The End of Children

Societies do collapse, sometimes suddenly. Nevertheless, prophets of doom might keep in mind that their darkest predictions have been, on the whole, a little premature. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population would approach infinity. Ehrlich prescribed a few sane proposals—the legalization of abortion, investments in contraception research, and sex education—but he also floated the idea of spiking the water supply with temporary sterilants. Americans might protest such extreme measures, he allowed, but people in foreign countries should have no choice. It was only reasonable that food aid be conditioned on the developing world’s ability to exhibit civilized restraint. Nations that tolerated a free-for-all of unrepentant copulation—he singled out India—would be left to fend for themselves.

“The Population Bomb” transformed regional unease into a global panic. India, in less than two years, subjected millions of citizens to compulsory sterilization. China rolled out a series of initiatives—culminating in the infamous one-child policy—that included punitive fines, obligatory IUD insertions, and unwanted abortions. Ehrlich can hardly be blamed for the most coercive incarnations of population control. He might, however, be accused of impeccable comic timing. By the time “The Population Bomb” was published, the population-growth rate had already peaked. For hundreds of thousands of years, we had gone forth and multiplied. This epoch was coming to an end.

The “total fertility rate” is a coarse estimate of the number of children an average woman will bear. A population will be stable if it reproduces at the “replacement rate,” or about 2.1 babies per mother. (The .1 is the statistical laundering of great personal tragedy.) Anything above that threshold will theoretically generate exponential expansion, and anything below it will generate exponential decay. In 1960, the tiny country of Singapore had a fertility rate of almost six. By 1985, it had been brought down to 1.6—a rate that threatened to roughly halve its population in two generations. As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt told me, “For two decades, the leaders of Singapore said, ‘Oh, uncontrolled fertility has terribly dangerous consequences, so the rate has to come down,’ and then, after a semicolon, without even catching their breath, said, ‘Wait, I mean go up.’ ” The nation’s leaders launched a promotional campaign: “Have-Three-or-More (if you can afford it).” Singaporeans were known to be good national sports, but, despite the catchiness of the slogan, they proved noncompliant. From one nation to the next, the nightmare of too many descendants turned into the nightmare of too few. In 2007, when Japan’s total fertility rate hit 1.3, a conservative government minister referred to women as “birth-giving machines.” This didn’t go over particularly well with anyone, including his wife.

Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720. (...)

Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”

The global population is projected to grow for about another half century. Then it will contract. This is unprecedented. Almost nothing else can be said with any certainty. Here and there, however, are harbingers of potential futures. South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren. The country is an outlier, but it may not be one for long. As the Korean political analyst John Lee told me, “We are the canary in the coal mine.”

In Seoul, an endless, futuristic sprawl of Samsung- and LG-fabricated high-rises, an imminent shortage of people seems preposterous. The capital city’s metropolitan area, home to twenty-six million citizens, or about half of all South Koreans, is perhaps the most densely settled region in the industrialized world. When I visited, in November, I was advised to withdraw my phone from my pocket on the metro platform, because it would be impossible to do so once on board the train. Fuchsia metro seats are reserved for pregnant women. Those who aren’t yet showing are awarded special medallions as proof of gestation. A looping instructional video reminded passengers of the proper etiquette. Even amid the rush-hour crush, these seats were often left vacant. They seemed to represent less a practical consideration than an act of unanchored faith—like a place for Elijah at a Seder table.

Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero. Cho Youngtae, a celebrity demographer at Seoul National University, said to me, “Ask people on the street, ‘What is the Korean total fertility rate?’ and they will know!” They often know to two decimal places. They have a celebrity demographer.

Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn. The entire town was garlanded with banners that congratulated the parents by name “on the birth of their lovely baby angel.” One village in Haenam, a county that encompasses the southern extremity of the Korean peninsula, last registered a birth during the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Haenam disappears into the sea at a windswept cape called Ttangkkeut, or “End of the World.” Not far away, there is a school that once had more than a thousand elementary-age students. When I visited, in November, it had five.

by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Javier Jaén

Medusa: Don’t Be a Stranger

The Israeli military and tech industry collaborate on user-friendly software tools that automate war and occupation

I met Isaac, an intelligence veteran, in a West Jerusalem café on a quiet Saturday morning in late May. We sipped iced coffee under an awning shading us from the heat wave. It was seven months into Israel’s war on Gaza. Upward of 30,000 Palestinians had been killed and millions more displaced in a protracted and bloody military offensive that had failed to achieve the military’s stated goals of decimating Hamas and bringing the remaining hostages home. Next to us, a table of reservists back from Gaza for the weekend rolled tobacco and knocked back pint glasses of draft beer. M-16 rifles were nestled between their knees or propped up against the graffitied table legs. An unremarkable scene. Isaac is also a reservist in the Israeli military—one of the over 350,000 mobilized after Hamas militants massacred more than 1,000 people in a historic security failure. Like many veterans I have interviewed for my academic work and reporting, Isaac spent the first few months of the war sitting in an intelligence base encouraged to use algorithmically generated targeting lists to help coordinate where and when bombs fell. A program called Lavender displayed lists of civilians who—because of the contacts in their phones, the content of their WhatsApp inbox, or their social media activity—had been greenlighted for assassination. Another, called Where’s Daddy, displayed alerts when those targets entered their family homes, helping to determine when and where the Air Force should strike. Over the next few months, “dumb bombs” dropped from the sky and explosives detonated by troops on the ground replaced universities, mosques, and apartment complexes with 500-foot-wide craters. The fabric of Palestinian life was scorched to earth.

