An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts of carnal pleasures,” as art historian Beth Harris puts it in the new Smarthistory video above. Throughout its fifteen minutes, she and her colleague Steven Zucker explain as much as possible of this jam-packed triptych — not that even a lifetime would be long enough to understand it fully.

“Bosch confounds our ability to even talk about what we see,” says Harris. “His imagination has run wild. He’s just invented so many things here that we could never even have thought about in our wildest imaginations.” Zucker cites one art-history theory that this triptych represents Bosch’s attempt to “elevate the visual arts to the level of creativity that was permitted in literature.”

Even in Bosch’s late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, writers had an enviably free hand in choosing and presenting their subject matter; because the directly representative form of painting, by contrast, “had always been at the service of religion, it was inherently more conservative.”

It’s entirely possible — and other analyses previously featured here at Open Culture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was working at the service of religion. But it could also be that The Garden of Earthly Delights, in its vast middle panel, tells “an alternate story,” as Zucker puts it. “What if the temptation had not taken place?

What if Adam and Eve had remained innocent, and had populated the world? And so, is it possible that what we’re seeing is that reality, played out in Bosch’s imagination?” Not that such a vision would have readily been accepted in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his intentions alone could lead us to a complete interpretation of his work. As any novelist knows, sometimes your characters simply take over, and it could hardly have been within even Bosch’s powers to deny the desires of a cast so teeming and bizarre

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture | Read more:
Image: YouTube

What's Happening to Students?

A frustrated teacher recently took to social media with a desperate warning:

You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….

First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.

When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….

They’re not there.

And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

They just care about the next fix—because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.

They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.

How bad is it for educators right now?

Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.

This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:

I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021….I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn't comprehended the material before, but hadn't faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn't care….

Since 2021 I've been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn't performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.

I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.

I’ve made a similar claim in this article—where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.

Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing—and at an accelerated pace.

Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis—and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists—shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.

This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.

Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things. (...)

I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”

But that’s just sophistry and spin.

Parents, for example, have no doubts about the danger—because they see it happening right before their eyes.

But let’s give tech companies some credit. They have improved one skill among current students—cheating, which has now reached epic proportions.

The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class!

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Common Sense

[ed. See also: Why ‘Adolescence’ Is Sparking Conversations About Incel Dread Online (RS). On Netflix. The second episode on 'school' is pretty depressing.]

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, W, September #13 1999, C-print.

via:

Shibata Zeshin 柴田是眞 (Japan, 1807-1891) #Sparrow Nest, n.d. (c.1880s)
via:

George Foreman (January 10, 1949 – March 21, 2025)

When a teenager from Texas named George Foreman waved a tiny American flag in the boxing ring after winning Olympic gold in 1968, he had little awareness of the political minefield beneath his size 15 feet. The moment, captured by television cameras for an audience of millions during one of the most volatile periods in American history, was instantly contrasted with another image from two days earlier at the same Mexico City Games: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, heads bowed and black-gloved fists raised in salute during the US national anthem, a silent act of protest that would become one of the defining visuals of the 20th century. Their message was unmistakable: a rebuke of the country that had sent them to compete while continuing to deny civil rights to people who looked like them. Their action was seen as defiant resistance, Foreman’s as deference to the very systems of oppression they were protesting.

But that reading, while emotionally understandable amid the fevered upheaval of 1968, misses something deeper – about Foreman, about patriotism, and about the burden of symbolic politics laid on the shoulders of Black athletes.

To understand the backlash the 19-year-old Foreman faced in the context of 1968, particularly from within the Black community, is to understand the mood of that year: a procession of funerals and fires, of uprisings in Detroit and Newark, of young people trading dreams of integration for the sharp rhetoric of militant self-determination. Dr Martin Luther King Jr had been gunned down in Memphis just months earlier. Black Power was no longer a whisper in back rooms or college classrooms – it had become a rallying cry, a style, a stance. And in that charged atmosphere, there seemed to be only one acceptable way to be Black and politically conscious: with fist raised, spine straight, voice sharpened by injustice.

In that climate, Smith and Carlos’s silent, defiant protest was seismic. They paid dearly for it – expelled from the Games, vilified at home and exiled from professional opportunity for years. They were heroes, then and now. But the demand for unity behind that particular kind of protest was strong. To many, in that moment, there was only one acceptable way to be Black and political. Foreman’s flag violated that code. It did not speak the language of protest. It did not name the enemy. And so, some saw it as a profound misstep.

Foreman had long insisted that there was no statement embedded in the flag he waved. “I didn’t know anything about [the protest] until I got back to the Olympic Village,” he said years later. “I didn’t wave the flag to make a statement. I waved it because I was happy.”

That kind of apolitical happiness wasn’t just seen as suspicious – it was infuriating to those risking everything to challenge the systemic racism at the foundation of American society. The fact that the mainstream white media embraced Foreman as a “good” Black athlete in contrast to Smith and Carlos only deepened the rift. He was positioned, perhaps unintentionally, as the safe symbol of patriotism, the counter-image to fists in the air.

But Foreman’s story was never simple. He grew up poor in Houston’s Fifth Ward, a tough and segregated neighborhood. He found boxing through the Job Corps, a federal anti-poverty program. For Foreman, the flag didn’t represent a government that had failed him – it represented a country that had offered him a way out. His patriotism was anything but performative; it was deeply personal.

Too often, different experiences of Blackness are mistaken for ideological betrayal. Not every expression of pride in America is a denial of its sins. Sometimes it’s a hard-earned survival mechanism. For Foreman, the flag may have symbolized escape, opportunity and the dream that somehow, in spite of it all, he belonged.

Still, the criticism followed him, stubborn and sharp. He was branded an Uncle Tom, accused of pandering to white America, made to feel, by his own account, unwelcome in many Black spaces. His response was not to explain but to retreat. In the ring, he became a fearsome presence – angry, sullen and distant. Outside it, he said little, and seemed to carry a quiet fury beneath the surface. When he laid waste Joe Frazier in 1973, knocking him down six times in two rounds to claim the heavyweight crown, he celebrated not with a grin but with a kind of grim inevitability. He looked less like a champion than an avenger.

