DOGE Shit

As recently as March 27, Elon Musk was still confident that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting initiative he unofficially headed, could reduce annual federal spending by $1 trillion. But during a Cabinet meeting two weeks later, Musk projected that the savings in FY 2026, when DOGE sunsets, would be more like $150 billion.

Even the latter, much smaller number cannot be trusted, because DOGE has been vague about most of its purported cuts and has repeatedly exaggerated the ones it has specified. And last week, as he shifted his focus from DOGE back to his businesses, Musk acknowledged a reality that should have been obvious from the outset: Any serious attempt to address the country's looming fiscal crisis will require hard choices and congressional action.

Shortly before last year's presidential election, Musk breezily estimated that DOGE could cut annual federal spending by "at least" $2 trillion, which was about the size of the budget deficit in FY 2024. At a press conference in February, he reduced that target by 50 percent, saying DOGE could "cut the budget deficit in half" by insisting on "competence and caring."

That goal was always improbable, since it would require eliminating something like 63 percent of discretionary spending. And although Musk said DOGE would be "as transparent as possible," the project's documentation of its work has fallen far short of that promise.

As of Tuesday, DOGE's website claimed $165 billion in "estimated savings" from "asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions." But DOGE's "Wall of Receipts" described just $69 billion in spending reductions, accounting for 42 percent of the purported total.

News organizations have identified many problems with those "receipts." The errors include contracts that were not actually canceled, contracts that were terminated during the Biden administration, iffy estimates of savings on contracts that had not been awarded yet, contracts that were counted multiple times, conflation of contract caps with actual spending, the inclusion of past spending in estimates of future savings, and overvaluation of contracts and grants.

DOGE's hyperbole is so pervasive that Manhattan Institute budget expert Jessica Riedl describes its work as "government spending-cut theater," saying "most of what is claimed to be spending cuts are just accounting errors." Somewhat more generously, Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that DOGE's actual cuts amount to about half of the total it claims.

"They're just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings," Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, told The New York Times last month. "What's most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we're watching them flail at achieving them."

DOGE's numbers do not distinguish between one-time savings and recurring savings or between total savings and annual savings. Some of its categories, such as "workforce reductions" and "programmatic changes," are plausible but vague, while others, such as "asset sales" and "regulatory savings," do not seem to imply any spending reductions at all. (...)

"If we don't do something about this deficit," Musk warned in February, "the country's going bankrupt." Back then, he implied that DOGE was up to that challenge. More recently, he has been singing a different tune.

"It's really difficult," Musk conceded last week. The question, he said, is whether there is "sufficient political will in Congress and elsewhere." Now he tells us. 

by Jacob Sullum, Reason |  Read more:

Image: Brian Merchant/How federal workers can organize to stop DOGE
[ed. 'Political will' for what? Actually doing something positive instead of giving more billions to the military and tax cuts to the rich? Musk might be out the limelight for now but his minions are still burrowed in like termites. See also: this Profile in Cowardice: Will Republican senator Susan Collins stay on the sidelines or take on Trump? (Guardian); and, DOGE Is Obliterating American Industry (American Prospect):]

***

One of the hidden gems of American government is a small division of the Department of Energy called the Loan Programs Office. This is a government bank that hands out loans to companies with business plans that go beyond the technological frontier, with ideas nobody has tried before. Commercial banks will generally not loan to such companies—as a rule, private bankers want something that is already proven to work—so the LPO helps such entrepreneurs get from the drawing board to producing and selling an actual product.

The LPO has funded thousands of successful projects, from renewable-energy installations, to solar and battery factories, to new low-emission industrial processes, to power grid upgrades, to the first new nuclear power plant in decades, to domestic EV companies, and much more in that vein. It has virtually no overhead, with just a few hundred staffers running a fund of more than $400 billion. Almost all of these projects are successfully paying back their loans. For any government—and especially the American one, with its underfunded and sclerotic agencies—this counts as a smashing success.

But not for much longer. The LPO is being gutted by Elon Musk—who got an LPO loan himself just 15 years ago—and his DOGE goons. New loans have been frozen, it seems permanently. Worse, a reported 60 percent of LPO staff has already accepted DOGE buyouts, with more to come. Even existing loans are under threat; the California utility PG&E recently requested a rate hike in part because its $15 billion LPO loan faces “substantial uncertainty.” One battery company has canceled a planned LPO-funded factory in Arizona, while another has canceled its planned LPO-funded factory in Georgia and moved it to China. (America First!) ...

The main difference between this and similar efforts to destroy, say, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—in this supposed cost-cutting exercise—is that the LPO makes a fair bit of money. The estimated $500 billion in additional federal debt brought about by DOGE gutting the IRS will only get bigger by taking the LPO off the board.

A more interesting question concerns Elon Musk himself. His company, Tesla, was saved from certain bankruptcy in 2010 by a $465 million LPO loan, which provided critical funding while the company was struggling to get its Model S to market. It is, of course, absolutely maddening that a man who benefited from immense government largesse—the LPO loan is only a tiny fraction of the $38 billion in subsidies Musk has collected over the years—is pulling the ladder up behind him, all while he gives himself government contracts to build a completely pointless missile defense shield and drain even more from the taxpayer.

The New Stadium Scam Is a Server Farm

La Porte, Indiana, is a small city between South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. The recent announcement that Microsoft is investing over a billion dollars into a vast new data center campus in La Porte is expected to be transformational for the town of 22,000 people.