Isaac, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the AI-powered targeting systems felt like any other search engine: type a name into a search bar and scroll through mountains of data seamlessly integrated into a user-friendly interface. The formal similarities are hardly a coincidence. Instead, they lay bare long-standing collaborations between civilian technology conglomerates and Israel’s military. Google provides some of the facial recognition algorithms powering classified surveillance databases that soldiers toggle between. Microsoft supplies speech-to-text software that expedites the work of surveilling and killing. The army uses Amazon cloud services to store troves of data used in lethal operations. These collaborations mean classified surveillance and targeting databases are even nicknamed after tech giants: Google Gaza or Facebook for Palestinians. “Like looking up a friend on social media,” Isaac admits, “they are familiar.”

How did we get to a place where seeking a target to kill remotely feels little different than scrolling through profiles of high school friends on Facebook? The AI systems deployed in Gaza are the apotheosis of a process set in motion in the mid-20th century, when early cyberneticians built up surveillance databases and rudimentary targeting systems for the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD). They hit the battlefield in the second half of the 20th century, when US troops scorched Vietnam to the ground, and were refined over four more decades of counterinsurgency warfare abroad and swelling surveillance at home. The Cold War made networked surveillance and killing a big business, largely bankrolled by the DoD. Slowly, innovations seeped into civilian markets—powering a revolution in personal computing, e-commerce, and dot com booms and busts, all predicated upon the expropriation of users’ information for corporate gain. In turn, civilian technology firms staked out new monopolies over mass surveillance and data analysis, which they sold back to governments. Underneath the user-friendly interfaces engineered by Google and Facebook employees was an enduring politics of death.

—

In the early 2000s, the CEO of PayPal, Peter Thiel, refashioned himself as an apostle of the military-industrial complex 2.0. His gospel was simple: re-engineer the algorithms powering platform capitalism for warfare. Thiel, along with others including businessman Alex Karp, who serves as CEO, founded Palantir, a start-up which ran troves of personal data through the same algorithms pinpointing credit fraudsters to hunt down terrorists on Middle Eastern battlefields.

Palantir promised to do what no technology firm had done before: leverage the civilian technology sector’s new monopoly over data analysis, pattern detection, and machine learning to revolutionize warfare, making military operations bloodless and precise. The product came at the cost of the privacy protections liberal democracies are supposed to enshrine. But Palantir’s early investors—namely the CIA—didn’t care; the power afforded by expansive surveillance databases was thrilling. Security states scrambled to drop cash onto an increasingly automated arms industry. For Thiel, Palantir was a realization of the “in-between space,” a vision of collaboration between militaries and Silicon Valley he had been boosting since 9/11. As the United States’ “war on terror” went global, Thiel promised Silicon Valley firms could develop and sell lethal systems back to governments and militaries struggling to keep up with the technology sector’s breakneck pace of innovation. The alliance was a return to Silicon Valley’s origins in a Cold War military-industrial complex, and Thiel said it would give the US and its allies an advantage over adversaries, so long as governments cultivated a welcoming climate for such operations. Features of conviviality included minimal regulations on data extraction, categorically denying civilians privacy protections, and relaxed oversight of AI development. Overpoliced cities in the United States, border zones in Europe, securitized regions of Northwest China, and the occupied Palestinian territories—spaces of exception, where civil liberties are non-existent—would be particularly hospitable.

Long a hub for military and security industries, by the late 2000s Israel would make the “in-between space” a national brand. Billions pumped into expanding military technology trained the next generation of start-up founders well-versed in military demands. Many secured lucrative contracts with an army eager to prototype and refine surveillance systems and weaponry across the occupied Palestinian territories. Politicians and military heads celebrated a revolving door between Israel’s booming start-up ecosystem and the army as the key to military prowess. Scandals surrounding boutique Israeli surveillance and weapons tech firms peddling their wares to foreign dictators, or eroding the rights of Palestinians, only boosted the country’s aspirational image as the World’s Ultimate Security State. (...)

The Israeli army couldn’t do it alone. Ben, a veteran who served in an Israeli intelligence unit devoted to big data and machine learning in 2014, told me his military base hosted many private contractors. When we spoke in June, he said some of these technologists worked for international firms while others were paid by domestic boutique surveillance start-ups founded by veterans of elite Israeli intelligence units. From 9 am to 5 pm, the contractors waltzed around in jeans and t-shirts, building up predictive targeting systems and surveillance interfaces between lunch breaks and trips to the gym. “You could be sitting there in your uniform, and next to you is a civilian making six times your salary, commuting from Tel Aviv.” Ben said the “civilian tech vibe” made it easy to view the military as a networking opportunity for those eager to land a job in the country’s burgeoning technology sector. Sometimes his team would tour the Tel Aviv offices of the tech firms supplying services. (...)

