Horizontal and Vertical Christian Faith

Selfishness is not a virtue

When Christianity goes wrong, it goes wrong in a familiar way.

Last Friday, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”

Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.

True enough, but that’s irrelevant to the question at hand. Yes, we’re all going to die, but it matters a great deal when, how and why. There’s a tremendous difference between dying after living a long and full life that’s enabled at least in part by access to decent health care, and dying a premature and perhaps needlessly painful death because you can’t afford the care you need.

All of this should be too obvious to explain, and it would cost Ernst — who occupies a relatively safe seat in an increasingly red state — virtually nothing to apologize and move on. In fact, just after her flippant comment, she did emphasize that she wanted to protect vulnerable people. The full answer was more complicated than the headline-generating quip.

By the standards of 2025, Ernst’s comment would have been little more than a micro-scandal, gone by the end of the day. And if we lived even in the relatively recent past, demonstrating humility could have worked to her benefit. It can be inspiring to watch a person genuinely apologize.

But we’re in a new normal now.

That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.

And so, the next day Ernst posted an apology video — filmed, incredibly enough, in what appears to be a cemetery. It began well. “I would like to take this opportunity,” she said, “to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall.” But her statement devolved from there.

“I made an incorrect assumption,” she continued, “that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.”

She didn’t stop there. “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Remember, this was not a snarky, impulsive rejoinder. It was a considered response. She decided to film the statement and release it. There is no ambiguity — the video delivered exactly the message she wanted to send.

The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.

Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes. My former Times colleague Jane Coaston has even popularized a term — “vice signaling” — to describe MAGA’s performative transgressiveness. Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.

But why bring Jesus into it?

America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.

To understand what I mean, let’s turn to a much darker time in American history, when Christianity and slavery existed side-by-side in the American South. In 1970, Wendell Berry published “The Hidden Wound,” a book-length essay about the profound damage that racism had inflicted on us all.

Reflecting on the Christianity of the slave-owning South, Berry wrote this passage, which is worth quoting at some length:

First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder.

The master hardened his heart to the plight of the slave by fundamentally rejecting the idea that his vertical faith in God carried with it a series of horizontal earthly obligations to love your neighbor as yourself, to do justice to the oppressed and to care for the vulnerable.

So long as the vertical relationship between God and man was secure, the horizontal relationship between men was of secondary importance, to the extent that it mattered at all. Why would this fleeting life matter when eternity was at stake?

Thankfully, we don’t live in such extreme times. We’re far from the dreadful days of slavery, and we’ve left Jim Crow behind, but I’m noticing a morphing of American evangelicalism back to the vertical, away from the horizontal, and that change is turning our gaze inward, to our own well-being above all, sometimes even to the exclusion of caring about the fate of others.

Let’s look at a different, more contemporary, example.

In April, I wrote about Paula White, one of Trump’s principal faith advisers, and her Easter offer of “seven supernatural blessings” in exchange for a suggested offering of $1,000. My piece was focused on the cohort of pastors and their Christian followers who behave more like Trump than like Jesus.

But I could have just as easily focused on the sheer selfishness of her message as well. Look again at the gifts White offered to her flock: “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The emphasis is clear — look at what God will do for you. It’s all vertical. Honor God (by giving White a pile of cash), and he’ll make you healthy, wealthy and strong.

Consider also the evangelical turn against empathy. There are now Christian writers and theologians who are mounting a frontal attack against the very value that allows us to understand our neighbors, that places us in their shoes and asks what we would want and need if we were in their place.

But Christianity is a cross-shaped faith. The vertical relationship creates horizontal obligations. While Christians can certainly differ, for example, on the best way to provide health care to our nation’s most vulnerable citizens, it’s hard to see how we can disagree on the need to care for the poor.

Put another way, when the sick and lame approached Jesus, he did not say, “Depart from me, for thou shalt die anyway.” He healed the sick and fed the hungry and told his followers to do the same. (...)

People often ask me if I think the evangelical church has changed during the age of Trump or if its true nature is being revealed. There is not a neat yes or no answer. Certainly Trump’s rise has revealed the extent to which the will to power has always lurked in Christian hearts. When faced with a conflict between their stated principles and their access to power, millions of Republican Christians chose power over principle — and they are continuing to do so every day.

At the same time, some things have changed. An evangelical community that once celebrated, for example, George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program — the AIDS initiative that has saved an estimated 26 million lives — has now either applauded or stood by passively as Trump has decimated American foreign aid and damaged the a program that was one of America’s greatest humanitarian accomplishments.

Ernst isn’t the chief offender here by any means. Nor do I think that she’s consciously trying to narrow Christian doctrine to the kind of purely vertical relationship that enables so much injustice. Senators aren’t theologians, and neither are columnists.

But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Heritage Images, Glowimages and imagenavi/Getty Images

[ed. See also: You Are Not Religious (HTW)]

PhD Timeline

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Big Sister is Watching You

Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best-seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This,” she is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. Insofar as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in boardrooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian dAntonio. This electrifying youth is the world’s biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rand’s chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad).

So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain’s, “all the knights marry the princess”–though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children–it suddenly strikes you–ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can’t fool little boys and girls with such stuff–not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily. The Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. (And neither Right nor Left, be it noted in passing, has a monopoly of such dreamers, though the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and labels.)

In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as “looters.” This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

“Looters” loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have got a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the author’s image of absolute evil–robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All “looters” are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deepseated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. (...)

So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book’s last line, that a character traces in the dir, over the desolate earth,” the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the “mysticism of mind” and the “mysticism of muscle”).

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash-payment.”‘ The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” (...)

So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially–a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship. (...)

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

by Whittaker Chambers, National Review (1957) |  Read more:

Image: Random House/1957 Phyllis Cerf portrait

[ed. Little wonder that Silicon Valley and many in the current administration and Republican party are so enamored with Ms Rand's philosophies. Fundamentally, Atlas Shrugged is a (fictional) extension of her previous polemic The Virtue of Selfishness, a series of essays mostly concerning ethical egoism. Christopher Hitchens is reportedly to have said "I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement."]

