to the individual worker in the sweatshop, the little slice of labor that you’re producing is both everything you have as a person and worth almost nothing in the market.

And I think we have the same thing with attention, where it’s really valuable, pooled and aggregated. Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless, is pennies — and then subjectively, to us, it’s all we have.

I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics. Certainly at the high levels.

There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention.

I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world. But it’s actually not what matters about him right now. It’s just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that’s a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made, and Democrats haven’t.

Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.

I really like this theory. I think there are a few things: One, I think you’re totally right to identify that it’s sort of a sliding scale between the two. Which is to say: For politics that get the least attention, money matters the most.

So in a state representative race, money really matters — partly because no one is paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been gutted. Money can buy their attention. You could put out glossy mailers. There’s a lot you could do. The further up you go from that, to Senate to president, the more attention there is already, the less the money counts.

And you saw this with the Harris campaign. They raised a ton of money, and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people’s attention, whether that’s through advertising or door knocking — but largely attention and then persuasion: I’m running for president. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s why you should vote for me.

Now you can do that at billions of dollars’ worth of advertising, and everything is just like drops of rain in a river because there is so much competition for attention.

What Trump and Musk figured out is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere. That in some ways, it’s kind of a sucker’s game to try to pop in and be like: I got an ad. Hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? What do you like?

All that is just going to whiz past people. The sort of attentional atmosphere — that’s where the fight is.

And that’s what Musk’s Twitter purchase ended up being — an enormous, almost Archimedean, lever on the electorate.

I think this is right. I think there’s another distinction between Democrats and Republicans here. Which is that I think Democrats still believe that the type of attention you get is the most important thing.

If your choice is between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention. And at least the Trump side of the Republican Party believes that the volume, the sum total of attention, is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention: not only fine — maybe great, right? Because there’s so much attentional energy and conflict.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and before them, Joe Biden — before the changeover, they were just terrified of an interview going badly. And Trump and Vance — they were all over the place, including in places very hostile to them.

Vance had a ton of interviews that went badly.

But they were everywhere. Because they cared about the volume of attention and were completely fine with the energy that negative attention could unlock.

I think this is the key transformational insight of Donald Trump to politics.

Generally, in politics, you want to get people’s attention for the project of persuading them. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” Mark Antony says before he proceeds to attempt to persuade them.

What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this sort of war of all against all, that just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it.

And one way reliably to get people’s attention is negative attention — if you insult people, act outrageously. There was a commercial model for this — which is the shock jocks of the 1980s and ’90s that we grew up with. They were in a competitive attentional marketplace in local places.

Shock jocks said outrageous things. They weren’t trying to get someone to vote for them. They just wanted you to know that they were running the morning zoo. (...)

OK, but now I think we need to have a moment of caution. Donald Trump won the popular vote by like 1.5 percentage points, which is a terrible win. And yet there’s just no doubt Trump has won some kind of cultural and attentional victory that is much bigger in its feeling than the actual electoral victory they won.

I’m not sure this works as well in politics, but in terms of changing the culture, his win has changed the culture immediately in a way that I would not have foreseen. It does not reflect, if you just told somebody the election results — I don’t think they feel the vibe shift.

There is something happening where it is not proven to be a replicable strategy — that the old logic that we were just talking about the Democrats having, and being outdated, still does hold in a lot of races.

In terms of influence, I think negative attention is incredibly effective. You can just call it trolling politics.

The idea of trolling and the reason that trolling exists is it’s easier to get negative attention than positive attention. It creates a conundrum for the other side. Which is: Do you ignore them while they say horrible stuff? Or do you engage them and give them what they want?

And I think this kind of trolling politics, which was really Donald Trump’s insight, is the most transformational part of politics now. And you’re 100 percent correct: The media management around Democrats involves so much risk aversion. If the choice is negative attention or no attention, we take no attention every time. And that is the wrong choice. (...)

There’s a certain personality type that is OK with that negative charge. A lot of people would not have been willing to absorb the personal polarization Musk has decided to absorb to become as significant as he is.

Trump is very similar. I think most people would rather be well-regarded but somewhat forgettable to a large group of people — rather than absolutely hated by half the country in order to be quite loved by the other half. And I think that’s something in people.