Microsoft was given a 40-year tax abatement on equipment, a renewable state sales tax exemption through 2068, and just $2.5 million of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) over four years—roughly 30 percent of what it would normally owe. After that? Nothing. Local utilities would cover the infrastructure.

Indiana's levy system is designed to reward growth with lower taxes. But when the biggest newcomer isn't taxed, the reward goes with them, the burden stays with the taxpayers, and the scales get tilted by bureaucrats.

Just 60 miles up the toll road sits Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. The stadium's 2002 post-modern renovation cost $587 million, $387 million of which was shouldered by taxpayers. Two decades and two dozen quarterbacks later, Chicago only has $640 million (thanks to $256 million in interest) left to pay (oh, and the Bears are now threatening to leave.)

Cities have long bankrolled stadiums for billionaire team owners, while promising taxpayers jobs, tourism, civic pride—maybe even a Super Bowl. The results? Almost uniformly dismal. The Cincinnati Bengals deal left Hamilton County, Ohio, buried in debt and obligated to fund high-tech upgrades just to keep pace. Miami, Florida, spent $500 million in public funds on a baseball stadium for the Marlins, only to see attendance collapse and the team gutted. St. Louis is still paying off the Edward Jones Dome, even after the Rams skipped town for sunnier Los Angeles. Charlotte, North Carolina, is the latest addition to this hall of shame after handing over $650 million in tourism taxes to renovate Bank of America Stadium, earning them the "Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year" distinction from the Center for Economic Accountability.

Today's stadium boondoggle is a server farm: shinier, techier, but often just as bad for taxpayers. Small towns (and not a few big ones) are bending over backward to lure data centers. Local economic development officials tilt the scales, suspend the rules, and give away the farm. The sales pitch is nearly identical to the stadium era: "It'll create jobs. It'll put us on the map. It's worth the investment."

But once the banners come down and the golden shovels are back in the closet, what's left is a trail of lopsided deals, and taxpayers stuck holding the bag. (...)

Analysts project that data center capacity will more than triple by 2030 and estimate the U.S. will need to reach 35 gigawatts of capacity by then—double today's total. The surge is largely driven by artificial intelligence (AI), which alone could account for 70 percent of all data center demand by 2030. These facilities already draw more electricity than some nations, and Goldman Sachs projects they'll consume up to 9 percent of U.S. power by decade's end. New builds are booming—yet much of that construction is being underwritten, piece by piece, by state and local governments chasing the illusion of growth.

by Marc Oestreich, Reason | Read more:
Image:Wirestock|Dreamstime.com

Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?

Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.

The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained.

Gioia’s contributions to this lineage of doomsaying have made him into something of an internet celebrity. For most of his career, he was best-known for writing about jazz. But with his Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker, he’s attracted a large and avid readership by taking on contemporary culture—and arguing that it’s terrible. America’s “creative energy” has been sapped, he told me, and the results can be seen in the diminished quality of arts and entertainment, with knock-on effects to the country’s happiness and even its political stability.

He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardian recently proclaimed that “the avant garde is dead.”

What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. More than 500 scripted TV shows get made every year; streaming services reportedly add about 100,000 songs every day. We have podcasts that cater to every niche passion and video games of novelistic sophistication. Technology companies like to say that they’ve democratized the arts, enabling exciting collisions of ideas from unlikely talents. Yet no one seems very happy about the results.

To a certain extent, such negativity may simply reflect an innate human tendency to fret about decline. Some of the most liberating developments in history have first triggered fears of social stultification. The advent of the printing press caused 15th-century thinkers to complain of mass distraction. In 1964, The Atlantic published an essay predicting, not unpersuasively, that rock and roll would only foster conformity and consumerism in young Americans.

For as long as I have been a critic at this magazine, I’ve tried to cut against the declinist impulse. The year I started the job, 2011, was a turning point of sorts: Spotify launched in America that July; Netflix debuted its first original series soon after. The brainy rock bands that I’d grown up loving—Radiohead, Wilco—were starting to fade in importance, but pop, hip-hop, and electronic music were cross-pollinating in fascinating ways. Understanding change, and appreciating how human creativity flourishes anew in each era, always seemed to be the point of the job.

Yet the 2020s have tested my optimism. The chaos of TikTok, the disruption of the pandemic, and the threat of AI have destabilized any coherent story of progress driving the arts forward. In its place, a narrative of decay has taken hold, evangelized by critics such as Gioia. They’re citing very real problems: Hollywood’s regurgitation of intellectual property; partisan culture wars hijacking actual culture; unsustainable economic conditions for artists; the addicting, distracting effects of modern technology.

I wanted to meet with some of the most articulate pessimists to test the validity of their ideas, and to see whether a story other than decline might yet be told. Previous periods of change have yielded great artistic breakthroughs: Industrialization begat Romanticism; World War I awakened the modernists. Either something similar is happening now and we’re not yet able to see it, or we really have, at last, slid into the wasteland. (....)

Stagnation

Cyniscism

Acceleration

by Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Javier Jaén

It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl

One afternoon this spring, I went to the West Village to meet a West Village Girl.

When I arrived at the whitewashed wine bar she chose, just two blocks from the brownstone stoop Carrie Bradshaw made famous, Miranda McKeon was journaling in her notebook and sipping a cup of green tea. She wore crimson leggings, a stack of candy-colored beaded necklaces, and a black sweatshirt that read SELF-EMPLOYED because she is a full-time influencer — or “creator,” as it is more polite to say in this part of town.