Ukraine’s Attack Exposed America’s Achilles’ Heel

It turns out Volodymyr Zelensky did have another card to play.

Ukraine’s astonishing drone attack on military airfields and critical assets deep inside Russia on Sunday blindsided the Kremlin, destroyed at least a dozen strategic bombers and marked a seismic shift in modern warfare.

The mission, dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, was a fresh reminder to leaders of the world’s most advanced militaries that the toughest threats they face today are not limited to their regular rivals with expensive gear. Instead, swarms of small, off-the-shelf drones that can evade ground defenses can also knock out billions of dollars of military hardware in an instant.

What happened in Russia can happen in the United States — or anywhere else. The risk facing military bases, ports and command headquarters peppered across the globe is now undeniably clear.

We don’t yet know if the operation will impact the Trump administration’s push for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, but it nonetheless delivered a tactical defeat to Russia’s military and will put pressure on President Vladimir Putin to respond. And what is almost certain is that the innovative use of inexpensive technology will inspire other asymmetric attacks that inflict serious damage against a well-heeled adversary.

Mr. Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, called the attack, which was planned by Ukraine’s Security Service, or S.B.U., his country’s “longest-range operation.” By smuggling more than 100 explosive-laden quadcopter drones across the border in cargo trucks, Ukraine managed to evade air defenses and then fly the drones undetected above four Russian bases, where they damaged or destroyed what Ukrainian officials said were more than 40 high-value aircraft used in the assault on Ukrainian cities. Those involved with the attack left Russia before it began, Ukrainian officials said. The operators could watch live video and hover the aircraft above their targets before steering them into a nosedive.

The extent of the attack — and the choice of targets — opens a new chapter in how drones are used in modern warfare, one that was improbable even a decade ago. The widespread availability of technology in the intervening years has empowered Ukraine to have mostly free rein in the skies above its larger, wealthier enemy, despite having a limited traditional air force.

The U.S. military understands Russia’s vulnerability firsthand. Although American pilots have managed to control the skies where they operate since the Korean War, U.S. troops in recent years have come under greater danger from drones. Militant groups have used the aircraft, which are a small fraction of the size of U.S. warplanes, to target American positions in the Middle East, dropping crude munitions that have maimed and killed American service members.

The U.S. military has globe-spanning technology to detect, track and shoot down ballistic missiles, but — so far — its multimillion-dollar systems remain helpless against the drone threat. The Pentagon has tried to develop technologies and defensive tactics, but results have been spotty at best. So-called hard-kill tactics to blast the drones out of the sky, or soft-kill methods to electronically disable them, haven’t proved to be silver bullets. The unmanned aircraft typically fly low to the ground and don’t always transmit their positions. Current radar systems are engineered to spot larger flying objects.

American commanders increasingly realize that forces stateside are just as exposed. Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of Northern Command, told Congress in February that there were some 350 detections of drone overflights above 100 military installations in the United States last year. Those small drones appeared to be more of a nuisance than a threat, but Spider’s Web exposed the risk of not taking them seriously.

The Federal Aviation Administration has licensed more than a million drones in the United States. Most fly by the rules, but sightings of drones making illegal flights are on the rise. The F.A.A. reports there are now 100 drone sightings around airports each month, despite federal law that requires them to avoid flying near airports in controlled airspace without authorization.

Military bases and aircraft hangars should be hardened to guard against the worst. Congress is poised to set aside about $1.3 billion this fiscal year for the Pentagon to develop and deploy counter-drone technologies. This is a good start. But the Pentagon’s most ambitious and expensive plans fail to address the threat.

President Trump unveiled plans last month for his $175 billion antimissile shield, called Golden Dome, which aims to shoot down all manners of ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles. The program, which is under development, wouldn’t protect the United States from the types of small drones Ukraine used in Spider’s Web.

The United States has spent millions of dollars to help Ukraine manufacture and fine-tune its drones but has not pushed American contractors to do the same. The Pentagon has been slow to procure the smaller, cheaper, less advanced brand of drones that are omnipresent over the battlefields in Ukraine. In August 2023 it did announce a project to field thousands of autonomous systems. The billion-dollar initiative, called Replicator, was inspired by lessons learned in Ukraine to manufacture inexpensive drones and make them widely available by this fall. The Pentagon has said vanishingly little about the effort’s systems and programs since Mr. Trump took office, though.

by W.J. Hennigan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

[ed. As we know, the US doesn't do asymetrical warfare well, so why is this a surprise? It's long been a staple of CIA thrillers. Check this one out by Terry Hayes - The Year of the Locust; or Mark Helprin's The Ocean and the Stars. Also, this essay: Imagining the Drone Air Force (VS).]

Forced to Relocate by Climate Change, These Southwest Alaska Villagers Found a New Crisis

Newtok’s relocation to the new site of Mertarvik, where much of the infrastructure is already failing, highlights the nation’s failure to prepare for the ways climate change is making some places uninhabitable.

A jumble of shipping containers holds all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved nine miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaska communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility for the move to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

by Emily Schwing and Ash Adams, Washington Post via ADN |  Read more:

Image: Tiny homes in Mertarvik. (Ash Adams/For The Washington Post)

What Could Go Wrong?

Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life

Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it was acquiring a company called io, an artificial-intelligence-forward product-development firm co-founded, last year, by Jony Ive, the vastly influential designer known for his work with Steve Jobs at Apple. Ive led the designs of the original iMac, the iPad, and the Apple Watch, among other era-defining products. Then, in 2019, he left Apple to start his own design firm called LoveFrom. The news of his move to OpenAI felt something like learning that LeBron James was joining the Miami Heat: Ive had become synonymous with Apple’s success, perhaps second only to Jobs. Now, after a period of independence, he was choosing a new team. The announcement of the deal with OpenAI—for a reported $6.5 billion in OpenAI equity—came via a press release, featuring a rather cuddly portrait of Ive with OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder, Sam Altman (shot by the British fashion photographer Craig McDean) and a faux-casual videotaped interview session between the two at San Francisco’s Cafe Zoetrope. In it, Altman describes “a family of devices that would let people use A.I. to create all sorts of wonderful things,” enabled by “magic intelligence in the cloud.” The symbolism of the partnership was clear: Altman is the new Jobs, and together he and Ive promise to create the next ur-device, a personal technology that will reshape our lives just as the iPhone did. Once it’s ready, they say, they’ll ship a hundred million devices “faster than any company” ever has.