The industrial scale of automated warfare today implicates many in the violence unfolding in Gaza: not only Israeli soldiers and civilian technology workers but also everyday users scattered across the world. Some of us sit in Silicon Valley technology complexes, engineering the cloud servers or databases informing lethal operations. More of us offer up the data and supply the free labor that trains and refines the algorithms driving bombing campaigns abroad each time we go online, even if you caption your selfies with the words “Free Palestine.” Selfies and search engine queries feed the surveillance databases and predictive models undergirding lethal weapons systems. Broad swaths of the world’s population is, in some way or another, what the media scholar Tung-Hui Hu has called “freelancers for the state’s security apparatus.”

by Sophia Goodfriend, Document | Read more:
Image: Robin Broadbent

[ed. See also: Welcome to the Future (Noahpion):]

Neural interface technologies are proliferating, as are new generations of wearable computer interfaces. Bionic eyes are getting better and better. 

It’s not just that cyberpunk predicted the ways we’d use technology. It did an amazing job at anticipating the aesthetics and the feel of a world in which, in William Gibson’s famous phrase, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Police can now shoot GPS trackers that attach themselves to suspects’ cars. Homeless people stole so many electrical boxes in Oakland that the city started switching traffic lights to stop signs. The app Protector will let you order an armed security team to wherever you are — basically, Uber for street samurai. Chinese government officials and contractors are stealing and reselling the surveillance state’s data at a profit.

Photos of the Week: May, 2025

Elwood Francis and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top perform at Langley Park in Perth, Australia, on May 1, 2025.

A worker tucks his mobile phone into a cloth covering his face and his eyewear while working inside a steel factory in Lahore, Pakistan, on April 30, 2025.

International Photos of the Week, May 2025 
via: (The Atlantic)

[ed. Nice selection.]

Tariffs Are Coming for Your Asian Grocery Store

Tariffs Are Coming for Your Chili Crisp

What will happen to the Chinese grocery store?

Image: The Atlantic. Sources: nilsz/Getty; west/Getty; numismarty/Getty

[ed. Hadn't thought about specialty mom and pops, but yeah... Asian stores in general are about to get a lot more expensive. See also: Temu halts shipping direct from China as de minimis tariff loophole is cut off (CNBC)]

"Chinese grocery stores are under pressure in more ways than one: Not only do they stock lots of products that are now subject to steep tariffs, but they already tend to run on thin margins. “Small, independent grocery stores—especially those catering to ethnic communities—are particularly vulnerable,” David Ortega, a food-economics professor at Michigan State University, told me. If Trump’s full slate of tariffs goes into effect in a few months, the pain won’t stop at Chinese grocers. Vietnam is facing some of the steepest proposed tariff hikes."   (The Atlantic)

Gordon Mortensen, “Yellow Iris” 

via:

Wall Street’s Not-So-Golden Rule

We’re all familiar with the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that its message of reciprocity and empathy is the bedrock of human civilization, certainly of Judeo-Christian thought. As Hillel the Elder said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”

There’s a variation of the Golden Rule — I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a perversion — that is the bedrock of the business of Money, a business that goes by the shorthand of ‘Wall Street’. This not-so-Golden Rule is the source of pretty much all of the unexpected Bad Things that happen from time to time in markets, where there’s a shock to the system that ‘no one could have foreseen’, like a sudden crash in the price of something or like a run on a bank or an investment firm. That perversion of the Golden Rule is this:

Do unto others as they would do unto you. But do it first.

It’s a perversion of the Golden Rule in two ways. First and most obviously, it’s got that extra sentence about doing the thing before the other guy. But second and less obviously, it’s normative-negative, which is a ten-dollar phrase to say that it’s not talking about doing good things (‘as you would have them do’), but is pretty obviously saying that you should do something that will actively hurt the other guy.

If you’re in the business of Money for more than a nanosecond, you will see this not-so-Golden Rule in action all around you. More to the point, if you want to stay in the business of Money and be successful in the business of Money, you must adopt and live by this not-so-Golden Rule yourself. Seems harsh, I know, but as Hyman Roth so aptly put it in The Godfather, Part II, “this is the business we have chosen.”

And it IS harsh. You can rationalize it by saying that he would have done the same thing to you if the situation had been reversed — and you are almost certainly correct in that assessment! — but the fact remains that YOU are doing the negative thing to the other guy. If you’re a thinking, feeling, non-sociopathic human being you will feel bad about doing that negative thing, but you will also get over it pretty quickly because it is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% the rational thing to do, and if you’ve been entrusted with managing Other People’s Money you have a moral if not legal obligation to do that rational thing despite the blecch feeling you have inside.

The first time I experienced that blecch feeling keenly was in December 2007 when I called our Bear Stearns rep and told him that we had decided to leave Bear Stearns as our hedge fund’s prime broker and we were pulling our money out. A prime broker is basically the ‘bank’ for a hedge fund. They provide lots of services, but the main ones are that they lend you money against the value of your portfolio so that you can buy more stock without using actual cash to go long (bet that the stock price will go up), and they locate and secure the shares of stock that you have to borrow in order to go short (bet that the stock price will go down). In exchange you pay them interest on the ‘leverage’ you used to buy more stock, just like you’d pay interest on a bank loan, and even more importantly from their perspective (and also just like a bank) you ‘deposit’ your stock holdings and some cash with them, which they can use to fund the loans and leverage they’re making available to other clients. It’s arguably the most important counterparty relationship that most hedge funds will have, certainly back then, and it’s a very profitable business for Wall Street investment banks, certainly back then.