Online, the blonde, rosy-cheeked 23-year-old from New Jersey has over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. She posts a lot, most often about her charmed life in the West Village: sweating it out at Pilates, treating herself to weeknight Froyo, drinking espresso martinis with her girlfriends. Over a photo of herself walking down the street, she wrote this past fall, “Life is too short. Wear the sparkly skirt!!!! Post the content!!!!! Text the boy!!!!! Leave your number on the table!!!!! Ask that girl to get coffee!!!! Wear cowboy boots year round if you love them!!!! Try! Fail! Love! Lose! Try again! Be embarrassing! Take a risk! Feel it alllllll while you’re here!!!!!”

McKeon knew she wanted to rent in the West Village long before she moved to New York. In college at the University of Southern California, she started hearing from high-school friends, girls who had migrated here before her, that it was the place to live — a cobblestoned paradise where a young woman like herself could live an entire life within a block. During her final semester, last year, McKeon started obsessively combing StreetEasy for the perfect postgrad apartment and, to prepare for the move, watched Sex and the City for the first time. (She identifies as a Carrie with some of Miranda’s “girlboss energy”; she majored in entrepreneurship.) Now eight months in, she likes that the neighborhood reminds her of being back on campus insofar as she is constantly running into people she knows, though instead of classmates, they are girls she follows or who follow her. “I feel like a freshman in New York,” she said.

In person, McKeon seems, just as she does online, to be a remarkably well-adjusted and unjaded New Yorker. On weekends, she likes going out for what she calls a “three-drinker” (a nice dinner with her girlfriends with a self-imposed three-cocktail minimum). She knows the names of the important restaurants (the Corner Store, American Bar, Dante), a couple of age-appropriate bars (Bandits, Bayard’s, the Spaniard), and even some of her neighbors. “I went out to dinner with two girls last night, both of whom live on my street,” she told me. “We met through social media. It’s nice.” (...)

“There’s a cult mentality” to the neighborhood, McKeon continued. It’s true that many of the young women passing by the bar looked like her clones. They move through the neighborhood in packs, wearing the local uniform: a white tank, light-wash jeans, and Sambas, an iced matcha latte in hand, and hair slicked back into a tight ponytail. It was chilly, so several of them, McKeon cheekily pointed out through the window, were also wearing Aritzia Super Puffs, as she was, in the color matte pearl. “I feel like everyone else here in some way,” McKeon told me. “That’s the point of it, I guess.”

The neighborhood has, in recent years, transformed into a fabulous theme park for young women of some privilege to live out their Sex and the City fantasies, posting and spending their mid-20s away. They all seem to keep impressive workout routines (“Hot this and hot that,” McKeon said), have no shortage of girlfriends, and juggle busy heterosexual dating schedules. (The boys they consort with tend to be of the fratty variety.) They work in finance, marketing, publicity, tech — often with active social-media accounts on the side. They have seemingly endless disposable income. They are, by all conventional standards, beautiful. Occasionally, they are brunettes. Whatever their political beliefs, their lives seem fairly apolitical; as one 27-year-old lawyer on a walk with her best friend, both wearing identical puffer jackets, succinctly put their collective interests to me one day in April, “Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.” (They may be more political than they appear: “You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights,” said one person who lives in the neighborhood.)

This isn’t the first time a generation of socially ambitious young women has descended on the West Village and, as one fashion executive explained to me with just a hint of an eye roll, “made the neighborhood their whole personality,” fundamentally changing it along the way. If Sex and the City washed out the last of the neighborhood’s bohemians two decades ago and turned the West Village into a celebrity playground where real adults with real incomes live, the pandemic turned it into something else entirely: a bustling sorority house. “Everyone has the same mind-set. We’re here, we’re young, we’re single. Let’s go out and have fun and be ourselves. Work hard. Play hard,” said a new arrival from Texas with blonde highlights while polishing off a bottle of rosé with her girlfriends one afternoon. They’re basic, they told me proudly. “Basic isn’t a bad thing,” a crew of Cosmo drinkers at Anton’s, just down the street, elaborated. “There’s a reason everyone wants to be like that.” (There’s a sense lately that the entire city, or at least much of downtown Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn, is going the way of the West Village. “They’re everywhere,” almost everyone I talked to for this story told me.) (...)

The young women who follow Kerrigan and Keenan — fellow New Yorkers and transplants alike — soon flooded the neighborhood. So many that it became a memeable stereotype: “the West Village Girl.” In a post last September, a TikToker named Kayla Trivieri summed up the type under the caption “POV: you’re on a date with a girl from the west village.” The monologue went like this: “So what are you into?” “Pilates, Cartier bracelets, Blank Street, Hugo spritzes, Reformation, and my dachshund …” “What kind of music do you like?” “Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, and Morgan Wallen once in a while.” When I asked Trivieri about the send-up recently, the native Canadian told me she became familiar with the type before she even moved to the States. “She was the cultural Zeitgeist on TikTok,” Trivieri said. “It became this almost idealized persona. I felt like people in Toronto were even dressing like that in head-to-toe Pilates gear.” (The influencer Tinx sells a $75 crewneck that reads RICH MOM WEST VILLAGE.) To put New York youth culture into high-school terms, Kerrigan said the West Village Girls are “the Plastics, the Mean Girls without the meanness.”