We don’t know what it will look like just yet, but Altman swears that it will be “​​the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” Ming-chi Kuo, a respected analyst of Apple’s Chinese manufacturing, posted on X that the product is planned to be “as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle” and that it will have “cameras and microphones for environmental detection.” It might resemble other early A.I. devices announced or launched in the past year, such as Friend, another pendant-like chatbot companion; Humane, an A.I. pin with a laser projector; or Rabbit, a small handheld gadget. Yet the functionality of these nascent inventions is severely limited. “Vaporware” is a term of art from the nineteen-eighties that was popularized in the early internet era, referring to new software or technology that overpromises and underdelivers—if the product is even released in the first place. However many breathless headlines about OpenAI’s acquisition, it’s just vaporware until Altman and Ive prove otherwise. Hype, after all, is one of OpenAI’s primary achievements—despite predictions about ChatGPT changing the world, the company is losing billions of dollars a year.

What we can do, in the meantime, is imagine what an iPhone of A.I. might look like based on the A.I. technology that so far exists. Generative A.I. has already been integrated into many of our daily digital experiences, whether we want it there or not. iPhones now summarize text threads using A.I. and allow users to generate custom emojis. Google recently announced an “AI Mode” that it intends to supplant its traditional search box with, a development that threatens to slow open-web traffic down to a trickle. Meta’s “AI Glasses,” a collaboration with Ray-Ban, integrate voice chatting and live translation with the company’s A.I. assistant. And chatbots with distinct personalities, like Replika and Character.ai, are becoming increasingly popular as they get better at mimicking human connection. Perhaps Altman and Ive’s machine will mingle all of these functionalities: it might listen to and interpret the sounds around you; it might respond with predictive text, delivered to you instantaneously and in a customizable tone; and it might become your main avenue for accessing information, like a personal concierge. It will reportedly not attempt to supplant the other technologies you depend on: according to the Wall Street Journal, Altman described it as a kind of third device, meant to work within an ecosystem that includes your laptop and smartphone. But it will effectively be a self-surveillance machine that creates a technological scrim for your personal reality. The involvement of Ive invites inevitable comparisons with the iPhone, but this is not necessarily a compliment; to many of us, an iPhone of A.I. sounds less like a utopian promise than like a threat that A.I. will soon become ubiquitous and unavoidable. Smartphones have already absorbed us in our screens, creating personalized information bubbles; omnipresent A.I. will only intensify that atomization while being more automated, more inscrutable, and more inescapable.

The video claims that more information about the new product will be shared next year, which would mean that we’re currently in the Palm Pilot stage of A.I.—with the iPhone-like invention looming around the corner, poised to obliterate the competition. But there are vast logistical hurdles to achieving this optimistic timeline for ubiquitous consumer A.I. More than a billion people in the world own iPhones. Some research estimates that generating a typical e-mail using A.I. consumes a bottle’s worth of water to siphon heat away from the data centers’ servers to separate cooling towers. This means that, if we all started using our personal A.I. machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll of our personal technology would skyrocket—imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck. This, in turn, would warp the direction of global economies, requiring the construction of ever-larger data centers. The economic and environmental overhaul would be done in the name of outsourcing our human thoughts and memories to an omnipresent machine resting in our pockets or hanging around our necks. (...)

Speculative mockups online imagine an A.I. companion device that looks simple, like a rounded metal amulet—it would be Ive’s style to make the design approachable yet austere. Yet the sleek and frictionless object will rely on a vast infrastructure of factories and server farms; the labor of human maintenance workers and moderators; and, ultimately, the corpus of information that has been digested as training data, which is effectively the entire history of human thought. The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ariel Davis

[ed. See also: ‘Humanity deserves better’: iPhone designer on new partnership with OpenAI (Guardian).]

via:

Substack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days

Everything happens so quickly at Substack. And in just the last few days, something big has changed.

By my measure, we’ve suddenly reached stage four in the evolution of this platform.

And I expect we will quickly get to level five (more on that below). But first let’s look at how we got here.

STAGE ONE

In the first stage, people ignored us. That was easy enough—Substack was small and out on the very fringes of the media world.

When I told people I published a Substack, I got blank stares. I tried to explain what Substack was. That wasn’t easy, because I wasn’t really sure myself.

Was I publishing a newsletter? Was I now just another blogger? Even worse, had I signed up for some cult or pyramid scheme?

I like to think of myself as a culture historian. Or maybe an essayist, who sometimes dabbles in journalism. But what I was now doing with The Honest Broker didn’t fit easily into those (or any other) categories.

Of course, this didn’t really matter—because nobody paid any attention whatsoever.

If someone asked about Substack, I said it was an “alternative publishing platform”—and left it at that.

But this anonymity didn’t last long.

STAGE TWO

In the second stage, people mocked us.

Substack had arrived—but only as the punchline to a joke. Or the pretext for a derisive cartoon in The New Yorker.

In this cartoon, a dismayed woman stares at her laptop and complains to her partner: “My mother’s upgrading the holiday newsletter to a paid Substack.”

During this period, Substack finally got noticed by the establishment. But they treated us like a circus that shows up uninvited on the edge of town. No matter how many tickets we’ve sold, we’re still just clowns and grifters.

Then something unexpected happened. The circus never left town—instead we kept growing.

So now we entered stage three.

STAGE THREE

That’s when powerful people began attacking Substack. They especially hated the fact that this platform lets writers decide what to write, and readers decide what to read.