What you need to understand is that I didn’t like working with Bear Stearns … I loved working with Bear Stearns. Loved the people, loved the attitude, loved the business terms. Bear Stearns was famously unafraid to take a chance on up-and-comers, both in its hiring of non-pedigreed entry-level employees (preferring, in legendary CEO Ace Greenberg’s words, to hire people who were ‘PSDs’: poor, smart, with a deep desire to be rich) and in its willingness to work with non-pedigreed hedge funds like mine. To be sure, it helped that the larger firm of which my fund was a part was filled with ex-Bear employees, all friends who would vouch for me and my partner. This was back in the day when vouching for someone meant something. It still does, I suppose, but a lot less than it used to. Bear stepped up to be our hedge fund’s prime broker from the very start, putting real time and real effort into a dinky little fund when nobody else would. Yes, they made good money off our business as we grew into a non-dinky fund, but I also owed a personal debt of gratitude to Bear Stearns for taking a chance on us.

And it didn’t matter.

Once I figured out in late fall of 2007 that if we had a nationwide decline in home prices, Bear Stearns faced enormous potential losses in the mortgage-backed securities that they owned, losses big enough to wipe out the entire bank because of their internal leverage on assets – or rather, once I suspected that I had figured this out, because you never know this stuff for sure unless you’re on the inside — then I knew for a certainty that it was only a matter of time before other prime broker clients of Bear Stearns would come to the same suspicion. And once that word got around — that there were doubts and suspicions about Bear Stearns as a counterparty — then I knew for a certainty that what would start as a trickle of clients taking their money out of the prime brokerage ‘bank’ would become a stream and then a river and then … well, then the dam breaks and the investment bank fails and if you’re still there as a prime brokerage client you get really, really hurt.

It didn’t matter if I was right about Bear Stearns and the risks to their balance sheet. I was, but I swear that didn’t matter. What mattered was the not-so-Golden Rule of Wall Street. What mattered is that you must act first when you have even a suspicion of counterparty risk, well before you know for sure whether or not you are ‘right’ about that risk, because everyone else on Wall Street will act first if you don’t. And if you don’t act first, or at least early … if you wait until you’re sure that there’s a counterparty risk … well, you’re screwed.

In December 2007, Bear Stearns still traded for over $100/share. In three months, it was below $5, before finally being taken out by JP Morgan for $10/share in a mercy killing. From suspicions to lights out in three months. Life comes at you fast when the not-so-Golden Rule of Wall Street comes into play. Getting out when we did saved our fund untold hassle and legal tie-ups, gave us the time to move to another prime broker out of strength and not desperation, and set us up for a career-making year in 2008.

Is this sort of run on the bank a self-fulfilling prophecy of doubt and ruin? Yep. If everyone had just kept their prime brokerage account in place would Bear Stearns have survived? Maybe. Do you have a choice but to get out before everyone else does, no matter how much it pains you personally and no matter how much your getting out might accelerate the sad and disappointing outcome? Nope. This is the business we have chosen. (...)

Why am I telling you this story?

I’m telling you this story because I think that Trump a) recognizes he made a mistake by overplaying the tariff card, b) is sidelining the ideologue pro-tariff crew like Navarro and Miran, and c) is actively looking for off-ramps and de-escalation in the China trade war. I think he may find an off-ramp and de-escalation in the China trade war, and that would be a wonderful thing for the United States and the world.

And it doesn’t matter.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Image: Margin Call (2011); Godfather Part II

[ed. Trust lost is almost impossible to regain. See also: ‘Trump wanted to break us’, says Carney as Liberals triumph in Canadian election' (Guardian); and (the not to be missed) Crashing the Car of Pax Americana. (Epsilon Theory).]

"Mirroring a theme of the campaign, Carney told election-night supporters that Trump wanted to “break us, so that America can own us”, adding: “That will never, ever happen,” to shouts from the crowd.

He also gave a stark assessment of a world order once defined by an integrated global trading system with the US at the centre, saying such a system was over, and he pledged to reshape Canada’s relationships with other nations.

“We are over the shock over American betrayal. But we will never forget the lessons,” he said."

[ed. And this: 2035: An Allocator Looks Back Over the Last 10 Years (AQR):]

"We really did not see this underperformance coming. After all, the prior 30 years saw much higher IRRs on private equity than total returns on public equity. What we didn’t count on, I mean who could see this coming, was this outperformance reversing. I mean, what better way is there to estimate what will happen in the future than looking at what happened in the past!?"

Peter Brüning, Ohne Titel, Um 1960.
via:

Kwame Akoto (a.k.a. Almighty God) (Ghanaian, b. 1950) “LET US STOP SMOKING PLEASE” “My Friend No One teaches a child GOD, In tears I SAY PRAY FOR ME
via:

Zhang Dequan
via:

The Price of Eggs

Or, death of a chicken

The chicken was unwell. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with only an unfamiliar smell for company. I am neither a farmer nor a veterinarian, but even a man unschooled in country ways knows the odor that announces that Death has removed his hat and entered the room.

In a few days, the bird would be dead. I would be her executioner. And I feel a need to relate the events that preceded the death, not because the fowl and I were overmuch close (we were not), nor to assuage a guilt (though there is always blame to hand around after such things), but because as E. B. White wrote of his own barnyard loss, she suffered in a suffering world. And pain deserves to be marked, even when it wears the confetti of farce, and though the only thing we have left to offer afterward is words, useless as they are.