But narratives have a way of bending, especially in American life, and Foreman’s eventually did. Not long after losing it all with his crushing loss to Muhammad Ali in Zaire the following year – a defeat that humbled and haunted him – he disappeared for a decade. He found God, became a preacher, opened a youth center. When he returned to boxing in the late 1980s, older, heavier and unfashionably gentle, the public met him with something approaching affection. He smiled now. He cracked jokes. He appeared on talk shows. And when, at 45 years old, he reclaimed the heavyweight title in one of the sport’s most improbable comebacks, it felt not like redemption but reinvention.

The same man who once waved the flag and was scorned for it now hawked millions of countertop grills bearing his name. He starred in a primetime network TV sitcom. He named all five of his sons George. He leaned into the myth and made it charming. In doing so, he reshaped the cultural meaning of his image – from the quiet bruiser to the joyful elder statesman, a symbol of resilience, reinvention and a kind of pragmatic hope.

by Bryan Armen Graham, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

On Being a Thai Girl

[ed. White Lotus. Haven't watched the series but this scene was recommended for its sheer depravity and disassociative perversity. There's actually a psychological term for this condition (of course): Autogynephilia. What acting:]

"In a recent episode, set in Thailand, actor Sam Rockwell delivers an intense monologue on how he took partying as far as it could go. And he backs up this claim with a lurid account of excesses and fetishes beyond anything I’ve heard on TV before.

But nobody mentioned the key fact.

Rockwell talks about how he walked away from this wild self, and found serenity in a Buddhist life of detachment and enlightenment. And this shows in how he delivers his monologue, which grabs our attention precisely because its serene tone is such a mismatch with the activities described.

But, of course, viewers didn’t latch on to that—because that kind of message never shows up in a TV series.

Or does it?

It’s worth repeating this: the white lotus is a symbol of purity and enlightenment—and emergence from darkness, especially in times of turmoil or political crisis

“You’re getting what you asked for.”

That’s how people describe a punishment—the curse of getting what you want. And it’s been true since the Garden of Eden.

Consider this in the context of the algorithm—a feedback technology designed to give people exactly what they want." 

via: THB

Just Suck It Up

Seniors won't complain if they miss a Social Security check, Lutnick says

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick [ed. net worth $2 billion] suggested this week that only "fraudsters" would complain about missing a monthly Social Security check, and that most people wouldn't mind if the government simply skipped a payment.

Why it matters: More than 70 million Americans get a Social Security benefit every month, and for many, those checks are their only income.

The big picture: For generations, Social Security was called "the third rail of American politics" — many talked of reform, but in the end no one really touched the system.

• That changed this week.

What they're saying: "Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain," Lutnick — a billionaire former Wall Street CEO — told the billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya.

• "She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,"

By the numbers: By the Social Security Administration's own estimates, of all beneficiaries over age 65, some 12% of men and 15% of women get at least 90% of their monthly income from Social Security.

The response: A Commerce Department spokesperson tells Axios: "The Secretary is committed to protecting Social Security for all eligible Americans."

The intrigue: As Lutnick's podcast remarks were drawing angry responses, a judge was expressing her own frustration Friday with the acting head of the agency, Lee Dudek.

• He was chastised by Maryland District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander over his reported threats to shut down the agency, following a temporary restraining order she had issued the previous day.

• The order restricted DOGE's access to Social Security's sensitive data. Dudek reportedly claimed the order left him no choice but to cut IT access for almost all his employees, which she said was "incorrect."

Catch up quick: The drama over Lutnick's comments and the judge's rebuke caps a long week for the agency.On Tuesday, Dudek announced changes to phone service that some former officials and current employees say could slow the benefits process for vulnerable people, and potentially cripple the system.

Zoom out: "Constantly having Social Security Administration in the news with with some, some, something or another, is creating a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos, a lot of real fear with our members," Bill Sweeney, vice president for government affairs at AARP, told Axios earlier this week.

The other side: The agency has said that its changes are meant to stop fraud in the system.

• That's what Lutnick seemed to be getting at: *Anybody who's been in the payment system, in the process system, knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing. ... 80-year-olds, 90-years-olds, they trust the government, they trust, ok, maybe it got screwed up, big deal, they're not going to call and scream at someone — but someone who's stealing always does."

Reality check: Seniors and other benefit recipients frequently lodge complaints about Social Security with both the agency itself, and their local member of Congress."

• Almost every member of Congress has a staff person whose job is almost fully dedicated to helping their constituents with problems at the Social Security Administration," AARP's Sweeney told Axios.

• In recent years the complaints have increased, as the agency faced a five-year staffing low. Planned DOGE-driven staff and office cuts could make that worse.

• "For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink," Lee Saunders, president of the union AFSCME, said in a statement Friday.

by Emily Peck, Axios |  Read more:

Image: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

[ed. A billionaire telling SSA recipients to just suck it up if their regular monthly payments disappear - no problem! If you can stomach it, watch the video. The self-satisfaction and sociopathy are breath-taking. I expect this guy to be gone sooner than anyone's first missed SSA check.]

Unitree G1 Humanoid Robot

Unitree is constantly updating the G1’s algorithm, allowing it to learn and practice a variety of movements. 

The latest update improves its balance and expands its range of motion. Designed for demanding, repetitive tasks in homes, factories, and hospitals, the G1 aligns with Unitree’s vision for humanoid robots to be practical work and life companions. Standing at just 4.33 feet (1.32 meters) tall and weighing 77 lbs (35 kg), the G1 folds compactly to 27 x 17.7 x 11.8 inches for easy storage. It features advanced technologies like 3D LiDAR, a RealSense depth camera, and a noise-canceling microphone array for voice command response. The G1 is powered by a 9,000mAh quick-release battery, offering two hours of runtime with quick transitions for extended use. It features a high-performance 8-core CPU and reinforced joints that enable 23 DoF in its arms, legs, and torso. The design allows for agile movement and walking speeds of up to 2 m/s (4.5 mph).

[ed. Today's must see video. I can't believe how far the field of robotics has advanced in just the last decade, at least in China (see X). I don't know what everyone else is thinking. More prototypes here (Unitree).]

Making America Germany Again

Mahmoud Khalil, Viewed From the Right

The arrest and possible deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, has galvanized the left and drawn criticism from liberals and civil libertarians. Even some neoconservatives have condemned the White House’s aggressive action earlier this month. MAGA conservatives should also oppose it.