That made them uneasy. It shouldn’t be allowed.

Around this time, total strangers started sending me rude emails—one wrote me four times during the course of a single week, telling me the various rules and controls he wanted to impose on my work.

These attacks soon lost steam. Few found them convincing, and Substack’s growth didn’t slow down a whit.

Judging by my experience, we actually expanded our audience because of this organized hate campaign. That often happens to censors. They add to the allure of what they try to censor.

Of course, it didn’t help the credibility of these assaults that many who attacked Substack soon decided to join it.

Some had no choice—they lost their jobs with legacy media. Or, in many cases, their previous employer disappeared entirely, as part of the ongoing media meltdown.

But the larger truth is that writers of all ideologies and persuasions began to grasp the value of a publishing platform that resists bullying by politicians, billionaires, or interest groups.

Democracy can’t operate without that kind of independence, and Substack has done more than any organization I know to protect journalism from brute power.

But this has led to stage four in Substack’s evolution.

STAGE FOUR

The establishment is now in a mad rush to join us. Just in the last 30 days, the whole vibe has shifted.

This is probably a good thing—although I will admit to some anxiety over gentrification here. But even more to the point, this is an inevitable next step.

I guess we’re the cool kids now. So others follow our lead.

In several recent articles, I wrote about the likelihood of this happening. But even I am shocked at the speed and intensity of the transition.

Check out, for example, the contortions taking place at The New Yorker. Just a few months ago, Substack was a target for their jokes. Substack writers were—or so they implied—like your insufferable mother-in-law.

But all of a sudden, The New Yorker published this on May 11.

It’s absurd how quickly the vibe shifted. The New Yorker had never reviewed anything on Substack before. They only ridiculed us. Then—in a flash!—they declare Substack as the source of the Great American Novel.

That turnabout is actually more amusing than any of their cartoons.

And The New Yorker is not the only establishment vehicle that fell in love with Substack during the month of May.

In my world of music writing, Billboard is a huge power broker. But from their perspective, I don’t even exist.

At least I didn’t until May 9, 2025.

That’s when Billboard felt obliged to respond to my criticism of private equity funds. (...)

But then guess what happened ten days later.

Yes, you guessed it. Billboard launched its own Substack on May 19. You can’t make this stuff up.

Don’t get me wrong. I think this is healthy for everybody. But these legacy outlets will find it difficult to adapt to the messy world of new media.

Consider the case of BBC History, which also joined Substack this month. As of yesterday morning, they only had 200 subscribers. That must be painful for the BBC—once the monopolistic media voice for a world-dominating empire.

But if they want to play in this new sandbox, they will need to fight for readers like the rest of us.

But the clearest sign of Substack’s ascendancy may be the number of aspiring politicians who are now on the platform.

I can’t tell you who will win the 2028 presidential election. But I’m fairly certain that the next president will be a Substacker.

Like all these others, Pete Buttigieg joined Substack in May. According to The Bulwark:

Buttigieg’s Substack already has over 380,000 followers, making him one of the most prominent Democrats now on the platform….

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has become a prolific Substack poster. Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett published her first Substack newsletter last Thursday….Rahm Emanuel posted for the first time just last month and the Democratic National Committee made its debut on the platform in March.

Republican hopefuls are also on board. Marco Rubio launched a Substack for the US State Department in late April. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are also on the platform. I expect to see many other leading politicians, of all parties and persuasions, join them in the coming months.

“I think that the 2026 and 2028 elections are going to play out on Substack,” boasts Catherine Valentine, Substack’s head of politics. That’s a sure bet, as far as I can see.

The final sign of Substack’s embrace by the establishment can be measured in the number of major brands and businesses now on board.

Many of them also joined in May.

Substack is “reshaping how brands communicate,” according to Forbes.

“Substack has found success because it offers what people have been craving: community,” shares the (anonymous) founder of People, Brands And Things. “Unlike mainstream social media, it thrives on creativity and niche interests. It’s a refreshing departure from data-driven content.”

Do I really want to see McDonald's and Pepsi and Nike on Substack?

I’m not so chuffed about this, but I don’t think they will have much luck here. They know how to pay for advertising and buy endorsements, but in the free-flowing world of Substack, they will struggle for influence.

And that’s how it should be.

But I do see more change in our future. In particular, I anticipate a stage five in the evolution of Substack.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: Barnum & Bailey poster; New Yorker; Billboard

[ed. Definitely trending. Many of the posts here come from Substack authors.]

Roxana Amed

[ed. See also: Tus Sueños; and, Roxana Amed - Laura Va (Official Video).]

Twain Dreams

The enigma of Samuel Clemens

Could some kind of Mark Twain revival be afoot in this, the 175th-anniversary year of Harper’s Magazine, a periodical that more consistently than any other provided a home for Twain’s writing during the half-century-long major phase of his career?  The signs are come unto us. The writer Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, in which Everett reimagines the story of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s raft mate on the Mississippi, the self-emancipated Jim, took home last year’s National Book Award for Fiction. Only two months ago, we got a major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it. Jim is the title, and subject, of Fishkin’s latest. So, we have James and Jim, barely a year apart. Meanwhile, the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor has taken on new significance as a sort of dissenter’s pulpit. This year’s winner, the comedian and talk-show host Conan O’Brien, seized the moment of his acceptance speech, delivered in March onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington—where the previous month, the board of trustees had been ousted by President Trump and replaced with a shock brigade of his sort of people, among them the country singer Lee Greenwood, of “Proud to Be an American” fame, all in the interest of ushering in a new “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” with Trump himself at the head, as chair, lobbing brain-damaged non sequiturs about this one time he saw Cats—and used it, O’Brien did, to speak out not-so-subtly against the regime. “Twain hated bullies,” O’Brien told the crowd, a statement largely true (although Tom Sawyer was a bully at times, and a manipulative narcissist at all times). O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks. But this is pedantry on my part. (...)