I’d been away from the house on that March day, two months previous, when a message had come from my neighbor: A friend had been visiting him, he wrote. The friend had a dog, and the dog had found its way through the hole in my fence. It had returned to its owner carrying my small Rhode Island Red in its jaws: the first of the casualties. I returned home to find russet feathers strewn under the lilacs and hawthorn—more in some places, a few in others—as clues to the progression of the crime. In the weeks afterward, the cedar waxwings used these feathers to pad their nests.

It was difficult to know where to place my anger. True, the dog had trespassed. But the neighbor was contrite. And I had known about the hole in the fence for weeks. Winter squats heavily around the few acres I call Poverty Flats, though, and the list of spring repairs was long, and I am slow and generally loath to deal with any repair that requires use of any tool more sophisticated than a hammer, to say nothing of fence tighteners and in-line straighteners. Now the chicken had paid for human laxity on all sides, and for a dog being a dog.

There was an inexorableness to the event. My few western acres sit between mountain ranges where the land opens like a lap, a brief pause in geography that permits domesticity and also lays the table for the creatures that would dine upon it. Between the red-tailed hawks perched on the electrical wires that lope beside the county road and the coyotes that sing on the hill, the life expectancy of a chicken is not long here. One hopes for life, but expects death.

So the red hen was gone. I found a second injured bird cowering beneath a pyracantha. She did not resist when I picked her up. The dog had delivered a solid bite to her rear. On such occasions, one is made aware of how much of a chicken isn’t chicken at all, but instead simply feathers and air: an illusion of poultry. Without her tail and covert feathers, which the dog had removed in toto, the bird now resembled only the front end of her former self. Friends who heard about the attack inquired how many hens remained. I replied truthfully, “Four and a half.”

The chickens had arrived the previous spring, unasked for, like most of life’s obligations. The teenaged daughters of a friend had pronounced my empty henhouse forlorn and returned the next week with a cardboard box containing a half dozen chicks. I kept them in the house beneath a heat lamp, unnamed until certain they would survive, like pioneer children. When you live in the country, as I do, it is easy to acquire animals. Friends that see you own land assume you wish to fill it, an empty field to their eyes seeming an injury to Protestant industry. Over the years, my desire not to offend their generosity has nearly led to ownership of several dogs, three or four geese, and a barn full of mousing cats. There had been talk of a horse to stand in the overgrown paddock, and a few sheep to keep the horse company. In this way, a single man at middle age who lacks resolution soon becomes a bachelor farmer without having bought a single head of livestock.

At the feed store in town, I sought advice about the chicks. It is one of those stores that used to be common in rural places but is rare nowadays—dimly lit, a dog sleeping in the aisle, the pale smell of dry goods in the unmoving air. On the sidewalk, a sign displays a new joke every few days. I asked Katrina behind the counter what young chickens like to eat. She nodded over her shoulder at the bags of chick starter in the rear.

“Any of ’em roosters?” she said.

“How can you know?” I asked. Through the window, the sign read: i wonder if tacos ever think about me.

“Hard to tell at first,” Katrina said. “I had that problem once. Turned out I had two.” She let the gravity of this dilemma percolate, then she leaned over the counter. “Took ’em out for a midnight walk.” She nodded in the slow way of a conspirator.

Once the chicks had grown into awkward pullets (all of them females, as it turned out), I gave them names, which real farmers never do. The red (RIP) was Hen-rietta. The two Easter Eggers I called Roger Featherer and Lilly Pullet-zer. A mottled Araucana with a puff of gray feathers beneath her chin was Janice, the Bearded Lady. And the pair of identical Buff Orpingtons I called Muffy and Buffy. The injured one now in my arms, bloody and stunned, was Muffy. Though as with any one-year-old twin, who could be certain?

Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb. Both were consistent layers of large brown eggs. Muffy was particularly fond of shade and languor, and she spent warm spring days beneath the lilacs wallowing in dust baths where she suffocated mites.

Each morning, though, upon hearing the screen door slam, which signaled the arrival of the bucket of table scraps, composure abandoned her. She appeared at a sprint with the other hens, her large body yawing from drumstick to drumstick like a chunky child who chases the ice cream truck. After feasting, Muffy roosted for hours atop an overturned stock tank in the yard and watched the horses graze in the neighbor’s field. Orpingtons are poor flyers, and she was no exception. She gravely considered even the shortest drop back to earth before undertaking. Once airborne, she had the glide path of a watermelon.

Sometimes, in the course of other chores, I bent low to examine a hen’s comb for pox. When I did so, the bird in question froze and crouched and allowed herself to be inspected. I scooped her up and carried her in the crook of an arm around the yard and spoke soothingly to her. I told myself the hens also enjoyed these encounters and that this signaled a growing bond between man and bird—even if upon being set down once more, the hen always gave herself a thorough shake, like St. Paul dusting off his sandals at the city limits of Antioch.

“Your hens consider you the rooster,” said Daren, a rancher and man of wood-plank Norwegian practicality. “They crouch because they think you’re going to mount them.” This information cast these interactions with the chickens in a more tawdry light and made me reach for them less often. After that, our relationship became strictly mercantile: If I had nothing to offer, they scattered at my approach. Any move by me toward the shed where the bin of black oil sunflower seeds were stored, however, and they followed close on my heels. In return, they laid more eggs than I could eat. In summer when insects were their chief diet—ants being plentiful, and grasshoppers in August—their yolks took on the color of a sunset and tasted good enough that I presented them as gifts to friends in the city.

Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb.

***

But let us return to the day of the incident: now I had an injured bird to deal with. And it is hard not to have some feeling for whom one provides daily care, even if that care goes unacknowledged. (I imagine this is what it is like to have a teenager in the house.) 

Friends had been invited to the house for the evening, and though events had left a stain on the day and I no longer felt in the mood for company, the excuse of a dead chicken seemed a poor one. We sat on the patio in the cooling dusk, the injured Muffy at our feet. Craig, a friend, lifted the bird, turned her rear-first, and considered her cloaca for a long time, as if he expected tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers to appear.

“Not gonna make it,” he announced finally, and he reached into his pocket for the jackknife that resided there. “I can take care of her for you.” Craig spends his days riding on the valley’s rural ambulance service, and the quickness with which he was willing to dispatch a life unnerved me. Instead, I followed the advice of Sarah, Daren’s wife and a sometimes doula. She advised an indoor convalescence, with regular cleaning of the wound.

Here I must confess that my sympathy for the chicken was not unpolluted. I am at best a reluctant landowner, more in love with the views the land provides than the unceasing work required to steward even my smallest curve of earth. I don’t find the work ennobling. During chores, my eyes always wander to the horizon. I want things to go easy. The hen’s struggle had disrupted the quiet ticking of the place. Her injury had breached the unspoken contract between us, upon which my laissez-faire philosophy depended. I was newer to life in the country, then, and didn’t understand that a barnyard isn’t a place but a series of unforeseen emergencies—irrigation leaks and downed fences and sudden illnesses. Something, living or not, is always breaking. Life is a daily war against entropy.

That night I prepared a small crate for in the house, lining its floor with yesterday’s news about inflation and Israel. I swabbed the backside of the traumatized hen with antiseptic and placed her inside. Then animal and man sat down and waited. For several days, very little happened. I hadn’t known that a chicken could experience shock. Sarah took a turn, cleaning her with care. The hen slowly began to recover. Two weeks after the attack, on a caressing day in April when the lilacs were in bud, I carried the box outside and lifted the injured chicken onto the soft warm grass for her to eat.

The other hens attacked. The sight of Muffy’s wound, and her bare skin, sent them into a frenzy. The Easter Eggers pursued her with particular ruthlessness. Already they had forgotten their flock-mate. Muffy cowered beneath the mock orange beside the front door. A second attempt at integration the next morning failed again. A man will reconsider the choices he has made while running down vindictive poultry at dawn, the hem of his bathrobe sodden with dew.

“They’ll bully her until they reestablish the pecking order,” said Katrina at the feed store, to which I had retreated. Outside, the sign mocked my incompetence: i want to grow my own food, but i can’t find bacon seeds. “Put her in the coop at night when it’s dark and they can’t see her,” she said. “That will help reintroduce her back to the flock.

“But that’s not your only problem,” she said. “Chickens will peck at the sight of blood. You need to cover it up.” She chinned toward the rear of the store. The bottle of Rooster Booster Pick-No-More was small, expensive, its liquid purple and thick like sap. It was a toss-up who was less content, the squawking bird whose tender rear had to be finger-painted to aubergine each morning, or the reluctant painter who applied the salve. The chicken and I were bound together now.

by Christopher Soloman, Orion |  Read more:

Image: the author

Scientists Have Birthed a ‘Super Cannibal’ That Never Grows Up

Quiet optimism that gene-edited ‘Peter Pan’ tadpoles could help control one of the world’s worst invasive species.

The toad’s eyes seemed to glow red, its warty and poison-soaked skin – normally splodged in browns – instead a porridge of creamy whites. This albino toad was produced by a team of scientists with one foot in a Sydney university laboratory and the other in a research station on the vast tropical savannahs and wetlands far away to the north near Humpty Doo.

It was September 2023 and for the man who dreamed it into being, the toad was but an opening act in a radical new play against one of the world’s worst invasive species.

The molecular biologist Maciej Maselko was stunned by how quickly the team was able to successfully inject a cane toad egg with a mixture of proteins and RNA to knock out a gene needed for pigmentation.

“I was astonished,” the Macquarie University associate professor says.

“I mean, I knew it was technically feasible, but we got – within a few months – as far as I hoped we would get within, maybe, two years. Basically, one of our very first attempts at genetically engineering the cane toads worked.”

This, however, was just stage one in the plan put to Maselko – meant only to prove “the capabilities necessary” for stage two. Because the injected tadpoles, normally jet black, were instead pure white, it was immediately obvious that the scientists could, indeed, use Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology on cane toads.

What they would produce next was a tadpole that – should eggs dream – would belong to a cane toad’s most diabolical of nightmares. They called it Peter Pan – and it was a “super cannibal”.

But while Maselko and the likes of post-doctoral researcher Michael Clark brought the genetic engineering expertise needed to execute the plan, it was not one of which they had conceived.

Macquarie University’s Prof Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist, ecologist and author of Cane Toad Wars, has dedicated much of his life to devising novel strategies in the ecological defence against the toads. In 2016, he won the prime minister’s prize for science for teaching quolls and goannas not to eat the invading amphibians by feeding them cane toad sausages.

That year he also won the New South Wales scientist of the year award for developing pheromone traps that lure cane toad tadpoles using the toad’s own poison.