At least one prominent MAGA-friendly voice, the author Ann Coulter, has already spoken out against deporting Khalil, who was born in Syria. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?” Coulter wrote last week on X.

Khalil, a green card holder whose wife is a U.S. citizen (and eight months pregnant), does indeed enjoy rights under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled in 1945 that alien residents cannot be deported for political speech, including speech in support of groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government. Notably, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the targeted alien held an “affiliation” with a subversive organization, judging that the claim relied on too loose a definition of that term. The case, Bridges v. Wixon, is highly relevant to the controversy surrounding Khalil.

The Trump administration, in rescinding Khalil’s green card, invoked a 1952 immigration law to justify the move. That statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, empowers the government to deport any lawful permanent resident whom the secretary of state deems a danger to U.S. foreign policy interests. The White House has said that Khalil, through his protest activities at Columbia University, promoted antisemitism. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security said that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terror organization.

These justifications are spurious. The First Amendment does not carve out an exception for speech that Marco Rubio labels “antisemitic,” and in any case Jewish students at Columbia have vouched for Khalil’s character. As for the vague assertion that Khalil is “aligned” with Hamas, the administration has not produced evidence that he was affiliated with the group in any meaningful sense. If the arrest of Khalil is legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, then the relevant provisions of that law are null and void under the Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

MAGA conservatives have a principled reason to defend Khalil’s right to free speech, even if they don’t agree with his anti-Israel views. Free speech is a cornerstone of our republican system of government, as the Founders knew well. One early-modern aphorism, which Benjamin Franklin quoted approvingly in 1722, captures the relation between free speech and a free people: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." Conservatives tend to emphasize ordered, political liberty rather than individual rights, but in matters of free speech, the latter bolster the former. (...)

MAGA conservatives have yet another reason, in addition to those relating to the protection of free speech, to oppose the Trump administration’s persecution of Khalil. John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, got near the mark in a recent podcast conversation. “The single greatest threat to freedom of speech in the United States at this point in time is Israel and its supporters here in the United States,” he said. Mearsheimer’s argument was about free speech, but he alluded to a principle that is even more fundamental.

Right-wingers tend to conceive of politics not in terms of rights, but of power. One political ideal that relates to power and that MAGA conservatives should cherish is sovereignty. What Mearsheimer’s comment suggests, even if he wouldn’t put the point in this way, is that Israel and the Israel lobby presently undermine the sovereignty of the United States.

Sovereignty refers to the exclusive authority of a state over the country it rules and the nation it defends. It is the glue that holds a political grouping together and safeguards its survival and liberty. A state, to truly possess sovereignty, must have the power to make decisions free from foreign influence. One reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people.

Here’s the plain truth: Khalil was arrested not because he posed a threat to the United States, but because he protested against Israel. Drop Site News reported that Khalil’s arrest “followed a two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro-Israel groups and individuals” (emphasis added). President Donald Trump has alleged that Khalil supports Hamas, an enemy of Israel. Khalil led protests against the Israeli war in Gaza. Miriam Adelson, a top donor to Trump’s presidential campaigns, has pushed the president to take pro-Israel actions and is leading the charge against critics of Israel on college campuses.

As if to make clear which nation’s interests are actually implicated in the Khalil episode, the White House’s X account has written “Shalom Mahmoud,” using the Hebrew word for “goodbye.”

I had thought English was America’s official language now. (...)

The undue influence that pro-Israel groups exert over the U.S. government deserves close scrutiny and blunt criticism. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long tried to drag the U.S. into war with Iran, which poses little threat to the American homeland. The president seems on the verge of giving Bibi what he wants, though in Trump’s first term he griped that the Israeli leader was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.” In recent months, Israel’s supporters have sought to thwart foreign policy appointments perceived as inimical to Israel, and they may have succeeded last week. [ed. Here's a sickening video of Israel blowing up and destroying the Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza dedicated to cancer patients. Not a mistake.]

The Trump administration simply cannot pursue an America-First policy agenda if its military and staffing decisions and the nation’s foundational rights are subject to Israeli veto. 

by Andrew Day, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

[ed. Sometimes (not often) it's good to check in on what the other side's thinking. In this case they get it exactly right. It's good to be reminded that there are some saner versions of Conservatism out there, even if most are quite happy to ride MAGA's coattails whenever it's convenient (like saying the unpopular parts out loud). Will it matter with this administration? Want to guess? See also: The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns (Responsible Statecraft); MAGA Must Resolve Tech vs. Populist Tensions; and, Trump's No Good, Very Bad Week (TAC).]

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!  (...) This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

 

Now, crucially, I do not mean to imply here that reading the New York Times gives you a sound grasp of reality. I have documented many times how the Times misleads people, for instance by repeating the dubious idea that we have a “border crisis” of migrants “pouring into” the country or that Russia is trying to “steal” life-saving vaccine research that should be free anyway. But it’s important to understand the problem with the Times: it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate—though sometimes they are—but that the facts are presented in a way that misleads. There is no single “fact” in the migrant story or the Russia story that I take issue with, what I take issue with is the conclusions that are being drawn from the facts. (...) The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times. I’ve written before about the Times’ reporting on Hitler and the Holocaust: it wasn’t that the grim facts of the situation were left out of the paper, but that they were buried at the back and treated as unimportant. It was changes in emphasis that were needed, because the facts were there in black and white. (...)

Possibly even worse is the fact that so much academic writing is kept behind vastly more costly paywalls. A white supremacist on YouTube will tell you all about race and IQ but if you want to read a careful scholarly refutation, obtaining a legal PDF from the journal publisher would cost you $14.95, a price nobody in their right mind would pay for one article if they can’t get institutional access. (I recently gave up on trying to access a scholarly article because I could not find a way to get it for less than $39.95, though in that case the article was garbage rather than gold.) Academic publishing is a nightmarish patchwork, with lots of articles advertised at exorbitant fees on one site, and then for free on another, or accessible only through certain databases, which your university or public library may or may not have access to. (Libraries have to budget carefully because subscription prices are often nuts. A library subscription to the Journal of Coordination Chemistry, for instance, costs $11,367 annually.)

