via:
[ed. Probabilities.]
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Death By a Thousand Emails
How Administrative Bloat is Killing American Higher Education
In recent years, Yale has achieved the unfortunate distinction of having more administrators and managers than undergraduate students. For its fewer than five thousand undergraduate students, Yale proudly employs an army of over 5,460 administrators. Like many of its peer institutions, Yale faces an epidemic of administrative bloat: a self-perpetuating ecosystem of expensive career administrators who are far removed from the classroom. In the last three decades, the number of administrators and managers employed by American colleges and universities has ballooned, dwarfing the growth of student and faculty populations. From 1987 to 2012, 517,636 administrators and professional employees were hired at colleges and universities across the country—an average of 87 hires for every working day. After disproportionate growth, these oversized administrative states needlessly increase costs and encumber the operation of institutions.
As Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg describes in his book, The Fall of Faculty, the American university has undergone many evolutions in its lifetime. As recently as the 1970s, schools were heavily influenced by faculty ideas and concerns. Top administrators were typically drawn from teaching staff and many mid level managerial tasks went to faculty members. These academics typically participated on a temporary basis and cycled in and out of teaching roles. Because professors were so involved in university management, presidents and deans could do little without faculty support. The college’s core educational mission was hard to ignore with administration composed primarily of semi-retired academics. Administrative tasks were a means to an academic end. As demand for services and the complexities of modern administrative requirements grew, however, a professional management class rapidly emerged.
Compared to academic leadership of the past, today’s professional administrators view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience and come directly from management degree programs or other non-teaching roles in higher education. The Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey (IPEDS) defines administrators as “staff whose job it is to plan, direct, or coordinate policies [and] programs, [tasks that] may include some supervision of other workers.” The IPEDS further states that although “Postsecondary Deans should be classified in this category as well,” the vast majority of administrators do no teaching or research. In many cases, their jobs are unrelated to the most crucial university functions. These career managers serve a bureaucracy that is fundamentally disconnected from the classroom experience.
The first problem with this self-reproducing professional class is its overwhelming cost. Administrative costs account for nearly a quarter of total spending by American universities, according to Department of Education data. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found that, across the entire higher education landscape, spending on administration per student increased by 61% between 1993 and 2007. This growth extends even to public universities, like the UNC System, which “saw a nearly 50 percent, inflation-adjusted increase” in 11 short years. This growth is unsurprising given administrators are exceedingly well compensated compared to faculty. Presidents at both public and private universities often make comparable salaries to business executives of similar size institutions, and receive extensive perks typically associated with corporate executives. Within middle management, armies of deans and provosts typically make salaries comfortably in the six-figures.
In a letter written to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel, signatories addressed the “collision of two opposing forces: extraordinary financial strength and runaway bureaucratic expansion.”
The request comes after Yale announced a broad hiring and salary slowdown as it braces for funding cuts from the Trump administration. Letter signees told the News they hope the adoption of their suggestions will place faculty at the center of University governance.
“With the second-largest per-student endowment in the world, Yale can navigate economic uncertainty without compromising its academic essence,” the letter reads.
Professor Juan de la Mora, a letter’s signee, said that a significant number of Yale professors believe that the institution is using funding for “improper” purposes and neglecting the school’s founding principles of emphasizing faculty and students.
He said that the Yale administration is turning into a bureaucracy lacking intellectual focus and noted that faculty do not have access to information on the administration’s growth and purpose.
Compared to academic leadership of the past, today’s professional administrators view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience and come directly from management degree programs or other non-teaching roles in higher education. The Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey (IPEDS) defines administrators as “staff whose job it is to plan, direct, or coordinate policies [and] programs, [tasks that] may include some supervision of other workers.” The IPEDS further states that although “Postsecondary Deans should be classified in this category as well,” the vast majority of administrators do no teaching or research. In many cases, their jobs are unrelated to the most crucial university functions. These career managers serve a bureaucracy that is fundamentally disconnected from the classroom experience.
The first problem with this self-reproducing professional class is its overwhelming cost. Administrative costs account for nearly a quarter of total spending by American universities, according to Department of Education data. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found that, across the entire higher education landscape, spending on administration per student increased by 61% between 1993 and 2007. This growth extends even to public universities, like the UNC System, which “saw a nearly 50 percent, inflation-adjusted increase” in 11 short years. This growth is unsurprising given administrators are exceedingly well compensated compared to faculty. Presidents at both public and private universities often make comparable salaries to business executives of similar size institutions, and receive extensive perks typically associated with corporate executives. Within middle management, armies of deans and provosts typically make salaries comfortably in the six-figures.
by Lance Dinino, The Bowdoin Review | Read more:
Image: YuLin Zhen
[ed. So when this system gets threatened, who'll win? See: Yale faculty call for admin hiring freeze, independent audit amid concerns over bureaucratic expansion (Yale Daily News):]
[ed. So when this system gets threatened, who'll win? See: Yale faculty call for admin hiring freeze, independent audit amid concerns over bureaucratic expansion (Yale Daily News):]
***
Over 100 Yale professors are calling for the University administration to freeze new administrative hires and commission an independent faculty-led audit to ensure that the University prioritizes academics.In a letter written to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel, signatories addressed the “collision of two opposing forces: extraordinary financial strength and runaway bureaucratic expansion.”
The request comes after Yale announced a broad hiring and salary slowdown as it braces for funding cuts from the Trump administration. Letter signees told the News they hope the adoption of their suggestions will place faculty at the center of University governance.
“With the second-largest per-student endowment in the world, Yale can navigate economic uncertainty without compromising its academic essence,” the letter reads.
Professor Juan de la Mora, a letter’s signee, said that a significant number of Yale professors believe that the institution is using funding for “improper” purposes and neglecting the school’s founding principles of emphasizing faculty and students.
He said that the Yale administration is turning into a bureaucracy lacking intellectual focus and noted that faculty do not have access to information on the administration’s growth and purpose.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
NASCAR Faces Future Viewership Crisis
NASCAR broadcasting icon Mike Joy has sent a warning to NASCAR about the future of the sport. Speaking on Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour podcast, Joy admits that the sport has failed in its attempt to attract young fans. This is an issue that threatens the very future of NASCAR, according to the experienced pundit.
After being part of NASCAR broadcasting for almost five decades, Joy has seen it all. He's seen sport blow up as it did in the 1990s, and now is watching its popularity fall once again to a worrying degree.
Talking on the podcast, he said the following about a growing age gap between its drivers and fans.
"We have 18 and 20-year-olds coming into the Cup Series and making a mark," Joy said. "The fan base is getting older. We're not attracting the younger fanbase that we need to move this sport forward into the next decade, [and] into the next couple of decades."
In 2017, the average age of a NASCAR fan in the United States was 58 years old. This was a nine year increase from when the same analysis was done in 2006, and this trend has likely continued.
"You couldn't go into a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR," he admitted. "It was everywhere. When the sponsors stopped activating toward the general public and toward the race fans, the sport just took a giant dump in the relative to everyday life department.
"We lost a lot of that young fanbase that we really need to covet if we're going to grow this sport again."
Joy added that the movie Talladega Nights was a peak of the sport's ebbing and flowing popularity.
"That was when we hit our peak for fan engagement and crowds at the racetrack. I remember going into a Food City in Bristol, Tennessee, and you couldn't push your cart down any aisle without knocking over a cardboard cutout of some driver hawking something. You couldn't go in a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR. It was everywhere." (...)
NASCAR has been trying to reach a new audience for many years, but the sport's executives have offered a more optimistic view with CMO Jill Gregory saying in 2020 that 40% of the sport's viewership were women.
"One of our points of differentiation has always been the passion and loyalty of our fans. Almost 70% of them consciously support NASCAR sponsors," she said. "We also have an increasingly diverse set of fans, with the biggest growth coming from a younger audience.
"About 40% of our fanbase is women, and we’ve got the highest amount of female TV viewers per event of any U.S. sport other than the NFL. Our percentage of multicultural fans is growing, too, and that’s an effort we’ve been very deliberate about."
After being part of NASCAR broadcasting for almost five decades, Joy has seen it all. He's seen sport blow up as it did in the 1990s, and now is watching its popularity fall once again to a worrying degree.
"We have 18 and 20-year-olds coming into the Cup Series and making a mark," Joy said. "The fan base is getting older. We're not attracting the younger fanbase that we need to move this sport forward into the next decade, [and] into the next couple of decades."
In 2017, the average age of a NASCAR fan in the United States was 58 years old. This was a nine year increase from when the same analysis was done in 2006, and this trend has likely continued.
"You couldn't go into a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR," he admitted. "It was everywhere. When the sponsors stopped activating toward the general public and toward the race fans, the sport just took a giant dump in the relative to everyday life department.
"We lost a lot of that young fanbase that we really need to covet if we're going to grow this sport again."
Joy added that the movie Talladega Nights was a peak of the sport's ebbing and flowing popularity.