“The Peter Pan approach is definitely [Shine’s] baby,” Maselko says.

By knocking out a single gene in toad eggs, the scientists produced hatchlings unable to metamorphose beyond tadpoles, hence their likening to the boy who wouldn’t grow up.

So how does this tale turn from fantasy to – for a cane toad at least – horror? The answer lies in its brief but storied Australian history.

The cane toad was introduced in 1935 in an effort to stop native beetles devastating sugar cane crops. An utter failure as a biological control, it was spectacularly successful as an invasive species.

The toads now number more than 200 million, having conquered the entire east coast of Queensland, swept across the tropical north, and are now marching down Australia’s west coast. Along the way they have devastated big predators naive to their deadly toxins, from lizards more than 1 metre long to freshwater crocodiles, marsupial carnivores to king brown snakes.

“The history of biocontrol is littered with failures,” Shine says. “But the introduction of cane toads to Australia is one of the classic examples of a truly stupid decision.” (...)

Shine has spent time in the toad’s native South American range. There, kept in check by parasites and co-evolved predators, and in competition with similar species, the cane toad can be “hard to find”.

Largely freed of these population checks in Australia, it thrives in such “fantastic abundance” that a cane toad’s greatest threat to its growing up is tens of thousands of other rival cane toads.

“If you are a cane toad tadpole and a female toad comes along and lays 20,000 eggs in your little pond, there are going to be 20,000 hungry mouths all trying to eat exactly the same stuff that you need,” Shine says.

Over years of observation and research, the ecologist and his team learned Australian tadpoles have responded by becoming irresistibly attracted to the scent of cane toad eggs, which they devour before the competition can hatch.

“We’ve discovered that the toads have evolved to be voracious cannibals in the course of their Australian invasion,” he says.

According to the team’s field studies, 99% of cane toad eggs are eaten in ponds that already have tadpoles – meaning eggs have next to no chance of survival until those tadpoles metamorphose and leave. (...)

Shine says that unable to transform into toads, his Peter Pans grow larger and exist as tadpoles for as long as three months, as opposed to – under ideal conditions – fewer than three weeks.

Which means that if Peter Pans were put into a pond, they might eat just about every single egg laid in it for an entire breeding season. Then, unable to metamorphose, they too would die.

by Joe Hinchliffe, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Terri Shine; TerryJ/Getty Images/iStockphoto
[ed. Truly awful animals (they're also in Hawaii). Thankfully, in the last 60-70 years, the idiocy of introducing non-native species into new environments has been tempered by failure after spectacular failure. Mongoose are another Hawaiian example (nearly wiping out native bird populations because people thought they'd prefer rats). I remember a toad once jumping into our house through an open door and our dachshund immediately pouncing and throwing it back out. She started foaming at the mouth and nearly died from the toxins in its skin. Like I said, awful. Wipe 'em all out.]

ChatGPT 'Glazing' Users

Oh God Please Stop This

[ed. Must think we're all Donald Trump. Scary.]

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Savage Meritocracies

No matter how many times I read it, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go breaks my heart all over again. Although it might be my favorite novel, I don’t have a clear memory of the first time I encountered it. Over the years, I’ve read it multiple times, at least five or six, and my memories overlap and blur (as is the case with so many of Ishiguro’s narrators) so that it’s hard to tease them apart. What I know for sure is that the cadences of this lovely, melancholy novel are ingrained in me. Some books belong to a specific place and time in a person’s life, and when you go back to them, they don’t fit you anymore: perhaps the politics hasn’t aged well, or a character’s voice no longer resonates, or the particular wound you brought to it, which made it speak to you, has healed. That’s not the case for me with Never Let Me Go.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication. Widely acknowledged as one of Ishiguro’s best, number nine on the (admittedly flawed) New York Times list of the top novels of the 21st century, Never Let Me Go has now reached the age at which its youthful protagonists confront the cruel reality of their lives: that they are clones created to serve as organ donors, soon to die painful, premature deaths.

Rereading it this fall, I found the book more resonant than ever. The questions it raises around cloning feel less immediate than they used to, but the world it presents—fundamentally extractive, inequitable, and threaded with loss—is more than ever our own.

Never Let Me Go is narrated—I want to say remembered—by Kathy H., the longest-surviving member of a trio of friends who grew up together at Hailsham, a mysterious yet unmistakably British boarding school in the countryside. Degrees of intimacy among Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy shift and swing as they grow from childhood to adulthood, but Kathy remains both the anchor point of the triangle and the person left, by the end of novel, to sift through the detritus of their lives for what treasures endure. As an adult, Kathy works as a “carer” for “donors,” a job she finds difficult but rewarding: “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural.”

Each of these statements raises its own question—about what it means to be natural and not a machine, what it means to have a kind. Kathy evidently takes pride in her work, but what she describes sounds less like care than control. Her donors, she says, have impressive recovery times, and “hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated,’ even before fourth donation.”

What is this world in which caring is containment, and donations are numbered? It takes some time for the ideas of the book to unfold for the reader, as it did for Ishiguro himself. He first conceived of Never Let Me Go as far back as the early 1990s. In his 2008 Paris Review interview, he outlined the process:

The original idea was to write a story about students, young people who are going to go through a human life span in thirty years instead of eighty. I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way. It finally fell in place when I decided to make the students clones. Then I had a sci-fi reason for why their life spans are limited. One of the attractions about using clones is that it makes people ask immediately, What does it mean to be a human being? It’s a secular route to the Dostoyevskian question, What is a soul? (...)