Of course, people can find their ways around paywalls. SciHub is a completely illegal but extremely convenient means of obtaining academic research for free. (I am purely describing it, not advocating it.) You can find a free version of the article debunking race and IQ myths on ResearchGate, a site that has engaged in mass copyright infringement in order to make research accessible. Often, because journal publishers tightly control access to their copyrighted work in order to charge those exorbitant fees for PDFs, the versions of articles that you can get for free are drafts that have not yet gone through peer review, and have thus been subjected to less scrutiny. This means that the more reliable an article is, the less accessible it is. On the other hand, pseudo-scholarhip is easy to find. Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Hoover Institution, the Mackinac Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation pump out slickly-produced policy documents on every subject under the sun. They are utterly untrustworthy—the conclusion is always going to be “let the free market handle the problem,” no matter what the problem or what the facts of the case. But it is often dressed up to look sober-minded and non-ideological. (...)

A problem beyond cost, though, is convenience. I find that even when I am doing research through databases and my university library, it is often an absolute mess: the sites are clunky and constantly demanding login credentials. The amount of time wasted in figuring out how to obtain a piece of research material is a massive cost on top of the actual pricing. The federal court document database, PACER, for instance, charges 10 cents a page for access to records, which adds up quickly since legal research often involves looking through thousands of pages. They offer an exemption if you are a researcher or can’t afford it, but to get the exemption you have to fill out a three page form and provide an explanation of both why you need each document and why you deserve the exemption. This is a waste of time that inhibits people’s productivity and limits their access to knowledge.

In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like. Let’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services like Google Scholar and EBSCO, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence. The content of the Wayback Machine, all of the newspaper archives, Google Books, Getty Images, Project Gutenberg, Spotify, the Library of Congress, everything in WestLaw and Lexis, all of it, every piece of it accessible instantly in full, and with a search function designed to be as simple as possible and allow you to quickly narrow down what you are looking for. (e.g. “Give me: all Massachusetts newspaper articles, books published in Boston, and government documents that mention William Lloyd Garrison and were published from 1860 to 1865.”) The true universal search, uncorrupted by paid advertising. Within a second, you could bring up an entire PDF of any book. Within two seconds, you could search the full contents of that book.

Let us imagine just how much time would be saved in this informational utopia. Do I want minute 15 of the 1962 Czechoslovak film Man In Outer Space? Four seconds from my thought until it begins. Do I want page 17 of the Daily Mirror from 1985? Even less time. Every public Defense Department document concerning Vietnam from the Eisenhower administration? Page 150 of Frank Capra’s autobiography? Page 400 of an economics textbook from 1995? All in front of me, in full, in less than the length of time it takes to type this sentence. How much faster would research be in such a situation? How much more could be accomplished if knowledge were not fragmented and in the possession of a thousand private gatekeepers?

What’s amazing is that the difficulty of creating this situation of “fully democratized information” is entirely economic rather than technological. What I describe with books is close to what Google Books and Amazon already have. But of course, universal free access to full content horrifies publishers, so we are prohibited from using these systems to their full potential. The problem is ownership: nobody is allowed to build a giant free database of everything human beings have ever produced. Getty Images will sue the shit out of you if you take a historical picture from their archives and violate your licensing agreement with them. Same with the Walt Disney Company if you create a free rival to Disney+ with all of their movies. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan because if you founded it here they would swiftly put you in federal prison. (When you really think about what it means, copyright law is an unbelievably intensive restriction on freedom of speech, sharply delineating the boundaries of what information can and cannot be shared with other people.)

But it’s not just profiteering companies that will fight to the death to keep content safely locked up. The creators of content are horrified by piracy, too. As my colleagues Lyta Gold and Brianna Rennix write, writers, artists, and filmmakers can be justifiably concerned that unless ideas and writings and images can be regarded as “property,” they will starve to death:

Is there a justifiable rationale for treating ideas—and particularly stories—as a form of “property”? One obvious reason for doing so is to ensure that writers and other creators don’t starve to death: In our present-day capitalist utopia, if a writer’s output can be brazenly copied and profited upon by others, they won’t have any meaningful ability to make a living off their work, especially if they’re an independent creator without any kind of institutional affiliation or preexisting wealth.

Lyta and Brianna point out that in the real world, this justification is often bullshit, because copyrights last well beyond the death of the person who actually made the thing. But it’s a genuine worry, because there is no “universal basic income” for a writer to fall back on in this country if their works are simply passed around from hand to hand without anybody paying for them. I admit I bristle when I see people share PDFs of full issues of Current Affairs, because if this happened a lot, we could sell exactly 1 subscription and then the issue could just be copied indefinitely. Current Affairs would collapse completely if everyone tried to get our content for free rather than paying for it. (This is why you should subscribe! Or donate! Independent media needs your support!)

At the end of last year, I published a book on socialism, and at first some conservatives thought it funny to ask me “if you’re a socialist, can I have it for free?” They were quieted, though, when I pointed out that yes, they could indeed have it for free. All they needed to do was go to the local socialized information repository known as a public library, where they would be handed a copy of the book without having to fork over a nickel. Anyone who wants to read my book but cannot or does not want to pay for it has an easy solution. (...)

The good news about our times is that the possibilities for democratizing knowledge are greater than ever. We could not have started Current Affairs in 1990 unless we had about ten times more money than what we actually had. Sharp left YouTubers are fighting hard to combat propaganda and debunk bad arguments, there are tons of great podcasts, and even Twitter has its uses. (Where else do you get to yell at powerful and influential people and personally tick them off?) But it is still true that Fox News and PragerU and the American Enterprise Institute have a hell of a lot of money to blast out their message as widely as possible. There is nothing on the left of remotely comparable size and influence.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'm a supporter of Current Affairs (not currently) and have reprinted many fine excerpts over the years. Who knew The Internet Archive had a blog? Check it out. See also: Current Affairs Magazine Demonstrates Paywalls Are Not Necessary for Publications to Thrive (IAB]

The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh

Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States:

• Semaglutide (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®)

• Tirzepatide (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®)

• Liraglutide (Victoza®, Saxenda®)

…but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans.

…if you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s semi-legal for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online.

So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over two million Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them?

Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but the FDA recently confirmed its decision is final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies can no longer sell cheap GLP-1 drugs. (...)