What I’m asking is: Does politics now select for a kind of attentional sociopath?

I think it does select for a potential sociopath. I would push back a little bit in this respect, though. I don’t know how much of the negative feedback gets to Donald Trump and Musk —

But he’s sitting there watching MSNBC and getting mad at it, or CNN. He’s a guy who actually seeks out stuff to make him angry.

Yes, but I guess what I’m trying to say is I think it bothers him and Musk, too. I guess I just don’t buy that it rolls off their back. They’re kind of obsessed with it, also. So that fixation is manifest differently. But the idea that they’re sort of Zen-like: Well, you know, people are just going to hate.

That’s not what’s going on psychologically. I worry, actually, that politics now selects for a kind of sociopathic disposition. Or just a very broken and compulsive one.

I have the show-off demon in myself and from the time I was very young wanted people to pay attention to me. I don’t love that part of me. I don’t think that’s the best part of me. I think that my relationship to it is a little fraught and intentionally managed. And I don’t think that I would be a better person if I let that beast run loose.

And I worry that the incentives are to basically do that, both for everyone individually, in politics and culture, and also in the collective public sphere.

Let me say that the thing that I think is the deepest problem here: Fundamentally, the most competitive attentional regimes select for the parts of people that are in the aggregate — and over time, the most reactionary. (...)

We’ve been, I think, talking about attention mostly in terms of social media here. I want to talk about another way: that attention and the way we think about stories changed in this period. Which is reality television — which is the other side of this that Trump comes out of.

One thing that has felt true to me about Trump’s second term, much more than the first, is that it feels like reality television. It is all these secondary characters with their own subplots and their own arcs: What’s going to happen with Pete Hegseth? And over here is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Musk.

In the first term, Trump was the only character of the Trump administration. Now he’s playing a role that feels to me much more like the host — like sometimes he comes out and somebody actually is voted off the island. It’s like: Well, Matt Gaetz is gone now. Or so and so has gone. People get fired, or he settles the big plot of that week.

He’s going to side with Musk and Ramaswamy on H-1B visas — or he comes in to announce a new plot, like Greenland. He’s not the only figure — he’s the host, the decider. Compared with other administrations, even compared with his first, this one is feeling programmed in a very different way. (...)

Does that resonate for you?

It does resonate. If you’ve ever talked to people in reality television, they have selected for people with very flawed personalities, borderline personality disorder, narcissism. Because that produces conflict and conflict produces drama, and conflict is what keeps attention.

And those people like attention. Not all of them — but the ones they pick, right? You pick people on reality shows who like attention, who are willing to absorb negative attention to be the star.

Exactly right. And you don’t pick people who are sort of shy and go along to get along. Because what does that get you? So that model I think explains a lot about the personalities who are selected for in the context of intense attentional competition.

In terms of the programming, I totally agree — although I do think it’s instinctual for him. I don’t think it’s that plotted out. But I do think fundamentally he thinks that he needs the attention at all times. And he just has an intuitive sense of that. And Greenland is a perfect example.

There were a thousand of them in the first Trump administration. There will be a thousand more. What do you do with it? Is it attention-getting to be like: The incoming president wants to take over Greenland? Yes, it is. Is he serious? I don’t know. Is it a good idea? No, it’s not.

Should we debate it? Should we talk about it? I don’t know. But we’re all just now inside the attentional vortex of the Greenland conversation. And he’s done that again and again and again. (...)

That connects to the next layer, which is the obsession with what’s called the mainstream media, the legacy media. All of which is understandable. But it’s increasingly a conversation that a relatively small part of the country is a part of, and they’re still laser focused on that. And they’re laser focused on it in terms of not making news.

I think about this phrase all the time, “not making news.” As opposed to “making news.” “Making news” means getting people’s attention. “Not making news” means not getting people’s attention.

And the goal of a lot of Democrats in their communication is to “not make news.” And Donald Trump’s goal is always to “make news.”