"That was when we hit our peak for fan engagement and crowds at the racetrack. I remember going into a Food City in Bristol, Tennessee, and you couldn't push your cart down any aisle without knocking over a cardboard cutout of some driver hawking something. You couldn't go in a supermarket without knowing about NASCAR. It was everywhere." (...)
NASCAR has been trying to reach a new audience for many years, but the sport's executives have offered a more optimistic view with CMO Jill Gregory saying in 2020 that 40% of the sport's viewership were women.
"One of our points of differentiation has always been the passion and loyalty of our fans. Almost 70% of them consciously support NASCAR sponsors," she said. "We also have an increasingly diverse set of fans, with the biggest growth coming from a younger audience.
"About 40% of our fanbase is women, and we’ve got the highest amount of female TV viewers per event of any U.S. sport other than the NFL. Our percentage of multicultural fans is growing, too, and that’s an effort we’ve been very deliberate about."
by Alex Harrington, Motorsport.com | Read more:
Image: Sean Gardner/Getty Images
[ed. R.I.P. Everything in 'sports world' is in crisis these days (except the NFL). I'm not surprised NASCAR would be a first major casualty. Admit it, it's just boring (except for the crashes and drunk people). Plus, with streaming platforms splicing and dicing subscriptions, nobody can see anything on one channel anymore. See also: Here’s why sports media can’t talk about sports anymore (awfulannouncing.com).]
[ed. R.I.P. Everything in 'sports world' is in crisis these days (except the NFL). I'm not surprised NASCAR would be a first major casualty. Admit it, it's just boring (except for the crashes and drunk people). Plus, with streaming platforms splicing and dicing subscriptions, nobody can see anything on one channel anymore. See also: Here’s why sports media can’t talk about sports anymore (awfulannouncing.com).]
Politically Connected Startup to Overhaul $700 Billion Government Payments Program
Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, financial technology startup Ramp published a pitch for how to tackle wasteful government spending. In a 4,000-word blog post titled “The Efficiency Formula,” Ramp’s CEO and one of its investors echoed ideas similar to those promoted by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk: Federal programs were overrun by fraud, and commonsense business techniques could provide a quick fix.
Ramp sells corporate credit cards and artificial intelligence software for businesses to analyze spending. And while the firm appears to have no existing federal contracts, the post implied the government should consider hiring it. Just as Ramp helped businesses manage their budgets, the company “could do the same for a variety of government agencies,” according to the blog and company social media posts.
It didn’t take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump’s first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president’s appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. Some of the meetings were organized by the nation’s top procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.
GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.
Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.
To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.
The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.
A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.”
GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Ramp did not respond to requests for comment.
Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.
Rabois sits on Ramp’s board of directors. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added.
Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.”
Thrive Capital, Kushner’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Thiel did not provide a comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I’ll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise.
Ramp’s meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and preparations are afoot for the next generation of the program. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank.
Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp’s January memo.
Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts, as well as former GSA officials, describe that view as ill-informed. SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas.
The cards typically are used to fund travel and purchases up to $10,000.
“SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” said former GSA commissioner Sonny Hashmi, who oversaw the program. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”
Jessica Riedl, a GOP budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said the notion that there was significant fraud in the charge card technology was far-fetched. She had criticized waste in government credit card programs before the latest SmartPay system was implemented in 2018.
“This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.”
by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, Pro Publica | Read more:
It didn’t take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump’s first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president’s appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. Some of the meetings were organized by the nation’s top procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.
GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.
Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.
To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.
The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.
A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.”
GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Ramp did not respond to requests for comment.
Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.
Rabois sits on Ramp’s board of directors. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added.
Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.”
Thrive Capital, Kushner’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Thiel did not provide a comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I’ll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise.
Ramp’s meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and preparations are afoot for the next generation of the program. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank.
Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp’s January memo.
Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts, as well as former GSA officials, describe that view as ill-informed. SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas.
The cards typically are used to fund travel and purchases up to $10,000.
“SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” said former GSA commissioner Sonny Hashmi, who oversaw the program. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”
Jessica Riedl, a GOP budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said the notion that there was significant fraud in the charge card technology was far-fetched. She had criticized waste in government credit card programs before the latest SmartPay system was implemented in 2018.
“This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.”
by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, Pro Publica | Read more:
Image: smartpay.gsa.gov
[ed. Every time someone uses the term 'waste, fraud and abuse' I know they're either lying or clueless. It has to be the most hollow and meaningless phrase to come out of this administration and others since 'thoughts and prayers' and 'fake news'. You don't fire 17 agency inspector generals who's duties were doing exactly that: rooting out waste, fraud and abuse if you're actually serious.]
Never Miss a Call
In our notification-heavy world, there is still one activity where you might just miss that buzz on your phone or ping on your smartwatch – while you’re vacuuming. Thankfully, Samsung has a solution.
Its newest cordless stick vac, the new Bespoke AI Jet Ultra ($1,099), now has an LCD display control panel that, along with standard features such as power level and battery life, can notify you when you have an incoming phone call or text message. The vacuum, which works with an auto-empty charging station, also features 400AW suction and 100-minute battery life.
Even better, if you’re doing the wash and left your phone in the other room, Samsung’s added touchscreens to its washers and dryers, including the new Bespoke AI Laundry Vented Combo washer/dryer ($3,099). This lets you answer a call directly on the built-in 7-inch LCD screen. The Combo can also (perhaps more usefully) put detergent in for you automatically and then, when the cycle is done, open its door.
by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Samsung
Its newest cordless stick vac, the new Bespoke AI Jet Ultra ($1,099), now has an LCD display control panel that, along with standard features such as power level and battery life, can notify you when you have an incoming phone call or text message. The vacuum, which works with an auto-empty charging station, also features 400AW suction and 100-minute battery life.Even better, if you’re doing the wash and left your phone in the other room, Samsung’s added touchscreens to its washers and dryers, including the new Bespoke AI Laundry Vented Combo washer/dryer ($3,099). This lets you answer a call directly on the built-in 7-inch LCD screen. The Combo can also (perhaps more usefully) put detergent in for you automatically and then, when the cycle is done, open its door.
by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Samsung
[ed. We're all gonna die.]
Texas vs. Virginia: Cover Your Breast
School officials in one part of the Lone Star State are no fans of the lone nipple on the Virginia state flag, so they have nixed an online lesson that included a picture of the banner.
Virginia’s flag and state seal feature Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, whose name suggests a buttoned-down gal but whose toga tells another story — draped so low on her left that one breast is fully out there for God Almighty and everybody else to see.
Some people call that art. The Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, in fast-growing territory west of Houston, calls it “frontal nudity” — something banned from its elementary school materials. (...)
Lamar’s school board voted 5-1 in November to update its library materials policy, which included adding this provision: “No material in elementary school libraries shall include visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity.” The Virginia lesson disappeared within days... (...)
“We have unlocked a new level of dystopian, book-banning, and censorship hell in Texas,” the Texas Freedom to Read Project declared on its website. (...)
Virtus has graced the state seal since it was created in 1776 and the state flag since 1861, with a few makeovers over the years changing the figure’s appearance. She started out fully clothed but her left breast has been exposed for more than a century.
A case of early 20th-century gender confusion led to the breast baring in the first place. In 1901, Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston complained that Virtus “looked more like a man than a woman and wanted to correct it. He instructed designers to add the breast to clarify her sex,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in a 2023 deep dive into how Virginia wound up with the only state flag boasting an exposed nipple.
Bare breast aside, Virtus is a fighter, not a lover. She holds a spear and sword, one foot planted atop a defeated tyrant sprawled on the ground. Instead of a come-hither look she telegraphs the state motto: “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which means “Thus Always to Tyrants.”
by Laura Vozzella, Washington Post | Read more:Image: Minh Connors/Washington Post
Virginia’s flag and state seal feature Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, whose name suggests a buttoned-down gal but whose toga tells another story — draped so low on her left that one breast is fully out there for God Almighty and everybody else to see.
Lamar’s school board voted 5-1 in November to update its library materials policy, which included adding this provision: “No material in elementary school libraries shall include visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity.” The Virginia lesson disappeared within days... (...)
“We have unlocked a new level of dystopian, book-banning, and censorship hell in Texas,” the Texas Freedom to Read Project declared on its website. (...)
Virtus has graced the state seal since it was created in 1776 and the state flag since 1861, with a few makeovers over the years changing the figure’s appearance. She started out fully clothed but her left breast has been exposed for more than a century.
A case of early 20th-century gender confusion led to the breast baring in the first place. In 1901, Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston complained that Virtus “looked more like a man than a woman and wanted to correct it. He instructed designers to add the breast to clarify her sex,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in a 2023 deep dive into how Virginia wound up with the only state flag boasting an exposed nipple.