Some compounding pharmacies are already telling their customers to look elsewhere, but not everyone is going gently into the good night. I’m seeing telehealth companies float absolutely amazing medicolegal theories, like:

• Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with a drug if they can’t tolerate the commercially available doses and need a special compounding dose. Perhaps our patients who were previously on semaglutide 0.5 mg now need, uh, semaglutide 0.51 mg. In fact, they need exactly 0.51 mg or they’ll die! Since the pharma companies don’t make 0.51 mg doses, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it.

• Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with special mixes of drugs if they need to take two drugs at the exact same time. Perhaps our patients who were previously on semaglutide 0.5 mg now need, uh, a mix of semaglutide and random vitamins. They need to have the random vitamins mixed in or they’ll die. Since the pharma companies don’t make semaglutide mixed with the exact random vitamins we do, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it.

• Compounding pharmacies are allowed to provide patients with drugs formulated for unusual routes of administration. All of our patients just developed severe needle phobia, sorry, so they need semaglutide gummies. Since the pharma companies don’t make semaglutide gummies, it has to be compounded and we can still sell it (thanks to Recursive Adaptation for their article on this strategy).

I am not a lawyer but this is all stupid. What are the companies thinking?

They might be hoping they can offload the stupid parts to doctors. Everyone else in healthcare is supposed to do what doctors tell them, especially if the doctors use the magic words “medically necessary”. So pharmacies and telehealth startups (big companies, easy to regulate) can tell doctors (random individuals, hard to regulate) “wink wink hint hint, maybe your patient might need exactly 0.51 mg of semaglutide, nod nod wink wink”. The doctor can write a prescription for exactly 0.51 mg semaglutide, add a note saying the unusual dose is ‘medically necessary’, and then everyone else can provide it with a “clean” “conscience”. If the pharma company sues the pharmacy or telehealth startup, they’ll say “we were only connecting patients to doctors and following their orders!” If the pharma company sues the doctors, the pharma company will probably win, but maybe telehealth companies can find risk-tolerant doctors faster than the pharma company can sue them.

The pharma company can probably still sue telehealth startups and pharmacies over the exact number of nods and winks that they do. But maybe they won’t want to take the PR hit if those pharmacies limit themselves to continuing to serve existing patients. Or maybe there are too many pharmacies to go after all of them. Or maybe DOGE will fire everyone at the FDA and the problem will solve itself. I don’t know - I don’t really expect any of this to work, but from a shareholder value perspective it beats lying down and dying.

But the compounders aren’t the only ones boxing clever. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the pharma companies behind semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively, have opened consumer-facing businesses about halfway between a traditional doctor’s appointment and the telehealth/compounder model that’s getting banned. So for example, Lilly Direct offers to “find you a doctor” (I think this means you do telehealth with an Eli Lilly stooge who always gives you the meds you want) and “get medications delivered directly to you”. The price depends on dose, but an average dose would be about $500 - so about halfway between the cheap compounding price and the usual insurance price. Not bad.

Pharma companies don’t like dose-based pricing (that is, charging twice as much for a 10 mg dose as a 5 mg dose). Part of their objection is ethical - some people have unusual genes that make them need higher doses, and it seems unfair to charge these people twice as much for genetic bad luck. But there’s also an economic objection - they want to charge the maximum amount the customer can bear, but if they charge a subset of people with genetic bad luck twice as much as they can bear, those people won’t buy their drug. So usually they sell all doses at a similar price, opening an arbitrage opportunity: if they sell both 5 mg and 10 mg for $500/month, and you need 5 mg, then buy the 10 mg dose, take half of it at a time, stretch out your monthlong supply for two months, and get an effective cost of $250/month. But here Eli Lilly is doing something devious I’ve never seen before. They’re selling their medication in single-dose vials, deliberately without preservatives, so that you need to take the whole dose immediately as soon as you open the vial - the arbitrage won’t work! So although this looks on paper like a $300 price increase ($200 to $500), the increase will be even higher for people who were previously exploiting the dose arbitrage.

The mood on the GLP-1 user subreddits is grim but defiant. 

Some people are stocking up. GLP-1 drugs keep pretty well in a fridge for at least a year. If you sign up for four GLP-1 telehealth compounding companies simultaneously and order three months from each, then you can get twelve months of medication. Maybe in twelve months the FDA will change their mind, or the pharmacies’ insane legal strategies will pay off, or Trump will invade Denmark over Greenland and seize the Novo Nordisk patents as spoils of war, or someone will finally figure out a diet that works.

Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection, or inactivate the drug, or accidentally take 100x too much of the drug and end up with negative weight and float up into the sky and be lost forever. ACX cannot in good conscience recommend this cheap, common, and awesome solution.

I think the past two years have been a fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine. I don’t mean the patent violations - it’s no surprise that you can sell drugs cheap if you violate the patent - I mean everything else. For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great. 

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The cost of GLP-1s needs to come way down for benefits to be worth it, study says (Quartz).]

What China Thinks

One of China's upcoming scholars and a Research Fellow at the International Cooperation Center of China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC, the top organization for China's economic planning and policymaking.

1. Observing Trump’s Return: The Perils of Radical Change

Question 1: You have been a visiting scholar at Harvard University for the past six months and have therefore witnessed Trump’s return to power firsthand. What was your reaction to his re-election, and how would you assess his first few weeks in office?

Mao Keji: I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on Trump’s re-election: I wouldn’t say I like or dislike him. That being said, I do have a general impression [总体感觉] of him which is that, in some sense, Trump’s victory represented a kind of “course correction” [拨乱反正] in American politics. In other words, America’s problems— social, economic and political—had become so entrenched [积重难返] that they could no longer be fixed by “politics as usual” [无法通过常规的政治过程纠正]. As a result, voters turned to Trump, an unconventional politician, to push through bold and drastic [大刀阔斧] reforms.

To be honest, as a Chinese observer, many of Trump and Musk’s actions in recent weeks have really shocked me [震撼]. You could say it has been a real eye-opener [大开眼界] for me. For example, Trump openly expressed his desire for Canada to become America’s 51st state and even floated the idea of annexing Greenland. Yet just a few months ago, the Biden administration was accusing China of “undermining the rules-based international order”. It is astonishing [让我很吃惊] how the once-sacred [被奉为圭臬] norms of international politics can apparently be discarded overnight, replaced by the law of the jungle [弱肉强食]. Frankly, I have lost a lot of respect for the US because of these childish political antics [政治儿戏].