I grew up so hopelessly steeped in the cult of Twain that I have to perform a mental adjustment to understand how a Twain revival could be possible. How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent? My sportswriter father, who died when I was in my mid-twenties, worshipped Twain, to the extent of wearing, every year on specific occasions, a tailored white suit. With the shaggy hair and Twainish mustache that he maintained year-round, the object of the homage was unmistakable. I was raised in New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, and in the late Seventies, when I was a boy, some of the last of the old-time steamboat races were held there. One of my earliest memories is of being taken down to the riverfront at the age of four to watch that spectacle. Twain’s face was everywhere. It was on TV, in a disturbing Claymation film called The Adventures of Mark Twain, which, I have since learned from the internet, gave bad dreams not just to me but to my whole microgeneration. Every Christmas until I was a teenager, I would find waiting under the tree a fine hardback copy of one or another Twain novel, sometimes one of the editions that had those marvelous N. C. Wyeth illustrations. These gifts would then stress me out for the rest of the year. They were given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well—they were a form of cultural proselytizing—and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough. My father would quiz me on the stories. Hadn’t I loved the part when such and such happened? When Huck decided he’d rather go to hell than hand over Jim to be reenslaved? No, more than that, more than any “rather,” did I grasp the fact that Huck actually believed he would go to hell for this loyalty to Jim, and chose it regardless? My answers, no matter how much forced enthusiasm I tried to pump in behind them, always left him a little crestfallen, a little chagrined. In his smoke-filled basement office, he would play his recordings of Hal Holbrook doing Twain. When I was cast in the role of Joe Harper, in our seventh-grade production of Tom Sawyer, he grew briefly delighted, and suggested I revisit the novel for character insights, but the show bombed. We had too little talent for too many parts. I remember our Injun Joe, a kid named Kevin. Bless him, he had one line, and the line consisted of a single word—“Bah!”—and somehow he kept fucking it up. It required a kind of genius to fuck up this line, but he did it every time, in a different way. The director would clutch the top of her head and scrunch up a fistful of hair and say, “Oh, Kevin!” I may be tidying the timeline somewhat here, but I’m pretty sure that the school play marked the end of my father’s efforts to inspire me with his devotion. He had already inflicted on me, though, some guilty shadow of it. (...)

Like Kafka when he went to see the aeroplanes at Brescia, did I not come to Percival Everett’s James with a kind of hostility? And if the answer is yes, what was the source of it? Certainly not any sense that a sacred cow of some kind had been violated, although the way I wrote “certainly” there makes me wonder if, in fact, it was that. Yes, there may have been some childish instinct to defend Twain. But Mr. Everett, you must realize that Twain himself saw Jim as fully human, and in the context of the time . . . Hilarious. Everett knows this as well as anyone. Twain’s “humor and humanity,” he acknowledges in the acknowledgments, “affected me long before I became a writer.” No, this hostility was more an expectation that the “brilliance” of the concept—Jim becomes James, the runaway becomes the self-emancipated, the boy (in the racist sense) becomes a man, and the whole polarity of the narrative, in which Huck’s choices matter, while Jim’s are incidental, has been reversed—would prove greater than the novel could possibly prove good, and that the story, as a result, would amount more or less to an extended skit, throughout the interminable course of which you would have to keep reminding yourself how brilliant the idea was, to make your hand turn the actual pages. The worst kind of book, the kind we are assailed by in this era, the kind of book people tell you they “loved,” and you think to yourself, They cannot possibly have read the book I tried to read. And often if you ask probing questions you find that they have not done so, or that they, like you, tried and failed, but came away loving the book nonetheless, or feeling a need to say as much, and after a while, when you have been burned enough times, it can feel like this is what books have become, things not to read but to love.

You know the story about Hemingway and Joyce’s Ulysses? A “most goddamn wonderful book,” he called it, but when Hemingway died and they examined his copy, a third of the pages were “uncut”—they had never been read. Or even seen! Well, obviously there is a place for books like that in the world.

Hemingway also said, or had the character of himself, “Papa” (!), say, in one of his books, Green Hills of Africa, which is classified as non-fiction but contains many scenes that read not quite plausibly as such, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But then Papa adds,

If you read it you must stop where Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

So many things about this oft-quoted statement are hard to understand. It’s the best American novel, but we should not read the last twelve chapters? That’s the final almost one hundred pages of the book. Ordinarily that would constitute a significant knock on a novel’s quality. Hemingway means that there is something deep and intrinsic in the good parts, qualities so important that they outweigh otherwise fatal formal defects. Hemingway is, by the way, technically correct to suggest the cut, in the sense that a good editor, the best editor, might have made the same suggestion to Twain. The chapter that Hemingway recommends be the last chapter is the aforementioned crucial chapter, the one in which Huck decides to go to hell rather than betray Jim. It is also the chapter in which Huck learns that Jim has been kidnapped and temporarily sold back into slavery by a confidence man. The novel would thus end in existential tragedy, with Huck making his moral choice and losing Jim anyway. Huck: bereft. Jim: reenslaved. Tom: who gives a shit. We are reminded (I am reminded, by a piece that Greil Marcus wrote for the Los Angeles Times twenty-eight years ago, on the occasion of the last Twain revival) that the critic Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, called Huck “the first Existentialist hero”:

He is the product of no metaphysics, but of a terrible breakthrough of the undermind of America itself. In him, the obsessive American theme of loneliness reaches an ultimate level of expression, being accepted at last not as a blessing to be sought or a curse to be flaunted or fled, but quite simply as a man’s fate. There are mythic qualities in Ahab and even Dimmesdale; but Huck is a myth: not invented but discovered by one close enough to the popular mind to let it; this once at least, speak through him. Twain sometimes merely pandered to that popular mind, played the buffoon for it, but he was unalienated from it; and when he let it possess him, instead of pretending to condescend to it, he and the American people dreamed Huck—dreamed, that is to say, the anti-American American dream.

We dreamed it together . . . how lovely.