Now, years after she started posting from the neighborhood, Keenan said, she often has to wait on line to get coffee at her favorite shop, Fellini. “I’m thinking about how that’s kind of my fault,” she added. “I’ve recommended it a million times. But it’s a beautiful sharing of information, so I can’t be annoyed.” (The lines, she said, are a good place to meet friends.) Kerrigan said the West Village is now filled with “young powerhouse women with vision boards,” ambitious zoomers who idolize Alex Cooper and Carrie Bradshaw in equal measure. The appeal is “the main-character energy you get when you’re in the West Village,” which feels, she said, like a “movie set.” The irony, of course, is that when everyone’s a main character, is anyone? (...)

The original West Village Girls — those who have remained in the neighborhood and didn’t jet off to Greenwich or to a classic six uptown — aren’t entirely pleased with their new neighbors.

One Tuesday in April, I met Kim Vernon, a former Calvin Klein executive who bought a loft in the neighborhood in 1997. “I don’t want to be an old-lady bitch, but this is the pinnacle of what happened to this fucking neighborhood,” she said when we sat down at Bar Pisellino, which even at 2 p.m. was packed with young women ordering spritzes and pastries. “I see less gay men and, more than anything, groups of four or five girls,” she added. “They’re always talking at a high, high pitch. It is so intolerable. It’s so unpleasant.” Not to mention it’s impossible to get a table at I Sodi or Via Carota these days, two once-neighborly Italian restaurants that were tumbled through the TikTok recommendation machine and came out nearly unrecognizable with lines of day-trippers waiting down the block at all hours of the day. “I used to go to I Sodi when they had an answering machine. Someone would call you back. It wasn’t super-popular,” said Vernon. The last time she tried to have dinner with a friend, she was quoted a three-hour wait. (...)

The old bars and restaurants are also adjusting to the new whims and tastes. “I have regulars who come in all the time and say, ‘What happened?’ It’s just an army of Levi’s and white tank tops,” a bartender at Bayard’s, a newly popping but long-standing Irish pub on Hudson Street, told me. (Behind the bar, she showed me a box of lost phones and another box of abandoned clothes, which she lugs to Housing Works once a month.) In the fall of 2023, the restaurant and bar Cowgirl decided to convert one of its margarita machines into one for frozen espresso martinis, “the new cocaine,” the owner joked to me. “You can see the new group coming in. I don’t know where they’re getting their money from, but they have money,” she said. “Especially on the weekends, everyone’s 27. That magic number. We never had demand like this.” The Spaniard, a cocktail bar by day and a shockingly rowdy hookup spot by night, had to hire an entire security team after what one manager described as a “mass exodus” of the older, tamer clientele. (Its top-three sellers now are spicy margaritas, espresso martinis, and Aperol spritzes, which are pre-batched into kegs.) At L’Artusi, a high-end Italian restaurant, the owner, Kevin Garry, told me he’s selling less expensive wine post-pandemic. “Previously, the crowd was kind of that classic West Village type. Late 30s, early 40s, Masters of the Universe with good jobs and no kids,” he said. “A $150 bottle of wine doesn’t compare to a vodka-soda.” As a waitress at La Bonbonniere, an old-school diner that has been around since the 1930s, said bluntly, “The old people? They die. Now it’s young people with the social media. After corona, pew! The internet!”

Needless to say, no one would go on the record getting too snarky about any of this; it all makes for good business. And some former West Village Girls admitted eventually that in their descendants they could see their younger selves. “I think they’re probably doing what I did when I was 20. This is where they want to go around and get drinks and run into people and look cool,” said Hruska MacPherson. “It’s like Disneyland for them. Let’s let them be young and have fun, even if we cringe at it. Let’s let them have their Aperol spritzes. We were also discovering ourselves.” Annelise Peterson echoed this thought: “We were discovering ourselves. I stayed down there until my ex-husband told me it was time to move to the Upper East Side. Things change; things never stay the same. What the West Village will be in 20 years might be something very different. The influencer is fickle.”

It’s easy to get reflective after a few brunchtime cocktails. “Was I one of these little fuckers?” Savannah Engel wondered aloud to me one Sunday after Bloody Marys at Cafe Cluny. The question seemed to stump her. Two girls hauled yoga mats past us, and she said, “I like to kick them out of the way.”

by Brock Colyar, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Dina Litovsky
[ed. Living the dream. Trust funds, inheritances, nepo connections, rich partners. It's easy.]

As for the apartments the businesses were shipping to, the average one-bedroom in the neighborhood is now $5,995 a month, though apartments often cost much more. A dingy one-bedroom can easily go for $7,500 (expensive but doable on a finance salary or with help from parents).

The Shadow

"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." - Carl Jung," Psychology and Alchemy," published in 1944.

Jung's concept of the shadow is rooted in the idea that individuals have parts of themselves that they consciously suppress or deny because they find them unacceptable, shameful, or incompatible with their self-image.

However, Jung argued that ignoring or suppressing these aspects doesn't make them disappear; instead, they become part of the unconscious mind and can manifest in various ways, such as projections onto others or in dreams. If left unacknowledged, the shadow can exert a powerful influence on behavior, often leading to destructive patterns or conflicts.

Jung believed that embracing and integrating these shadow aspects into consciousness is crucial for personal growth and individuation. By recognizing and accepting these hidden parts of ourselves, individuals can achieve a greater sense of wholeness and balance, leading to a more authentic and fulfilling life. This process often involves self-reflection, introspection, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about oneself.