Bare breast aside, Virtus is a fighter, not a lover. She holds a spear and sword, one foot planted atop a defeated tyrant sprawled on the ground. Instead of a come-hither look she telegraphs the state motto: “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which means “Thus Always to Tyrants.”
by Laura Vozzella, Washington Post | Read more:
[ed. C'mon. Who's against seeing a nipple now and then. Texans? Really?]
The New Space Race with China
On January 23rd, three hundred miles southwest of Beijing, a rocket the size of a fifteen-story building ascended on a thundering pillar of flame from the Taiyuan spaceport. It was carrying a five-ton payload: a batch of eighteen satellites for the Qianfan (“Thousand Sails”) satellite internet project. There have been four Thousand Sails launches so far, with 72 now in orbit. Many more will be launched this year.
Thousand Sails will be a “megaconstellation,” a new category of orbital satellite constellations that number in the thousands. SpaceX’s Starlink is the first and biggest such megaconstellation, with seven thousand satellites in orbit, a feat China aims to match. Thousand Sails is scheduled to have over one thousand satellites by 2027 and 14,000 in the 2030s. These are credible plans, both because there are no new technical challenges to overcome and because Chinese space organizations have had a good track record in recent decades of achieving their announced timelines.
Other Chinese constellations are also underway, such as the more secretive and defense-oriented Guowang (“National Net”) project run by the state-owned enterprise China SatNet, which current plans also place at 13,000 satellites by 2035. The first ten National Net satellites were launched on December 16, 2024, this time on a rocket with three times the payload capacity. Details are unclear from public information, but the rocket lift capacity suggests these new satellites may be the size of Starlink V3 satellites (close to 2,000 kilograms). SpaceX has not yet deployed Starlink V3, which will provide substantially higher network capacity; the company is waiting on the higher payload offered by Starship, their new launch vehicle.
China now has over 800 satellites in orbit, recently having overtaken the United Kingdom for second-most behind the United States. While the United States might seem far ahead at almost 9000, as recently as 2017 the U.S. had less than 800 satellites in orbit. Once new launch vehicles are developed, the number of Chinese satellites might quickly increase to match or exceed those launched by the United States. There is a revolution underway in space technology, with the United States leading and only China catching up. These are by no means the only Chinese space accomplishments in recent years.
The day after the first National Net deployment, Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong broke the record for the longest spacewalk in human history. The Chinese astronauts spent over nine hours working on maintenance and upgrades to the Chinese Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) space station, circling the Earth six times before their work was done. New, more lightweight and flexible Chinese spacesuits helped make this long spacewalk less tiring and dangerous. These achievements are not exceptional but expected for the modern Chinese space industry. Gone are the days of infrequent launches and deep caution.
In 2024, China launched 68 orbital rockets—a new record, and lagging behind only the United States. There were two failures in the growing commercial launch sector, but other commercial launches were successful. Recent Chinese successes in space have ranged from the Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) mission, driving a rover around the Martian surface for almost a year from 2021 to 2022, to commercial satellite launches for friendly nations, to a series of lunar exploration missions, starting with the Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter in 2007 and including the Chang’e-6 mission in 2024, which was the first mission by any nation to return samples from the dark side of the Moon. The United States undeniably finds itself in a new space race that its politicians and the American public barely know anything about. Unless that changes, it might well be a space race the Western superpower ends up losing.
The Chinese Plan to Outdo the Apollo Program
In the wake of the second successful Chinese lunar sample-return mission, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping met with space program leaders in September 2024 and redoubled his emphasis on space achievements in the pursuit of national greatness, encouraging accelerated development. Xi has made his goals clear: to “explore the vast universe” and “become a great power in space.” The requirements for great power status, however, are relative. Cai and Song’s record-setting spacewalk was only barely longer than the old record after all—just enough for a news headline.
China’s space program, carried out by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), has become a focal point in building up national prestige and an aspirational mindset. Tellingly, contemporary CNSA program names such as the Chang’e series of lunar missions—named after the Chinese Moon goddess—draw from Chinese mythology rather than the history of revolutionary communism as with the Long March rockets—programs that began in an era when the Soviet Union, not just the United States, was far ahead in space technology.
Chinese lunar exploration has clearly become focused on sending a crewed mission to the Moon and landing astronauts on its surface, matching the United States’ accomplishment and prestige as currently the only country whose astronauts have walked on the Moon. The Chinese intend to go this decade too: current plans schedule a manned landing for 2030. After that, they intend to build a Moon base.
Various state-owned enterprises within the Chinese space industry are working on improving all the technologies they have developed over the last decade to help achieve this goal. These projects include more advanced spacesuits, a lunar lander, and, most importantly, a new super heavy-lift rocket. By U.S. conventions, a super heavy-lift rocket is one that delivers fifty metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). The Long March 10 rocket has a stated capacity clocking in at seventy metric tons to LEO and 27 to trans-lunar injection—the more energetically expensive trajectory required to reach the Moon. The first test flight is planned for 2026.
The third and final module of the Tiangong space station was installed in 2022. Launched on a Long March 5B rocket, the Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) module weighed 23,000 kg at launch and had to be accelerated to over seven kilometers per second to achieve a stable orbit four hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Delivering to the existing modules with a crew on board required careful orbit alignment and a large robot arm to help manipulate the module into place. This was the realization of a plan conceived in the early 1990s. Chinese astronauts have inhabited the Tiangong station ever since, performing countless spacewalks, experiments, and live streams for the Chinese public.
The construction of the first permanent space station is not just an achievement in and of itself but a crucial stepping stone for manned missions deeper in space. Tiangong and the International Space Station (ISS) are the only space stations humans today operate in the Earth’s orbit. While the ISS is set to be decommissioned in the coming years, the Chinese space agency is preparing a new space telescope module to be launched in 2026 and periodically dock to their space station. The Chinese station has seen notable research take place, including experiments such as microgravity rice cultivation for feeding crews on long space voyages and tests of artificial photosynthesis to produce ingredients for rocket fuel. (...)
The Windfall of a Second Space Race
Chinese satellite internet may or may not be better than that of U.S. companies, but they are very likely to complete megaconstellations made up of thousands of satellites providing service across vast parts of the globe, if only for their own national security needs. CNSA may well beat NASA’s Artemis to the Moon, and they will almost certainly achieve manned lunar landing at lower cost. If SpaceX does send humans to Mars, barring unlikely changes in the nature and interests of the governing regime, China will quite likely have the capability to reach Mars not too much later.
China is expanding the vision of its space program. For example, future stages of the Tianwen interplanetary exploration missions include sample returns from the atmosphere of Venus in the 2030s. NASA has plans for this too, perhaps sooner but perhaps not. Venus is closer than Mars, has more Earth-like gravity, and the upper layers of its atmosphere may be able to support habitable colonies—floating cities in the sky above the lightning storms and acid rains. However, our understanding of the exact composition and properties of its atmosphere remains incomplete. If NASA is too mismanaged to keep to project timelines, China may well fill the gap.
by Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg, Palladium | Read more:
Image: Global Times/Long March-5B rocket launching in 2022
[ed. See also: The Moon Should be a Computer; and, A Trillion Tons in Orbit (Palladium):]
"Gerard O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton University who had previously applied for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, was dismayed at the growing apathy about space and the future that he was seeing in his students. To inspire them, he began a weekly freshman seminar in 1969 for a group of eight to ten students focused on large-scale engineering problems that could benefit a broad spectrum of humanity. The theme of his first seminar was “Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”
Over the course of the seminar, O’Neill and his students considered if, instead of colonizing Mars, we should build a megastructure that could serve as a space colony. Looking at the possible constraints of such a project from first principles, they began to realize they were solvable. This included an analysis of the economics, safety, simplicity, and ruggedness of every element of the megastructure’s conceptual design. (...)
The design concept the group settled on became known as “O’Neill cylinders.” These were to be vast space stations dwarfing the small scientific outposts of the 1970s such as Skylab or the contemporary International Space Station, and featured a pair of 20-mile long cylinders with three land areas alternating with three vast windows, plus three mirrors that open and shut to create a day-night cycle. The cylinders rotate in opposite directions, enabling them to remain aimed toward the sun and generating a centrifugal force that simulates the effect of gravity. (...)
Mars colonization is widely viewed as the logical end point for the first phase of space exploration. But we should again be asking if this is the right goal, and whether Gerard O’Neill’s vision represents a better path to colonizing space and a better driver of technological development."
Thousand Sails will be a “megaconstellation,” a new category of orbital satellite constellations that number in the thousands. SpaceX’s Starlink is the first and biggest such megaconstellation, with seven thousand satellites in orbit, a feat China aims to match. Thousand Sails is scheduled to have over one thousand satellites by 2027 and 14,000 in the 2030s. These are credible plans, both because there are no new technical challenges to overcome and because Chinese space organizations have had a good track record in recent decades of achieving their announced timelines.