Hemingway says that “Nigger Jim” (Twain never used that epithet) is “stolen from the boys.” That last part is wrong in two ways. Jim is not stolen from “the boys.” Tom is not there when it happens. Nor is Jim “stolen.” Huck does not own him. Huck pretends to be Jim’s owner, when he finds out that Jim has been caught, in order to conceal their true relationship: Jim is his friend, and Huck is helping him escape. It is not possible for Jim to be “stolen” from the boys, or even from Huck. And don’t say, “Oh, you know what he means . . .” No, it was the wrongest possible word Papa could have used.

Those details aside, what on earth does Hemingway mean when he says, “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”? People have wondered, psychoanalyzed. Hemingway could be so fantastically full of shit. There was nothing before? But there were Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe and . . . There had been “nothing as good since,” i.e., between 1885 and 1935, when Hemingway published those sentences? But there had been Henry James and Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Speaking of Faulkner, what did he mean, twenty years later, when he called Twain “the father of American literature”?

If we could get under and behind this tradition of hyperbole, figure out what motivates it, we might learn something not only about Hemingway and Faulkner but about ourselves and this country. Why has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion? Presumably the answer involves some variant of whatever instinct prompted Everett to subvert (and thereby affirm the power of) the very book that gave rise to this glorification.

James is a good novel and not just a clever idea. Everett accomplished the task that was necessary to make this so: not to criticize Twain and his novel (though he does that often enough and subtly enough) but to provide the element most sorely missing from those original Adventures, namely, the interior life of Jim. The first sentence made me burst out laughing: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” Or rather I burst out laughing ten sentences later when it is revealed that those little bastards are Huck and Tom. Much further into the story, the choice of insult will provide the matter for a deeper joke, one that may even transcend the status of a joke.

The place where Everett has left himself open to the most obvious criticism is in his decision to make James  an intellectual. The man is not merely intelligent, in other words, in the way that any healthy, alert person might be. He is instead a highly literate and systematic thinker, who, when he dreams, is visited by John Locke and Voltaire. They discuss such topics as the nature of civic equality and natural rights and the real-world responsibilities of philosophers. It’s absurd, in a way. Jim becomes not just James but a heroic scholar-in-exile, of the kind that one might occasionally have encountered not among the enslaved or formerly enslaved, as a rule, but in the free black communities of the South, the social context that produced a writer like David Walker (of Walker’s Appeal). By drafting James as a man born enslaved who rose to this level of cultural sophistication by reading books in the library of his owner, Everett has situated James’s backstory among an infinitesimally tiny group of historical destinies. One is meant to think, perhaps, of Toussaint Louverture in his Haitian cabin, reading the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. All but unique, in other words, and therefore—one could argue—a flawed lens through which to view James’s full humanity. But these passages, and the cluster of authorial decisions behind them, are redeemed by, of all things, laughter. At least, I’m pretty sure that I can hear Everett laughing behind them, or smiling, anyway. He hears the thing in me (and, I have to assume, in many other readers) that starts to rise up and protest, “Hey, come on, did you have to make him an intellectual?,” and the writer in him laughs. I see you little bastards hiding out there in the tall grass. James and I will decide what he dreams about. (...)

The pen name, Mark Twain, derives (as we used to learn in school) from a boatman’s call. “By the mark, twain!” meant that the water was two fathoms deep—or twelve feet, according to the leadsman’s weighted sounding rope—and by extension that it was safe to keep going: there was enough water for the boat to float through and not run aground. A hopeful cry, then.

Twain consistently lied about where he’d got the name from—the idea of using it, that is. He claimed that he had essentially stolen it, albeit in an act of homage, from an older riverboat pilot—one of the original Mississippi steamboat men—Isaiah Sellers, who (according to Twain) used to generate occasional on-the-spot reports of river conditions and send them to the Picayune in New Orleans, signing himself “Mark Twain.” These reports were said to be amusingly all-knowing in tone. “Hoary” would be the word, I suppose. Twain writes about them, and Sellers, in Life on the Mississippi, and even quotes one of the alleged reports: “My opinion is that the water will be 4 feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June,” etc.

A fatal difficulty arises in that scholars have gone looking for these items, in the old newspapers, and they appear not to exist. Certainly there are none signed “Mark Twain.” Sellers existed—we can confirm that—but there is no evidence of his having published anything at all, much less under the famous pen name. An independent Twain scholar in Texas, named Kevin Mac Donnell, has recently discovered a far more likely source: a humor sketch, from a magazine published in 1861, that featured a character called Mark Twain. This would explain not only where the name came from but why Twain may have felt motivated to lie about it—he had basically plagiarized it, and not by way of honoring an obscure figure whom he felt bad about having lampooned, but from a popular source. Off the rack, as it were.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Mark Twain on the steps leading up to his study at Quarry Farm, New York, 1903, by T. E. Marr

[ed. James is indeed a very good book, definitely worth it - even if you've forgotten most of Huckleberry Finn.]

Feeld Grows in Different Directions

Unconventional dating app Feeld reports surge in ‘vanilla tourists’

Ethical non-monogamy, switch, edging: you might expect these terms to be old hat for people on a non-traditional dating app – but increasingly they’re not.

Feeld, which describes itself as being for “the curious”, is being colonised by so-called “vanilla tourists” – people who are using the app for more conventional dating.

The result is that Feeld has been booming in recent years, at a time when other dating apps’ numbers are falling. Since 2022, its user base has grown by 30% year on year, helped by those looking to observe and perhaps dip their toe into experimental lifestyles.

The dating app’s chief executive, Ana Kirova, said reaching a wide audience has never been a goal, and that it raises questions of how to integrate new and longstanding members.

“I do think it’s a challenge that it’s becoming more mainstream in some ways,” she said. “How do we welcome people who’ve never heard of Feeld, who don’t understand the list of sexualities and genders [or] who don’t understand what ethical non-monogamy is?”

But she added: “Every time someone tells me about this vanilla people being on the app, I just ask: ‘What’s the problem with vanilla?’ Why are we so binary about it – [as if] there is vanilla, which is boring and whatever, and then there is the rest, which is dark and interesting?