***

“There is no generally effective technique for assimilating the shadow. It is more like diplomacy or statesmanship and it is always an individual matter. First one has to accept and take seriously the existence of the shadow. Second, one has to become aware of its qualities and intentions. This happens through conscientious attention to moods, fantasies and impulses. Third, a long process of negotiation is unavoidable.” - Carl Jung

***

“Unless you learn to face your own shadows, you will continue to see them in others, because the world outside of you is only a reflection of the world inside you.” - Carl Jung

via:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Carl Jung and the Shadow: a Guide to the Dark Side of the Mind; and, Darkness Within: The Dangers of a Non-Integrated Shadow (Arts of Thought).]

Bear cam
via:

[ed. One of the things I loved about living in Alaska. Every time you went out you could run into one of these guys. Looks like Cambell Creek trail in Anchorage.]

The Sam Brownback Playbook

[ed. We're not in Kansas anymore (it's much, much worse).]

A newly elected Republican chief executive, backed by a cadre of right-wing economists and think tanks, rides a populist wave to victory. Despite inheriting a relatively healthy economy, he unleashes a radical economic policy agenda and defunds government agencies, promising that his actions will usher in a new era of prosperity.

Instead, the economy slows. Budgets collapse. Investors are spooked. Core services erode. Even allies defect. By the end, voters—many of whom once cheered the project—recoil, and a Democrat wins back power.

 

That’s a version of the scenario Democrats are praying plays out in response to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda—and one Republicans are quietly fearing.

But it is an equally accurate description of what’s happened in Kansas over the past decade and a half. In 2012, after riding a Tea Party wave to victory two years earlier, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback launched what he called “a real live experiment” in conservative governance, slashing income taxes, starving the state budget, and insisting that a burst of economic growth would follow to pay for it all.

But that growth, and fresh tax revenue, never came. To fill his ballooning budget holes, Brownback squandered the state’s surplus, drained the rainy-day fund, fully privatized Medicaid, raided the state’s highway funds, decimated state agencies, and cut public education funding. When the service cutbacks started affecting people’s lives, even Brownback’s own supporters started to notice. Roads fell apart. Class sizes grew. And Brownback’s approval rating sank from 55 percent in his first month in office to 22 percent in 2016. Rather than finish out his second term, he took a job with the first Trump administration in 2017. The following year, Laura Kelly, a Democratic state legislative leader with a clear record of opposing Brownback’s reforms, won the governorship. Four years later, she was reelected, in part by tying her opponent to Brownback. To this day, she is one of the most popular governors in the country.

No political parallel is perfect, of course. Brownback didn’t have the cult following Trump does. On the other hand, the chaos Brownback’s policies caused didn’t kick in for several years, whereas Trump’s shock-and-awe actions have already rattled the country and the world.

We can’t predict the future. But we can look at Kansas. Brownback’s story offers Republicans a warning—and Democrats a possible path to victory.

A lawyer who grew up on a family farm in eastern Kansas, Brownback ran for Congress as a moderate in 1994 but quickly became one of the most radical members of Newt Gingrich’s revolution—so radical, in fact, that he refused to sign the Contract with America because it wasn’t conservative enough. As ambitious as he was ideological, he ran for the Senate two years later, won, and was reelected in 2004, both times with heavy financial support from the Wichita-based Koch brothers. In the 2008 cycle, he entered the GOP presidential primaries as a favorite of the religious right (he had grown up Methodist but converted to Catholicism during his first term in the Senate), didn’t catch fire, and soon set his sights on the Kansas governorship, which he won in 2010 with a plan to make Kansas a model for small-government revival.

In a Republican Party increasingly drawn to theatrics, Brownback was something rarer: a radical ideologue who followed through on his bluster. Whether campaigning for religious freedom abroad—he once emerged as a leading voice in Congress against the genocide in Darfur—or slashing taxes at home, Brownback brought the zeal of a missionary to every cause he took up. His theory for Kansas wasn’t new. It was the old supply-side catechism—cut taxes, shrink government, and wait for growth to swell the coffers and supercharge the economy. What distinguished Brownback was the scale of his ambition and his indifference to evidence.

Brownback went all in on that spring day in 2012. He signed a law that slashed income tax rates, eliminated taxes on pass-through business income, and made no serious effort to offset the losses. Moderate Republicans had hoped to negotiate a more tempered version of the plan in conference committee. They didn’t. Brownback got everything he wanted. His tax regime would go into effect starting New Year’s Day, 2013.

Conservative think tanks cheered the law on. Arthur Laffer—he of the infamous napkin diagram—had helped create the law. Grover Norquist gave his blessing. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted a Cato Institute report giving Brownback an A grade for “the biggest tax cut of any state in recent years relative to the size of its economy.”

The laboratory was well chosen. Kansas was—and remains—deep red. Since 1940, it has voted for every Republican presidential nominee with the exception of Lyndon Johnson. Much like the libertarian bend in the American psyche, if you tell Kansans you are going to lower their taxes, cut government expenses, and make programs more efficient, they’ll give you a great deal of leeway.

But beneath Kansas’s right-wing surface lies a persistent ideological split. The state’s Republican electorate includes both hard-line religious conservatives and a sizable bloc of moderates. That tension helps explain why Kansas has a long tradition of electing centrist Republicans—and even the occasional Democrat—to the governor’s mansion.

“Kansas is Republican,” one former state Republican politician told me, “but it’s not crazy.”