China now has over 800 satellites in orbit, recently having overtaken the United Kingdom for second-most behind the United States. While the United States might seem far ahead at almost 9000, as recently as 2017 the U.S. had less than 800 satellites in orbit. Once new launch vehicles are developed, the number of Chinese satellites might quickly increase to match or exceed those launched by the United States. There is a revolution underway in space technology, with the United States leading and only China catching up. These are by no means the only Chinese space accomplishments in recent years.
The day after the first National Net deployment, Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong broke the record for the longest spacewalk in human history. The Chinese astronauts spent over nine hours working on maintenance and upgrades to the Chinese Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) space station, circling the Earth six times before their work was done. New, more lightweight and flexible Chinese spacesuits helped make this long spacewalk less tiring and dangerous. These achievements are not exceptional but expected for the modern Chinese space industry. Gone are the days of infrequent launches and deep caution.
In 2024, China launched 68 orbital rockets—a new record, and lagging behind only the United States. There were two failures in the growing commercial launch sector, but other commercial launches were successful. Recent Chinese successes in space have ranged from the Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) mission, driving a rover around the Martian surface for almost a year from 2021 to 2022, to commercial satellite launches for friendly nations, to a series of lunar exploration missions, starting with the Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter in 2007 and including the Chang’e-6 mission in 2024, which was the first mission by any nation to return samples from the dark side of the Moon. The United States undeniably finds itself in a new space race that its politicians and the American public barely know anything about. Unless that changes, it might well be a space race the Western superpower ends up losing.
The Chinese Plan to Outdo the Apollo Program
In the wake of the second successful Chinese lunar sample-return mission, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping met with space program leaders in September 2024 and redoubled his emphasis on space achievements in the pursuit of national greatness, encouraging accelerated development. Xi has made his goals clear: to “explore the vast universe” and “become a great power in space.” The requirements for great power status, however, are relative. Cai and Song’s record-setting spacewalk was only barely longer than the old record after all—just enough for a news headline.
China’s space program, carried out by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), has become a focal point in building up national prestige and an aspirational mindset. Tellingly, contemporary CNSA program names such as the Chang’e series of lunar missions—named after the Chinese Moon goddess—draw from Chinese mythology rather than the history of revolutionary communism as with the Long March rockets—programs that began in an era when the Soviet Union, not just the United States, was far ahead in space technology.
Chinese lunar exploration has clearly become focused on sending a crewed mission to the Moon and landing astronauts on its surface, matching the United States’ accomplishment and prestige as currently the only country whose astronauts have walked on the Moon. The Chinese intend to go this decade too: current plans schedule a manned landing for 2030. After that, they intend to build a Moon base.
Various state-owned enterprises within the Chinese space industry are working on improving all the technologies they have developed over the last decade to help achieve this goal. These projects include more advanced spacesuits, a lunar lander, and, most importantly, a new super heavy-lift rocket. By U.S. conventions, a super heavy-lift rocket is one that delivers fifty metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). The Long March 10 rocket has a stated capacity clocking in at seventy metric tons to LEO and 27 to trans-lunar injection—the more energetically expensive trajectory required to reach the Moon. The first test flight is planned for 2026.
The third and final module of the Tiangong space station was installed in 2022. Launched on a Long March 5B rocket, the Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”) module weighed 23,000 kg at launch and had to be accelerated to over seven kilometers per second to achieve a stable orbit four hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Delivering to the existing modules with a crew on board required careful orbit alignment and a large robot arm to help manipulate the module into place. This was the realization of a plan conceived in the early 1990s. Chinese astronauts have inhabited the Tiangong station ever since, performing countless spacewalks, experiments, and live streams for the Chinese public.
The construction of the first permanent space station is not just an achievement in and of itself but a crucial stepping stone for manned missions deeper in space. Tiangong and the International Space Station (ISS) are the only space stations humans today operate in the Earth’s orbit. While the ISS is set to be decommissioned in the coming years, the Chinese space agency is preparing a new space telescope module to be launched in 2026 and periodically dock to their space station. The Chinese station has seen notable research take place, including experiments such as microgravity rice cultivation for feeding crews on long space voyages and tests of artificial photosynthesis to produce ingredients for rocket fuel. (...)
The Windfall of a Second Space Race
Chinese satellite internet may or may not be better than that of U.S. companies, but they are very likely to complete megaconstellations made up of thousands of satellites providing service across vast parts of the globe, if only for their own national security needs. CNSA may well beat NASA’s Artemis to the Moon, and they will almost certainly achieve manned lunar landing at lower cost. If SpaceX does send humans to Mars, barring unlikely changes in the nature and interests of the governing regime, China will quite likely have the capability to reach Mars not too much later.
China is expanding the vision of its space program. For example, future stages of the Tianwen interplanetary exploration missions include sample returns from the atmosphere of Venus in the 2030s. NASA has plans for this too, perhaps sooner but perhaps not. Venus is closer than Mars, has more Earth-like gravity, and the upper layers of its atmosphere may be able to support habitable colonies—floating cities in the sky above the lightning storms and acid rains. However, our understanding of the exact composition and properties of its atmosphere remains incomplete. If NASA is too mismanaged to keep to project timelines, China may well fill the gap.
by Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg, Palladium | Read more:
Image: Global Times/Long March-5B rocket launching in 2022
[ed. See also: The Moon Should be a Computer; and, A Trillion Tons in Orbit (Palladium):]
"Gerard O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton University who had previously applied for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, was dismayed at the growing apathy about space and the future that he was seeing in his students. To inspire them, he began a weekly freshman seminar in 1969 for a group of eight to ten students focused on large-scale engineering problems that could benefit a broad spectrum of humanity. The theme of his first seminar was “Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”
Over the course of the seminar, O’Neill and his students considered if, instead of colonizing Mars, we should build a megastructure that could serve as a space colony. Looking at the possible constraints of such a project from first principles, they began to realize they were solvable. This included an analysis of the economics, safety, simplicity, and ruggedness of every element of the megastructure’s conceptual design. (...)
The design concept the group settled on became known as “O’Neill cylinders.” These were to be vast space stations dwarfing the small scientific outposts of the 1970s such as Skylab or the contemporary International Space Station, and featured a pair of 20-mile long cylinders with three land areas alternating with three vast windows, plus three mirrors that open and shut to create a day-night cycle. The cylinders rotate in opposite directions, enabling them to remain aimed toward the sun and generating a centrifugal force that simulates the effect of gravity. (...)
Mars colonization is widely viewed as the logical end point for the first phase of space exploration. But we should again be asking if this is the right goal, and whether Gerard O’Neill’s vision represents a better path to colonizing space and a better driver of technological development."
Friday, April 25, 2025
How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future
Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.
The future National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee didn't know it, but he had just invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic, a material Corning would later dub Pyroceram. Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram eventually found its way into everything from missile nose cones to chemistry labs. It could also be used in microwave ovens, and in 1959 Pyroceram debuted as a line of space-age serving dishes: Corningware.
The material was a boon to Corning's fortunes, and soon the company launched Project Muscle, a massive R&D effort to explore other ways of strengthening glass. A breakthrough came when company scientists tweaked a recently developed method of reinforcing glass that involved dousing it in a bath of hot potassium salt. They discovered that adding aluminum oxide to a given glass composition before the dip would result in remarkable strength and durability. Scientists were soon hurling fortified tumblers off their nine-story facility and bombarding the glass, known internally as 0317, with frozen chickens. It could be bent and twisted to an extraordinary degree before fracturing, and it could withstand 100,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. (Normal glass can weather about 7,000.) In 1962 Corning began marketing the glass as Chemcor and thought it could work for products like phone booths, prison windows, and eyeglasses.
Yet while there was plenty of initial interest, sales were slow. Some companies did place small orders for products like safety eyeglasses. But these were recalled for fear of the potentially explosive way the glass could break. Chemcor seemed like it would make a good car windshield too, and while it did show up in a handful of Javelins, made by American Motors, most manufacturers weren't convinced that paying more for the new muscle glass was worth it—especially when the laminated stuff they'd been using since the '30s seemed to work fine.
Corning had invented an expensive upgrade nobody wanted. It didn't help that crash tests found that "head deceleration was significantly higher" on the windshields—the Chemcor might remain intact, but human skulls would not.
After pitches to Ford Motors and other automakers failed, Project Muscle was shut down and Chemcor was shelved in 1971. It was a solution that would have to wait for the right problem to arise. (...)
The office of Wendell Weeks, Corning's CEO, is on the second floor, looking out onto the Chemung River. It was here that Steve Jobs gave the 53-year-old Weeks a seemingly impossible task: Make millions of square feet of ultrathin, ultrastrong glass that didn't yet exist. Oh, and do it in six months. The story of their collaboration—including Jobs' attempt to lecture Weeks on the principles of glass and his insistence that such a feat could be accomplished—is well known. How Corning actually pulled it off is not.