“We don’t yuck anyone’s yum … and that does count for more traditional relationships and popular sexual experiences, too. I think there is space for that.”

Unlike other dating apps, users are able to browse profiles without gamified swiping “like” and “dislike”, and Feeld does not use AI or predictive algorithms to find matches, which Kirova likens to “shopping for granola”.

“That constrains the experience for the members. As soon as you join the app, you’re put on to a conveyor of what your experience should be. And the platform makes a lot of choices for you in order for an algorithm to match you and people, because there is a default assumption for everyone that you’re there to find X,” she added.

As a result, she believes there is less – although not no – bad behaviour such as ghosting and “benching” someone in the belief there is someone better a swipe away.

However, she added that safety is still a battle. “With toxic misogyny still a challenge in wider society, it inevitably finds its way into the dating app landscape,” she said.

There has also been a proliferation of sophisticated romance scams, for which Feeld uses AI to identify fake profiles. “There are big companies that are investing in scammers. It’s like there is Feeld and then there is the ‘dark Feeld’ somewhere, with a lot of people and resources invested into making fake accounts on dating apps … it’s a real difficult thing to tackle,” she said.

Feeld has benefited from changing cultural attitudes towards sex, relationships, sexuality and identity, and a shift away from the “linear journey from single to coupled to married to having children to having a house”, Kirova says.

She has observed a growing openness. “Older generations look at identity and sexual orientation as quite static. They’re starting to change slowly, but that’s their perception. Whereas younger people see them as ongoing, growing and changing parts of the self.”

by Rachel Hall, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Koshiro K/Alamy

Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne
via: Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]

[ed. See also: 17th-Century Sculpture Captures Unbelievable Lace Details in Hand-Carved Marble (My Modern Met).]

Art Pepper

[ed. Another recommendation - Straight Life. See also: Notes From A Jazz Survivor | Art Pepper Unmasked: The Symphony of Ones Turbulent Life (YT).]

"Art Pepper, born in Gardena, California on September 1, 1925 and raised in nearby San Pedro, began playing clarinet at age 9 and, by 15, was performing in Lee Young’s band at the Club Alabam on Central Avenue, the home of jazz in prewar Los Angeles.

He joined Stan Kenton’s band, touring the U.S. and gaining fame, but was drafted in 1943 serving as an MP in London and performing with some British jazz bands. He returned to the States and to Kenton, touring and recording. In 1952 he placed second only to Charlie Parker in the Down Beat jazz poll. Probably his most famous recording from that period is his stunning performance of “Art Pepper,” written by Shorty Rogers (as part of a series of charts Kenton had commissioned to feature members of his band).

Art left Stan Kenton in 1951 to form his own group, occasionally recording for Rogers and others. He signed with Contemporary Records in 1957.

From the beginning Art’s playing combined a tender delicacy of tone with a purity of narrative line—a gift for storytelling that was made irresistible by an inherent, dancing, shouting, moaning inability to ever stop swinging.

He was one of the few alto players to resist the style and tone of Charlie Parker. What he failed to resist was the lure of drugs, ubiquitous, at that time, among jazz musicians. And although some users managed to get through and over their addictions, Art, survivor of a rocky childhood (alcoholic neglectful mother, alcoholic violent father), unbalanced from the get-go, never did quite triumph over his, though he may have fought them to a draw.

So, in 1952, he began a long series of hospitalizations and incarcerations for violations of the drug laws of his time—possession, internal possession (“marks”), and then for violations of his previous releases (more possessions and internal possessions). In time, he became a petty thief, a real thief, a robber (though not an armed robber; his fellow criminals thought he was too crazy to be trusted with a gun). He served time for the Feds (Terminal Island) and for the State of California (San Quentin). He prided himself on being “a stand-up guy,” a good criminal.

All this history makes a pretty gripping story as it’s told by Art with his wife Laurie Pepper in their book, Straight Life (DaCapo). What’s surprising is that the music he managed to make during irregular bursts of freedom was enthralling, too. The gift was starved for the spotlight, for opportunities for performing and recording, but it flowered in the dark, became deeper and more soulful. The performances—from The Art Pepper Quartet (1952) and Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (with Miles Davis’s rhythm section) on Contemporary (1957) all the way through the recordings he made at the Village Vanguard (Contemporary, 1977) and his later recording with strings (Winter Moon, Galaxy, 1981)—are brilliant, poignant, and a joy to hear. The rigor and abandon with which he lived his life were present in every note he played.

Art Pepper died June 15, 1982 of a cerebral hemorrhage. But the 1979 publication of Straight Life and accompanying press had revived Art’s career. With Laurie’s help, he spent the last years of his life trying to make up for lost time, making each performance a life-or-death occasion, touring worldwide with his own bands, recording over a hundred albums, writing songs, winning polls, respect, and adulation."  ~  Straight Life - The Stories of Art Pepper

Therapy for the Disoriented

Why MAGA Defends Everything Trump Does

There is no executive order too authoritarian, no lie too blatant, and no action too extreme for the MAGA base to defend. To understand why, one must dig deeper than party politics. MAGA is not merely a right-wing movement, it is a full-spectrum identity ecosystem built on loyalty, grievance, and manufactured narratives of moral clarity.

Trump's most recent executive order, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," is a case study in how propaganda becomes policy. It seeks to overhaul museums, public monuments, and the Smithsonian Institution itself, casting any mention of systemic racism, gender identity, or structural inequality as a dangerous ideological distortion. It does not merely revise history, it replaces pluralism with a state-sanctioned narrative that criminalizes complexity and centralizes the cultural narrative under one ideology.

And MAGA loves it.

The Authoritarian Blueprint, Seize the Culture

Paulo Freire warned of the oppressor's need to control cultural institutions to shape how the oppressed see the world. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he argued that once dominant forces dictate the terms of education and culture, the oppressed internalize their role, often fighting to preserve the very systems that subjugate them.