In a way, the fact that I keep hearing Democrats call this a media problem rather than say an attention problem —

Reflects exactly the problem. 

by Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mathieu Larone

[ed. A little longer than usual but this seems like an important topic. Do read the whole thing. And, for a really great burn: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers (Guardian). *Cringe*]

Caspar David Friedrich, Cabin in the Snow (1827)

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Adrian Tomine, The New Yorker

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Mauro C Martinez, Celestial, 2024

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Wikipedia Day: The Editors Weaves Wikipedia’s Volunteers Into a Global Suspense Tale

Yesterday was Wikipedia Day, celebrating the first edit made to the online encyclopedia on January 15, 2001. It's a tricky kind of celebration because, for many of us, every day is a Wikipedia Day. Scanning a new Wikipedia tab can feel like turning on a faucet, using a resource that has seemingly always been there and dispensed evenly, almost magically, from the Internet pipes.

But that's not where Wikipedia comes from. It comes from editors, who are volunteers that add missing topics, update pages when new things happen, and settle debates ranging from grammar ticks to deep philosophy. Author Stephen Harrison has written about these people for Slate, WIRED, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Now, he's exploring the distinctive lives, interests, and conflicts of this tribe in a fiction tome, The Editors.

The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.

I spoke with Harrison about his work writing about Wikipedia, his approach to fiction as a tool for exploring the humans behind the site, where he thinks Wikipedia is now, and where it might be headed. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Ars: Out of everything in Wikipedia that you've written about, what made you want to explore the people, The Editors?

Harrison: I was kind of reporting on what the editors are doing or deciding upon, the debates they're having. But there's something about fiction—one of the strengths is that you can get inside the characters' heads. And I just thought that fiction was the best vehicle for that. …

I also just always saw the Internet encyclopedia as being inherently suspenseful. You never know who the people are behind the information, right? It's like this great unmasking; you see the username, but then you actually meet the person, and you learn about them. So, I had that model in the back of my head, and it informed my writing of the book. (...)

Ars: You talked with Caitlin Dewey (of Links I Would Gchat You) about the different eras of Wikipedia. I'm wondering, since last summer, if you sense anything has changed about Wikipedia's direction, new challenges for the big ol' encyclopedia?

Harrison: I guess I would say it's [in] a little bit of an "existential threat phase." So, okay, if we have all this AI technology, do we even need Wikipedia anymore? I would argue that we do. One, because we need a data set, or a sort of central text, to train the LLMs. That's the way these LLMs work is they need a central text on which they learn, and Wikipedia is a big part of the training data, but it doesn't maintain itself; you do need people to write it.

Ars: Wikipedia is this perfect corpus of human-written text, full of human language about things that humans are interested in…

Harrison: And publicly licensed, too. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty clean data set in a lot of ways. And so I guess the existential threat is, if Wikipedia is not getting appropriately credited, will we forget about it and then stop maintaining it, and then will it no longer be as valuable a resource to both humans and AI?

Ars: You're writing about volunteer editors, their personalities, their pride, motivations. Do you think it affects the editors behind Wikipedia if they get a sense they're mostly writing for bots, for AI and Google to just summarize for searchers? Do you have any sense of whether editors care about the way they're feeding people information?

Harrison: It's a bit nuanced because Wikipedia editors aren't the most egotistical people. They're largely anonymous or writing behind pseudonyms. They're not like TikTok stars who are trying to get their name out there. So in a way, they were never trying to claim credit for their edits and contributions to Wikipedia. So you could make the argument that because they're relatively selfless, maybe it doesn't matter if the data is going to AI or LLMs.

On the other hand, just from having talked to a lot of Wikipedia editors, they are very thoughtful of the reader. They envision a reader, and a lot of them are thinking about: Does this serve the reader? And I also think just a lot of them are put off by the idea that their work is just a big gift to Google, a for-profit company.

… It's also a hard issue that I'm grappling with because what is the fix? Maybe it's like, okay, these Big Tech companies are getting so much value from Wikipedia, maybe they should just donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation. On the other hand, you don't want the Big Tech companies to have any influence over the encyclopedia. So it's not just that we want the big companies to reciprocate and influence the whole thing. It's challenging.

Ars: It's always fascinating to me how, by and large, every page is so much better than I think it will be. Really high-energy, maybe "truth optional" pages for topics like cryptocurrencies. It's a small miracle that they're as orderly and reasonable as they end up being. Do you have any thoughts on how, 24 years from now, Wikipedia has been able to maintain that kind of stability?