Weeks joined Corning in 1983; before assuming the top post in 2005, he oversaw both the company's television and specialty glass businesses. Talk to him about glass and he describes it as something exotic and beautiful—a material whose potential is just starting to be unlocked by scientists. He'll gush about its inherent touchability and authenticity, only to segue into a lecture about radio-frequency transparency. "There's a sort of fundamental truth in the design value of glass," Weeks says, holding up a clear pebble of the stuff. "It's like a found object; it's cool to the touch; it's smooth but has surface to it. What you'd really want is for this to come alive. That'd be a perfect product."
Weeks and Jobs shared an appreciation for design. Both men obsessed over details. And both gravitated toward big challenges and ideas. But while Jobs was dictatorial in his management style, Weeks (like many of his predecessors at Corning) tends to encourage a degree of insubordination. "The separation between myself and any of the bench scientists is nonexistent," he says. "We can work in these small teams in a very relaxed way that's still hyperintense."
Indeed, even though it's a big company—29,000 employees and revenue of $7.9 billion in 2011—Corning still thinks and acts like a small one, something made easier by its relatively remote location, an annual attrition rate that hovers around 1 percent, and a vast institutional memory. (Stookey, now 97, and other legends still roam the halls and labs of Sullivan Park, Corning's R&D facility.) "We're all lifers here," Weeks says, smiling. "We've known each other for a long time and succeeded and failed together a number of times."
One of the first conversations between Weeks and Jobs actually had nothing to do with glass. Corning scientists were toying around with microprojection technologies—specifically, better ways of using synthetic green lasers. The thought was that people wouldn't want to stare at tiny cell phone screens to watch movies and TV shows, and projection seemed like a natural solution. But when Weeks spoke to Jobs about it, Apple's chief called the idea dumb. He did mention he was working on something better, though—a device whose entire surface was a display. It was called the iPhone.
Jobs may have dismissed green lasers, but they represented the kind of innovation for innovation's sake that defines Corning. So strong is this reverence for experimentation that the company regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D. And that's in good times and in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning's stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity.
"They're one of the very few technology-based firms that have been able to reinvent themselves on a regular basis," says Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied Corning's history of innovation. "That's so easy to say, and it is so hard to do." Part of that success lies in the company's ability not only to develop new technologies but to figure out how to make them on a massive scale. Still, even when Corning succeeds at both, it can often take the manufacturer decades to find a suitable—and profitable enough—market for its innovations. As Henderson notes, innovation at Corning is largely about being willing and able to take failed ideas and apply them elsewhere.
The idea to dust off the Chemcor samples actually cropped up in 2005, before Apple had even entered the picture. Motorola had recently released the Razr V3, a flip phone that featured a glass screen in lieu of the typical high-impact plastic. Corning formed a small group to examine whether an 0317-like glass could be revived and applied to devices like cell phones and watches. The old Chemcor samples were as thick as 4 millimeters. But maybe they could be made thinner. After some market research, executives believed the company could even earn a little money off this specialty product. The project was codenamed Gorilla Glass. (...)
[ed. Speaking of glass, there's something new in the fashion world now called "aliengelic glass skin". Scary.]
The future National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee didn't know it, but he had just invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic, a material Corning would later dub Pyroceram. Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram eventually found its way into everything from missile nose cones to chemistry labs. It could also be used in microwave ovens, and in 1959 Pyroceram debuted as a line of space-age serving dishes: Corningware.
Yet while there was plenty of initial interest, sales were slow. Some companies did place small orders for products like safety eyeglasses. But these were recalled for fear of the potentially explosive way the glass could break. Chemcor seemed like it would make a good car windshield too, and while it did show up in a handful of Javelins, made by American Motors, most manufacturers weren't convinced that paying more for the new muscle glass was worth it—especially when the laminated stuff they'd been using since the '30s seemed to work fine.
Corning had invented an expensive upgrade nobody wanted. It didn't help that crash tests found that "head deceleration was significantly higher" on the windshields—the Chemcor might remain intact, but human skulls would not.
After pitches to Ford Motors and other automakers failed, Project Muscle was shut down and Chemcor was shelved in 1971. It was a solution that would have to wait for the right problem to arise. (...)
The office of Wendell Weeks, Corning's CEO, is on the second floor, looking out onto the Chemung River. It was here that Steve Jobs gave the 53-year-old Weeks a seemingly impossible task: Make millions of square feet of ultrathin, ultrastrong glass that didn't yet exist. Oh, and do it in six months. The story of their collaboration—including Jobs' attempt to lecture Weeks on the principles of glass and his insistence that such a feat could be accomplished—is well known. How Corning actually pulled it off is not.
Weeks joined Corning in 1983; before assuming the top post in 2005, he oversaw both the company's television and specialty glass businesses. Talk to him about glass and he describes it as something exotic and beautiful—a material whose potential is just starting to be unlocked by scientists. He'll gush about its inherent touchability and authenticity, only to segue into a lecture about radio-frequency transparency. "There's a sort of fundamental truth in the design value of glass," Weeks says, holding up a clear pebble of the stuff. "It's like a found object; it's cool to the touch; it's smooth but has surface to it. What you'd really want is for this to come alive. That'd be a perfect product."
Weeks and Jobs shared an appreciation for design. Both men obsessed over details. And both gravitated toward big challenges and ideas. But while Jobs was dictatorial in his management style, Weeks (like many of his predecessors at Corning) tends to encourage a degree of insubordination. "The separation between myself and any of the bench scientists is nonexistent," he says. "We can work in these small teams in a very relaxed way that's still hyperintense."
Indeed, even though it's a big company—29,000 employees and revenue of $7.9 billion in 2011—Corning still thinks and acts like a small one, something made easier by its relatively remote location, an annual attrition rate that hovers around 1 percent, and a vast institutional memory. (Stookey, now 97, and other legends still roam the halls and labs of Sullivan Park, Corning's R&D facility.) "We're all lifers here," Weeks says, smiling. "We've known each other for a long time and succeeded and failed together a number of times."
One of the first conversations between Weeks and Jobs actually had nothing to do with glass. Corning scientists were toying around with microprojection technologies—specifically, better ways of using synthetic green lasers. The thought was that people wouldn't want to stare at tiny cell phone screens to watch movies and TV shows, and projection seemed like a natural solution. But when Weeks spoke to Jobs about it, Apple's chief called the idea dumb. He did mention he was working on something better, though—a device whose entire surface was a display. It was called the iPhone.
Jobs may have dismissed green lasers, but they represented the kind of innovation for innovation's sake that defines Corning. So strong is this reverence for experimentation that the company regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D. And that's in good times and in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning's stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity.
"They're one of the very few technology-based firms that have been able to reinvent themselves on a regular basis," says Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied Corning's history of innovation. "That's so easy to say, and it is so hard to do." Part of that success lies in the company's ability not only to develop new technologies but to figure out how to make them on a massive scale. Still, even when Corning succeeds at both, it can often take the manufacturer decades to find a suitable—and profitable enough—market for its innovations. As Henderson notes, innovation at Corning is largely about being willing and able to take failed ideas and apply them elsewhere.
The idea to dust off the Chemcor samples actually cropped up in 2005, before Apple had even entered the picture. Motorola had recently released the Razr V3, a flip phone that featured a glass screen in lieu of the typical high-impact plastic. Corning formed a small group to examine whether an 0317-like glass could be revived and applied to devices like cell phones and watches. The old Chemcor samples were as thick as 4 millimeters. But maybe they could be made thinner. After some market research, executives believed the company could even earn a little money off this specialty product. The project was codenamed Gorilla Glass. (...)
In just five years, Gorilla Glass has gone from a material to an aesthetic—a seamless partition that separates our physical selves from the digital incarnations we carry in our pockets. We touch the outer layer and our body closes the circuit between an electrode beneath the screen and its neighbor, transforming motion into data. It's now featured on more than 750 products and 33 brands worldwide, including notebooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. If you regularly touch, swipe, or caress a gadget, chances are you've interacted with Gorilla.
I Don’t Want You to ‘Believe’ Me. I Want You to Listen.
I fear that the more I tell you, the less you will understand who I am.
I am not a private person — quite the opposite — but I do have two secrets. The first concerns some Bad Events that happened to me long ago (yes, it’s the sort of thing you are thinking of), and the second is an unrelated Fact about my neurological makeup.
Let me be clear: I am not ashamed of either of these things. Keeping them secret creates, in me, an uncomfortable feeling, as though I were hiding something, as though I were ashamed, and that bugs me all the time, like a scratchy tag in my clothing. But I can’t tell you what The Fact is, because you won’t believe me; and I can't tell you about The Events, because you will I have barely told you anything about The Events, but I suspect that you have already started believing. You want to be someone who believes women; you see this as the belief-challenge you have been waiting for; you want to rise to it. When I first told a therapist about The Events, she said: “Of course. In retrospect it makes perfect sense of so many things …”
Later she apologized for this as therapeutic overreach. Even therapists can’t help themselves — they are off to the races, believing and believing. On this topic, so much gets packaged into “being believed” that I fear the more I tell you, the less you will understand me.