Almost immediately after the cuts went into effect, state revenues plunged. By June 2013, just six months into the new tax regime, Kansas was $338 million short of its revenue projections. Within a year, the state had lost nearly $700 million—an 11 percent drop in revenue. Credit downgrades followed. But the administration continued to insist that growth was coming. Brownback dismissed economists’ warnings and suppressed internal projections that contradicted the party line.

Job growth didn’t materialize. Brownback had promised 100,000 new private-sector jobs. By 2014, a year into the “experiment,” the state had added fewer than 20,000—well behind national trends and trailing neighboring Missouri and Colorado. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the year the cuts took effect, the Kansas economy shrank, even as the national economy grew. Then, in 2014, the state’s economy grew but still lagged the national average. By 2015, Kansas’s real GDP was growing at half the rate of the national economy. According to the CBPP, five of the previous six years before the tax cut, Kansas’s economy had grown faster than the nation’s as a whole.

What did expand—quickly and predictably—was income tax avoidance. Pass-through entities multiplied practically overnight as doctors, lawyers, and accountants restructured to avoid paying state income taxes. “I’m making out like a bandit,” one attorney told The Kansas City Star. “And it’s completely unfair,” he complained, because his secretary, like most Kansans, still paid full freight.

Before a critical mass of voters caught on, Brownback’s administration was able to paper over the fiscal collapse with budget chicanery. It drained the state’s budget surplus, moved money from the highway fund, cut the state’s pension fund contributions, and tightened eligibility requirements for programs assisting the poor.

The result was a slow bleed: Agencies were hollowed out gradually, and the most vulnerable Kansans suffered, but the daily lives of most voters hadn’t yet been directly affected by the time the 2014 elections rolled around. As Ashley All, a veteran Democratic operative in Kansas, told me, “They were able to conceal the scale of the crisis just long enough.” Brownback squeaked by to reelection, aided in part by a well-timed reminder that his opponent had visited a strip club 16 years earlier.

It wasn’t until after the election that Brownback was forced to take actions that shocked average voters. Two weeks into his second term, another round of credit rating downgrades further raised the state’s borrowing costs and led to more budget cuts in education and infrastructure. Brownback slashed $45 million from school budgets to fill the growing hole. That forced some school districts, already cash strapped from the governor’s previous cuts, to begin sending students home at two p.m. Others canceled classes on Fridays or started summer vacation early. Working parents, left in a lurch, had to scramble to find child care. “We felt we didn’t have a choice,” said Janet Neufeld, superintendent of the Twin Valley School District, which then served 590 students in eastern Kansas. The district ended its academic year 12 days early that year. “It’s not good for kids, it’s not good for families,” Neufeld told Bloomberg. “There have been times when things were tight, but this is the absolute worst I’ve ever seen it,” Mike Sanders, superintendent of the Skyline School District, said at the time. Even parents in districts that didn’t impose such drastic service cuts read or heard about them in the media and worried that their schools would be next.

Meanwhile, the governor shelved 24 highway expansion and modernization projects, including ones he’d campaigned on, such as a $29 million widening of a dangerous 24-mile stretch of K-177 known for rollover accidents and blind curves. During Brownback’s first term, almost 50 percent of all highway fatalities recorded in Kansas occurred on roads like K-177: two-lane highways with no controlled access. “New Budget Deal Postpones Upgrades on Lethal Two-Lane Roads, Harrowing Intersections,” read a Topeka Capital-Journal headline. Republican legislators joined Democrats in blasting the broken promise.

And then came the great irony. Having promised sweeping tax relief, but facing a $400 million shortfall and another credit downgrade, Brownback signed the largest tax increase in Kansas history. Yet rather than place the burden on high-income individuals who had benefited from his first-term reductions, the new law raised the state sales tax, including on groceries, and hiked cigarette taxes, disproportionately penalizing middle- and lower-income Kansans. Conservative lawmakers wept as they voted affirmatively. (Cue the world’s smallest violin.) Brownback insisted that it wasn’t a tax hike—“Look at the totality,” he said. “Overall, it’s still a net tax cut.” But even Grover Norquist called it what it was: a violation of his “Never raise taxes” mandate, and one that particularly punished the poor.

“It wasn’t abstract anymore,” Ashley All, who served as communications director for Laura Kelly’s 2018 campaign, told me. “Parents were paying extra at the grocery store and seeing 30 kids in a classroom. People were noticing delays on roads. You didn’t need to follow politics whatsoever to understand something had gone very wrong.”

The experiment had obviously failed. But the governor wasn’t done defending it. He blamed “media elitists,” “leftists,” and “liberal outside groups” for misleading the public. “Some at the local Missouri-based paper in Kansas,” he warned in bold-faced type in one fund-raising letter, had “even taken to openly rooting for the Kansas economy to fail.”

by Nate Weisberg, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. The real story is that people keep falling for the same old scams.]

A Little Help From Your Friends

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Hartley Lin
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A Spring in Every Kitchen

Johnny Appleseed used to be a staple character in old American children’s books. A ragged vagabond in the early nineteenth century, Appleseed traveled barefoot through the forest, wore coffee sacks with cut-out holes for his arms and head, and planted thousands upon thousands of apple trees for the first settlers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.

“Appleseed” was a nickname; he was born as John Chapman. As a young man, Chapman became convinced that Christianity had lost its way and needed to be restored by a new church. He worked in an orchard, fell in love with apples, and devoted the rest of his long life to wandering through the newly occupied Middle West, passing out tracts for the new church — and establishing apple orchards, selling the saplings for a few pennies each.