Moreover, Musk’s push to reform the federal government through DOGE with the support of Trump reminds me of the actions of two Soviet leaders. First, Khrushchev, who, in his secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, exposed many of Stalin’s dark deeds [众多黑幕]. Although this consolidated his political position in the post-Stalin era, it permanently damaged the Soviet Party’s domestic authority and international moral standing, with the Sino-Soviet split being the most direct result. [Similarly,] Musk and Trump’s tireless [不遗余力] efforts to expose the so-called “deep state” are certainly beneficial to the new administration, but the damage they are inflicting on America’s institutions and moral authority is irreversible and incalculable, with potentially terrifying consequences.

Second, Gorbachev, who believed the Soviet Union was in terminal decline, forced through bold reforms [推出了力度极大] based on his “new thinking”. He intended to address issues through reform to put the Soviet Union back on track. However, due to the huge scale of the reforms and insufficient preparation, he ended up unintentionally bringing about the USSR’s collapse. Similarly, Trump, seeing America’s problems, also wants to bring in bold and drastic reforms [大刀阔斧改革], but his radical [激进] approach is likely to lead to internal unrest or even civil war [内战]. In conclusion, I have serious doubts about such radical [激进] reforms, and I also question whether they are truly motivated by America’s interests or just the self-interest of these individuals [他们的私利].

2. Deterring Trump: Meeting Strength with Strength

Question 2: Let’s say you yourself were faced with someone like Trump, how would you respond to his threats and tariffs? How would you deter him from pursuing his pressure tactics while earning his respect?

Mao Keji: Trump is a businessman by nature; he is used to cost-benefit analyses, but less sensitive [敏感] to long-term strategic planning. Therefore, I feel the best strategy for responding to his pressure is to demonstrate that you are both able and willing to impose costs [on him]. At the same time, showing weakness or displaying anxiety in front of him will not get you any sympathy. On the contrary, it will only invite further aggression [会招致他得寸进尺的攻击].

Unfortunately, Canada, Denmark, Germany and Ukraine have all proven this point. As obedient [言听计从] allies who have always followed Washington’s lead, they trusted the US too much and never had a strategy for counteracting or resisting it. In the face of Trump’s threats, they were helpless [束手无策] and ultimately suffered humiliating blows [遭到侮辱性的敲打]. To me, this is a lesson in realism [这是一种非常现实主义的领悟]: surrendering just invites further humiliation [投降是自取其辱]; only by resisting to the very end can one turn the situation around [必须抵抗到底，才能翻转局面]. Therefore, while maintaining respect and decorum towards him, I would demonstrate China’s firm will and ability to retaliate against the US. This would ensure he takes decisions in full awareness that the costs of squeezing China will far outweigh the benefits, thereby deterring him from engaging in risky behaviour [采取冒险行动].

3. Trump’s Return: Consensus and Disagreement in China

Question 3: Sinification, as you know, focuses on China’s intellectual elite and their perspectives on the world. How have Chinese scholars and analysts—particularly those of your “post-90s” (90后) generation—reacted to Trump’s return? What key points of consensus and disagreement have you observed so far?

Mao Keji: Many of us, myself included, have not been particularly surprised by Trump’s return. In fact, it even seemed inevitable: if it weren’t Trump, someone else like him would have emerged. This is because we all believe that many of America’s domestic issues have become too deeply-entrenched to be fixable [积重难返]. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has shown that neither the Democrat nor Republican establishment can resolve these issues through conventional political processes.

There is actually very little disagreement among young Chinese intellectuals on the point that America’s internal problems are deeply entrenched and difficult to resolve. However, there are often disagreements on whether Trump’s reforms have the potential to save America [拯救美国]. Optimists believe that Trump and Musk have put together a strong [组合力度很大] package of reforms, backed by strong determination [决心很强] and an unprecedented level of support from the public. With the added boost from AI, there is a real possibility that America could be saved through radical reforms, [they claim]. Many people believe that, considering Trump’s isolationist strategy, the US could just withdraw into its North American comfort zone, settling into a new role as a regional hegemon, while gradually replenishing its strength [修复综合国力].

However, pessimists argue that the US’s overall power is fundamentally tied up [深深嵌入] in the global system, including the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency, its ability to attract top talent from around the world, and its ability to absorb global capital. Therefore, if Trump were to pursue isolationism forcefully and strip the US of its resource-extracting global hegemony [剥离汲取资源], [the pessimists believe that] the country would face a precipitous decline due to its inability to sustain itself [维持而断崖式坠落], potentially even resulting in a Soviet-style implosion [内爆].

There’s a quote from the The Three-Body Problem Trilogy that I really like: “Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”

Although the United States appears to be in decline, it remains, by any measure, the world’s leading power. After all, the fact that an unconventional reformer like Trump could emerge suggests that the American system does indeed possess a strong capacity for self-correction. That’s my view anyway.

At the same time, I pay particular attention to the technological forces behind Trump [特朗普背后的技术力量], as they may well bring about new and unexpected changes. I would rather overestimate [the impact of] Trump’s reforms than risk underestimating them.

Many establishment think tanks and media outlets in the US display real arrogance, which comes from assuming that their values are superior [基于价值观的傲慢]. In contrast, I sometimes feel that the perspectives of Trump, Vance and others are more grounded [接地气], and more worth paying attention to.

4. Trump’s Impact on China: Threat or Opportunity?

Question 4: Some Chinese scholars view Trump’s return to power as detrimental to China’s national interests, while others see it as an opportunity. What is your perspective?

Mao Keji: Trump’s second term has only just begun, and no one knows what’s going to happen next. Although he hasn’t done much deliberate China-bashing [敲打中国] recently, once he has resolved the Russia-Ukraine issue and dismantled [清理完] the Deep State, he will have his hands free to deal with China.

During his first term, Trump followed a similar script. This is why the many Chinese people who see his re-election as beneficial to China may be celebrating a bit too soon.

To be honest, I don’t particularly care whether Trump is beneficial or harmful to China. He is only a marginal variable [边际变量] for China.

China is a vast country with a large population and a massive industrial base. In many cases, so long as its domestic affairs are well managed, there is no need to fear a volatile international situation [外部环境风云变幻].

From a dialectical perspective, the most beneficial thing Trump did for China during his first term was launching the trade and tech war. This was a wake-up call that made China realise the urgency of developing independent and controllable technological pathways [技术路线] and accelerating its transition towards smart technologies [智能化].