Harrison: Well, there are a lot of dedicated volunteers. If a page is getting a lot of eyeballs, like cryptocurrency, for example, that's a page that people are going to be monitoring with some vigilance. With the mobile revolution, people are also watching edits on their phones and can run back to their laptops to revert incorrect edits.

(Harrison mentioned an article he wrote for The Outline about a Czech grandpa who largely oversaw the cryptocurrency page.)

Coming up on the 24th anniversary, I want to give a salute to the longtime contributors while also acknowledging that Wikipedia has been recruiting new people. And I hope that, even with AI and all these other potential threats, Wikipedia is still recruiting these people.

Because it really is a relatively small group of people. Everyone can edit, of course, but in English, it's been found that there are only about 1,500 core contributors—pretty small overall. So one of the things in the book is characters discovering, oh, it feels kind of like a small community. People tend to know each other by usernames. That's a little bit of art imitating life, because people start to see the same usernames on Wikipedia or come across each other on the same pages, and then develop a bit of a reputation. And that, obviously, inspired me.

by Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Inkshares

In Defense of Courtship

I devoted a decade, more or less, to researching a multidisciplinary book on love songs.

This forced me to learn the history of dating, marriage, and sexuality—going back thousands of years.

So I read all the experts on the subject—Stendhal’s Love, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, José Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, and lots of others.

But all that history is beside the point. That’s because I want to talk about the state of romance today.

It must be in short supply, because I hear lots of complaints from singles. They tell me it’s not easy to find a good partner for a relationship. (...)

They hate dating apps, but they don’t know any better way of finding somebody.

And how do you break out of the app cycle? Some people are starting to take desperate measures.

I keep coming back to the paradox. Apps make things easier—so why are relationships getting harder?

As I mull this over, I’m reminded of something I studied while researching the history of love songs. But it’s never mentioned nowadays.

It’s called courtship.

When was the last time you heard somebody use that word?

Maybe you hear it in a movie about romances from the distant past. But you can watch a whole season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and courtship won’t make a single appearance.

I bet the spellcheck on my iPhone won’t even recognize it.

Courtship? Did you mean to write Court-Issued Restraining Order?

It seems such a silly and old-fashioned concept. Why bother with courtship when it’s faster to do a hookup?

Hey, I’m no prude. I’m not doing abstinence training here. Nobody’s saying you can’t do what you’ve got to do.

But let’s give courtship its due.

1. It brought couples together for more than a thousand years. We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for those courting couples.
2. The rules of courtship embrace ritual and gracious behavior. These “rules of the game” provide guidance and impart structure (as well as add spice) in an otherwise unstable process.
3. You become better and more attractive yourself by following these rules—because they impose a discipline and aura of courtliness on your own actions.
4. They also provide a sense of safety for both participants.
5. The notion behind courtship is that love is stronger when creating a relationship is harder. That’s true in other spheres of life—sports training, musicianship, education, etc. And it’s easy to understand why: We get stronger at anything by avoiding shortcuts and taking on challenges.
6. Courtship moves step-by-step, and thus provides a chance for ongoing reflection and learning, as well as an easy exit path, before things get too complicated.
7. But here’s the most important reason for courtship: It fosters an attitude of respect, appreciation, and courtesy between the two people.

And that’s exactly what they will need if they decide to build a lasting relationship. You set the foundation for the future with this respect. (...)

There’s a good reason why this kind of idealized courtship still shows up in Hollywood movies. It’s because it creates an intense atmosphere of romance. (...)

Many contemporary romance novels are still working from this playbook.

The appeal of these tales is obvious.

I think we all crave a little more of this in our relationships.

Maybe this is just one more example of apps creating shortcuts, when we might be better off with a longer, more ceremonial process.

We all know that slow food tastes better than fast food. And that’s true in many other pursuits—good things take time. If you care about results, you don’t rush.

So why not try the same in relationships. (...)

This step-by-step process happened everywhere back then, not just in Europe. Consider this account of courtship among the Omaha tribe, from researcher Alice Fletcher:

A young man of the tribe watches his beloved from afar….

and at the dawn his love-song may be heard echoing over the hills. Sometimes he sings in the evening to let the maiden know of his presence. Girls find ways of learning who are the young men seeking them, and they also in their turn watch these lovers secretly and either flirt a little or entertain a serious regard for the young wooer. All this little drama takes place covertly, no elder is made a confidant.