Although a dozen or so Johnny Appleseed festivals are still celebrated, he is less likely to be found in children’s books today. That may be because historians realized that Appleseed was not just a kindly religious eccentric who went around planting apples so that Midwesterners could have fresh, healthy fruit. Instead, he was a vital part of village infrastructure: his apples were mostly not for eating, they were for making hard cider.

Typical hard cider has an alcohol level of about five percent, enough to kill most bacteria and viruses. Many settlers drank it whenever possible, because the water around them was polluted — sometimes by their own excrement, more commonly by excrement from their farm animals. Cider from Appleseed’s apples let people avoid smelly, foul-tasting water. It was a public health measure — one that, to be sure, let some of its users pass the day in a mild alcoholic haze.

For as long as our species has lived in settled communities, we have struggled to provide ourselves with water. If modern agriculture, the subject of the previous article in this series, is a story of innovation and progress, the water supply has all too often been the opposite: a tale of stagnation and apathy. Even today, about two billion people, most of them in poor, rural areas, do not have a reliable supply of clean water — potable water, in the jargon of water engineers. Bad water leads to the death every year of about a million people. In terms of its immediate impact on human lives, water is the world’s biggest environmental problem and its worst public health problem — as it has been for centuries.

On top of that, fresh water is surprisingly scarce. A globe shows blue water covering our world. But that picture is misleading: 97.5 percent of the Earth’s water is salt water — corrosive, even toxic. The remaining 2.5 percent is fresh, but the great bulk of that is unreachable, either because it is locked into the polar ice caps, or because it is diffused in porous rock deep beneath the surface. If we could somehow collect the total world supply of rivers, lakes, and other fresh surface water in a single place — all the water that is easily available for the eight billion men, women, and children on Earth — it would form a sphere just 35 miles in diameter. Adding in reachable groundwater would add some miles to that sphere, but not enough to dramatically alter the fact that our water-covered globe just doesn’t have that much fresh water we can readily get our hands on.

Couldn’t we make more? It is true that salt water can be converted into fresh water. Desalination, as the technique is called, most commonly involves forcing water through extremely fine membranes that block salt molecules but let water molecules, which are smaller, pass through. The Western hemisphere’s biggest desalination plant, in Carlsbad, California, is a technological marvel, pumping out about 50 million gallons of fresh water every day, about 10 percent of the water supply for nearby San Diego. But it also cost about $1 billion to build, uses as much energy as a small town, and dumps 50 million gallons per day of leftover brine, which has attracted numerous lawsuits. For now, in most places, supplying fresh water will have to be done the way it has always been done: digging a well or finding a river, lake, or spring, then pumping or channeling the water where needed.

The Problem

No matter what its source, almost every way that humans use water makes it unfit for later use. Whether passed through an apartment dishwasher or a factory cooling system, a city toilet or a rural irrigation system, the result is an undrinkable, sometimes hazardous fluid that must be cleaned and recycled. When water engineers say, “We need clean water,” clean is the part they worry about.

Clean water is a necessity for more than just drinking. Almost three-quarters of human water use today is for agriculture, especially irrigation (out of all the world’s food, about 40 percent is grown on irrigated land). Another fifth of water use is by industry, where water is both a vital raw ingredient and a cleaning and cooling agent. Households are responsible for just one-tenth of global water consumption, but most of that is used for cleaning: washing dishes, washing clothes, washing people, washing away excrement.

Providing the clean water needed for all these purposes entails four basic functions:

• Finding, obtaining, and purifying the water that goes into the system;
• Delivering it to households and businesses;
• Cleaning up the water that leaves those homes and businesses; and
• Maintaining the network of pipes, pumps, and other structures responsible for the previous three functions.

Simple to describe, these tasks are hair-pullingly complex on the ground. The challenge of building and operating a water system that can supply the daily onslaught of morning flushes and showers while not flooding people who turn on their taps at low-use times is the sort of thing that keeps engineers awake at night. Even simple water-supply pipes are more complex than one might think. Water is heavy and not very compressible. When it travels through a pipe, it can acquire a lot of momentum. When multiple water users close valves or stop pumps, the momentum can create a shockwave in the pipe. In big pipelines, this “water hammer” is like a freight train smashing into a wall — it can damage the pipeline or tear apart equipment. Special slow-closing valves and pumps are required.

Difficult as these technical issues are, they have been largely understood since biblical times and before. By far the biggest and most frustrating obstacle is instead what social scientists call “governmentality” — and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

The evidence is global and overwhelming. English cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania’s cities lose almost a quarter; cities in Brazil lose more than a third. So much of India’s urban water is contaminated that the cost of dealing with the resultant diarrhea is fully 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Texas loses so much water that just fixing the leaks could provide enough water for all of its major cities’ needs in the near future. All fifty states and all U.S. territories are plagued by water systems with lead pipes, which can leak dangerous lead into their water. The Mountain Aquifer between Israel and Palestine is the primary source of groundwater for both. In an atypical act of collaboration, both are overusing and polluting it. And so on.

by Charles C. Mann, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Julie Wallace; USGS; Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles, Aerial Archives/Alarmy
[ed. Third installment in the series How the System Works (New Atlantis).]

Donna Summer

The Future of Silk

The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1844 brought major benefits ​to the practice of medicine, but ran headlong into an unexpected quirk of human nature. It turns out that millions of people feel an instinctive horror at the thought of receiving an injection – at least ten percent of the US adult population and 25 percent of children, according to one estimate. This common phobia partly explains the widespread reluctance to receive vaccinations against Covid-19, a reluctance which has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.