I don't want you to think you know the meaning of The Events; I don’t want to be classified as damaged; I don’t want you to feel good about yourself for believing me; I don’t want you to feel sorry for me; and most of all, I don’t want you to praise my courage for “coming forward” or for “surviving.” The prospect of receiving praise or honor for this revelation fills me with rage — when I imagine your admiration, I immediately imagine throwing it back in your face.
The Fact I’d like to tell you has to do with a difference between how we — you and I — think. But to get specific about this difference, I have to use a word you associate with people who don’t talk, who can’t take care of themselves, whose inner lives seem utterly obscure to you, people who harm themselves, people you struggle to see as human, people whose existence you see as a tragedy.
And you will find this comparison preposterous. You will tell me I shouldn’t use “that word,” you will helpfully offer me milder alternatives. You might acknowledge that I’m “quirky” or “idiosyncratic” — in a good way! — and that a few of those quirks may superficially resemble those people. But I have a professional career, a family. I can’t be like them. (Ask yourself: how much knowledge would you need, really, to be certain of this?)
You might be willing to budge a little if you could hear it from some medical professionals — though one might not be enough. You’d need a second and third opinion. Notice that if I told you I had cancer or diabetes or depression, or for that matter that I was left-handed, you would not insist on seeing my papers. You would not be inclined to think I was faking my left-handedness by having trained myself to use my left hand; or that I resembled depressed people only “in some respects.”
In the case of The Events, you are eager to assign victim status to me; in the case of The Fact, you are wary of assigning it to me. For you, there is only one question: how much suffering can she legitimately lay claim to?
You are so busy trying to answer this question — trying to serve as judge in the pain/suffering/disadvantage Olympics — that you cannot hear anything I am trying to tell you. And that means I can’t talk to you. No one can sincerely assert words whose meaning she knows will be garbled by the lexicon of her interlocutor. I don’t want privacy, but you’ve forced it onto me.
You might wonder why I have to tell you these things. Couldn’t I find a supportive community of people who endured similar Events, and wouldn’t I be believed by other Fact-Bearers? Yes, and individual connections of this kind are very valuable, but at the group level this kind of support has never worked for me.
Being surrounded by people who are supposedly like me inevitably leads me to feel maximally “different.” Probably my failure to benefit from such communities is a sign that I have not suffered so much, and deserve very little victim credit. So be it!
Solidarity is not my thing, openness is. It is a consequence of The Fact, for me, that I lean toward transparency in all contexts: I have to consciously prevent myself from oversharing (even more than I do), and I am honest from necessity rather than virtue.
There is a reason for all of this, which is that I am bad — really bad, you cannot imagine how bad — at figuring things out on my own. If I take too many steps in reasoning without the intervention of another person, I go very far wrong. So I have accustomed myself to reasoning in public as much as I can, to making sure to expose my mistakes to correction.
I know that I don’t know what corner assistance might come from. I don’t want to confide in a select group of people who grumble among themselves about how you misunderstand “us.” I want to talk to you, any and all of you, freely, so you can help me stop misunderstanding myself.
The truth is that I don’t know the meaning of The Events, for my life. Isn’t it at least possible that they simply don’t have any meaning? Or maybe the meaning will change once I am allowed to speak them out loud? Perhaps I really am scarred for life, but do we have to assume that from the outset?
If I could talk it through, I might have a hope of figuring this out. Because that is mostly how I figure out all the difficult problems of my life: I talk about them to whoever is available, whenever the problems seem relevant to something else I am thinking about; I listen; I rethink; I write; I circle back and write something else; over and over again; and over time I develop a stable picture.
With The Events, I am at sea. For so long I did not even allow myself to speak them to myself. Now that I can, it chafes at me that you have decided that if I want to talk about them with you, I have to follow your rules, and let you trample all over me. Perhaps more people who have experienced Events would talk about them with you if they thought you would do less “believing” and more listening.
I am not a private person — quite the opposite — but I do have two secrets. The first concerns some Bad Events that happened to me long ago (yes, it’s the sort of thing you are thinking of), and the second is an unrelated Fact about my neurological makeup.
Let me be clear: I am not ashamed of either of these things. Keeping them secret creates, in me, an uncomfortable feeling, as though I were hiding something, as though I were ashamed, and that bugs me all the time, like a scratchy tag in my clothing. But I can’t tell you what The Fact is, because you won’t believe me; and I can't tell you about The Events, because you will I have barely told you anything about The Events, but I suspect that you have already started believing. You want to be someone who believes women; you see this as the belief-challenge you have been waiting for; you want to rise to it. When I first told a therapist about The Events, she said: “Of course. In retrospect it makes perfect sense of so many things …”
I don't want you to think you know the meaning of The Events; I don’t want to be classified as damaged; I don’t want you to feel good about yourself for believing me; I don’t want you to feel sorry for me; and most of all, I don’t want you to praise my courage for “coming forward” or for “surviving.” The prospect of receiving praise or honor for this revelation fills me with rage — when I imagine your admiration, I immediately imagine throwing it back in your face.
The Fact I’d like to tell you has to do with a difference between how we — you and I — think. But to get specific about this difference, I have to use a word you associate with people who don’t talk, who can’t take care of themselves, whose inner lives seem utterly obscure to you, people who harm themselves, people you struggle to see as human, people whose existence you see as a tragedy.
And you will find this comparison preposterous. You will tell me I shouldn’t use “that word,” you will helpfully offer me milder alternatives. You might acknowledge that I’m “quirky” or “idiosyncratic” — in a good way! — and that a few of those quirks may superficially resemble those people. But I have a professional career, a family. I can’t be like them. (Ask yourself: how much knowledge would you need, really, to be certain of this?)
You might be willing to budge a little if you could hear it from some medical professionals — though one might not be enough. You’d need a second and third opinion. Notice that if I told you I had cancer or diabetes or depression, or for that matter that I was left-handed, you would not insist on seeing my papers. You would not be inclined to think I was faking my left-handedness by having trained myself to use my left hand; or that I resembled depressed people only “in some respects.”
In the case of The Events, you are eager to assign victim status to me; in the case of The Fact, you are wary of assigning it to me. For you, there is only one question: how much suffering can she legitimately lay claim to?
You are so busy trying to answer this question — trying to serve as judge in the pain/suffering/disadvantage Olympics — that you cannot hear anything I am trying to tell you. And that means I can’t talk to you. No one can sincerely assert words whose meaning she knows will be garbled by the lexicon of her interlocutor. I don’t want privacy, but you’ve forced it onto me.
You might wonder why I have to tell you these things. Couldn’t I find a supportive community of people who endured similar Events, and wouldn’t I be believed by other Fact-Bearers? Yes, and individual connections of this kind are very valuable, but at the group level this kind of support has never worked for me.
Being surrounded by people who are supposedly like me inevitably leads me to feel maximally “different.” Probably my failure to benefit from such communities is a sign that I have not suffered so much, and deserve very little victim credit. So be it!
Solidarity is not my thing, openness is. It is a consequence of The Fact, for me, that I lean toward transparency in all contexts: I have to consciously prevent myself from oversharing (even more than I do), and I am honest from necessity rather than virtue.
There is a reason for all of this, which is that I am bad — really bad, you cannot imagine how bad — at figuring things out on my own. If I take too many steps in reasoning without the intervention of another person, I go very far wrong. So I have accustomed myself to reasoning in public as much as I can, to making sure to expose my mistakes to correction.
I know that I don’t know what corner assistance might come from. I don’t want to confide in a select group of people who grumble among themselves about how you misunderstand “us.” I want to talk to you, any and all of you, freely, so you can help me stop misunderstanding myself.
The truth is that I don’t know the meaning of The Events, for my life. Isn’t it at least possible that they simply don’t have any meaning? Or maybe the meaning will change once I am allowed to speak them out loud? Perhaps I really am scarred for life, but do we have to assume that from the outset?
If I could talk it through, I might have a hope of figuring this out. Because that is mostly how I figure out all the difficult problems of my life: I talk about them to whoever is available, whenever the problems seem relevant to something else I am thinking about; I listen; I rethink; I write; I circle back and write something else; over and over again; and over time I develop a stable picture.
With The Events, I am at sea. For so long I did not even allow myself to speak them to myself. Now that I can, it chafes at me that you have decided that if I want to talk about them with you, I have to follow your rules, and let you trample all over me. Perhaps more people who have experienced Events would talk about them with you if they thought you would do less “believing” and more listening.
by Agnes Callard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jesse Draxler
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
The Difficulty In Dating Good Men
I’m supposed to find someone who makes me happy. I’m 33, I’m weird, and I’ve got some eggs frozen. Let’s go.