Without Trump’s policy of extreme pressure, no Chinese government department or domestic enterprise would have been able to drive the transition to domestic alternatives [国产替代的转型]. Doing so would not only have been costly but [the outcome would also have] been highly uncertain. As a result, China might still be, at this crucial moment in time, neglecting the development of critical industries and allowing risks to accumulate, with potentially irreversible and catastrophic consequences [无法挽回的灾难性后果].

Many things that seem beneficial to China may not actually be that significant [没有那么大的作用], while other things that seem highly detrimental may, in fact, serve as powerful stimuli for growth. Ultimately, whether something is beneficial or harmful depends on how [well] China can absorb external shocks. At the end of the day, strengthening China’s capabilities and focusing on domestic priorities is probably more important than anything else. There is no need to fixate on Trump.

5. The World in 2029 and 2049

Question 5: Looking ahead, what do you think the US and the world will look like in four years’ time? And by 2049?

Mao Keji: Predicting what will happen in the four years of Trump’s second term is extremely difficult, but for now, one thing seems certain: the US’s global influence will shrink significantly. This is perhaps the clearest trend [最鲜明倾向] to emerge so far from Trump’s second term.

If Trump’s policymaking continues at its current pace, then by the end of his four years, the US alliance system, the dollar’s status as a global currency, America’s influence over multilateral institutions, its military presence across the world, and even its ideological and media dominance will all be significantly diminished. This is a deliberate choice by the Trump administration, most likely based on the belief that the costs of maintaining these global arrangements outweigh their benefits to the US.

At the same time, Trump’s retreat may be a calculated one, effectively reviving the 19th-century doctrine of spheres of influence. That means a return to an era akin to that of the warring states period, in which great powers can simply draw circles on a map to determine the fate of smaller nations.

Such a world, where the law of the jungle reigns [丛林秩序], may seem inconceivable. However, Trump’s encouragement of European defence autonomy, his tacit acceptance of Russia’s actions, his territorial ambitions concerning Canada and Greenland, and even his blunt remark that he would “leave Bangladesh to PM Modi”, all suggest a [growing] tendency towards a world carved-up [into spheres of influence] [全球割据]. This is something that cannot be ignored.

Domestically, the next four years in the US are equally difficult to predict [扑朔迷离]. As mentioned earlier, although I believe Musk, with Trump’s backing, could indeed carry out some important reforms, I remain highly sceptical of their radical [激进的方式] approach. It even reminds me a little of China’s Cultural Revolution in the sense that a small group of political outsiders [少数体系边缘人], with the tacit approval of their leader, has gained access to the core of government and power [进入权力核心] and is exploiting widespread social dissatisfaction to rally large numbers of ordinary people—especially those from the lower rungs of society and young people with little experience of the world—to launch a fierce assault on the existing system. At the moment, it seems that much of what DOGE is doing—exposing shocking “dirt” [黑料] on social media—is less about genuinely pushing for reform and more about maintaining the “revolutionary legitimacy” of this movement, ultimately creating a cycle of self-reinforcing and escalating fervour [狂热].

As Trump continues to use attacking the Deep State as an excuse to dismantle the federal government, growing numbers of people may find the situation [increasingly] intolerable and join the ranks of a fierce opposition to Trump [选择加入激烈反对的阵营]. This could create an unprecedented level of division within American society. I don’t know how this situation will ultimately end, but rifts in society, combined with economic turbulence and growing international pressures, undoubtedly present a thorny challenge.

As for how I envisage 2049, the world one generation from now, I haven’t given this much thought until now. I don’t think I’m very good at imagining things that far off. However, since you asked, I will try my best to provide an answer.

Unless there is a geopolitical disaster like a nuclear war or a science-fiction-like scenario such as a robot uprising, and assuming current trends continue on a linear path, it is highly probable that by 2049 China will have overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy. From now until then, as long as China focuses on managing its own affairs effectively, it should naturally achieve this leap due to its sheer size, thereby circumventing [today’s] tricky structural “contradictions” [结构性矛盾] between the US and China. [But] this should not be seen as a unilateral geopolitical victory for China over the US.

What will China look like by 2049? Over a billion people (let’s hope China’s population is still of that size!), fully industrialised and automated, and living in a socialist system that prioritises the public interest [公众利益]. At that point, China could become the first truly advanced socialist nation in human history, fulfilling Karl Marx’s great prophecy from two centuries ago.

I look forward to seeing China achieve further institutional innovations [更多制度创新] and material advancements, thereby contributing to the betterment of human civilisation [为全人类的文明进步多做一点贡献] and making the world a better place.

by Thomas des Garets Geddes and Mao Keji, The China Academy |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. They don't seem too worried. tl;dr version here: (X). I'm glad he mentioned the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao, which has echos here; the ideological purging and banishment of anyone with bureaucratic or scientific expertise. See also: Avoiding the Abyss: An Urgent Need for Sino-U.S. Crisis Management (Responsible Statecraft).]

King of Fruits

King of Fruits (WiP)

Images: Wikimedia/Del Monte

"By the late eighteenth century, ‘pineries’, as pineapple gardens were called, had become a regular feature of large European estates. The fruit had gone from being a rare curiosity to become an expensive but attainable luxury, at least for the wealthy. It became common practice to display a fresh pineapple at dinner parties to impress guests. This led to delightfully absurd situations: the pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves.

Around the turn of the twentieth century entrepreneurs realized that steamship transport, refrigeration, and canning could be combined into a new business opportunity.

The first person to understand this was a young man named James Dole. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in agriculture, Dole moved to Honolulu in 1899 (it helped that his cousin, Sanford D. Dole, had been president of the short-lived Republic of Hawaii and now held the position of the first governor of the US territory of Hawaii). He bought a farm, experimented with some crops, and settled on the pineapple. In 1901, he formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (today known as Dole), and by 1903, he was shipping canned pineapple to the mainland US. His success was quickly imitated by other businesses, notably by the California Packing Corporation, now known as Del Monte.