Vaxess is testing a skin patch covered in dozens of microneedles made of silk protein and infused with influenza vaccine. Each needle is barely visible to the naked eye and just long enough to pierce the outer layer of skin. A user sticks the patch on his arm, waits five minutes, then throws it away. Left behind are the silk microneedles, which painlessly dissolve over the next two weeks, releasing the vaccine all the while.

The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.

No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators ​between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.

‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’

Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.

It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.

Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, ​a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.

For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.

‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’

Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal ​tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.

But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia.

Legend has it that the wife of the Yellow Emperor, who reigned around 2700 BC, was sipping hot tea under a mulberry tree when the cocoon of a silkworm fell into her cup. The hot liquid dissolved the cocoon’s sticky coating and caused the silk underneath to unravel, revealing its extraordinary beauty and strength. Then again, Chinese archeologists in 2017 found traces of silk in the soil under bodies in tombs 8,500 years old. The traces could be wild silk, but they could also suggest that sericulture – silk farming – may have begun much earlier.

A gray moth called Bombyx mori is the source of the silk. Centuries of selective breeding have created moths that reproduce at an exceptional rate – up to eight generations per year, compared to just three for wild silk moths. Domestication has wrought other changes; their wings are so stubby that the moths can barely fly, and the female moths are born already fat with as many as 500 eggs ready for immediate fertilization by a male.

In about ten days, the eggs hatch into silkworms, tiny caterpillars that are only about two or three millimeters in size. They mature quickly; given proper care, the worms will grow to 10,000 times their birth weight in about a month.

Theirs is a monotonous diet – they eat only the leaves of mulberry trees, and quite a lot of them. The recipe for one pound of silk: start with about 3,000 worms, gradually add 220 pounds of clean, fresh mulberry leaves, and wait about a month.

That’s when the silkworms begin to spew forth the cocoons that will shield them from harm as they develop into moths. The silk emerges from two glands called spinnerets located near the worm’s jaws. The stuff is almost entirely made of a protein called fibroin. The worm emits two streams of fibroin, then coats them in a gooey protein called sericin.

For up to three days, the silkworm’s head weaves back and forth as it wraps itself in silk. The finished cocoon is no bigger than a chocolate-​covered almond, yet its silk forms a continuous thread a kilometer long.

To get at the silk, humans boil the cocoons, killing the worm inside and stripping away the sericin. Then the silk fiber is unspooled.

The stuff is stronger than a steel wire of equal thickness, stronger even than the Kevlar fibers found in bullet-resistant vests. In fact, one of the first such vests, developed by Chicago Catholic priest Casimer Zeglen in 1897, was woven of silk. It worked, too.

Spider silk is actually stronger than that produced by silkworms. But nobody’s been able to successfully domesticate spiders, which have an unfortunate habit of eating one another. Happily, silkworms have been getting along well with humans and one another for quite a few centuries. (...)

One Silklab spinoff, Boston-based Mori, has raised over $82 million in investment capital, and has begun signing contracts with food distributors for a product that turns silk into a food preservative.

Keeping meats and vegetables flavorful is largely a matter of keeping oxygen and bacteria out and moisture in. A plastic wrapper can accomplish this, but supermarkets aren’t going to wrap each apple or banana. Apart from the cost and inconvenience, it would generate vast amounts of plastic waste.

But in 2016, Omenetto and Kaplan joined with Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to demonstrate that merely dipping the food in a solution of silk and water leaves behind a film that holds in moisture and keeps out air and bacteria. ​On average, fruit and vegetables coated in silk protein can remain fresh at room temperature for one week longer than unwrapped food. And unlike plastic wrap, there’s no waste. It’s not even necessary to wash off the silk coating; it’s flavorless, nontoxic, and biodegradable. (...)

Today’s skin care ingredients are mostly synthetic compounds supplied by petrochemical companies. Not dangerous in themselves, the manufacture of these synthetics often involves the use of toxins like cyanide and heavy metals. Besides, many of these chemicals eventually end up in our food and water.

‘We don’t necessarily know if they’re biodegradable,’ Altman said. ‘We don’t know where they end up.’

Altman and Lacouture’s new company, Evolved by Nature, developed a version of silk protein that substitutes for claudin, a different protein that occurs naturally in human skin. Over time, claudin tends to erode, making our skin more vulnerable to moisture loss. Evolved by Nature’s skin barrier is designed to deliver a dose of silk protein to fill in the gaps. (...)

But Altman said skin care is only the beginning. Silk protein, he said, makes an excellent substitute for petrochemical coatings used in a vast array of products.

The stuff’s everywhere, Altman said. ‘There’s a layer on your glasses. There’s a coating on a trillion dollars of textiles produced every year. In every house, architectural surfaces. In every car, on every piece of leather.’

His company’s future product road map includes custom silk protein for coating fabrics and leather. Because it’s not a medical application, these coatings needn’t be made of the finest silk. Altman said his company could thrive on silk producers’ leftover scraps. ‘Evolved by Nature could generate a billion dollars in revenue’, he said, ‘and never use anything but the trash of the sericulture industry.’

by Hiawatha Bray, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Images: Wikimedia; Library of Congress

Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment” by Lusha Nelson, 1935.
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Lucia Laguna (Brazilian, b. 1941), Paisagem no.145, 2023
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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)