Despite the internet’s conservative confidence, I’m not too worried about the poly slut thing. I live in SF and in the cultures willing to invite me to their parties, it’s normal to casually overhear someone referring to their boyfriend and their husband in the same sentence. Every other person I meet is poly, and I know many decades-long married-with-kids poly relationships. When someone asks me “what do you do” and I say “sex work”, they say “cool my girlfriend’s a sex worker, you two should talk.” In my world, this is normal.
So, a cousin recommends a guy. She says "He's perfect for you." He looks good enough on paper, so I sit down for dinner. He’s a little older, and shorter than me, but I don’t mind. I watch him carefully. He tells me about his life, and I imagine what it’s like to be him. A part of my brain is running a low-fi model of his emotions, and lights up with curiosity when the model runs into a place it can’t predict. I say something like:
“Wait, you just said you got fired and then moved countries? Do you think if you hadn’t had such a sudden impetus, you would have moved at all? Like, would it have eventually snuck up on you anyway?”
He answers smoothly, comfortably, like he’s relaxing into a great armchair I’ve dusted off and wheeled over to him. He partially answers the question in the first twenty seconds and then continues to talk for another four minutes.
I want to understand him fast. I am paying close attention, looking for novel words to toss at him. It feels playful for me, like wrestling, or leaning into tension. I want to see the green under his bark, the places where he’s unpracticed. I slip in fast, arrowhead questions, ones that carry intensity or exploration. “Are you smarter than your coworkers” or “When your ex broke up with you, did you deserve it?” or “So when your mom died, did you feel bad about it?”
He answers all of these with surprise, like he is a child riding on the back of my hay wagon. I’m a bit sad that he seems surprised. I would have felt safer if he seemed at home among awkward questions.
As time passes, it becomes rapidly clear that he is not paying much attention to me. I decide to count the amount of questions he asks me, and I eventually realize with growing disappointment that he just… isn’t asking any questions at all.
But I figure if I want something from the conversation - him to know about me - I shouldn’t sulk and be mad that he’s not giving it to me; I shouldn’t just expect him to read my mind, I should be an adult and reach for what I want. So after he finishes talking, I try to volunteer information. I force myself to ramble a bit. I tell him “yeah, my own biggest change was this time when I was nineteen in Idaho and decided to move by myself to Australia. It was real scary.”
I’m vaguely uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m aware he didn’t ask me, and I’m not sure he wants to know. But I say it anyway. When I’m done, he replies by telling me he went to Australia once, and he liked the surfing. He tells me about the fight he had with his boss during a surfing trip. He tells me about the importance of speaking up for yourself.
We get the check, and I offer to split but he pays. I give him a hug and leave. He seems like a perfectly nice person. No part of me feels a desire to see him again. Maybe he feels that way about me too, maybe I’m the weird question girl.
I’m discouraged. But I figure if I don’t go on dates with anyone, then I’ll never end up dating anyone. And I would like to get married + kids at some point, that seems cool. Happily married people seem like they’re having a great time, and I’d like to join their ranks.
The next guy wasn’t a date, he ended up in a uber in hour-long SF traffic with me ride sharing back from a party. I suspect he might be interested in me, because of the way he moves his hands and eyes and the quickness of his laughter. So I Investigate.
I ask him many questions - less aggressively than I did to my date last week, because I’m tired - but still ones that are gently trying to build a model of him, his desires, ambitions, insecurities.
I like him. He is funny, and seems smart. But after many minutes I notice that, much like my last date, he has asked me no questions. I imagine his factory’s figure-out-the-gaps-in-models-of-other-people gears are rusted and covered in cobwebs. I’m sad about this as a pattern. I don’t know why this is happening. This time, instead of forcibly talking about myself, I tell him that I’m sad he’s asked me no questions.
He says “Oh, I’m sorry” and seems awkward. As our conversation continues, he starts deliberately inserting questions.
“So, uh, what do you like doing for hobbies?”
I’m glad he’s at least trying, but his questions seem performative, like he’s searched for a premade question script and is reading down them, like I could be swapped out with any other woman and it wouldn’t change much. There is no locus of hot itching curiosity shining from behind his eyes, or at least not one that I can find here in this uber. I realize he’s not deeply trying to understand me. He's unattuned. I find my body does not trust him. I think I want a relationship where we can sink in together, touch souls or something. I imagine if I tried to date him, it'd be a lot of work to get him to understand me, like I'd have to force feed him myself. I'd rather have someone who's hungry.
Or maybe there’s something wrong with me. Have I been misled by some romance-movie ideal of becoming As One, where two people deeply understand each other down to their cores, where the fibers of their minds get woven together? I sort of think that’s what love is. But maybe this idea just comes from porn, a fantasy meant to get women off but is not a realistic idea of men’s wants or needs. Am I the girl equivalent of a gooner who locked on hard to the notion he deserves a perfect fucktoy and won’t settle until he has it?
Not sure. I gently watch this theory out of the corner of my eye.
At social events, I keep lowkey evaluating lots of men I have faint brushes with. I notice signs of coolness - competence or bravery or something - and any time a whiff of it floats by I follow it to chat with them at parties.
But my body does not like them. One man talks about his failures in a tone that implies he's uncomfortable with himself, like somewhere deep down a part of him believes he's a bad person, and it seems that many of his bids for social approval are attempts to be reassured that he is in fact okay.
I get it, humans - me included - are like this sometimes, and I have a great deal of compassion for it, but I do not want to be in a relationship with someone who's straining against themselves. Judgment is never isolated; if I become one with them, their inward violence will slam up against me, too. I don't want to be put in a position where my affection is the thing they use to prove to themselves that they are worthy. I want to be an equal, not a crutch.
Another guy… I’m not sure what his problem is exactly, but he seems to warp around me. He agrees with what I say a little too fast. He laughs at my jokes immediately. His hands twitch with nervous energy. He seems nice enough, but he seems afraid of me, and like he’s putting in a huge amount of effort to make himself seem not afraid of me. His body tension reminds me of the way I feel when I’ve appeared on high-pressure public shows and I don’t want people to know that I’m really scared right now. I feel as though my presence towers above him, and I have to be delicate with him, like if I speak too honestly he'll crumble in my hands. (...)
This is.... pervasive. Most people with whom I sit down and dig show devastating cracks in their psyche. They are not whole.
It’s not that these men aren’t good people. They seem very disproportionately good. They have learned that the goodest thing to do is to reassure people when they hurt, to demonstrate self-flagellation upon failure, to say a lot of interesting things for many consecutive minutes when a woman asks them a question. Pain is bad, ew, grrr. Nice things are good, yay! They are top tier, A+ at being Good People.
While I might be assessing them for a marriage I’d be happy in, I rarely feel judgment towards them. It makes a whole lot of sense to be a primate with ancient hardware that’s learned from thousands of generations of violence that social ostracization means death, that showing vulnerability will not pass on your genes, that you had better know your place in the hierarchy or else. It’s probably very hard to be a man, who by default are thrust into the sea and told ‘swim or die.’ I don’t fault them for it. If I were born them, I would be uttering the exact same words and flinching away from the exact same mind-pieces as they are. I would be, very reasonably, attempting to be the Goodest Person too. Perhaps this is a strategy that’s already worked well for them and they have no reason to try anything else.
But next to them, I feel like a sprawling seeping hunk of organic flesh with tendrils that uncurl into horror as readily as they do loveliness. I am uncultivated.
Maybe in their eyes, I’m a girl with a weird digging compulsion. Maybe they very much enjoy casual, lighthearted questions, and conversations where both people ramble over each other, where their idea of love is something like sitting next to each other on a beach in old age, existing comfortably adjacent to someone whose insides you don’t need to know, because whatever they are is good to you and leads to a beautiful life, and that’s what matters.
There’s some details here: (...)
It also counts if you get them to fill out my Date Me survey, just make sure they list your name in the ‘who recommended you’ question.
Despite the internet’s conservative confidence, I’m not too worried about the poly slut thing. I live in SF and in the cultures willing to invite me to their parties, it’s normal to casually overhear someone referring to their boyfriend and their husband in the same sentence. Every other person I meet is poly, and I know many decades-long married-with-kids poly relationships. When someone asks me “what do you do” and I say “sex work”, they say “cool my girlfriend’s a sex worker, you two should talk.” In my world, this is normal.
“Wait, you just said you got fired and then moved countries? Do you think if you hadn’t had such a sudden impetus, you would have moved at all? Like, would it have eventually snuck up on you anyway?”
He answers smoothly, comfortably, like he’s relaxing into a great armchair I’ve dusted off and wheeled over to him. He partially answers the question in the first twenty seconds and then continues to talk for another four minutes.
I want to understand him fast. I am paying close attention, looking for novel words to toss at him. It feels playful for me, like wrestling, or leaning into tension. I want to see the green under his bark, the places where he’s unpracticed. I slip in fast, arrowhead questions, ones that carry intensity or exploration. “Are you smarter than your coworkers” or “When your ex broke up with you, did you deserve it?” or “So when your mom died, did you feel bad about it?”