This sounds like it’s straight out of the Romeo and Juliet playbook.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. I'm not so sure this doesn't happen these days too, but more in group situations where a bunch of folks just hang out together and subtle signals get passed in a low-risk environment. Plus, it gives the advantage of seeing how someone you might be interested in interacts in social situations and around your friends. More data points. See also: The Guitar as the Instrument of Seducers (HB).]

Peter Brown (British b.1967), Christmas, Combe Park, 2019
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Niklas Delin, Swedish , b. 1989. When the sun came back to Västertorp

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No FAIR

Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.

A knowledgeable reader took a look at a court filing on the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire. The implication for Los Angeles rebuilding its burned out neighborhoods are not pretty. As you will see below, nearly 2/3 of the homes destroyed in the Santa Cruz Mountains conflagration are not being rebuilt. Fewer than 15% have been rebuilt and are now occupied.

We will need to firm this tidbit as more authoritative sources weigh in, but this informed-looking comment on Reddit suggests that most claims will not be paid out in full due to the State of California being the insurer and lacking the capacity to do so. From Reddit:

The issue isn’t insurance companies going bankrupt in California since, as you mentioned, there are virtually no homeowners insurance plans with wildfire coverage that are underwritten by anything other than the California FAIR Plan anymore. The California FAIR Plan is both the underwriter for virtually all of California’s wildfire insurance as well as the guarantee association that is owned/run by the state.

The issue is that the price controls combined with the state pillaging the FAIR Plan’s funds for “other stuff” means that it only has $400 million to cover the losses. This is combined with the fact that California has a potentially >$60 billion budget deficit for 2025 that they don’t know how they’ll fund (the actual deficit isn’t actually known because the state is deliberately excluding certain items from its calculation of it, such as $20 billion that it needs to pay to the Federal Government this year. The deficit is not less than $38 billion with a middle estimate of ~$60 billion. The high estimate is “who knows?”).

The California Department of Insurance’s official plan on how to now “fund” the FAIR Plan’s multibillion dollar exposure is to prevent insurance companies from non-renewing existing plans as of January 9 and to threaten unspecified penalties for insurance companies that don’t retroactively renew policies that were non-renewed in the past few months. That wouldn’t necessarily do much even if it was able to be implemented, never mind that its unconstitutional and has a 0% chance of going through.

Because there’s very few policies written by insurance companies, their exposure is so low that there isn’t really a concern about any of them becoming insolvent. The real issue is that the FAIR Plan is very clearly insolvent, there is no viable mechanism to fund it, and the FAIR Plan itself is supposed to be the entity covering claims against insolvent insurers.

This isn’t a situation that has ever happened in the modern US and no one knows how it’s going to play out.

So everything is like CalPERS.

On top of the elephant-in-the-room “how meager will my insurance payout be?” another big impediment to reconstruction is shortages and inflation. If that’s in play from a major burn more than four years ago, imagine what will happen with the much greater pressure on building supplies with the unheard of scale of Los Angeles reconstruction when that gets going. (...)

The press is already starting to discuss hurdles homeowners whose houses were burnt out face, from insurance payouts being (legitimately) slow due to claims processing being overwhelmed to insurers trying to lowball payouts and policy-holders (and likely regulators and politicians) going to war with insurers, compounded by high odds of widespread underinsurance. High insurance costs would translate into conscious or accidental only-partial coverage.

Readers who are LA-knowledgeable mentioned other impediments to rebuilding. The wealthy Palisades is a family neighborhood. “There’s nothing to go back to: no schools, no grocery stores.” The implication is that families will be strongly inclined to move to functioning communities and may stay there due to not wanting to uproot their kids yet again.

By contrast, in Altadena, which is more middle class, many of the residents are multi-generational. They could not have afforded to buy the homes they lived in and cannot afford to rebuild. Nearly all will be underinsured, particularly in light of the way building costs will be sure to rise as a result of competition for materials and contractors.