Never Let Me Go appeared in 2005, a work of art in the age of biotechnological reproduction. As the interview quote suggests, Ishiguro’s novel wrestles less with scientific questions than with human ones. The clones are not laboratory experiments but students—of the human condition, and of their own. The fullness of their existence as clones dawns only gradually on Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Like any children, their view of the world is blinkered; their identity is a fact about themselves that they grow up knowing yet not knowing at the same time.

The first part of the book centers on the day-to-day routines of their lives at Hailsham, where they are reared by “guardians” and encouraged to express themselves creatively through sculpture, drawing, and painting. Throughout their safe, secure childhood, occasional ominous notes sound; darkness lingers around the edges. A shared intimacy develops between characters and readers as our understanding grows alongside theirs. An early clue to the situation arrives when Madame, an external figure of authority, visits the school to collect some of their artwork for her “gallery.” The children of Hailsham have the sense that she dislikes them, and they decide to swarm around her in greeting to test her response:

I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.

Being the spiders: Ishiguro’s choice to narrate the story from the perspective of the othered lends the novel its beauty and its chill. Madame’s shudder throws their evanescing innocence into relief—this is a tale not about children feeling different but about seeing that difference refracted through the gaze of society. To come of age is to understand the implications of that gaze. Tucked away at Hailsham, where they feel safe, they are being raised for harvest. It’s not a school—it’s an abattoir. Like the butler in 1989’s Remains of the Day and the AI doll in 2021’s Klara and the Sun (all three of Ishiguro’s narrators share similarities of affect, and the books seem to compose a trilogy of English life past, present, and future), Kathy H. will grapple all her life with the harsh truths of her home. (...)

Never Let Me Go maintains its timelessness in part via the euphemistic terminology Ishiguro assigns to cloning (the word itself appears in the book only a few times). When they become adults, the clones “donate” three or four times before they “complete” and die. The specifics around clone technology remain opaque—there are no scientist characters, no labs, no public debates. Cloning is as given and mysterious as death itself.

Can you call something a donation if the person is required to give it, has been bred for the very purpose of giving? It’s like saying cattle donate hamburgers. Can you call a life complete when it doesn’t include agency around choices of career or family? In its gnomic simplicity, Ishiguro’s language calls attention to the ways in which social agreement shellacs over the complicated reality of extraction. (...)

Because of its speculative element, Never Let Me Go is sometimes referred to as a science-fiction novel, but I don’t think the label fits. The novel inhabits an uncanny valley all its own, staking out a particular relationship to place and time. In much of his work, Ishiguro writes about and from a mythic England, deploying recognizable iconography: the boarding school, the countryside of cottages and hedges and winding roads, trips to the seaside. This allows him to weave the fabric of his story out of imagined touchstones rather than a specific lived reality. (...)

Against the backdrop of these “savage meritocracies,” Ishiguro’s gaze rests purposefully on his three main characters in the foreground. The political context gives shape to the human dramas of love and friendship; at the same time, the attention paid to those dramas insists upon the fundamental value and worth of the characters. In her narration, Kathy often addresses the reader directly: “I don’t know how it was where you were,” she says, or “I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day.” There’s an anxious, beseeching quality to these addresses that escalates in pathos as the book goes on.(...)

Holding on tightly against forces that will sweep them away—this is what Kathy and Tommy can do for one another. Matthew Salesses has pointed out that causally connected, character-driven plots emphasize individual choices; such stories revolve around “the idea that human agency is how to make sense of the human experience.” But not every person, and not every character, has that agency. Ishiguro’s novels often center the perspective of marginalized individuals who have little control over the larger political forces of their times. Just because individuals don’t have meaningful agency doesn’t mean their lives don’t have meaning. Like Kafka, Ishiguro shows how the dictates of systems override the capacity of the individual. But unlike Kafka, his systems can be beautiful, even beloved. Stevens loves Darlington Hall; Kathy loves Hailsham; and Klara loves the human girl she’s made to befriend, the girl who will abandon her. So too do many of us love a world that doesn’t always love us back.

Once they realize what’s happening to them, the clones don’t fight back, or try to escape. There’s no clone uprising, no battle scenes; nobody takes to the streets. Over the years, talking about my love for the novel, I’ve met many people who object to this aspect of it. As a representative Goodreads reviewer wrote in 2009, “Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by … going about their lives in the exact same way as before. I mean, good God.” People are entitled to their own responses, but isn’t this the most resonant part of all? In 2025, as oceans rise, glaciers melt, violence increases, and dictators expand their powers, many of us do the same as Kathy and Tommy: we keep living our lives as best we can, holding on to moments of human decency where we find them, taking care of one another.

by Alix Ohlin, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Excellent review. One of my favorite books (maybe top five). What struck me most was the precision of the writing. Every word and sentence, perfect. See also, art imitating life:
Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine (MIT Technology Review):]

***

"It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress. (...)

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman."

Duane Michals, “Madame Schroedingers Cat”. 1998.
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[ed. Probabilities.]

Gérard DuBois, Who can sleep?
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Kurt Cobain

[ed. Wanted to be Ringo.]

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.

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):]

***

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.

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[ed. Binkying bunnies.]

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."

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).]