He answers all of these with surprise, like he is a child riding on the back of my hay wagon. I’m a bit sad that he seems surprised. I would have felt safer if he seemed at home among awkward questions.
As time passes, it becomes rapidly clear that he is not paying much attention to me. I decide to count the amount of questions he asks me, and I eventually realize with growing disappointment that he just… isn’t asking any questions at all.
But I figure if I want something from the conversation - him to know about me - I shouldn’t sulk and be mad that he’s not giving it to me; I shouldn’t just expect him to read my mind, I should be an adult and reach for what I want. So after he finishes talking, I try to volunteer information. I force myself to ramble a bit. I tell him “yeah, my own biggest change was this time when I was nineteen in Idaho and decided to move by myself to Australia. It was real scary.”
I’m vaguely uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m aware he didn’t ask me, and I’m not sure he wants to know. But I say it anyway. When I’m done, he replies by telling me he went to Australia once, and he liked the surfing. He tells me about the fight he had with his boss during a surfing trip. He tells me about the importance of speaking up for yourself.
We get the check, and I offer to split but he pays. I give him a hug and leave. He seems like a perfectly nice person. No part of me feels a desire to see him again. Maybe he feels that way about me too, maybe I’m the weird question girl.
I’m discouraged. But I figure if I don’t go on dates with anyone, then I’ll never end up dating anyone. And I would like to get married + kids at some point, that seems cool. Happily married people seem like they’re having a great time, and I’d like to join their ranks.
The next guy wasn’t a date, he ended up in a uber in hour-long SF traffic with me ride sharing back from a party. I suspect he might be interested in me, because of the way he moves his hands and eyes and the quickness of his laughter. So I Investigate.
I ask him many questions - less aggressively than I did to my date last week, because I’m tired - but still ones that are gently trying to build a model of him, his desires, ambitions, insecurities.
I like him. He is funny, and seems smart. But after many minutes I notice that, much like my last date, he has asked me no questions. I imagine his factory’s figure-out-the-gaps-in-models-of-other-people gears are rusted and covered in cobwebs. I’m sad about this as a pattern. I don’t know why this is happening. This time, instead of forcibly talking about myself, I tell him that I’m sad he’s asked me no questions.
He says “Oh, I’m sorry” and seems awkward. As our conversation continues, he starts deliberately inserting questions.
“So, uh, what do you like doing for hobbies?”
I’m glad he’s at least trying, but his questions seem performative, like he’s searched for a premade question script and is reading down them, like I could be swapped out with any other woman and it wouldn’t change much. There is no locus of hot itching curiosity shining from behind his eyes, or at least not one that I can find here in this uber. I realize he’s not deeply trying to understand me. He's unattuned. I find my body does not trust him. I think I want a relationship where we can sink in together, touch souls or something. I imagine if I tried to date him, it'd be a lot of work to get him to understand me, like I'd have to force feed him myself. I'd rather have someone who's hungry.
Or maybe there’s something wrong with me. Have I been misled by some romance-movie ideal of becoming As One, where two people deeply understand each other down to their cores, where the fibers of their minds get woven together? I sort of think that’s what love is. But maybe this idea just comes from porn, a fantasy meant to get women off but is not a realistic idea of men’s wants or needs. Am I the girl equivalent of a gooner who locked on hard to the notion he deserves a perfect fucktoy and won’t settle until he has it?
Not sure. I gently watch this theory out of the corner of my eye.
At social events, I keep lowkey evaluating lots of men I have faint brushes with. I notice signs of coolness - competence or bravery or something - and any time a whiff of it floats by I follow it to chat with them at parties.
But my body does not like them. One man talks about his failures in a tone that implies he's uncomfortable with himself, like somewhere deep down a part of him believes he's a bad person, and it seems that many of his bids for social approval are attempts to be reassured that he is in fact okay.
I get it, humans - me included - are like this sometimes, and I have a great deal of compassion for it, but I do not want to be in a relationship with someone who's straining against themselves. Judgment is never isolated; if I become one with them, their inward violence will slam up against me, too. I don't want to be put in a position where my affection is the thing they use to prove to themselves that they are worthy. I want to be an equal, not a crutch.
Another guy… I’m not sure what his problem is exactly, but he seems to warp around me. He agrees with what I say a little too fast. He laughs at my jokes immediately. His hands twitch with nervous energy. He seems nice enough, but he seems afraid of me, and like he’s putting in a huge amount of effort to make himself seem not afraid of me. His body tension reminds me of the way I feel when I’ve appeared on high-pressure public shows and I don’t want people to know that I’m really scared right now. I feel as though my presence towers above him, and I have to be delicate with him, like if I speak too honestly he'll crumble in my hands. (...)
This is.... pervasive. Most people with whom I sit down and dig show devastating cracks in their psyche. They are not whole.
It’s not that these men aren’t good people. They seem very disproportionately good. They have learned that the goodest thing to do is to reassure people when they hurt, to demonstrate self-flagellation upon failure, to say a lot of interesting things for many consecutive minutes when a woman asks them a question. Pain is bad, ew, grrr. Nice things are good, yay! They are top tier, A+ at being Good People.
While I might be assessing them for a marriage I’d be happy in, I rarely feel judgment towards them. It makes a whole lot of sense to be a primate with ancient hardware that’s learned from thousands of generations of violence that social ostracization means death, that showing vulnerability will not pass on your genes, that you had better know your place in the hierarchy or else. It’s probably very hard to be a man, who by default are thrust into the sea and told ‘swim or die.’ I don’t fault them for it. If I were born them, I would be uttering the exact same words and flinching away from the exact same mind-pieces as they are. I would be, very reasonably, attempting to be the Goodest Person too. Perhaps this is a strategy that’s already worked well for them and they have no reason to try anything else.
But next to them, I feel like a sprawling seeping hunk of organic flesh with tendrils that uncurl into horror as readily as they do loveliness. I am uncultivated.
Maybe in their eyes, I’m a girl with a weird digging compulsion. Maybe they very much enjoy casual, lighthearted questions, and conversations where both people ramble over each other, where their idea of love is something like sitting next to each other on a beach in old age, existing comfortably adjacent to someone whose insides you don’t need to know, because whatever they are is good to you and leads to a beautiful life, and that’s what matters.
Probably my desires are arcane. Dating men who are curious and self-accepting doesn’t mean the relationship works out, and of course there’s lots of things on top that are important too, like being really kind and competent and compatible with me in general lifestyle and values. And it’s true that people with huge cracks in their psyche go on to live happy lives with long, fulfilling relationships.
So maybe my desire is luxurious. Maybe I should lower my standards? But this is a clean, sleek thought, which is sensible to look at and interacts with nothing else. The physical wariness creeps into my muscles without me asking for it. I’m a slave to my own desire.
So maybe my desire is luxurious. Maybe I should lower my standards? But this is a clean, sleek thought, which is sensible to look at and interacts with nothing else. The physical wariness creeps into my muscles without me asking for it. I’m a slave to my own desire.
by Aella, Knowingless | Read more:
Image: uncredited
***
I have a $100,000 bounty on my marriage. If you introduce me to someone who I end up marrying, I’ll pay you $100k upon marriage*.There’s some details here: (...)
It also counts if you get them to fill out my Date Me survey, just make sure they list your name in the ‘who recommended you’ question.
How Impermanence Became Central to Japanese Thought
Images:Moe Suzuki
[ed. On Japanese impermanence. Other topics: Fashion, Cuteness, Monsters, Seasonality, Walking, Iterations, Fandom, Milky, Boxes, Citrus, Koreans, Pop Music, Matcha, Ozu, America, Fermentation, Purin.]
[ed. On Japanese impermanence. Other topics: Fashion, Cuteness, Monsters, Seasonality, Walking, Iterations, Fandom, Milky, Boxes, Citrus, Koreans, Pop Music, Matcha, Ozu, America, Fermentation, Purin.]
April 22, 2025: Earth Day
Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.
DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.
Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”
Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.
Siler explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.” (...)
Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.
In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals. (...)
Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America's balance sheet.” “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It's 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That's the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”
Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the story behind the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson's sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson's sanity.
But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.
Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”
And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.
In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.
Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”
Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.
Siler explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.” (...)
Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.
In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals. (...)
Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America's balance sheet.” “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It's 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That's the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American | Read more:
Image: via/USFWS/William Anders/NASA
[ed. When I was a kid, every month or two a truck would come through the neighborhood spewing plumes of DDT to keep the mosquitoes down. We'd run and play in the clouds, chasing the truck down the street. Crazy. But, who knew back then? Also, the Santa Barbara oil spill was a catalytic event in my young and emerging awareness of environmental issues. Imagine having the opportunity 20 years later to direct the cleanup of a spill orders of magnitude larger and more damaging? (Exxon Valdez)]
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