Another potential stumbling point is pressure to rezone. For instance, there will be pressure to allow more multi-family housing, the arguments including climate change benefits (lower materials use, cheaper cooling and heating) and arguably faster restoration of housing for if nothing else, the benefit of businesses.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/NYT; Santa Cruz Planning Dept.; YouTube

[ed. It does make you think. Pretty soon it'll be impossible to get disaster insurance of any kind (if it isn't already), so no one is safe even if you're living in the middle of a city. Apparently these 'urban fires' are caused by flaming debris carried at great distances - a sort of chain reaction - not the edge of wilderness type situations one would expect. Another wrinkle (and I'm just speculating here) but usually no insurance company is entirely on the hook. Typically they'll 'reinsure' policies with other insurers (or governments) to spread the risk around - eg. FAIR. That sounds an awful lot like the sub-prime mortgage fiasco we saw where various high-risk loans were 'bundled' and sold off in 'tranches' to banks and investors. Will this be a similar situation, with contagion spreading beyond the insurance industry to other industries as well? We'll see (but, minimum, rates are poised to go skyrocketing - for everybody).  As with the financial crisis, the federal government likely will step in at some point to make sure insurance companies who couldn't get reinsurance don't go bankrupt (but with the bozos coming in, who knows). As for homeowners, well...good luck.]

 

Los Angeles Is Being Crushed Under the Weight of Inaction

We got the evacuation alert on Wednesday night. The fire came out of nowhere and threatened to sweep through Hollywood. I pulled our son out of the bathtub. We rushed into the car and drove north, past two other fires, through smoke and sirens, gridlock and chaos, flames on the horizon in all directions.

People keep saying the scenes out of Los Angeles look like something from a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need a protagonist. Every on-screen apocalypse has a leader. So where is ours?

Fires have wiped out entire communities. Thousands have lost their homes. Many more are displaced and looters are taking the personal property of those lucky enough to have any. The steady stream of alerts from Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app, ding as I type this, new fires igniting, existing ones spreading, winds picking up again. Will the latest alert say that our neighborhood, our street or our school is next?

I would love a deus ex machina to change this story line or for the real-estate developer and would-be mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his mall, the Grove. For now, I’d settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it’s going to be horrific, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.

As any screenwriter will tell you, a protagonist does not need to be perfect. We actually prefer that they be flawed, as long as they are ours.

I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at ground zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?

In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin called General Honoré “a John Wayne dude” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”

In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.

It’s not that Los Angeles lacks heroism. The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From firefighters and paramedics to everyone who has offered shelter, volunteered and pitched in on GoFundMe pages, I’ve never seen such unity. But if leadership is that Churchillian combination of confident words and decisive action, Los Angeles has seen neither.

When Mayor Karen Bass returned from a previously scheduled trip to Ghana, she held a brief, defensive news conference and told residents they could find emergency resources at “URL.” She had to quiet a public squabble with her fire chief, telling reporters at a joint news conference on Saturday that she and Chief Kristin M. Crowley are in “lock step.”

On Saturday, she said on X, “We will get through this crisis, together.” On Sunday, during a news conference, Ms. Bass vowed to “make sure that Los Angeles comes out of this a much better city.”

Will these efforts put Angelenos at ease? On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.

In a viral video, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, in aviator sunglasses, looked to me as if he couldn’t wait to get back in his idling S.U.V. as an anguished Angeleno told him her community had been destroyed and implored him for help. He did make time to do a lengthy interview with “Pod Save America,” in which he defended his record and response to the crisis, explaining that he “wasn’t getting straight answers” from local officials. How about we Pod Save Los Angeles first?

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming Democratic policies for the devastation in Los Angeles.

Despite what X will have us think, history shows Americans are pretty forgiving in a crisis. We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose. Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows? (...)

Every day we watch our city, our communities, our livelihoods burn. At least 24 people have died and an estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed. Without leadership, we try to find reliable information on WhatsApp chats and neighborhood Facebook pages. (I told you, it’s bleak.)

At the moment I do not care who did or did not cut funding for which water or fire services or whether the smelt is a thing or if the wind ate your homework. We are heartbroken, suffocating in toxic air and crushed under the weight of inaction.

by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jacob Ogden