This is exactly what Trump’s executive order does, it forces federal institutions to frame American history not as a story of progress through struggle, but as a seamless celebration of exceptionalism. In doing so, it violates the core tenets of historical inquiry and replaces it with myth. This act is not simply about pride, it is about engineering consent.

As Golec de Zavala (2020) describes, collective narcissism emerges when a group sees itself as exceptional but under siege. MAGA doesn’t want an honest retelling of the past, it wants a curated myth that proves America has always been right, and that they, as its defenders, are righteous. This sense of victimized exceptionalism feeds directly into why they perceive criticism of the past as an existential threat to the present.

Cognitive Armor, Why MAGA Can’t Let Go

This loyalty is not accidental. It is scaffolded by a mix of psychological traits and media reinforcement. Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), and collective narcissism work in concert. RWA creates a desire for strong leaders and rigid social order. SDO creates comfort with inequality as long as the hierarchy benefits them. And collective narcissism transforms Trump from a politician into a totem of cultural survival.

In Understanding Peace and Conflict through Social Identity Theory, McKeown et al. (2016) explore how identity threats can entrench group loyalty. To the MAGA base, any criticism of Trump is not a political disagreement, it is a personal attack. Trump embodies their sense of justice, power, and cultural primacy. His humiliation is their humiliation. His success, their vindication. As a result, they engage in motivated reasoning, reversing the direction of logic so the conclusion always supports their loyalty, and any fact that contradicts it is viewed as propaganda.

This is why even when Trump is caught lying, indicted, or contradicting past statements, the base rushes to protect him. Their defense isn’t rational, it’s existential. And that existentialism is rooted in fear: fear of change, of equality, of perceived loss. That fear becomes the fuel that binds them emotionally to the narrative, no matter how contradictory or unsupported.

Why Defending Trump Feels Like Morality

When Trump passes an order demanding that museums stop displaying systemic racism as historical fact, the MAGA base doesn’t see it as censorship. They see it as moral clarity. This is how authoritarianism disguises itself. It doesn't arrive wearing jackboots, it comes cloaked in the language of virtue.

by The Rational League |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Reality really is crazier than fiction. Who'd have thought we'd see a massive crazy cult form around a scamming billionaire in our lifetimes? Which begs the question: is it transferable? See also: Why MAGA’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Repeats Every Economic Mistake Since Reagan. More here (TRL).]

Brenda Stichter, Flood Stage
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[ed. Potemkin buffalo.]

I’m a Trump-Loving Springsteen Fanatic, and the Cognitive Dissonance Is Finally Catching Up with Me

“Bruce Springsteen has spoken out against the White House again after President Donald Trump called him a ‘dried-out prune’ on social media. Speaking in Manchester, England, the musician criticized the government for the second time during his Land of Hopes and Dreams tour, despite Trump previously biting back.” — Newsweek, May 18, 2025

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I’m a middle-aged guy from Jersey. A freedom-loving, meat-and-potatoes family guy. A Springsteen guy. A Trump guy.

I’ve seen the Boss forty-seven times and own one of the largest collections of Springsteen bootlegs in North America. I’ve also been a registered Republican since I was old enough to vote and was part of the great Gen X wave that brought Trump back into office.

If you’re thinking that Springsteen’s empathy for the working class and exploration of the runaway American dream are about as far as you can get from President Trump’s plans to make America great again, well, my leftist daughter would agree with you.

“Have you actually listened to the lyrics of ‘Born in the USA’ or ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ or, like, anything on Nebraska, Dad?” she asked me last year, before the election, when she was still speaking to me. Four years at Liberal University and all she learned is how to be a pain in my ass, but I just smiled.

I’ll never tell her what I really love about the Boss: all the songs about sex. On those first four albums, young Bruce was doing it everywhere: underneath the boardwalk, in an old abandoned beach house, possibly even in an ambulance. He was dancing in the dark, proving it all night, and teenage me couldn’t get enough.

Sure, I know Springsteen is a bleeding-heart liberal and has written a ton of political songs. I get that he intended “Born in the USA” as an indictment of our country, not a celebration. Doesn’t bother me. You know how people talk about separating the art from the artist? I believe in separating the lyrics from a good bop. Hell yeah, I was born in the USA! Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey! Bru-u-u-u-u-u-uce! I feel no need to go deeper than that. When Bruce tells those little stories between songs at his shows, anything that sounds like it might have some kind of “woke” point, I usually go get a hot dog and a couple of beers.

But this latest brouhaha has been impossible to miss, and I feel like I’m being asked to take sides. Touring in Europe, the Boss called our president “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous,” and Trump called Springsteen “a pushy obnoxious JERK” and a “dried-out prune.” He also hinted that the Boss might not be let back into the country. I fully expected a gloating text from my daughter, but it never came.

“You know Wendy’s not speaking to you,” my wife said, and reminded me that our daughter lost her job in one of those DOGE cuts. The look she gave me as she left the room suggested she thought I was, at least in part, to blame.

I wanted nothing more than to blast one of my favorite bootlegs—perhaps Bruce at the Nassau Coliseum in 1980, or Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2008—but those songs would just reinforce the choice I had to make. How could I give up Springsteen’s world of hot girls and cars? Of working men, so much like the working men and women who bust their asses in the business I inherited from my father?

But I also love the things Trump loves: money, and the promise of returning to a simpler time, when men were men, women were girls, and pronouns were something you barely remembered from fourth-grade English. Sure, the president can be petty and a bully. But also my business will make millions if he wipes out some of the EPA rules he’s promised to get rid of.

So I guess if I have to choose between a Tenth Avenue freeze-out and Trump’s Fifth Avenue hypothetical, I’ve gotta side with the leader of the free world. If I keep riding the Trump train, I’ll be able to afford the bachelor pad I see waiting for me in my future, and I’ll decorate it with Springsteen memorabilia should the Boss ever see the error of his ways.

by Lisa Borders, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Haha... I was actually wondering about this too. It must be destabilizing to learn who to hate each week, even if it's someone you've loved or respected all your life.]

St. Vincent