In the next three decades Hawaiian pineapple production skyrocketed. This was due in part to Hawaii’s climate, where the pineapple plantations grew to be the largest in the world. Famously, the island of Lanai, the sixth-largest of the archipelago, was turned into an island-wide plantation for Dole in the 1920s." ~ King of Fruits

Seeing Things For What They Are

Born into a chaotic world, all of us develop a frame of reference to make everything intelligible. Consciously or not, we all have a narrative about reality that we overlay on events, placing them into a context in our own minds, allowing us to understand why things happened and what is likely to happen next. In the same way that our brains automatically filter out much incoming stimulus in order to provide us with a breadth of sensation that we can handle, our belief systems allow us to turn life’s waterfall of events into a story that we can read, and participate in.

Once we have developed this frame, this mental machine that inhales life and exhales explanations, it is tempting to allow it to run unimpeded. We can anchor ourselves to it and stop wondering why things happen. Religion is the classic example of this, but it applies to all realms of thinking. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the fact that these frames we generate are only approximate—they are the best we can do at any given time given the facts at hand. If we are actually concerned with keeping them as close to truth as possible, we must constantly dust them off and rework them in light of the unfolding of reality. This is what learning is. It takes work. It is tempting to check out from it, after we have enough to get by. Once we have an explainer machine that seems to work, it is easy to stick with it. The passing of time, the ceaseless interaction of people and things and ideas that produce events in the world, will render our frames anachronistic. Still, it is human nature to kind of relax into them, at a certain point, like an elderly person who sticks with their 20 year-old computer because they know how it works, turning off the software updates, satisfied with what they have.

This is a luxury that people in certain fields cannot afford. Science? Can’t stop updating. Medicine? Of course you must stay current. Literature? Technology? Academia? You must always do the painful work of tearing apart and rebuilding your knowledge and beliefs because failing to do so means that you will not be good at your job. Politics is the same. Effective political policies and strategies are direct responses to the true condition of the world. Delusion does not pay. If the world changes and our political leaders don’t, it is the political leaders and not the world that will be left behind. The people who suffer for this failure are not usually the leaders, but the citizens who find that the leaders seem to have gone blind.

Things have changed in America. There are deep undercurrents that have been exerting pressure from below—the relentless evolution of global capitalism, the growth of inequality, new forms of technology jumbling the world of information—and then there are things that have changed rapidly, closer to the surface. It was possible to use a certain frame of reference that worked pretty well in the American political system for the past 40 years or so. But now that frame is out of date. It is worse than useless. It is misleading. It is detrimental, because the answers it spits out, the explanations it gives, the strategies it recommends for specific situations, are all based upon old data and old wisdom that no longer works. The frame of reference that guides many of the people who, unfortunately, dominate the Democratic Party in Washington is like a flood map that was drawn up before climate change. They keep using these same old formulas that worked back then, ignoring the rising water as it creeps up to their necks.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. This should be one of the basic operating principles in life: to avoid being manipulated be as informed and unbiased as possible. It's one of the most important defenses one can have in a capitalist system that, by nature, is designed to exploit blind spots and emotions for profit and other types of competitive advantage (eg. politics). Updating your priors, previous belief systems, are essential as new information becomes available, especially contradictory information. See also: Three Methods of Control (HTW); and, this message from Ralph Nader.]

Coast to Coast?

Boston Celtics to Seattle? Maybe?

The NBA has danced around the topic of expansion for more than a year, with occasional steps forward and more than a few times where the conversation has come to a halt.

Thanks to the agreed-upon sale of the Boston Celtics on Thursday, the league may finally be ready to go all-in on embracing the talk of adding one or two teams to the league and seeing where Seattle stands in the discussion.

It’s not going to happen immediately and the process likely won’t be at a pace to the liking of fans who have longed for the return of the SuperSonics. But several issues have been settled and created a situation where moving forward on the topic seems it could happen soon.

Here’s a rundown of where things stand:

What happened in Boston?

The current owners of the Celtics reached agreement with a group led by Bill Chisholm for a sale process at a valuation of $6.1 billion, a record for a pro sports franchise in North America.

One of the benchmark franchises in the league being up for sale was an unexpected twist in the expansion saga and delayed the NBA moving forward on discussing the possibility of adding teams.

Why the Celtics’ sale matters?

The Celtics’ sale was the last major piece of financial business the league needed to settle. Two years ago, the NBA reached a new collective bargaining agreement with the players and last year finalized a landmark media rights deal that’ll pay out $76 billion over the next 11 years.

The sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves seems to be closer to completion after an arbitration panel ruled in February in favor of the new owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez.

The Celtics’ sale was the one lingering piece that was unresolved and perhaps more importantly than the status of the franchise being settled, it gives the league a current franchise valuation for which an expansion fee could be based off. Before the agreement on the Celtics, the last sale of an NBA franchise was the Phoenix Suns at a valuation of $4 billion.

It seems like the midpoint between the sales of the Suns and Celtics could be a smart figure for a potential expansion fee. Maybe a little lower. But if NBA owners are about to divide up their pie by one or two more pieces, they’re going to want every cent they can from the new guests at the table.

What are the next steps?

The NBA owners — the Board of Governors — are scheduled to meet before the end of the regular season, potentially as early as next week. While it’s unclear if expansion will be addressed, the Celtics situation progressing at least opens up the topic for potential conversation. It could be the topic is held for after the season. Last year, the Board of Governors met during NBA Summer League in Las Vegas in July.

Whenever the topic is broached, it won’t be a rubber stamp. There is likely to be significant debate among the owners as to whether now is the time to expand, especially with some concerns about the talent pool and how adding one or two more teams could impact the bottom line for some teams. In other words, some owners may have to be convinced that expansion is worthwhile for themselves and the league.

by Tim Booth, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times
[ed. The Celtics got sold? For $6.1 billion? Wow. That's like selling the Green Bay Packers or something. Reading all this I wonder, when did sports get so complicated (and mercenary)?]

Matteo Mancuso

[ed. Awesome talent.]

“You’re killing us,” guitarist Al Di Meola said when he first heard Matteo Mancuso. “It would take two, three lifetimes to catch up with him.”

Steve Vai reached the same verdict: “I was pretty stunned when I heard Matteo…..It’s just a new level.” “I’ve never seen anything like it,” enthused Joe Bonamassa.

Sicilian guitarist Mancuso first got attention via a viral YouTube video. He was 17 at the time, but had already been playing professionally for five years. Yet he didn’t release a full studio album until 2023, around the time of his 25th birthday. (HB)